The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

by David Wallace-Wells

“climate caste system.”

In fact, with one exception—Australia—countries with lower GDPs will warm the most.

If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters.

Fully half of British emissions, it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of American energy is wasted; globally, according to one paper, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5 trillion each year.

Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of Bitcoin; today mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled, out of distrust of one another and the nations behind “fiat currencies,” a program to wipe out the gains of several long, hard generations of green energy innovation.

Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves; a bigger increase is to come.

At present, there are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines.

Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, when projections suggest we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed, we may also have 50 percent less grain to give them.

Norman Borlaug,

“carrying capacity”: How much population can a given environment ultimately support before collapsing or degrading from overuse?

an investment in the well-being of the global south made by mortgaging the ecological future of the planet.

by 2050, milk consumption in China is expected to grow to triple the current level,

Already, global food production accounts for about a third of all emissions.21 To avoid dangerous climate change, Greenpeace has estimated that the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050;

In the postindustrial West, we try not to think about these bargains, which have benefited us so enormously. When we do, it is often in the guilty spirit of what critic Kris Bartkus has memorably called “the Malthusian tragic”—namely, our inability to see any remaining innocence in the quotidian life of the well-to-do West, given the devastation that wealth has imposed on the world of natural wonder it conquered and the suffering of those, elsewhere on the planet, left behind in the race to endless material comforts.

Nutrient Collapse.”

Jakarta is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, today home to ten million; thanks to flooding and literal sinking, it could be entirely underwater as soon as 2050.7

Without flood adaptation measures, large swaths of northern Europe and the whole eastern half of the United States will be affected by at least ten times as many floods. In large parts of India, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia,

And while business-as-usual 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.

One major concern is methane, particularly the methane that might be released by a melting Arctic, where permafrost contains up to 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, considerably more than is currently suspended in the earth’s atmosphere.

“albedo effect”: ice is white and so reflects sunlight back into space rather than absorbing it; the less ice, the more sunlight is absorbed as global warming; and 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.

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 2100.54

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

the most harrowing of the ways in which the fires seemed to confirm our cinematic nightmares was the third: that climate chaos could breach our most imperious fortresses—that is, our cities.

The following year, Americans watched the Kardashians evacuate via Instagram stories, then read about the private firefighting forces they employed, the rest of the state reliant on conscripted convicts earning as little as a dollar a day.

By 2050, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again, and in some places within the United States the area burned could grow fivefold.

In California, a single wildfire can entirely eliminate the emissions gains made that year by all of the state’s aggressive environmental policies.

Fires of that scale happen now every year. In this way, they make a mockery of the technocratic, meliorist approach to emissions reduction.

Remember Hurricane Sandy? By 2100, floods of that scale are expected as many as seventeen times more often in New York.

In the Florida Keys, 150 miles of road need to be raised to stay ahead of sea level, costing as much as $7 million each mile, or up to $1 billion, total. The county’s 2018 road budget was $25 million.

Globally, between 70 and 80 percent of freshwater is used for food production and agriculture, with an additional 10 to 20 percent set aside for industry.

As soon as 2020, as many as 250 million Africans could face water shortages due to climate change; by the 2050s, the number could hit a billion people in Asia alone.

But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces. When it comes to freshwater, the bigger picture is this: personal consumption amounts to such a thin sliver that only in the most extreme droughts can it even make a difference.

regional GDP could decline, simply due to water insecurity, by as much as 14 percent in the Middle East, 12 percent in Africa’s Sahel, 11 percent in central Asia, and 7 percent in east Asia.

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

fish populations have migrated north by hundreds of miles in search of colder waters—

“dead zones”; oxygen-deprived zones have grown by several million square kilometers, roughly the size of all of Europe;

“ocean conveyor belt,” the great circulatory system made up of the Gulf Stream and other currents that is the primary way the planet regulates regional temperatures.

With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.1

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

In 2017, simply breathing its air was the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day, and local hospitals saw a patient surge of 20 percent.

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

And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.55

Aerosol particles actually suppress global temperature, mostly by reflecting sunlight back into outer space.

Lyme is still, in relative terms, a young disease, and one we don’t yet understand all that well: we attribute a very mysterious and incoherent set of symptoms to it, from joint pain to fatigue to memory loss to facial palsy, almost as a catchall explanation for ailments we cannot pinpoint in patients who we know have been bitten by a bug carrying the bug.

India alone, one study proposed, would shoulder nearly a quarter of the economic suffering inflicted on the entire world by climate change.8 In 2018, the World Bank estimated that the current path of carbon emissions would sharply diminish the living conditions of 800 million living throughout South Asia.

even an astonishing, improbable effort to limit warming to two degrees would still, by this math, result in at least 40 percent, and perhaps as much as 80 percent, more war.

agriculture and economics: when yields drop and productivity falls, societies can falter, and when droughts and heat waves hit, the shocks can be felt even more deeply,

forced migration

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.