The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

You have probably heard of “coral bleaching”—that is, coral dying—in which warmer ocean waters strip reefs of the protozoa, called zooxanthellae, that provide, through photosynthesis, up to 90 percent of the energy needs of the coral. Each reef is an ecosystem as complex as a modern city, and the zooxanthellae are its food supply, the basic building block of an energy chain; when they die, the whole complex is starved with military efficiency, a city under siege or blockade. Since 2016, as much as half of Australia’s landmark Great Barrier Reef has been stripped in this way. These large-scale die-outs are called “mass bleaching events”; one unfolded, globally, from 2014 to 2017. Already, coral life has declined so much that it has created an entirely new layer in the ocean, between 30 and 150 meters below the surface, which scientists have taken to calling a “twilight zone.” According to the World Resources Institute, by 2030 ocean warming and acidification will threaten 90 percent of all reefs. This is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food and income for half a billion people. They also protect against flooding from storm surges—a function that offers value in the many billions, with reefs presently worth at least $400 million annually to Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cuba, and Mexico—$400 million annually to each. Ocean acidification will also damage fish populations directly. Though scientists aren’t yet sur...

Over the past fifty years, the amount of ocean water with no oxygen at all has quadrupled globally, giving us a total of more than four hundred “dead zones”; oxygen-deprived zones have grown by several million square kilometers, roughly the size of all of Europe; and hundreds of coastal cities now sit on fetid, under-oxygenated ocean. This is partly due to the simple warming of the planet, since warmer waters can carry less oxygen. But it is also partly the result of straightforward pollution—a 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. In 2014, a not-atypical toxic event struck Lake Erie, when fertilizer from corn and soy farms in Ohio spawned an algae bloom that cut off drinking water for Toledo. And in 2018, a dead zone the size of Florida was discovered in the Arabian Sea—so big that researchers believed it might encompass the entire 63,700-square-mile Gulf of Oman, seven times the size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. “The ocean,” said the lead researcher Bastien Queste, “is suffocating.”

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. How does this work? The water of the Gulf Stream cools off in the atmosphere of the Norwegian Sea, making the water itself denser, which sends it down into the bottom of the ocean, where it is then pushed southward by more Gulf Stream water—itself cooling in the north and falling to the ocean floor—eventually all the way to Antarctica, where the cold water returns to the surface and begins to heat up and travel north. The trip can take a thousand years. As soon as the conveyor belt became the subject of real study, in the 1980s, there were those oceanographers who worried it might shut down, which would lead to a dramatic disequilibration of the planet’s climate—the hotter parts getting much hotter and the colder parts much colder. A total shutdown would be inconceivably catastrophic, though the impacts look deceptively innocuous on first scan—a colder Europe, more intense weather, additional sea-level rise. Invariably, this is described as the Day After Tomorrow scenario, and it is a strange twist of fate that so forgettable a movie has become the memorable shorthand for this particular worst-case nightmare.

A shutdown of the conveyor belt is not a scenario that any credible scientists worry about on any human timescale. But a slowdown is another matter. Already, 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. And in 2018, two major papers triggered a new wave of concern over the conveyor belt, technically called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which was found to be moving at its slowest rate in at least 1,500 years. This had happened about a hundred years ahead of the schedule of even alarmed scientists and marked what the climate scientist Michael Mann called, ominously, a “tipping point.” Further change, of course, is to come: the transformation of the ocean by warming making these unknown waters doubly unknowable, remodeling the planet’s seas before we ever were able to discover their depths and all the life submerged there.

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, wherever they were introduced. The effects of air pollution seem starker already. Small-particulate pollution, for instance, lowers cognitive performance over time so much that researchers call the effect “huge”: 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. A higher pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to reduce earnings and labor force participation at age thirty, and the relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight of babies is so strong that the simple introduction of E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems, in the vicinity of toll plazas, by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, just by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars slowed to pay the toll.

In Delhi, much of the pollution comes from the burning of nearby farmland; but elsewhere small-particulate smog is produced primarily by diesel and gas exhaust and other industrial activity. 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. In the developing world, 98 percent of cities are enveloped by air above the threshold of safety established by the WHO. Get out of urban areas and the problem doesn’t much improve: 95 percent of the world’s population is breathing dangerously polluted air. Since 2013, China has undertaken an unprecedented cleanup of its air, but as of 2015 pollution was still killing more than a million Chinese each year. Globally, one out of six deaths is caused by air pollution.

