The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

Uninhabitable Earth; Life After Warming by David Wallace-WellsUsually, I write a book review to share a sense of joy or insights or pleasure that I've gained from reading a book. Not so with this book. I'm writing this book review in an attempt to purge the angst that I suffered from reading it, to turn the sense of dread and potential for despair I often felt while reading it into something more positive, into courageous action. Can I succeed? I hope so, for my sake and for the sake of any reader.Wallace-Wells undertakes two tasks in this book. First, he brings us up to date with the latest climate science and the most reliable prognostications about the effects of climate change. The works of thousands of scientists converge around a variety of hellscapes that would make Dante swoon. As Wallace-Wells points out, we've been conditioned to think that climate change is just rising sea levels or some warmer temperatures here and there. It's not nearly so simple. It's not "I don't live near the coast, so what's my worry," because the problem is manifold and ubiquitous. No one can escape. Yes, sea levels will rise. Temperatures will rise so that some areas to become nearly unhabitable, especially around the Middle East and India (and having lived in northern India, I have a sense of what extreme temperatures feel like). Droughts and floods will increase in frequency and severity. Wildfires, as Americans have seen within the past year in California and the Pacific Northwest, will increase in severity and frequency. Severe weather events, such as hurricanes and tornados, will proliferate and become stronger. Get ready for the designation of a Category 6 hurricane. Established diseases will spread (malaria, dengue fever, and zika will move north), and new pathological organisms will evolve in our hothouse atmosphere. Crops will fail and yields decline. Nature will survive, of course, but species and whole ecosystems will disappear. We'll see Nature altered in ways that we don't recognize and won't enjoy. Human beings will be forced to migrate to survive. And conflicts will proliferate and intensify, from domestic quarrels (and undoubtedly physical abuse) to wars and civil unrest. We seem intent on creating a perfectly Hobbesian world of the war of all against all.Is Wallace-Wells just another alarmist? Is this just a book with cheap thrills like a 50's horror flick? I wish. Wallace-Wells went into this research and writing project as someone who was cognizant of climate change, but who didn't hold it front and center of his concerns until, as a journalist, he saw an increasing flood of scientific papers that revealed a much more frightening future than most of the media was reporting. What Wallace-Wells discovered disturbed him and frightened him. But he hasn't given up hope, and neither should we.In fact, the second portion of the book, after establishing the likelihood of various varieties of hell that we humans are creating for ourselves--and we are creating it, and we are choosing it--Wallace-Wells turns to our responses and how individuals, societies, and nations may respond to the increasing pressures that we face.We humans, like most of our fellow creatures here on Earth, have three instinctive responses to threats: fight, flight, or freeze (even faint). I couldn't help but think along these lines as I read about reactions (or the lack of response) to our increasingly certain knowledge. As a whole, we've chosen to faint, to swoon at the thought of what we've wrought and then distract ourselves from our plight. We play mind games with ourselves to distract ourselves from the challenge at hand, and 21st-century consumer capitalism is most willing to enable us to do this. The Republican Party in Congress tries to pretend that the science is wrong and the problem unreal, 'another liberal plot" they say. Some say its just "God's will" and take a fatalistic approach justified on some bit of Bible misreading. Others seek to flee through technological panaceas, some of which may prove useful, but none of which promise reliable remedy and none of which can be attempted without immense costs and tremendous uncertainty about unintended consequences. The super-rich investigate how to govern the bunkers they're building to try to escape the wrath of the masses who will seek both vengeance and access to the resources that the super-rich have squirreled away. (But the super-rich remain worried about how to keep their guardians from turning on them.)The last option is to fight (climate change, not my fellow humans), and that's the option I'll take. We'll suffer significant--if not devastating--dislocations. We'll continue to see all sorts of changes, natural, social, economic, political, and cultural. But as Wallace-Wells makes clear, we have options and the potential to dramatically reduce the suffering that the future holds for all humans if we don't take sufficient steps to alleviate our plight. And I believe--or at least I possess a ray of hope--that we humans can respond in time (and time is of the essence). Thomas Friedman recently quoted an elementary but valuable insight from economic thinker Eric Beinhoffer: "there are only two ways to cure political tribalism: 'A common threat or a common project.'” Friedman uses this point to recommend that we need to undertake a common project to repair the foundations of the middle class. I suggest that repairing the foundations of the middle class must be subsumed under the project of dealing with climate change, which is a common threat and can become a common project. Indeed, starting now, we must re-imagine our political structures, our political economy, our entire culture. We have the potential to use the impending catastrophes to attempt to build a more just society. We either seek a just and sustainable world, or we can expect increasing international strife and civil anarchy. The range of possibilities for political, economic, and cultural change is vast, from outcomes that will prove (reasonably) attractive to appalling possibilities for anarchy or totalitarianism (and every nightmare in between).In listening to a couple of interviews of author David Wallace-Wells (The Ezra Klein Show & The Joe Rogen Experience), I was relieved to learn that he has an infant daughter, born while he was researching this topic. This fact reinforces his fundamental commitment to strive for the best possible outcome of our climate challenge, and it lets readers know that his hopeful words (there are some) don't represent publisher mandated pablum for readers. Wallace-Wells has to believe that we can take effective action to reduce our suffering and that of those who will come after us.One final comment: Again, from interviews, suggestions have been made that millennials will face this problem and must live with the consequences. Of course, this is true. But we baby-boomers have overseen an almost obscene increase in carbon in the atmosphere in the period since Al Gore released "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006). We bear the burden of responsibility for addressing our planetary illness. Alleviating the devastation of climate change must be a cross-generational project. We must begin the think in Burkean terms: society is a contract among generations past, present, and future. (If only there were more true conservatives!)Please, read this book and ponder your response. What shall we choose?

