The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Which means that, if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too.

too busy looking at our new phones;

But what does that science say? It is complicated research, because it is built on two layers of uncertainty: what humans will do, mostly in terms of emitting greenhouse gases, and how the climate will respond, both through straightforward heating and a variety of more complicated, and sometimes contradictory, feedback loops.

This is part of what makes climate change what the theorist Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”—a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.

The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again.

Climate change isn’t something happening here or there but everywhere, and all at once. And unless we choose to halt it, it will never stop.

But the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics.

heat death is among the cruelest punishments to a human body, just as painful and disorienting as hypothermia. First comes “heat exhaustion,” mostly a mark of dehydration: profuse sweating, nausea, headache. After a certain point, though, water won’t help, your core temperature rising as your body sends blood outward to the skin, hoping desperately to cool it down. The skin often reddens; internal organs begin to fail. Eventually you could stop sweating. The brain, too, stops working properly,

and sometimes, after a period of agitation and combativeness, the episode is punctuated with a lethal heart attack.

That soil, believe it or not, is literally disappearing—75 billion tons of soil lost each year. In the United States, the rate of erosion is ten times as high as the natural replenishment rate; in China and India, it is thirty to forty times as fast.

The academic term for the subject of this debate is “carrying capacity”: How much population can a given environment ultimately support before collapsing or degrading from overuse?

Global warming, in other words, is more than just one input in an equation to determine carrying capacity; it is the set of conditions under which all of our experiments to improve that capacity will be conducted. In this way, climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met—a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world’s future problems and all of its possible solutions.

This is one reason that our global climate fate will be shaped so overwhelmingly by the development patterns of China and India, who have the tragic burden of trying to bring many hundreds of millions more into the global middle class while knowing that the easy paths taken by the nations that industrialized in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries are now paths to climate chaos. Which is not to say they won’t follow them anyway:

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

“We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

Africa is today straining to feed about 1 billion people, a population expected to quadruple over the course of the twenty-first century to 4 billion.

A decade ago, there was great optimism that GMO crops could produce another green revolution, but today gene modification has been used mostly to make plants more resistant to pesticides, pesticides manufactured and sold by the same companies engineering the crops.

Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

Much of the infrastructure of the internet, one study showed, could be drowned by sea-level rise

in less than two decades; and most of the smartphones we use to navigate it are today manufactured in Shenzhen, which, sitting right in the Pearl River Delta, is likely to be flooded soon, as well.

But sea-level rise is different, because on top of the basic mystery of human response it layers much more epistemological ignorance than governs any other aspect of climate change science, save perhaps the question of cloud formation. When water warms, it expands: this we know. But the breaking-up of ice represents almost an entirely new physics, never before observed in human history, and therefore only poorly understood.

The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic. Better not to think what that means for life at the equator.

The effects of these fires are not linear or neatly additive. It might be more accurate to say that they initiate a new set of biological cycles. Scientists warn that, even as California is baked into brush by a drier future, making inevitable more and more damaging fires, the probability of unprecedented-seeming rainfalls will grow, too—as much as a threefold increase of events like that which produced the state’s Great Flood of 1862. And mudslides are among the clearest illustrations of what new horrors that heralds;

“There’s a sense of not being able to get away. Where do you go? There’s smoke everywhere.” —

“vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in.

This is not simply a wildfire phenomenon; each climate threat promises to trigger similarly brutal cycles. The fires should be terrorizing enough, but it is the cascading chaos that reveals the true cruelty

of climate change—it can upend and turn violently against us everything we have e...

Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered in water. Barely more than 2 percent of that water is fresh, and only 1 percent of that water, at most, is accessible, with the rest trapped mostly in glaciers. Which means, in essence, as National Geographic has calculated, only 0.007 percent

of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its seven billion people.

As soon as 2030, global water demand is expected to outstrip supply by 40 percent.

Freshwater lakes, by the way, account for up to 16 percent of the world’s natural methane emissions, and scientists estimate that climate-fueled aquatic plant growth could double those emissions over the next fifty years.

drain underground water deposits known as aquifers, but those deposits took millions of years to accumulate and aren’t coming back anytime soon. In the United States, aquifers already supply a fifth of our water needs;

But of all urban entitlements, the casual expectation of never-ending drinking water is perhaps the most deeply delusional. It takes quite a lot to bring that water to your sink, your shower, and your toilet.

We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces. When it comes to freshwater, the bigger picture is this: personal consumption amounts to such a thin sliver that only in the most extreme droughts can it even make a difference.

Four billion people, it is estimated, already live in regions facing water shortages at least one month each year—that’s about two-thirds of the planet’s population. Half a billion are in places where the shortages never end. Today, at just one degree of warming, those regions with at least a month of water shortages each year include just about all of the United States west of Texas, where lakes and aquifers are being drained to meet demand,

and stretching up into western Canada and down to Mexico City; almost all of North Africa and the Middle East; a large chunk of India; almost all of Australia; significant parts of Argentina and Chile; and everything in Africa south of Zambia.

One study

tracing human impact on marine life found only 13 percent of the ocean undamaged,

recent Gulf of Mexico dead zone, all 9,000 square miles of it, was powered by the runoff of fertilizer chemicals washing into the Mississippi from the industrial farms of the Midwest.

And then there is the possible slowdown of the “ocean conveyor belt,” the great circulatory system made up of the Gulf Stream and other currents that is the primary way the planet regulates regional temperatures.

Day After Tomorrow scenario,

climate change has depressed the velocity of the Gulf Stream by as much as 15 percent, a development that scientists call “an unprecedented event in the past millennium,” believed to be one reason the sea-level rise along the East Coast of the United States is dramatically higher than elsewhere in the world.

With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent. The effects are more pronounced indoors, where CO2 tends to build up—that’s

In recent years, researchers have uncovered a whole secret history of adversity woven into the experience of the last half century by the hand of leaded gasoline and lead paint, which seem to have dramatically increased rates of intellectual disability and criminality, and dramatically decreased educational attainment and lifetime earnings,

Pollution has been linked with increased mental illness in children and the likelihood of dementia in adults.

The public health damage is indiscriminate, touching nearly every human vulnerability: pollution increases prevalence of stroke, heart disease, cancer of all kinds, acute and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, and adverse pregnancy outcomes, including premature birth. New research into the behavioral and developmental effects is perhaps even scarier: air pollution has been linked to worse memory, attention, and vocabulary, and to ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Pollution has been shown to damage the development of neurons in the brain, and proximity to a coal plant can deform your DNA.

seabirds are not immune: one researcher found 225 pieces of plastic in the stomach of a single three-month-old chick, weighing 10 percent of its body mass—the

“Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”)

Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, and sixteen of seventeen tested brands of commercial sea salt, across eight different countries. The more we test, the more we find; and while nobody yet knows the health impact on humans, in the oceans a plastic microbead is said to be one million times more toxic than the water around it.

We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested