David Wallace-Wells

"The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon."--Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.

Life After Warming

The Uninhabitable Earth

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

But conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action, advertising not just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus, which would displace ideological dispute; and that, in the mean-time, in the supermarket aisle or department store, one can do good for the world simply by buying well.

We won't get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes. In an age of personal politics, hypocrisy can look like a cardinal sin; but it can also articulate a public aspiration. Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. And a perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only "wellness.”

But global warming carries a message more concerning still: that we didn't defeat the environment at all. There was no final conquest, no dominion established. In fact, the opposite: Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame in any day-to-day way. But more than that: with our continued activity, we have rendered that system only more out of control. Nature is both over, as in "past," and all around us, indeed overwhelming us and punishing us— this is the major lesson of climate change, which it teaches us almost daily. And if global warming continues on anything like its present track, it will come to shape everything we do on the planet, from agriculture to human migration to business and mental health, transforming not just our relationship to nature but to politics and to history, and proving a knowledge system as total as "modernity."

But the world's suffering will be distributed as unequally as its profits, with great divergences both between countries and within them. Already-hot countries like India and Pakistan will be hurt the most; within the United States, the costs will be shouldered largely in the South and Midwest, where some regions could lose up to 20 percent of county income.

Spreadsheets, database management software, email— these innovations alone would seem to promise huge gains in efficiency for any business or economy adopting them. But those gains simply haven't material-ized; in fact, the economic period in which those innovations were introduced, along with literally thousands of similar computer-driven efficiencies, has been characterized, especially in the developed West, by wage and productivity stagnation and dampened economic growth. One speculative possibility: computers have made us more efficient and productive, but at the same time climate change has had the opposite effect, diminishing or wiping out entirely the impact of technology. 

Oil is the patrimony of the planet's prehuman past: what stored energy the earth can produce when undisturbed for millennia. As soon as humans discovered that storehouse, they set about plundering it— so fast that, at various points over the last half century, oil forecasters have panicked about running out. In 1968, the labor historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, "Whoever says Industrial Revolution, says cotton." Today, he would probably substitute "fossil fuel."

Already, in laboratories, several microbes have been reanimated: a 32,000-year-old "extremophile" bacteria revived in 2005, an 8-million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, a 3.5-million-year-old one a Russian scientist self-injected, out of curiosity, just to see what would happen. (He survived.) In 2018, scientists revived something a bit bigger-a worm that had been frozen in permafrost for the last 42,000 years.

Some fish have learned to eat plastic, and certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling "nanoplastics."

The Chinese "airpocalypse" of 2013 doubled the high end of that upper range, reaching a peak Air Quality Index of 993, and scientists studying the phenomenon suggested that China had inadvertently invented an entirely new and unstudied kind of smog, one that combined the "pea soup" pollution of industrial-era Europe and the small-particulate pollution that has lately contaminated so much of the developing world. That year, smog was responsible for 1.37 million deaths in the country.

But while the planet commands the necessary resources today to provide water for drinking and sanitation to all the world’s people, there is not the necessary political will—or even the inclination—to do so.

But accusations of individual irresponsibility were a kind of weaponized red herring, as they often are in communities reckoning with the onset of climate pain. We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces. We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces.

Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and live not far from the mainland on an island millions of Americans have visited personally. And yet when climate disaster struck there, we processed their suffering, perhaps out of psychological self-interest, as foreign and far away.

When trees die—by natural processes, by fire, at the hands of humans—they release into the atmosphere the carbon stored within them, sometimes for as long as centuries. In this way, they are like coal. Which is why the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops—that the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, would become carbon sources, unleashing all that stored gas.

The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.”

“Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say,” he writes. “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

Almost as a prophylactic against climate guilt, as the news from science has grown bleaker, Western liberals have comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into performances of moral or environmental purity—less beef, more Teslas, fewer transatlantic flights. But the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics. 

First, the project of remaking the planet so that it is undeniably ours, a project whose exhaust, the poison of emissions, now casually works its way through millennia of ice so quickly you can see the melt with a naked eye, destroying the environmental conditions that have held stable and steadily governed for literally all of human history. That has been the work of a single generation.

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. 

We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.

Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged.

As recently as the 1997 signing of the landmark Kyoto Protocol, two degrees Celsius of global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons we used to call "natural disasters" but will soon normalize as simply "bad weather."

