The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

mortality, and enhanced life expectancy. It’s true, we are. When you look at the charts, the trajectory of that progress seems inarguable: so many fewer violent deaths, so much less extreme deprivation, a global middle class expanding by the hundreds of millions. But again, that story is about the wealth brought by industrialization and the transformations of societies by newfound wealth powered by fossil fuel. It is a story written largely by China and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the developing world, which has developed by industrializing. And the cost of much of that progress, the balance come due for all the industrialization that made middle-class-ness possible for the billions of people in the global south, is climate change—which we are, ironically, far too sanguine about, Pinker included. Worse still, the warming unleashed by all our progress heralds a return to violence.