The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

“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 merely ‘bad weather.’ More recently, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands offered another name for that level of warming: ‘genocide.’” 

This quote functions in a few ways. For one, it introduces a benchmark for measuring the severity of climate change through the metric of post-Industrial global temperature increases. Throughout the book, Wallace-Wells relies heavily on this benchmark as a way of quantifying a phenomenon like climate change, which can at times feel too complex and wide-reaching in its consequences to comprehend. In addition, the quote hints at the author’s broader mission, which is to ponder what it will feel like to live in a world where the ravages of climate change are normal. Finally, the invocation of genocide plays into Wallace-Wells’s contention that climate change is less an accident of nature and more a human conspiracy.

“It would take a spectacular coincidence of bad judgment and scientific ignorance to make that kind of zero earth possible within our lifetime. But the fact that we have brought that nightmare eventuality into play at all is perhaps the overwhelming cultural and historical fact of the modern era—what historians of the future will likely study about us, and what we’d have hoped the generations before ours would have had the foresight to focus on, too.” 

The author ponders the remote possibility that the increase in post-Industrial global temperatures reaches double digits by the end of the 21st century, thus making the world truly uninhabitable as the book’s title suggests. Such an outcome would likely only be possible if climate feedback loops turn out to be much more severe than expected. Wallace-Wells has come under fire from climate scientists who view his writing as alarmist, but the author stands by his approach, which acknowledges worst-case scenarios in an attempt to shake readers out of complacency.

“We know what a best-case outcome for climate change looks like, however unrealistic, because it resembles the world as we live on it today.”

Wallace-Wells repeatedly emphasizes that climate change is not a discrete binary, a fate to be avoided or tolerated. Rather, it is a fact of life as it is lived today that can only grow worse, and the evidence of it can be seen most clearly in the increased severity of storms and heat waves, along with the melting of polar ice. The question is how much worse, and the answer will be determined primarily by human action or inaction.

“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. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.” 

The relationship between climate change and the growth of nationalist movements is not necessarily obvious, but Wallace-Wells ties the influx of refugees from the Syrian Civil War—a climate-related crisis—to the rise of anti-immigrant nationalist movements on both sides of the Atlantic. It is one of climate change’s most tragic ironies, he writes, that countries like the United States and the United Kingdom are retreating from the world stage at a time when international cooperation is needed most. The author explores this theme in greater detail when he ponders the new types of governance that may arise as climate change worsens. 

“Adaptation to climate change is often viewed in terms of market trade-offs, but in the coming decades the trade will work in the opposite direction, with relative prosperity a benefit of more aggressive action.” 

The author is, at best, ambivalent about whether market capitalism is worth saving as the world faces down a climate-ravaged fate. At the same time, he acknowledges that the immense—albeit unequally distributed—wealth created by capitalism is under enormous threat by global warming, which stands to decimate crop yields and already costs nations and property owners billions of dollars a year in disaster recovery efforts. For that reason, the author believes that doctrines arguing against climate action on the basis of the harm it would cause to private enterprise are deeply flawed.

“Over the last few years, as the planet’s own environmental rhythms have seemed to grow more fatalistic, skeptics have found themselves arguing not that climate change isn’t happening, since extreme weather has made that undeniable, but that its causes are unclear—suggesting that the changes we are seeing are the result of natural cycles rather than human activities and interventions. It is a very strange argument; if the planet is warming at a terrifying pace and on a horrifying scale, it should transparently concern us more, rather than less, that the warming is beyond our control, possibly even our comprehension.” 

Aside from the scientific arguments for why climate change is manmade, Wallace-Wells offers a philosophical argument for why such a conclusion should be embraced rather than dismissed. This idea that a problem of humanity’s own design is thus one that is more easily fixed is the basis for the author’s continued optimism, despite the litany of dire projections he includes throughout the book. Moreover, the argument serves as a rejoinder to a wide range of attitudes on climate change, including skepticism, fatalism, and nihilism.

“How much hotter will it get? The question may sound scientific, inviting expertise, but the answer is almost entirely human—which is to say, political.” 

Wallace-Wells contends that the biggest variables surrounding climate modeling are the human inputs. This view is consistent with IPCC projections, which offer a range of possibilities based entirely on humanity’s commitment to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the author equates “human” with “political” on the basis that any large-scale reduction in emissions will be the result of aggressive political action rather than an aggregation of individual consumer choices.

“The graphs that show so much recent progress in the developing world—on poverty, on hunger, on education and infant mortality and life expectancy and gender relations and more—are, practically speaking, the same graphs that trace the dramatic rise in global carbon emissions.” 