Infonya penting tapi ga seneng sama penyampaiannya. Kinda repetitive and patronizing with a hint of white supremacy and classism? Trus kalimatnya ga efektif, satu halaman bisa dua kalimat aja. I appreciate the collection of up to date news on climate change, i just grow to dislike the author for nonsubstantial reasons as i read and i'm glad to finish the book and finally part with him. 
I'd rather recommend The Crash Course by Chris Martenson. A bit different but more elaborate, holistic and successful in stirring up urgency (for me).

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Andrew John Kinney

The Uninhabitable Earth is a good book for those not yet acquainted with the severity of the global warming crisis. For those of us who have been paying attention to the subject, as I have for over 35 years, it is less revelatory; what I had been hoping for from the book was more of a “what and where” of most current predictions of warming effects, coupled with some hard data on what is technologically possible in terms of reducing warming. I got some of each, but not as much of either as I would have liked. The book reminds me a bit of Jonathon Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, written at the height of Reagan’s nuclear saber-rattling, which meant to shock the public into perceiving how dangerous the nuclear brinksmanship game was. Like Fate of the Earth, Uninhabitable Earth is long on epistles about different philosophies of looking at humanity’s possible extinction, and a bit shorter on the nuts and bolts of how we avoid our dismal fate. Since in my case, Mr. Wallace-Wells is preaching to the converted, this is perhaps an unfair criticism to level at him; after all, there are plenty of people who do not understand how dire the situation really is, and if his target audience is those people, then he has done a fine job laying out the facts. 

Thirteen or fourteen years ago I read Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers to get a sense of where we stood at that time with regard to global warming. Two things that struck me about that book were that a) Flannery (a scientist himself) went into his research for the book not really convinced of the case for anthropogenic warming, and came away from it a true believer, and b) the comments that Flannery got, scientist to scientist, from climate researchers, indicated that those climate scientists were not just concerned, they were outright frightened by what their research was telling them. Uninhabitable Earth does nothing to tone down the level of fear, nor should it. The problem is, there has not been, nor is there likely to be any Pearl-Harbor-type trigger to set in motion the WW2 scale mobilization to combat warming that is urgently needed, and this book does not move the needle significantly in that regard. The book does do a very useful thing for the uninitiated: it makes clear that sea-level rise is far from the only catastrophe awaiting us if we don’t change our ways; decline in crop productivity by > 50%, vast increases in wildfires and desertification, vast increases in extreme weather like hurricanes and extreme rain events, increases in tropical diseases, and, of course, death from the direct effects of heat in the areas nearest the equator, to name a few. 

But I am an engineer with a math minor, and I was looking for a bit more precision on what is needed to save the planet. Wallace-Wells’ answer is, basically, everything including the kitchen sink, and all that right now. And he does explore, at length, the need to convert from coal-powered plants to solar and wind, immediately. He documents how concrete and asphalt in cities hold heat, how eating meat contributes to warming, how increased CO2 makes plants less nutritious, how most of the estimates of sea-level rise are under-estimates by a wide margin, how freshwater is disappearing from lakes and aquifers, how the oceans are dying from a combination of heating and acidification and fish are metabolizing plastic, how air pollution (think eastern China or Delhi) causes / exacerbates a host of diseases and permanently lowers IQ among children growing up in pollution, and diseases, and economic collapse, and conflict and mental health, etc, etc. The list of negative effects is long and well footnoted. And by the way, all of the above is without taking into consideration the plants and animals being driven to extinction by warming. But back to saving the planet; the book points out that at the current pace, we will not be 100% converted to sustainable energy for another 400 years – only about 20 times too slow a rate. He also points out that the number of machines needed to suck CO2 from the air is something on the order of the number of automobiles currently in existence. So there is a bit of information about how far we are from doing what is urgently needed, but not enough information from engineers and scientists about what we do need to do, in gory detail. My simple, mechanical engineer’s brain is beginning to whisper to me that something along the lines of a physical, space-based, shade-creating film or reflective particulate cloud is going to be needed to buy us time to get all the other things done before extinction catches us. And yes, I know how that turned out in the movie Snow Piercer, but absent some radical galvanization of the U.S., China, and Europe on the subject in the next five years, that may be the only real option available in time to stop us from cooking.

Wallace-Wells correctly points out the need for political will to get us moving, but he does not address the problem (which I see every day because I live in the southeast U.S.) that a significant chunk of the US population rejects the idea that global warming is even happening. How, oh how to convince those folks? Effective education will be needed, and that right soon – not all deniers will see the light, but you don’t need all; you only need about 5-10% to shift the electorate and get people elected who will take real action.

So “A” for effort to this book, but not exactly what I was hoping for. It is a good book for many people who have not yet been shocked into realization of the gravity of our global situation. I was sufficiently shocked a decade ago.

