The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
- Jul 4, 2019
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 13
★★★★★
When I finished the opening section of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, a blistering thirty-page sequence titled, “Cascades,” in which the book’s premise is painted with broad, powerful strokes, I thought: There is no way David Wallace-Wells can maintain such ferocious pace and intensity. He can and he does. Over the next hundred or so pages, in a section titled, “The Elements of Chaos,” he zooms in, artificially isolating twelve of these cascading climate dangers. The result is terrifying—a pummeling, relentless picture of what we can expect life on earth to be like with two, three, four more degrees of global warming. Thankfully, the third section, “The Climate Kaleidoscope,” offers a reprieve from the onslaught. Here, Wallace-Wells turns more philosophical, offering ways in which we might make sense of the climate crisis.
This is not a book about the science of global warming. It does not present the evidence for global warming (though it is written with that scholarship and research at its very core, all of which is presented in a thoroughly detailed bibliography). Nor does it offer creative solutions for saving the planet. If that’s what you’re looking for, resources abound elsewhere. Rather, it is about the potential consequences of living on an increasingly warming planet that, assuming we choose to do nothing about the trajectory we’ve set ourselves on, will be devastating—if not for everyone everywhere, then certainly for many millions of people (not to mention all the non-human creatures) across huge swaths of the planet.
This isn’t an imaginary future. We are, in many ways, living that future now. And we have, in large part (lip service and non-binding accords notwithstanding), chosen to do nothing—a thought particularly troubling with the very clear (and very real) understanding that any action we take now would be much easier and far more impactful than anything we might do in one, or five, or 10 years. Then again, as Wallace-Wells ponders by way of opening the book’s outro, “What if we’re wrong?” Of course, the science is clear: global warming is happening, it’s mostly caused by humans, and the consequences will be severe. What isn’t so clear is how, exactly, things will play out in a warmer world, and over what timeline. Here, like the accused witch whose innocence was only proved by her drowning, science only wins if we lose. If we choose to do nothing, or not enough, or too little too late, then our only choice will be in how we cope—mentally, physically, spiritually, practically—with the world we made for ourselves.
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