The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

by David Wallace-Wells

if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too. We all also know that second lifetime. It is ours.

The U.N. projections are bleaker: 200 million climate refugees by 2050.23

Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.

By 2040, the summer of 2018 will likely seem normal.

Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered in water.1 Barely more than 2 percent of that water is fresh, and only 1 percent of that water, at most, is accessible, with the rest trapped mostly in glaciers.

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.

Today, at just one degree of warming, those regions with at least a month of water shortages each year include just about all of the United States west of Texas, where lakes and aquifers are being drained to meet demand, and stretching up into western Canada and down to Mexico City; almost all of North Africa and the Middle East; a large chunk of India; almost all of Australia; significant parts of Argentina and Chile; and everything in Africa south of Zambia.

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.1 Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it.

Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015.24

We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000.

If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.