This passage is, in effect, a summary of the arguments behind fossil capitalism, the field of economics pioneered by ecologist Andreas Malm that attributes the growth and prosperity of the past two centuries to a single factor: fossil fuels. While Wallace-Wells is sympathetic to this view, he also acknowledges that it is held by a minority of economists. In any case, the implications of fossil capitalism are of great interest to the author, as it would seem to suggest that the promise of continued prosperity—so often used to justify the more ruthless aspects of capitalism—is an illusion laid bare by climate change.

“But in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil promising to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon. Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons.” 

Later in the book, the author writes that an individual’s decisions at the ballot box are of greater consequence than personal consumption habits. Illustrating this argument is Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, whose actions since winning the 2018 election have dramatically accelerated greenhouse gas emissions. A less dramatic illustration of Wallace-Wells’s argument can be seen in the example of US President Donald Trump, whose rollback of emissions standards corresponded with a rise in CO2 emissions in 2018 after three years of decline. 

“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.” 

As in the previous quote, the author reckons with the idea that individual consumption habits tend to be overvalued as a factor in climate change. Even worse, the focus on individual communities’ use of resources is often argued along racial lines, as was the case during the Cape Town water shortage that he explores here. This discussion plays into the author’s broader theme that climate change stands to exacerbate existing divisions, threatening to unravel the social fabric of numerous communities and nation-states.

“By the 2090s, depending on what pollution path we take, as many as 2 billion people globally could be breathing air above the WHO ‘safe’ level. Already, more than 10,000 people die from air pollution daily. That is considerably more each day—each day—than the total number of people who have ever been affected by the meltdowns of nuclear reactors.”

While deaths from air pollution dwarf deaths caused by nuclear power, the notion that fewer than 10,000 people have been affected by reactor meltdowns is specious. Aside from the unknown number of cancer deaths related to radiation exposure, over 100,000 were evacuated from their homes in the wake of the Chernobyl meltdown and explosion. This isn’t to say that an aggressive nuclear build-out would not save lives. Nevertheless, the author opens himself up to criticism here by employing an arguably misleading statistic.

“But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a number of historians and iconoclastic economists studying what they call ‘fossil capitalism’ have started to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power—a onetime injection of “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by unending subsistence living.”

This is among the more controversial arguments the author highlights. Although statistics about how human progress neatly corresponds with the use of fossil fuels offers considerable support for this thesis, the author acknowledges that mainstream economists tend the find the theory reductive. For one, it would seem to dismiss a host of scientific advancements in the field of medicine that have led to improvements in both life expectancy and quality of life in the developed and developing world alike. To be fair, the author does not explicitly endorse the theory of fossil capitalism, though he does incorporate it heavily into his kaleidoscopic view of climate change.

“What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing—not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.” 

What’s perhaps most unsettling about a global economic crisis brought on by climate change is that, unlike the Great Depression or the Great Recession, there will be less of a perception that the suffering is temporary. A large part of what drives individuals to persist during a crisis is the reasonable belief that the crisis will end, and at least a measure of normalcy will return, be it in weeks, months, or even years. However, even reasonable climate change projections stand to cause such a shock to markets and civilizations, the author writes, that a return to anything resembling normalcy may be impossible.

“But wars are not caused by climate change only in the same way that hurricanes are not caused by climate change, which is to say they are made more likely, which is to say the distinction is semantic.” 

The relationship between climate change and armed conflict is one of the author’s central preoccupations, and it’s one he can find evidence to support dating as far back as the fall of the Roman Empire. His comparison to hurricanes is instructive, given that tropical storms are caused by a host of meteorological factors, just as wars are caused by a host of social and economic ones. The comparison is also in keeping with the author’s larger theme of climate change as a metanarrative that sets the contextual conditions for the world’s problems, natural and otherwise.

“From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization, and the effect may be especially pronounced amid ethnic strife: from 1980 to 2010, a 2016 study found, 23 percent of conflict in the world’s ethnically diverse countries began in months stamped by weather disaster.”

This is an illustrative example of the cascading effects of climate change. In the case of wars, these effects are particularly powerful, given that drought can lead to poverty and desperation, which can then lead to radicalization. Again, Wallace-Wells does not argue that climate change causes the sort of sectarian and racial divisions preyed upon by terrorist leaders. It does, however, exacerbate them.

“That we reengineered the natural world so sufficiently to close the book on an entire geological era—that is the major lesson of the Anthropocene.” 