This book had my near heart-stopping attention while I was on vacation. And I actually tried desperately to find another copy to continue reading it after accidentally leaving it in one of my hotel rooms. As an engineer and science-based person, I was on the fence about the global warming hype since I had read so many articles regarding both sides of the argument as to how desperate the situation was or was not. This book, with all its backed up supporting information, will leave you with no question on how much humanity is in future trouble. Very much an eye opening read for any reader, science background or not!

This book opens with what, for me, was a surprise. I know that carbon emissions have, world-wide, steadily increased even since the first international "climate mitigation agreements" of thirty years ago. What I did not know is that since 1990, the world, collectively, has pumped twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as it did in the thirty years from 1960 to 1990. There are other surprises: Bitcoin anyone? Sure there's some electricity involved but how much could that be? It turns out to be about as much, per year, as one million international jet flights! Our own industrial activity is only a part (albeit still a large part) of the problem now. Other, cascading effects, are now adding their impact. Global wild-fires now consume, on average, ten times as much forest every year as they did thirty years ago. That's a lot of extra carbon. Even worse, the world's permafrost is beginning to melt releasing carbon in the form of methane which, depending on whether we are speaking of low or high altitude, has between four and eighty times the warming effect of carbon dioxide.The title of the book is prescient. Think of the climatologically worst environments on the Earth today (having warmed a bit more than one degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1800. We are on track to hit two degrees by 2050 or so), perhaps the middle of the Sahara, or someplace where it never stops being hot and raining. These are today's most inhospitable climate environments. By 2100, that sort of place will be among the best and most livable we have on Earth. Large parts of our world will be largely and literally uninhabitable, places where humans die because their bodies cannot cool themselves by sweating unless immersed in cool water, or because there is no water the glaciers being gone, and this at only three degrees of warming (2100).The first third of the book is about various cascades, most already triggered, some on the verge. Effects of warming that add up both by directly making things worse, and by degrading the planet's ability to absorb carbon and mitigate the other effects. Wallace's picture here is very dire. In the rest of the book Wallace deals with the economic, political, social, and psychological future. Here I do not think he is dire enough. He speaks of refugees in the tens of millions (try hundreds), extremist movements on both the right and left, of wars, pandemics, crop failures, of collapsing economies unable to sustain the cost of climate mitigation, and that only the economies that can afford any mitigation to begin with. The rest will have since joined the refugees. Wallace touches on all of this, but I do not think he fully appreciates how quickly and thoroughly human beings can (and will) turn on one another long before this all becomes as bad as it's going to get!Technology will not save us. Wallace covers that too. We can desalinate water and even pull carbon out of the air. There will never be enough of either that the world can afford. Besides, both are energy intensive processes and even if powered with renewable energy, that is not easy to do as concerns the chain of activities that must be powered to build and maintain that technology. Rare-Earth mining is a very dirty business.In the end, Wallace is hopeful, though not optimistic, that the global polity will wake up and de-carbonize the global economy, not in time to halt two to three degrees of warming, it is already too late for that, but in time to prevent it going to four degrees or more. I think he is over-optimistic here too. It is simply not possible, politically, and this for economic reasons, for soon-to-be nine-billion humans to de-carbonize as quickly as needed to hold the line at two to three degrees. What will force the race to de-carbonize will be economic collapse, leading to socio-political collapse, leading to mass death (over some decades) from starvation, disease, or war. I think Wallace sees this grim possibility. He hopes it isn't inevitable.This a good and timely book though I doubt it will have much effect on the carbon trajectory of our so-called civilization. It is good to see the ground covered as much as Wallace covers it. He does a good job of showing how the climatological and the political go together (alas perversely). I think he fails to draw some obvious conclusions from his own well-made points. Perhaps it's for the better. He would be accused of doom saying. I am a doomsayer! Feel free to accuse me! Meanwhile, the book is frightening enough as it is!

