The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

elementary school classrooms have been found, by one study, to already average 1,000 parts per million, with almost a quarter of tho...

other studies have shown even higher concentrations on airplanes,

Droughts have a direct impact on air quality, producing what is now known as dust exposure and in the days of the American Dust Bowl was called “dust pneumonia”; climate change will bring new dust storms to those plains states, where deaths from dust pollution are expected to more than double and hospitalizations to triple.

The hotter the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by the middle of this century Americans should suffer a 70 percent increase in days with unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected.

Already, more than 10,000 people die from air pollution daily.

That is considerably more each day—each day—than the total number of people who have ever been affected by the meltdowns of nuclear reactors.

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...

In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural wind-ventilation patterns it had come to depend on, and, as a result, blanketing much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog.

the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks according to an idiosyncratic unit scale tabulating the presence of a variety of pollutants: the warnings begin at 51–100, and at 201–300 include promises of “significant increase in respiratory effects in the general population.” The index tops out with the 301–500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and “serious risk of respiratory effects in the general population”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.” The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 doubled the high end of that upper range, reaching a peak Air Quality Index of 993, and scientists studying the phenomenon suggested that China had inadvertently invented an entirely new and unstudied kind of smog, one that combined the “pea soup” pollution of industrial-era Europe and the small-particulate pollution that has lately contaminated so much of the developing world. That year, smog was responsible for 1.37 million deaths in the country.

the record California wildfire season of 2017, the air around San Francisco was worse than on the same day in Beijing. In Napa, the Air Quality Index hit 486.

in Santa Barbara, residents scooped ash from their drainpipes by the handful.

in Delhi, where in 2017 the Air Quality Index reached 999.

In 2017, The Lancet reported, nine million premature deaths globally were from small-particulate pollution; more than a quarter were in India. And that was before final figures were in from that year’s spike.

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.

95 percent of the world’s population is breathing dangerously polluted air.

Globally, one out of six deaths is caused by air pollution.

“the Great Pacific garbage patch”—that mass of plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating freely in the Pacific Ocean.

The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are

a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and California contain plastics,

European eaters of shellfish, one estimate has suggested, consume at least...

A majority of fish tested in the Great Lakes contained microplastics, as did the guts of 73 percent of fish surveyed in the northwest Atlantic.

certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics.”

Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, and sixteen of seventeen tested brands of commercial sea salt, across eight different countries.

they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

when plastics degrade, they release methane and ethylene, another powerful greenhouse gas.

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.

“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 warming.

“geoengineering,”

it has gained a terrific amount of currency among the most concerned climate scientists, many of whom will also note that none of the quite modest goals of the Paris climate accords can be achieved without negative-emissions technologies—at present prohibitively expensive.

Even an environmentalist billionaire, going rogue, could make it happen on their own.

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.

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.

In Alaska, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million—about 3 percent of the world’s population, and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. Scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice,

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.

in Minnesota, during the 2000s, winter ticks helped drop the moose population by 58 percent in a single decade,

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 behind a spooky gray skin that has earned them the name “ghost moose.”

More than 99 percent of even those bacteria inside human bodies are presently unknown to science, which means we are operating in near-total ignorance about the effects climate change might have on the bugs in, for instance, our guts—about

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,”

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,”

“In fact, humidity levels were the highest ever seen in the region since records began in 1948. The same pattern held for two earlier, and much smaller, die-offs from 1981 and 1988.

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,

The more recent Great Recession lowered it by about 2 percent, in a onetime shock;

a team led by Thomas Stoerk suggested that these estimates could be dramatic underestimates.

(Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.)

From Switzerland to Finland, heat waves have necessitated the closure of power plants when cooling liquids have become too hot to do their job.

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.