'A profound book, which simultaneously makes me terrified and hopeful about the future' Jonathan Safran Foer A Times and FT Most Anticipated Book 2019 It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.

What Climate Change Means

Daniel Gynn

Jamieson

3.5

it is good. I did enjoy listening to it, especially the third part. but at times it's dry and repetitive and honestly, a lot of the information you would have heard in other hyped up books about climate change/just through the news if you follow climate science at all. The author also rambles A LOT.

I think I preferred Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes

The collection of information here is mind-blowing. There are tons of figures, data and stories.

Sadly while the author builds many good arguments for why we should care about this issue the conclusions for me are very dissatisfying.

After a tour de force of the failures of our civilization to deal with warming the author lands on an insipid conclusion: we need more neoliberal political activism. By being politically active and creating good policies we will solve this issue.

Unfortunately this seems even more deranged to me than the technological solutionism he criticizes which at the very least acknowledges the failures of the system.

I would skip this, I think this book is meant for liberal millennials who are unaware of our predicament 

Oscar von Hauske

The collection of information here is mind-blowing. There are tons of figures, data and stories.

Sadly while the author builds many good arguments for why we should care about this issue the conclusions for me are very dissatisfying.

After a tour de force of the failures of our civilization to deal with warming the author lands on an insipid conclusion: we need more neoliberal political activism. By being politically active and creating good policies we will solve this issue.

Unfortunately this seems even more deranged to me than the technological solutionism he criticizes which at the very least acknowledges the failures of the system.

I would skip this, I think this book is meant for liberal millennials who are unaware of our predicament 

Fraser Simons

It’s really nice to have thoughts on climate change collected and filtered through a person. When you do your own research, there’s just so much information to go through and so much misinformation. Tackling it topically and from best and worst case scenario is immensely helpful, imo. 

I wouldn’t call this fun reading, even when it’s best case. And the prose are fairly dry, given the subject matter. But It is a useful and helpful framework to consume if you’re interested in the subject matter. If only as a supplement as to how you want to frame your own thoughts regarding the climate crisis.

Bob Simone

Diana Platgalve

Terrifying collection of facts and opinions on the climate change. I particularly enjoyed his usage of modern terms concerning the concept, as political depression. However, I am not convinced with references to The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and similar; on the other hand, he’s referring to the great minds of today as Naomi Klein, Yuval Noah Harari and others, making strong points.

Olivera Mitić

Take this rating with a grain of salt. I was already familiar with a lot of the information Wallace-Wells decided to interpret and therefore found this not to be as enlightening as I wanted it to be. 
Either way, it's a really accessible and important read and, dare I say, mandatory.

Анастасия Розова

2.5/5

Well, even though I believe this topic is very important, vital even, the book wasn't very engaging hence the rating. It didn't blew me away with the facts and it just was quite boring fro me.

Hovewer I'm giving it 2.5/5 cause the climate change is real and scary. And everyone should know about it.

**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig 'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening Standard Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Sunday Times, Spectator and New Statesman A Waterstones Paperback of the Year and shortlisted for the Foyles Book of the Year 2019 Longlisted for the PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.

A Story of the Future

Lewis John Fisher

Having being recommend this book by Dr Simon Clark (https://www.youtube.com/user/SimonOxf... ), this was a depressing, alarming and must-read for anyone and everyone living today. The age of the Anthropocene is what will determine the future of our species and the future of our planet

Ricardo Sousa

An incredibly eye-opening description of the impacts of climate change, particularly effective in providing a very vivid (read horrific) account of what life on Earth will look like in a few decades if we don’t drastically change course. 

Reading this feels simultaneously as a moral duty and an act of masochism. Definitely impacted my perception of climate change - and if such thing existed, this book should be at the very top of every politician’s mandatory readings.

(9/10)

Sameer Vasta

If you’re looking for good news, or for a concrete way to get us out of this climate change crisis we find ourselves in, this book is not that. Yes, it does outline what needs to be done to fix the problem, but it also acknowledges that we are far too late to fix it all. We have f**ked up, and now we have to pay for the damage we have done. According to Mr. Wallace-Wells, that damage is extensive, and the consequences are dire; if anything, reading this will scare you about the future, but in a way that still holds out a very slim glimmer of hope. It’s hopeful in its direness, and it the stark honesty of the miserable reality that awaits us feels almost galvanizing. The Uninhabitable Earth reminds us that yes, we’ve really screwed up, but if we want to save what we can, it’s time for us to get to work.

**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this ... what this book forces you to face is more important than any other subject' David Sexton, Evening Standard It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.

