The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

The world’s natural wheat belt is moving poleward by about 160 miles each decade, but you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, and not just because it’s difficult to suddenly clear the land occupied now by towns, highways, office parks, and industrial installations. Yields in places like remote areas of Canada and Russia, even if they warmed by a few degrees, would be limited by the quality of soil there, since it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt. The lands that are fertile are the ones we are already using, and the climate is changing much too fast to wait for the northern soil to catch up. 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.