The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

by David Wallace-Wells

The U.N. projections are bleaker: 200 million climate refugees by 2050.

This is part of what makes climate change what the theorist Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”—a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.

“We’re getting some intimations of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene,” as the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, of the New School, wrote.15 “We’re on our own.”

“There’s a saying in the water community,” Gleick tells me. “If climate change is a shark, the water resources are the teeth.”