Throughout the book, Wallace-Wells makes frequent use of the word Anthropocene, a relatively newly-coined term used to describe the current geological age. It signifies the era during which humanity significantly alters the Earth’s ecosystem and is often said to have begun around 15,000 years ago with the commencement of the Agricultural Revolution. As this quote suggests, the term is potentially unsettling in that by partitioning this era of human history, it implies that the era will eventually come to an end.

“More recently, Klein has offered the island of Puerto Rico, still reeling from Hurricane Maria, as a case study, even beyond its unfortunate spot in the path of climate-change-fueled hurricanes. Here is an island endowed with abundant green energy nevertheless importing all its oil, and an agricultural paradise nevertheless importing all its food, importing both from a quasi-colonial mainland power that sees it merely as a market. That mainland power has effectively turned over the government of the island, down to its power company, to a select board of bondholders whose interest is in the repayment of debt.” 

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Wallace-Wells sees a troubling prediction of how the wealthy ruling class will approach climate devastation. Citing the work of author Naomi Klein, he illustrates the extent to which capitalist systems only extend their reach in times of crisis, rather than allow market concessions to victims in the interest of alleviating human misery. As climate change continues to threaten the de facto sovereignty of capital, the author paints capitalism as a cornered animal, more dangerous than ever.

“Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more.” 

Much like wars and hurricanes, the author argues that climate change does not cause income inequality; it does, however, exacerbate it and make it more visible. That those who suffer most from the ravages of climate change will not be those most responsible for causing it is an injustice the author already perceives in the examples of storm-battered island territories like Puerto Rico. Given the appetite for political and economic revolution already building among many in the United States, an acceleration of these demands in response to climate change is not outside the realm of possibility, the author argues. 

“Another way of looking at it is that the world’s futurists have come to regard technology as a superstructure within which all other problems, and their solutions, are contained. From that perspective, the only threat to technology must come from technology, which is perhaps why so many in Silicon Valley seem less concerned with runaway climate change than they are with runaway artificial intelligence: the only fearsome power they are likely to take seriously is the one they themselves have unleashed.” 

The author devotes a significant portion of the book to pondering the reasons why today’s cutting edge inventors and innovators haven’t done more to address climate change, either from a technological perspective or in terms of rhetoric and political action. Judging from this quote, the biggest point of contention between Wells-Wallace and most of Silicon Valley is disagreement over whether technology is the superstructure holding sway over all the world’s problems or if climate change is. From the author’s perspective, technology is not some monolith containing the answer to every challenge the world faces. Rather, it is only one of many tools—alongside political action, for example—for addressing the existential problem of climate change.

“Elon Musk—it’s not the name of a man but a species-scale survival strategy.” 

Once again, Wells-Wallace addresses what he perceives as an absurd blind faith in technology among the Silicon Valley set, illustrated by its blithe religious belief that a single man will be the world’s savior. Aside from Elon Musk’s accomplishments, the idea that one individual genius is capable of saving the planet runs counter to the author’s contention that addressing climate change will require an overhaul of many of the systems that govern modern life. This is an impossible task for any one individual, unless that person is an authoritarian sovereign leader on a planetary scale.

“‘Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence,’ the group’s manifesto begins. ‘What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric.” 

This quote is sourced from the manifesto of the Dark Mountain Project, a loose organization of individuals whose concern over climate change and lack of hope over humanity’s ability to combat it has led them to withdraw from environmental advocacy. While the author personally rebuffs this attitude, he admires the group’s eloquent rejection of myths surrounding human progress. Even though it contradicts his own worldview, the author appreciates the intensity with which the Dark Mountain Project embraces inhumanism, a philosophy that deemphasizes human concerns. In the context of the book’s broader themes, the Dark Mountain Project illustrates one of the many attitudes that make up the tapestry of modern thought surrounding climate change.

“And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops.”

Throughout the book, Wallace-Wells is sensitive to the term “alarm,” which for so many years was used in a pejorative sense against scientists and activists expressing their concerns over climate change. His hope, however, is that as the consequences of climate change become more severe and harder to ignore, this alarm will calcify into a potent political coalition. Such a coalition, he implies, would unite revolutionaries, seasoned pragmatists, and climate converts. 

“What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one.”

By casting both doubt and derision on sound and robust climate science, deniers call into question science itself. Moreover, if nations do adopt emissions standards based on the advice of scientists, thus saving the planet from the worst consequences of climate change, some will view the avoidance of danger as there having been no danger in the first place. This is what the author means when he says, “It is a bet that science can win only by losing.”