Importante livro, muito bem pesquisado sobre a maior ameaça que os humanos já enfrentaram e que nós mesmos criamos: as mudanças climáticas e seu efeitos ao redor do mundo.

A good read to know about the influences to climate changes and global warming. The font size is quite small for a comfortable read.

Gostei muito

It starts off so well. Such a promising subject. In the first couple of pages it has a directness and an urgency which stares you in the face daring you to look-away as it presents you with comprehension stretching facts and scenarios.Unfortunately, the rest of the book is so badly written it is barely or even not readable. Repeatedly clumsy, uncomfortable sentence structures mean that one continually loses one’s mental place in whatever point the author is trying to make. Often even multiple re-readings don't make what the author is writing any clearer. It seems to have been written by someone who really cannot write or as if it has been translated into English from an unrelated language by someone who was a native speaker of neither. If only. That at least would be easier to understand.Some of this is not helped by the author’s inward looking Americanisms. References to the sea rising as far as “I95” (which i presume is some place in America?), to how one fire ‘swallowed an entire sub-division’ (whatever that is) alienate the reader and the use of feet and Fahrenheit leave one cold when being told how hot somewhere might get.He has a jarring habit of dropping quite odd words into sentences where they simply do not fit. He loves the words ‘quotidian’ and ‘parsimonious’ (among others) but doesn't seem to actually know what they mean and they really jar when seemingly randomly dropped into the middle of a sentence as if the author is trying to seem clever but just keeps on showing his ignorance. He has no idea how to use semi colons and writes as if commas are going out of fashion (ie they are everywhere). The use of English is generally very poor and very clumsy which spoils tremendously a book which is making a very serious point. Where was this person’s editor?One fire ‘invented a new term “fire tsunami” ‘ apparently (of course, the author means that the fire inspired the creation of a new term but the book is full of these kind of silly writing mistakes).But its' the generally clumsy and amateurish writing which lets it down and makes this, sadly, a difficult book to read. It's full of silly similes and metaphors that don't work, sentences that seem to end mid-way through or just make no sense at all. It needs a thorough editing and a complete rewrite, to be much shorter and to lose the padding and irrelevant digressions which make it seem like the author is trying to be a creative writer but without the skill.I have just looked up who the author is. Incredibly, he is the deputy editor of the New York magazine. ! How a deputy editor can write so badly I cannot comprehend. Sadly I simply couldn't finish this book. The writing becomes worse, the sentences become increasingly disjointed and laughably incomprehensible. It becomes unreadable and the message becomes lost. I had to stop. Which is such a shame. In among the garbled sentences, the silly comparisons, the purple attempts at creativity and the weird misplaced word drops, there is a very very important message. Unfortunately this book isn't the one to convey that message and this author isn't the one capable of writing the book that is.

The author needs to learn to write, to convey his thoughts. He sets out to deal with a critically important topic, but acts more like a bedtime story teller trying to send someone to sleep.The book is 300 pages, all text (no diagrams of charts or illustrations to help present the information), with a typical page comprising two extremely long paragraphs. The level of English is poor (it does not even come up to English O-level pass grades, let alone any hope of riveting the reader to the page).There is no obvious structure to the information. Facts, or assertions, appear randomly.The Acknowledgements take a fifth of the book (pages 228 to 300): they look like citations but there is no citation reference in the text, so the Acknowledgements may as well been plucked from anywhere.In short, a waste of money and time.