The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Much of the infrastructure of the internet, one study showed, could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades;

by the end of the century, one recent study showed, certain places could be struck by six different climate-driven disasters simultaneously.

one estimate of global damages is as high as $100 trillion per year by 2100. That is more than global GDP today.

twenty cities most affected by such sea-level rise are all Asian megalopolises—among them Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

Nearly two-thirds of the world’s major cities are on the coast—not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice paddies—and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high.

In the United States, one recent model suggested that FEMA’s recent projections of flood risk were off by a factor of three, and that more than 40 million Americans were at risk of catastrophic inundation.

When the Paris Agreement was drafted, those writing it were sure that the Antarctic ice sheets would remain stable even as the planet warmed several degrees; their expectation was that oceans could rise, at most, only three feet by the end of the century. That was just in 2015. The same year, NASA found that this expectation was hopelessly complacent, suggesting three feet was not a maximum but in fact a minimum.

In 2017, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggested eight feet was possible—still just in this century.

In 2018, a major study found things accelerating faster still, with the melt rate of the Antarctic ice sheet tripling just in the past decade. From 1992 to 1997, the sheet lost, on average, 49 billion tons of ice each year; from 2012 to 2017, it was 219 billion.

In 2016, climate scientist James Hansen had suggested sea level could rise several meters over fifty years, if ice melt doubled every decade;

Since the 1950s, the continent has lost 13,000 square miles from its ice shelf; experts say its ultimate fate will probably be determined by what huma...

Each of our projections, from the most blasé to the most extreme, comes wrapped in doubt—the result of so many estimates and so many assumptions that it would be foolish to take any of them, so to speak, to the bank. But sea-level rise is different, because on top of the basic mystery of human response it layers much more epistemological ignorance than governs any other aspect of climate change science, save perhaps the question of cloud formation.

When water warms, it expands: this we know. But the breaking-up

up of ice represents almost an entirely new physics, never before observed in human history, and ther...

There are now, thanks to rapid Arctic melt, papers devoted to what are called the “damage me...

But we do not yet well understand those dynamics, which will be one of the main drivers of sea-level rise, and so cannot yet make confident predictio...

Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets—enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.

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.)

while high-end emissions trajectories warm the planet by just over 4 degrees by 2100, because temperature changes are unevenly distributed around the planet, they threaten to warm the Arctic by 13.

In 2014, we learned that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were even more vulnerable to melting than scientists anticipated—in fact, the West Antarctic sheet had already passed a tipping point of collapse, more than doubling its rate of ice loss in just five years.

The same had happened in Greenland, where the ice sheet is now losing almost a billion tons of ice every single day. The two sheets contain enough ice to rais...

2017, it was revealed that two glaciers in the East Antarctic sheet were also losing ice at an alarming rate—eighteen billion tons of ice each year, enoug...

The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher.

When I first began seriously researching climate change, the risk from a sudden release of methane from the Arctic permafrost was considered quite low—in fact so low that most scientists derided casual discussion of it as reckless fearmongering and deployed mockingly hyperbolic terms like “Arctic methane time bomb” and “burps of death” to describe what they saw as a climate risk not much worth worrying about in the near term.

one Nature paper found that the release of Arctic methane from permafrost lakes could be rapidly accelerated by bursts of what is called “abrupt thawing,” already under way.

while the consensus is still that a rapid, sudden release of methane is unlikely, the new research is a case study in why it is worthwhile to consider, and take seriously, such unlikely-but-possible climate risks.

Today, all do agree that that permafrost is melting—the permafrost line having retreated eighty miles north in Canada over the last fifty years.

as far back as 2011, NOAA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center predicted that thawing permafrost would flip the whole region from being what is called a carbon sink, which absorbs atmospheric carbon, to a carbon source, which releases carbon, as quickly as the 2020s. By 2100, the same study said, the Arctic could release a hundred billion tons of carbon. That is the equivalent of half of all the carbon produced by humanity since industrialization began.

the total disappearance of that ice, Peter Wadhams has estimated, could mean a massive warming equivalent to the entire last twenty-five years of global carbon emissions.

our uncertainty over each of these dynamics—ice sheet collapse, Arctic methane, the albedo effect—clouds our understanding only of the pace of change, not its scale.

In fact, we do know what the endgame for oceans looks like, just not how long it will take us to get there.

It may take centuries, he says, even millennia, but he estimates that ultimately, even at just three degrees of warming, sea-level rise will be at least fifty meters—that is, fully one hundred times higher than Paris predicted for 2100.

The U.S. Geological Survey puts the ultimate figure at eighty meters, or more than 260 feet.

at just 170 feet, more than 97 percent of Florida would disappear, leaving only a few hills in the Panhandle; and just under 97 percent of Delaware would be submerged. Oceans would cover 80 percent of Louisiana, 70 percent of New Jersey, and half of South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Maryland. San Francisco and Sacramento would be underwater, as would New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, Houston, Seattle, and Virginia Beach, among dozens of other cities. In many places, the coast would retreat by as much as one hundred miles. Arkansas and Vermont, landlocked today, would become coastal.

Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian Amazon, would not just be on the oceanfront, but underneath its waters, as would Buenos Aires and the biggest city in landlocked Paraguay, Asunción, now more than five hundred miles inland. In Europe, in addition to London, Dublin would be underwater, as would Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Stockholm, Riga and Helsinki and Saint Petersburg. Istanbul would flood, and the Black Sea and the Mediterranean would join. In Asia, you could forget the coastline cities of Doha and Dubai and Karachi and Kolkata and Mumbai (to name just a few) and would be able to trace the trail of underwater metropolises from what is now close to desert, in Baghdad, all the way to Beijing, itself a hundred miles inland.

it is a pretty good bet that without some incomprehensibly large ocean engineering project to forestall the rise we will get there eventually.

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

Five of the twenty worst fires in California history hit the state in the fall of 2017,

just one, made up of a whole network of fires together called the Mendocino Complex, burned almost half a million acres alone. In total, more than two thousand square miles in the state turned to flame, and smoke blanketed almost half the country.

In the affluent cities of the West, even those conscious of environmental change have spent the last few decades walking our street grids and driving our highways, navigating our superabundant supermarkets and all-everywhere internet and believing that we had built our way out of nature. We have not.

On local golf courses, the West Coast’s wealthy still showed up for their tee times, swinging their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not have been more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy.

Over the last five decades, the wildfire season in the western United States has already grown by two and a half months;

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. “Ta...

In icy Greenland, fires in 2017 appeared to burn ten times more area than in 2014; and in Sweden, in 2018, forests in the Arctic Circle went up in flames.

the twenty-first century’s second-deadliest wildfire had swept through the Greek seaside, killing ninety-nine. At one resort, dozens of guests tried to escape the flames by descending a narrow stone staircase into the Aegean, only to be engulfed along the way, dying literally in each other’s arms.

in Santa Barbara that January, the town’s low-lying homes were pounded by the mountains’ detritus cascading down the hillside toward the ocean in an endless brown river. One father, in a panic, put his young children up on his kitchen’s marble countertop, thinking it the strongest feature of the house, then watched as a rolling boulder smashed through the bedroom where the children had been just moments before. One kindergartner who didn’t make it was found close to two miles from his home, in a gulley traced by train tracks close to the waterfront, having been carried there, presumably, on a continuous wave of mud. Two miles.

Each year, globally, between 260,000 and 600,000 people die from smoke from wildfires,

And more burning only means more warming only means more burning.