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 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!

The book present data and a forecast scenario not readable in the daily press. Information on what to reflect.

A scary but wheel written book.

If you have come across this book and if you care even a little about life, earth or future, just read this book. Not an easy read, the author even says so himself, but an important read.

This is arguably the most important book on the climate change crisis since Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014). David Wallace-Wells writes:‘When critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypothetical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits this disparity, but feeds and profits from it – this is what Thomas Piketty calls the ‘apparatus of justification.’ And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the EU average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.’Indeed, the 2018 Global Green Economy Index points out that the most environmentally-friendly countries in the world are 1. Sweden 2. Switzerland 3. Iceland 4. Norway 5. Finland – countries which also enjoy a high quality of life.Hence Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is absolutely correct that it is possible to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Furthermore, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson has provided country-by-country plans for the world to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. So why the delay?In his book Cultural Evolution (2018), Dr. Ronald Inglehart, leader of the World Values Survey, points out that following World War II, the advanced world shifted from materialist to postmaterialist values, including a growth in the environmental movement. However, this evolution in mindset was not reflected rapidly enough in our actions.‘Many people perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades… The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime – the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral…Due to global warming, in the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago…The Indian capital is home to 26 million people. In 2017, simply breathing the air was the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day…With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are at today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent…The basic rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature, is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, when we have 50 percent more people to feed, we may also have 50 percent less grain to give them…Beyond carbon, climate change means that staple crops are doing battle with more insects – their increased activity could cut yields an additional 2 to 4 percent, as well as fungus and disease, not to mention flooding…Whole cultures will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited, Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States’ largest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nation of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh; all of Miami Beach and much of South Florida; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington…Much of the infrastructure of the internet could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades; and most of the smartphones we use to navigate it are manufactured in Shenzhen, which is likely to be flooded soon, as well…If no significant action is taken to curb emissions, one estimate of global damage is as high as $100 trillion dollars per year by 2100. That is more than global GDP today. Most estimates are a bit lower - $14 trillion a year, still almost a fifth of present-day GDP…The International Panel on Climate Change furnishes us with a median prediction of an over four degrees rise in planetary temperature by 2100, should we continue down the current emissions path. That would deliver wildfires burning 16 times as much land in the American West, hundreds of drowned cities…’Unfortunately, Canada has been a laggard on this critical issue. Prime Minister Trudeau seems to have only recently woken up to the existential threat posed by climate change, and has finally introduced a modest carbon tax. The Andrew Scheer Conservatives remain for their part firmly in the pocket of the fossil fuels industry, and are every bit as destructive to the environment as the Trump Republicans in the US.On the other hand, organizations like 350.org, the Solutions Project and the Sunrise Movement, and political leaders like Germany’s Katharina Schulze, France’s Karima Delli, Sweden’s Isabella Lovin, the Netherland’s Jesse Klaver, Belgium’s Benoit Hellings, and Costa Rica’s Carlos Alvarado Quesada are leading the way to a sustainable future.They are joined by youth leaders Greta Thunberg (Sweden), Varshini Prakash and Alexandria Villasenor (United States), Holly Gillibrand (UK), Luisa Neubauer (Germany), Louis Couillard, Sara Montpetit and Autumn Peltier (Canada), Jonas Kampus (Switzerland), and Anuna de Wever (Belgium).The least we can do, is to give them our support – our future depends on it.

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.

The book is justifiably alarmist.And the reader should note that the book was published before the two huge natural disasters occurred - among the many anticipated by the book which would wreak havoc on the planet unless urgent and concerted global effort is invested to decarbonize the planet which, unfortunately, is not presently the case.The two natural disasters I referred to, were the Hurricane Dorian which devastated the Bahamas with 43 dead at the present count and a biblical catastrophe in property and the nearly eighty thousand wildfires in the Amazon burning huge areas of its forests. In this regard, it should be noted that the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet's forests each year. The result is that carbon deposited in the trees is released in the atmosphere. More generally, forest fires means fewer tees, means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still. The preceding is just one of a page-long series of 'cascades' described in the book. I am tempted to cite a few more: a warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still; also warmer oceans contain less oxygen which is a doom for phytoplankton - which does for the ocean what plants do on land, consuming carbon and producing oxygen - which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further; also increased carbon dioxide in the oceans results in their acidification and the bleaching of the coral ecosystems. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the earth's atmosphere, and some of which, when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is dozens of times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.I have outlined in the preceding some of the consequences of global warming, there are many more such as heat waves, floods, droughts, desertification, unprecedented famines, mass immigration, and refugee crises, political instability, climate conflicts and rising of oceans to flood coastal cities.It was in the light of the above that the 2016 climate accords were adopted - defining two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial level (we are already at one degree) as a must-meet target and rallying all the world's nations to meet it - and the results are grim. In 2017, carbon emissions grew by 1.4 percent, according to the International Energy Agency.It has to be noted that the last twenty - five years of emissions is about half the total that humanity has ever - produced - a scale of carbon production that has pushed the planet from near - complete climate stability to the brink of chaos.Just to give a single statistic, from 1992 to 1997 the Antarctic ice sheet lost, on average, 49 billion tons of ice each year; from 2012 to 2017, the corresponding number was 219 billion.It is something of an irony that the graphs that show so much recent progress in the developing world - on poverty, on hunger, on education, on infant mortality, and life expectancy - are, practically, the same graphs that trace the dramatic rise in global carbon emissions, due to burning fossil fuels to obtain the requisite energy and in the process creating global warming that has brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe.If we had started decarbonization in 2000s when Al Gore narrowly lost the election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it would require us to cut emissions by 30 percent per year. This is why U.N Secretary - General Antonio Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.The measures to salvation which require collective and concerted global effort comprise 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 products in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.