The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

pushing us right up to the threshold of 2 degrees of warming, long thought to be the border separating a livable future from climate catastrophe.

There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years—in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the

Overall, the number of disease cases from mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas have tripled in the U.S. over just the last thirteen years, with dozens of counties across the country encountering ticks for the first time.

Perhaps scariest are those that live within us, peacefully for now. More than 99 percent of even those bacteria inside human bodies are presently unknown to science,

the saiga—the adorable, dwarflike antelope, native to central Asia. In May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global population died in the span of just days—every

“mega-death,”

Generations being as long as they are and historical memory as short, the West’s several centuries of relatively reliable and expanding prosperity have endowed economic growth with the reassuring aura of permanence: we expect it, on some continents, at least, and rage against our leaders and elites when it does not come.

Even given worst-case warming, there are places that benefit, in the north, where warmer temperatures can improve agriculture and economic productivity: Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Greenland. But in the mid-latitudes, the countries that produce the bulk of the world’s economic activity—the United States, China—would lose nearly half of their potential output.

We have gotten used to setbacks on our erratic march along the arc of economic history, but we know them as setbacks and expect elastic recoveries. What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing—not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.

(Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.)

There may not be any such relief or reprieve from climate deprivation, and though, as in any collapse, there will be those few who find ways to benefit, the experience of most may be more like that of miners buried permanently at the bottom of a shaft.

From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization,

And today migration is already at a record high, with almost seventy million displaced people wandering the planet right now.

climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.

The New York Times: “Add this to the list of decisions affected by climate change: Should I have children?”

global warming is already responsible for 59,000 suicides, many of them farmers, in India—where one-fifth of all the world’s suicides now occur, and where suicide rates have doubled since just 1980.

This is climate’s kaleidoscope: we can be mesmerized by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly.

One message of climate change is: you do not live outside the scene but within it, subject to all the same horrors you can see afflicting the lives of animals.

the “pathetic fallacy” still holds: it can be curiously easier to empathize with them, perhaps because we would rather not reckon with our own responsibility, but instead simply feel their pain, at least briefly.

But while plastics have a carbon footprint, plastic pollution is simply not a global warming problem—and

Anthropocene,”

That we reengineered the natural world so sufficiently to close the book on an entire geological era—that is the major lesson of the Anthropocene. The scale of that transformation remains astonishing, even to those of us who were raised amidst it and took all of its imperious values for granted. Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild.

Unfortunately, worrying so much about erring on the side of excessive alarm has meant they have erred, so routinely it became a kind of professional principle, on the side of excessive caution—which is, effectively, the side of complacency.

there is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one.

We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.

If we do succeed, and pull up short of two or even three degrees, the bigger bill will come due not in the name of liability but in the form of adaptation and mitigation—that is, the cost of building and then administering whatever systems we improvise to undo the damage a century of imperious industrial capitalism has wrought across the only planet on which we all can live.

we have not yet developed anything close to a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation.

a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars.

anyone proposing space travel as a solution to global warming must be suffering from their own climate delusion.

rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being.

It is probably one explanation for contemporary political discontent—a perception that the world is being almost entirely remade, but in a way that leaves you, as delighted as you may be by Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and Google Maps, more or less exactly where you were before.

We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started when hippies were affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.

Solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it’s just buttressing it.

We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination—it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world’s energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture.

This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.

We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes. In an age of personal politics, hypocrisy can look like a cardinal sin; but it can also articulate a public aspiration. Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important.

GMOs aren’t a sign of a sick planet but a possible partial solution to the coming crisis of agriculture; nuclear power the same for energy.

many American brand-name foods made from oats, including Cheerios and Quaker Oats, contain the pesticide Roundup,

With China and Russia, the ideological contrast is clearer. Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s. Xi, now the

leader-for-life of the planet’s rising superpower, seems to feel mutual obligations to the country’s growing prosperity and to the health and security of its people—of whom, it’s worth remembering, it has so many.

of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.

Sapiens,

Yuval Noah Harari

Jared Diamond—whose Guns, Germs, and Steel gave an ecological and geographical account of the rise of the industrial West, and whose Collapse is a kind of forerunner text for this recent wave of reconsiderations—has called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

The central exposition is this: society is and always has been bound together by collective fictions, no less now than in earlier eras, with values like progress and rationality taking the place once held by religion and superstition.

If you strip out the perception of progress from history, what is left?

The possibility that our grandchildren could be living forever among the ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world seems almost inconceivable from the vantage of the present day, so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement.

as early as next century, the planet could lose its capacity to produce clouds, which could alone add eight degrees of warming to our total.

of perceived climate hypocrisy—those who call for change while still flying and eating hamburgers, who probably perceive that politics does offer a more productive path than lifestyle choices, which even multiplied across like-minded communities would have only small or intermediary impacts. But the growing hypocrisy of the truly empowered—corporations, nations, political leaders—illustrates a far more concerning possibility, all the more alarming for being so familiar from other realms of politics: that climate talk could become not a spur to change but an alibi, a cover, for inaction and irresponsibility, the world’s most powerful uniting in a chorus of double-talk that produces little beyond the song.