Review → The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells

Rate It For Me.

★★★★★

What's It About?

David Wallace-Wells believes that you, dear reader living a comfortable life in an affluent country, have not adequately reckoned with the consequences posed by climate change. The Uninhabitable Earth is a wake up call — a chilling construction of the dystopian landscape we are hurtling towards. The data he presents is not necessarily new, but in avoiding the "eerily banal language of climatology" he removes the academic curtain and makes the implications of this data concrete.

Wallace-Wells sketches an undeniably bleak picture of what humanity is up against. But it is by no means a fatalistic account. He emphasizes that a range of futures are still possible — but the window is closing, and the time to act is now.

"But while there are a few things science does not know about how the climate system will respond to all the carbon we've pumped into the air, the uncertainty of what will happen — that haunting uncertainty — emerges not from scientific ignorance but, overwhelmingly, from the open question of how we respond."

Why Should I Read It?

Fear is a powerful motivator. If you're like many, maybe you don't feel a personal responsibility to make big life changes due to climate change yet (and going to that protest sure is inconvenient). It still feels somewhat abstract and far away — and if it's that important someone in power must be doing something about it, right?

The Uninhabitable Earth will shake off that complacency, fast. It gives shape to the urgency shown by the Greta Thunbergs of the world, the Youth Climate Protests and Extinction Rebellion. It will force you to look at the challenges facing humanity with clear eyes — just don't read it on a night you need to sleep well.

If you only read one book in 2019, this is a good pick.

What's So Great About It?

It challenges a lot of assumptions we tend to have about climate change — what caused it and where we're heading. Some examples:

We tend to think of carbon emissions and pollution as problems created by the advent of the industrial revolution, which have been steadily increasing for a couple hundred years. But in reality, the worst of the damage occurred recently: "Fully half the carbon in the air was put there in just the last 25 years." A typical response in regards to the exceptionally bad fires that raged across the West Coast the last couple summers is that "this is the new normal." The implication is that we'll need to accept and adjust to this higher (but static) level of disaster occurrence. But there will be no new normal — as climate change (and the corresponding disasters) worsens, we may look back on the traumatic episodes of this decade with nostalgia. The effects of climate change do not occur in isolation (it's a "threat multiplier") — and the economic effects could be staggering. Right now we're on track to hit 3.7 degrees of warming by 2100. At that point projections put the cost of the resulting annual damage at $551 trillion globally, which is double the current wealth of the world (something to consider when arguments arise around how much a Green New Deal would cost...).

What's It Like?

If Cormac McCarthy wrote non-fiction about climate change. Wallace-Wells makes it abundantly clear that the future is grim, but it's hard not to take pleasure in the rhythm of his carefully crafted sentences.

Give Me A Quote That Conveys The Vibe.

"In the affluent cities of the West, even those conscious of environmental change have spent the last few decades walking our street grids and driving our highways, navigating out superabundant supermarkets and all-everywhere internet and believing that we had built our way out of nature. We have not. A paradise dreamscape erected in a barren desert, L.A. has always been an impossible city... For a time, we had come to believe that civilization moved in the other direction — making the impossible first possible and then stable and routine. With climate change, we are moving instead toward nature, and chaos, into a realm unbounded by the anthology of any human experience."