The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

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.

we do know that, globally, warmer temperatures do dampen w...

Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel have identified an optimal annual average temperature for economic productivity: 13 degrees Celsius, which just so happens to be the historical median for the United States and several other of the world’s biggest economies. Today, the U.S. climate hovers around 13.4 degrees, which translates into less than 1 percent of GDP loss—though, like compound interest, the effects grow over time.

The greater San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, is sitting pretty right now, at exactly 13 degrees.

because it has so much to lose, and in part because it so aggressively developed its very long coastlines, the U.S. is more vulnerable to climate impacts than any country in the world but India,

compared to the impact of American losses at one degree, at two degrees the economic ripple effect in China would be 4.5 times larger.

but the waves will be coming from nearly every country in the world, like radio signals beamed out from a whole global forest of towers, each transmitting economic suffering.

Should the planet warm 3.7 degrees, one assessment suggests, climate change damages could total $551 trillion—nearly twice as much wealth as exists in the world today.

we now know that it will be much, much more expensive to not act on climate than to take even the most aggressive action today.

In 2018, one paper calculated the global cost of a rapid energy transition, by 2030, to be negative $26 trillion—in other words, rebuilding the energy infrastructure of the world would make us all that much money, compared to a static system, in only a dozen years.

for every half degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict.

a planet four degrees warmer would have perhaps twice as many wars as we do today.

Already, climate change has elevated Africa’s risk of conflict by more than 10 percent; in that continent, by just 2030, projected temperatures are expected to cause 393,000 additional deaths in battle.

Beginning with the bombing at Bikini Atoll, these islands were ground zero for American atom bomb testing just after the war; the U.S. military has only ever “cleaned up” one island of radioactivity, which makes them the world’s largest nuclear waste site.

From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization,

The Center for Climate and Security, a state-focused think tank, organizes the threats from climate change into six categories: “Catch-22 states,” in which governments have responded to local climate challenges—to agriculture, for example—by turning toward a global marketplace that is now more than ever vulnerable to climate shocks; “brittle states,” stable on the surface—but only by a run of good climate luck; “fragile states,” such as Sudan, Yemen, and Bangladesh, where climate impacts have already eaten into trust in state authority, or worse; “disputed zones among states,” like the South China Sea or Arctic; “disappearing states,” which they mean literally, as in the case of the Maldives; and “non-state actors,” like ISIS, which can seize local resources, such as freshwater, as a way of applying leverage against the nominal state authority or the local population.

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.

evanescing

Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation.

By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States could bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries, and acts of larceny.

wave. It’s not just temperature effects. In 2018, a team of researchers examining an enormous data set of more than 9,000 American cities found that air pollution levels positively predicted incidents of every single crime category they looked at—from car theft and burglary and larceny up to assault, rape, and murder.

Between 2008 and 2010, Guatemala was hit by Tropical Storm Arthur, Hurricane Dolly, Tropical Storm Agatha, and Tropical Storm Hermine—this a country that was already one of the ten most affected by extreme weather and reeling in the same years from the eruption of a local volcano and a regional earthquake. All told, almost three million were left “food insecure,” and at least 400,000 needed humanitarian assistance; from the 2010 disasters alone, the country sustained damages totaling more than a billion dollars, or roughly a quarter of the national budget, devastating its roads and supply chains. In 2011, it was hit by Tropical Storm 12E, and, in the wake of the disasters, farmers turned to growing poppies; organized crime, already an enormous problem, exploded—which

the Sicilian mafia was produced...

the impacts will be greatest in the world’s least developed, most impoverished, and therefore least resilient nations—almost literally a story of the world’s rich drowning the world’s poor with their waste.

The first country to industrialize and produce greenhouse gas on a grand scale, the United Kingdom, is expected to suffer least from climate change.

according to the U.N. IOM, climate change may unleash as many as a billion migrants on the world by 2050. One billion—that is about as many people as live today in North and South America combined.

In Ecuador, climate damage has been seen even in middle-class children, who bear the mark of rainfall shocks and extreme temperatures on their wages twenty to sixty years after the fact. The effects begin in the womb, and they are universal, with measurable declines in lifetime earnings for every day over ninety degrees during a baby’s nine months in utero.

