If you see people with a thousand-yard stare, bumping into traffic signs and wandering straight off Toronto’s unfenced edges right into Lake Ontario, well, they just might know something you don’t.

They have read David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, which tells us what life is going to be like on this planet. “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” That was Rick from Casablanca on a whole other topic, but he’s right.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” writes Wallace-Wells, the American journalist who may be the Rachel Carson of 2019 science journalism. She was writing about pesticides but his wingspan is all-encompassing, covering air, water, land and sea.

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It’s true that industrial filth began spewing in 1760 as the Industrial Revolution geared up. But forget the centuries. Most of the damage to the planet has been done in the past 30 years, he writes, which means Boomers and everyone born since. Where were you in 1989?

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Wallace-Wells jogs the memory. It was the year Seinfeld and The Simpsons premiered. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. A man shot 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Nintendo Game Boy. The Berlin Wall came down. Sega Genesis.

Skip to now. The Kyoto Protocol did almost nothing. The Paris Agreement hopes to limit warming to 2C in this century. Even if rules were followed religiously by China, India and the U.S. — they’re not — warming may reach at least 3.2C (some say 4C), at which point the ice sheets will melt, flooding Miami, Dhaka, Hong Kong and hundreds of other cities worldwide, he writes.

He lists the “elements of chaos,” meaning sectors of suffering: heat; hunger; drowning; wildfire; unpredictable storms; freshwater drain; dying oceans; unbreathable air; plagues; economic collapse; and climate wars. We will be living in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but wetter and windier.

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Let’s study Wallace-Wells’ list. The 2003 heat wave that killed 35,000 Europeans was just a taste. 2040 is the scarier date because it’s closer than 2100 which is unimaginable.

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Two thirds of the planet will live in cities, heat islands by day but now with no cool nighttime reprieve. In a heat death, as your core temperature rises, “your body sends blood outward to the skin, hoping desperately to cool it down.” Your skin reddens and without blood, internal organs die off. Sweating stops. As the brain dies, you become agitated and combative until your lethal heart attack.

That is the world’s worst fortune cookie.

As for hunger, it will become too hot to grow the grain, soybeans and corn that form about 40 per cent of the human diet. New insects will feast. Farmlands will move north until soil becomes too thin to sustain agriculture. The green revolution, which helped save much of the world’s poor, will end and the poor will die.

Waters will rise. In 20 years, Shenzhen, where smartphones are made, will be underwater. Coastlines will move up and in. Inland river flooding will be catastrophic.

Wildfire will be as common as snacks. Deforestation accounts for 12 per cent of carbon emissions worldwide and forest fires 25 per cent. “When the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in,” writes Wallace-Wells, which means malaria and worse.

Unpredictable storms hit hard in 2018. Six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared at once, including Hurricane Florence. There were wildfires in Sweden and the American West was covered in smoke. By 2040, this will seem normal.

We waste freshwater. In India 600 million people are under severe water stress. As the U.S. dries up, it will empty its last aquifers, even as they are poisoned by fracking. Look at us with our lawns and pools.

The oceans are dying, absorbing heat from the sky and running out of marine life. Droughts will cause dust exposure that will stuff our lungs. New diseases will emerge from melting Arctic ice.

Economically, we have faced the Great Depression and Great Recessions. Wallace-Wells tells us to prepare for the Great Dying. I haven’t even mentioned his climate wars. I lack the will.

Read The Uninhabitable Earth. You may walk into a lamp post. And there you’ll stand, stunned but warned.