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The Uninhabitable Earth

October 8, 2019

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells, has a misleading title. Wallace-Wells is not at all sure that human life will continue post-warming. The point of his hard-to-read volume is that we need to act with the urgency a life-threatening situation demands. Action devoid of the mandatory intensity and intentionality will render us a footnote in history - a history no one will read.

The author begins by telling us "It is worse, much worse, than you think," and goes on to list the ways in which we have chosen to delude ourselves. The bitter truth is that we are all in this together, though some will suffer more than others, with India and Pakistan leading the pack. Let us count the ways: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, disasters no longer natural, freshwater drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues of warming, economic collapse, climate conflict, and "systems," or threat multipliers. Thus far we have incurred one degree Celsius of warming and have been forced to learn about the attendant problems, which include warmer oceans that spin off stronger, more numerous hurricanes and typhoons, the spread of viruses like Zika, the failure of crops in Syria leading to civil war, increased wildfires, from the Arctic to the Amazon, and filthy air leading to shortened lives, to cite only a few.

The problems will multiply as warming increases. Since 1980, there has been a fiftyfold increase in dangerous heat waves. At four degrees of warming, corn yields in the United States are predicted to decrease by nearly half. By the year 2100, as much as 5 percent of the global population will be flooded every year if we continue to live as we do (given a world population of 10 billion, that 5 percent would equal 500 million people). Destruction from wildfires is predicted to double globally
by 2050 if we ignore our imminent peril.

There are already 40 per cent more intense rainstorms in the United States than there were in the middle of the 1900s. In the Northeast, that figure is 71 per cent. Conversely, in the last hundred years, many of the world's largest lakes have begun to dry up, from the Aral Sea in central Asia, to Lake Mead in Nevada. Half of Australia's Great Barrier Reef is dead. By the 2090s, as many as 2 billion people will breathe air the World Health Organization considers unsafe. And on and on it goes, with problems proliferating due to every fraction of a degree of warming. There are those who believe that technology - the usual example is carbon capture - will alleviate the coming catastrophe, and Wallace-Wells does not discount the possibility.  But we are so hopelessly behind in the construction of such systems, we may never fully understand what they might have done for us.

The raft of information presented in this book is formidable; too much, really, for the average reader to digest and understand. Nevertheless, give it a try. Wallace-Wells knows his subject, and tackles it from a number of different angles: the effect of climate change on the arts, economic systems, politics, and our understanding of human history, in addition to its disastrous effects on life as we know it. Read this book a little at a time, would be my suggestion. It deserves that degree of effort.

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