An enormous study in Taiwan found that, for every single unit of additional air pollution, the relative risk of Alzheimer’s doubled. Similar patterns have been observed from Ontario to Mexico City.

The next decades are not yet determined. A new timer begins with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life this child will live on it. The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable.

between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as an ongoing negative shock to their mental health.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 62 percent of evacuees exceeded the diagnostic threshold for acute stress disorder; in the region as a whole, nearly a third had PTSD. Wildfires, curiously, yielded a lower incidence—just 24 percent of evacuees in the aftermath of one series of California blazes. But a third of those who lived through fire were diagnosed, in its aftermath, with depression.

Even those watching the effects from the sidelines suffer from climate trauma.

“climate depression,”

“environmental grief.”

In the sense of psychological distress, which so many of them endure, climate scientists are the canaries in our coal mine.

Thirty-two weeks after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, killing forty, more than half of children surveyed had moderate PTSD and more than a third had a severe form; in the high-impact areas, 70 percent of children scored in the moderate-to-severe range fully twenty-one months after the Category 5 storm. By dismal contrast, soldiers returning from war are estimated to suffer from PTSD at a rate between 11 and 31 percent.

One especially detailed study examined the mental health fallout from Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm and the second-deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, which struck Central America in 1998, leaving 11,000 dead. In Posoltega, the most hard-hit region of Nicaragua, children had a 27 percent chance of having been seriously injured, a 31 percent chance of having lost a family member, and a 63 percent chance of their home having been damaged or destroyed. You can imagine the aftereffects. Ninety percent of adolescents in the area were left with PTSD, with the average adolescent boy registering at the high end of the range of “severe” PTSD, and the average teenage girl registering over the threshold of “very severe.” Six months after the storm, four out of every five teenage survivors from Posoltega suffered from depression; more than half, the study found, compulsively nursed what the authors called, a bit euphemistically, “vengeful thoughts.”

Schizophrenics, especially, are admitted at much higher rates when the temperatures are higher, and, inside those hospitals, ward temperature significantly increases symptom severity in schizophrenic patients.

One startling paper by Tamma Carleton has suggested that global warming is already responsible for 59,000 suicides, many of them farmers, in India—where one-fifth of all the world’s suicides now occur, and where suicide rates have doubled since just 1980.

How quickly will we act to save ourselves and preserve as much of the way of life we know today as possible?

“Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ” His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,

also promises at least a simulation of agency. That could grow more comforting in the coming years, assuming we continue to proceed, zombie-like ourselves, down a path to ruin.

with global income inequality, which is one reason that many on the Left point to the all-encompassing system, saying that industrial capitalism is to blame. It is. But saying so does not name an antagonist; it names a toxic investment vehicle with most of the world as stakeholders, many of whom eagerly bought in. And who in fact quite enjoy their present way of life.

it simply isn’t the case that the socialist countries of the world are behaving more responsibly, with carbon, nor that they have in the past.

a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world.

American inaction surely slowed global progress on climate in a time when the world had only one superpower. But there is simply nothing like climate denialism beyond the U.S. border, which encloses the production of only 15 percent of the world’s emissions. To believe the fault for global warming lies exclusively with the Republican Party or its fossil fuel backers is a form of American narcissism. That narcissism, I suspect, will be broken by climate change. In the rest of the world, where action on carbon is just as slow and resistance to real policy changes just as strong, denial is simply not a problem. The corporate influence of fossil fuel is present, of course, but so are inertia and the allure of near-term gains and the preferences of the world’s workers and consumers, who fall somewhere on a long spectrum of culpability stretching from knowing selfishness through true ignorance and reflexive, if naive, complacency. How do you narrativize that?

Beyond the matter of villainy is the story of nature and our relationship to it.

It’s natural, so to speak, to anthropomorphize animals—our whole animation industry is built on it, for starters. But there is something strange, even fatalistic, about such vain beings as ourselves identifying this strongly with creatures who operate so entirely without free will and individual autonomy that many experts in the field aren’t sure whether we should think of the bee or the colony as the organism.

as recently as 2018, magazines were devoting whole feature articles to the bee fable. Presumably, this is not because people enjoyed being wrong about bees, but because treating any apparent crisis as an allegory was somehow comforting—as though it sequestered the problem in a story whose meaning we controlled.