Shreerag Plakazhi

It's rarely that you pick up a book that changes your life. I can sum it up in two statements:
1. Bad news - our species, and all the species in our current era, are probably screwed.
2. Good news - whether extinction happens is entirely in our control.

This book is quite possibly the most important book I'll read this year.

Anyaconda

This reads more like the worst horror book (you can pack your bags Stephen King). Why? This is going to happen soon. It was extremely depressive, but we'll researched and informative. You don't have to be extremely knowledgeable as the author is explaining things very well.
Highly recommend this to anybody who gives a 💩 and especially to the people who don't. This should be read and taught in schools!

Victoria Simansjah

A tough and depressing read. However very enlightening and insightful. Greatest research pieces I’ve read on climate and the systemic impact. Economics, psychology, sociology, politics, nature surrounds us. Subconsciously or not, it impacts every little bit. Nothing is stopping the Earth from warming up, my hope is that we can start shifting the climate needle for our future generations to come.

Bryan Alexander

It is worse, much worse, than you think.
(opening line)The Uninhabitable Earth is an introduction to the climate crisis, aimed at terrifying you into action.

It's not a scientific or political book. Instead, it's a goad for thoughtful readers who either haven't looked into the science, or who want reassurance.

The book begins by sketching out very bad possibilities. These include killing heat, a reduction to the planetary food supply, floods, degraded air quality, expanded and mutated diseases, economic decline, and political chaos. Each can worsen the others. 

The Uninhabitable Earth then offers a tour of possible human reactions to an age of climate disaster. One chapter notes some apocalyptic and doomful thinkers, like the Dark Mountain crew, and suggests "we surely will... imagin[e] things more apocalyptically... and soon" (207). The book explores various political configurations ranging from collapsing states to massive, climate-fixated superstates.

The author does see a way forward that reduces chances of the worst happening. He offers a clear formula[C]onsider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture. (226-7)
In contrast, Wallace-Wells is skeptical of technological solutions. He doesn't think they'll win the day; instead, they'll make the world less terrible, rendering the future "merely grim" (31). A fascinating passage explores the idea of seeding the atmosphere with particulates aimed at reducing solar inputs to the Earth's surface. Wallace-Wells finds that to have some change of reducing warming, but at the cost of environmental degradation and many deaths as a result of what is effectively a new form of pollution (106-8). Carbon capture tech is very expensive right now, and future price drops have to be balanced against a worsening temperature (170).

On the plus side The Uninhabitable Earth gives many readers a well written and short tour of the climate change horizon. I can see this becoming widely read in book clubs and schools. 

I was especially taken with the book's argument that most of climate change's causes are very recent.The majority of the [carbon] burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld [1989]. Since the end of WWII the figure is about 85%. The story of the industrial world's kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime - thee planet brought from seeming stability to thee brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral. (4)Which leads to this charge:[I]f the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within thee lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation. We all know that second lifetime. It is ours. (7)On the other hand, the book can misfire. The "Church of Technology" chapter (171-184) is very weak, scattering cheap anti-Silicon Valley bromides. Its downplaying of human ingenuity is both sad and risks offering a bad forecast. The absence of science fiction suggests a similar refusal to parts of human creativity.

I am also confused by the book's politics. At times it blames industrial capitalism, then it blames the whole human race. Global warming isn't a perpetrator; it's a conspiracy. 
 We all live within climate and within all the changes we have produced in it, which enclose us all and everything we do. (20)It seems to dodge a real left politics in favor of something... post-left? The approach to technology is similarly murky. Uninhabitable slams technologists yet wants to use carbon capture, which it thinks isn't very good, but is part of our best tool set. 

Otherwise, recommended for your climate change needs.

PS: reading The Uninhabitable Earth gave me a weird prickle of deja vu. I worked through several chapters before I got it. 
In 1982 Jonathan Schell published The Fate of the Earth. Like Uninhabitable Earth, Schell's book wanted to scare the bejesus out of readers. It was thoughtfully written, even lyrical at times, clearly aimed at literate audiences. There wasn't much new for people who'd been paying attention, so it was more useful for those who'd lost track of nuclear weapons and then-current thinking about their use. Wallace-Wells really feels like he's trying to do a Fate for climate change and the 21st century.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon."--Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon With a new afterword It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible--food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation's Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it--the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation--today's. Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth "The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet."--Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times "Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells's outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too."--The Economist "Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the 'eerily banal language of climatology' in favor of lush, rolling prose."--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times "The book has potential to be this generation's Silent Spring."--The Washington Post "The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book."--Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

The Uninhabitable Earth Life After Warming

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