The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

fact, the concrete and asphalt of cities absorb so much heat during the day that when it is released, at night, it can raise the local temperature as much as 22 degrees Fahrenheit,

Already, global food production accounts for about a third of all emissions. To avoid dangerous climate change, Greenpeace has estimated that the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050; everything we know about what happens when countries get wealthier suggests this will be close to impossible.

But these remain vanguard technologies, distributed unequally and, being so expensive, unavailable for now to the many who are most in need.

The problem has gotten worse as carbon concentrations have gotten worse. Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse, since so many of the world’s poor depend on crops, rather than animal meat, for protein;

All told, at just 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, flood damage would increase by between 160 and 240 percent; at 2 degrees, the death toll from flooding would be 50 percent higher than today.

One study suggests that the Greenland ice sheet could reach a tipping point at just 1.2 degrees of global warming. (We are nearing that temperature level today, already at 1.1 degrees.) Melting that ice sheet alone would, over centuries, raise sea levels six meters, eventually drowning Miami and Manhattan and London and Shanghai and Bangkok and Mumbai.

More than 600 million people live within thirty feet of sea level today.

Each year, globally, between 260,000 and 600,000 people die from smoke from wildfires, and Canadian fires have been linked to spikes in hospitalizations as far away as the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Drinking water in Colorado was damaged for years by the fallout from a single wildfire in 2002. In 2014, Canada’s Northwest Territories were blanketed with wildfire smoke, producing a 42 percent spike in hospital visits for respiratory ailments and what one study called a “profound” negative effect on individual well-being. “One of the strongest emotions that people felt was isolation,” the lead researcher later said. “There’s a sense of not being able to get away. Where do you go? There’s smoke everywhere.”

that the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, would become carbon sources, unleashing all that stored gas.

The world’s worst emitter, by far, is China; the country was responsible for 9.1 gigatons of emissions in 2017. This means Bolsonaro’s policy is the equivalent of adding, if just for a year, a whole second China to the planet’s fossil fuel problem—and, on top of that, a whole second United States.

There is a public health impact as well: every square kilometer of deforestation produces twenty-seven additional cases of malaria,

By 2070, Asian megacities could lose as much as $35 trillion in assets due to storms, up from just $3 trillion in 2005.

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.

only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its seven billion people.

We’re already racing, as a short-term fix for the world’s drought boom, to drain underground water deposits known as aquifers, but those deposits took millions of years to accumulate and aren’t coming back anytime soon.

The five-year Syrian drought that stretched from 2006 to 2011, producing crop failures that created political instability and helped usher in the civil war that produced a global refugee crisis, is one vivid example.

reducing Chinese pollution to the EPA standard, for instance, would improve the country’s verbal test scores by 13 percent and its math scores by 8 percent. (Simple temperature rise has a robust and negative impact on test taking, too: scores go down when it’s hotter out.) Pollution has been linked with increased mental illness in children and the likelihood of dementia in adults.

The Indian capital is home to 26 million people. In 2017, simply breathing its air was the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day, and local hospitals saw a patient surge of 20 percent.

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

when plastics degrade, they release methane and ethylene, another powerful greenhouse gas. But a third relationship

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 ice. Already,

Should the planet warm 3.7 degrees, one assessment suggests, climate change damages could total $551 trillion—nearly twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. We are on track for more warming still.

even the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world in the middle of the last century did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.

An enormous study in Taiwan found that, for every single unit of additional air pollution, the relative risk of Alzheimer’s doubled.

In 2018, Romer won the Nobel Prize. He shared it with William Nordhaus, who pioneered the study of the economic impact of climate

The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.

the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.

that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action, advertising not just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus, which would displace ideological dispute; and that, in the meantime, in the supermarket aisle or department store, one can do good for the world simply by buying well.

“Civilizations rise, but there’s an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,”

The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.