Environmentalists probably know already about “the Great Pacific garbage patch”—that mass of plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating freely in the Pacific Ocean. It is not actually an island—in fact, it is not actually a stable mass, only rhetorically convenient for us to think of it that way. And it is mostly composed of larger-scale plastics, of the kind visible to the human eye. The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are more insidious. And, believe it or not, more pervasive: a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and California contain plastics, according to one recent study. European eaters of shellfish, one estimate has suggested, consume at least 11,000 bits each year.

Some fish have learned to eat plastic, and certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics.” But krill can’t grind it all down; in one square mile of water near Toronto, 3.4 million microplastic particles were recently trawled. Of course, 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 equivalent of an average human carrying about ten to twenty pounds of plastic in a distended belly. (“Imagine having to take your first flight out to sea with all that in your stomach,” the researcher told the Financial Times, adding: “Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”)

Aerosol particles actually suppress global temperature, mostly by reflecting sunlight back into outer space. In other words, all of the non-carbon pollution we’ve exhausted from our power plants and our factories and our automobiles—suffocating some of the largest and most prosperous cities of the world and consigning many millions of the lucky to hospital beds, and many millions of others to early deaths—all of that pollution has been, perversely, reducing the amount of global warming we are currently experiencing. How much? Probably about half a degree—and possibly more. Already, aerosols have been reflecting so much sunlight away from the earth that, in the industrial era, the planet has only heated up two-thirds as much as it would have otherwise. If we had somehow managed to produce precisely the same volume of carbon emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as we have, while somehow keeping the skies clear of aerosol pollution, the temperature rise would be half again higher than it is now. The result is what the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has called a “Catch-22” and what the climate writer Eric Holthaus has described, perhaps more incisively, as a “devil’s bargain”: a choice between public-health-destroying pollution on the one hand, and, on the other, clear skies whose very clearness and healthiness will dramatically accelerate climate change. Eliminate that pollution and you save millions of lives each year, but also create a dramatic spike in w...

A 2018 paper suggested it would rapidly dry the Amazon, producing many more wildfires. The negative effect on plant growth would entirely cancel out the positive effect on global temperature, according to another 2018 paper; in other words, at least in terms of agricultural yield, solar geoengineering would offer no net benefit at all. Once we began such a program, we could never stop. Even a brief interruption, a temporary dispersal of our red sulfur umbrella, could send the planet plunging several degrees of warming forward into a climate abyss. Which would make whatever installations were sustaining that umbrella quite vulnerable to political gamesmanship and terrorism, as its advocates themselves would acknowledge. And yet many scientists still describe geoengineering as an inevitability—it’s just so cheap, they say. Even an environmentalist billionaire, going rogue, could make it happen on their own.

Rock is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. 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, in laboratories, several microbes have been reanimated: a 32,000-year-old “extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, an 8-million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, a 3.5-million-year-old one a Russian scientist self-injected, out of curiosity, just to see what would happen. (He survived.) In 2018, scientists revived something a bit bigger—a worm that had been frozen in permafrost for the last 42,000 years.

Many of these frozen organisms won’t actually survive the thaw; those that have been brought back to life have been reanimated typically under fastidious lab conditions. But in 2016, a boy was killed and twenty others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least seventy-five years earlier; more than two thousand present-day reindeer died.

In Brazil, for generations, yellow fever sat in the Amazon basin, where the Haemagogus and Sabethes mosquitoes thrived, making the disease a concern for those who lived, worked, or traveled deep into the jungle, but only for them; in 2016, it left the Amazon, as more and more mosquitoes fanned out of the rain forest; and by 2017 it had reached areas around the country’s megalopolises, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—more than thirty million people, many of them living in shantytowns, facing the arrival of a disease that kills between 3 and 8 percent of those infected.

Lyme case counts have spiked in Japan, Turkey, and South Korea, where the disease was literally nonexistent as recently as 2010—zero cases—and now lives inside hundreds more Koreans each year. In the Netherlands, 54 percent of the country’s land is now infested; in Europe as a whole, Lyme caseloads are now three times the standard level. In the United States, there are likely around 300,000 new infections each year—and since many of even those treated for Lyme continue to show symptoms years after treatment, the numbers can stockpile. 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. But the effects of the epidemic can be seen perhaps most clearly in animals other than humans: in Minnesota, during the 2000s, winter ticks helped drop the moose population by 58 percent in a single decade, and some environmentalists believe the species could be eradicated entirely from the state as soon as 2020. In New England, dead moose calves have been found suckling as many as 90,000 engorged ticks, often killing the calves not through Lyme disease but simple anemia, the effect of that number of bugs each drawing a few milliliters of blood from the moose. Those that survive are far from robust, many having scratched so incessantly at their own hides to clear it of ticks that they completely eliminated their own hair, leaving beh...

