The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

What is coming? Much more fire, much more often, burning much more land. Over the last five decades, the wildfire season in the western United States has already grown by two and a half months; of the ten years with the most wildfire activity on record, nine have occurred since 2000. Globally, since just 1979, the season has grown by nearly 20 percent, and American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970. By 2050, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again, and in some places within the United States the area burned could grow fivefold. For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple. What this means is that at three degrees of warming, our likely benchmark for the end of the century, the United States might be dealing with sixteen times as much devastation from fire as we are today, when in a single year ten million acres were burned. At four degrees of warming, the fire season would be four times worse still. The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.”