Overwhelmingly, of course, the viruses and bacteria making homes inside us are nonthreatening to humans—at present. Presumably, a difference of a degree or two in global temperature won’t dramatically change the behavior of the majority of them—probably the vast majority, even the overwhelming majority. But consider the case of 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 single saiga in an area the size of Florida, the land suddenly dotted with hundreds of thousands of saiga carcasses and not one lone survivor. An event like this is called a “mega-death,” this one so striking and cinematic that it gave rise, immediately, to a whole raft of conspiracy theories: aliens, radiation, dumped rocket fuel. But no toxins were found by researchers poking through the killing fields—in the animals themselves, in the soil, in the local plants. The culprit, it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella multocida, which had lived inside the saiga’s tonsils, without threatening its host in any way, for many, many generations. Suddenly it had proliferated, emigrated to the bloodstream, and from there to the animals’ liver, kidneys, and spleen. Why? “The places where the saigas died in May 2015 were extremely warm and humid,” Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic. “In fact, humidity levels were the highest ever seen in the region since records began in 1948. The same pattern held ...

But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a number of historians and iconoclastic economists studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have started to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power—a onetime injection of that new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by unending subsistence living. This is a minority view, among economists, and yet the précis version of the perspective is quite powerful. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from five hundred years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves.

In the West especially, we tend to believe we’ve invented our way out of that endless zero-sum, scratch-and-claw resource scramble—both with particular innovations, like the steam engine and computer, and with the development of a dynamic capitalistic system to reward them. But scholars like Andreas Malm have a different perspective: we have been extracted from that muck only by a singular innovation, one engineered not by entrepreneurial human hands but in fact millions of years before the first ones ever dug at the earth—engineered by time and geologic weight, which many millennia ago pressed the fossils of Earth’s earlier carbon-based life forms (plants, small animals) into petroleum, like lemon under a press. Oil is the patrimony of the planet’s prehuman past: what stored energy the earth can produce when undisturbed for millennia.

The vanguard research on the economics of warming has come from Solomon Hsiang and Marshall Burke and Edward Miguel, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: in a country that’s already relatively warm, every degree Celsius of warming reduces growth, on average, by about one percentage point (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field. Compared to the trajectory of economic growth with no climate change, given a high-end emissions scenario their average projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century. Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier. There is a 51 percent chance, this research suggests, that in a worst-case future climate change will reduce global output by more than 20 percent by 2100, compared with a world without warming, and a 12 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 50 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Depression dropped global GDP by about 15 percent, it is estimated—the numbers weren’t so good back then. The more recent Great Recession lowered it by about 2 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by 2100 that is twenty-five times worse. In 2018, a team led by Thomas Stoerk suggested that these estimates could be dramatic und...

The breakdown by country is perhaps even more alarming. 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. The warming near the equator would be worse, with losses throughout Africa, from Mexico to Brazil, and in India and Southeast Asia approaching 100 percent. India alone, one study proposed, would shoulder nearly a quarter of the economic suffering inflicted on the entire world by climate change. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that the current path of carbon emissions would sharply diminish the living conditions of 800 million living throughout South Asia. One hundred million, they say, will be dragged into extreme poverty by climate change just over the next decade.

Stupid whitey wont even exist by 2100 but gleefully predicts doom for India.

For the past few decades, economists have wondered why the computer revolution and the internet have not brought meaningful productivity gains to the industrialized world. Spreadsheets, database management software, email—these innovations alone would seem to promise huge gains in efficiency for any business or economy adopting them. But those gains simply haven’t materialized; in fact, the economic period in which those innovations were introduced, along with literally thousands of similar computer-driven efficiencies, has been characterized, especially in the developed West, by wage and productivity stagnation and dampened economic growth. One speculative possibility: computers have made us more efficient and productive, but at the same time climate change has had the opposite effect, diminishing or wiping out entirely the impact of technology. How could this be? One theory is the negative cognitive effects of direct heat and air pollution, both of which are accumulating more research support by the day.

This is retarded. Fuck this white loser. I'm done reading. If he's wrong about this, he's probably wrong about a lot of the other shit in this book. Real pity that I don't have access to better sources than this liberal white cuck.