The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Whatever you may have read over the past year - as extreme weather brought a global heat wave and unprecedented wildfires burned through 1.6 million California acres and newspaper headlines declared, “Climate Change Is Here” - global warming is not binary. Wallace-Wells also draws quotations from non-scientific works, such as the novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, Joan Didion’s essay “Los Angeles Notebook” from her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Upton Sinclair’s cautionary fable The Jungle.It’s not too late. Wilson, most notably Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, a book that outlines a warming scenario in which the southern hemisphere (and parts of the northern one, too) become uninhabitable, forcing humanity to migrate to and sequester themselves on small, habitable parts of the planet’s far north. He also cites the work of famed biologist E.O. the Climate, two books about how climate change stands to affect our global economy (and vice versa). Among the books he mentions are Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Throughout The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells engages with several seminal, important books by other journalists as well as scientists and climatologists. Just as climate change’s many cascades threaten to multiply and compound as they wash away the infrastructure of our society on any level, Wallace-Wells offers a barrage of data that offers an unflinching and terrifying look at how industrialization and the idea of the Anthropocene, or an era of human domination, has forever changed the course of our planet’s history. While it may seem that a certain storm, like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, is a once-in-a-lifetime event, the reality is that the globe is warmer right now than it has been at any point in all of human history-and it’s only getting hotter. By examining these massive natural disasters decade by decade, Wallace-Wells charts the rapidly worsening effects of warming on everyday life.

Along the way, Wallace-Wells closely examines many major record-setting weather events, such as 1988’s Hurricane Mitch, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and 2017’s Thomas Fire in Southern California.

He looks as far ahead as 2100 as he offers data-driven, climatologist-backed projections of what the Earth will look like at the end of the century if climate change continues to ravage the planet at its current rate. Wallace-Wells swings from the Earth’s past-12,000 years ago, when humans first began farming and cultivating lands-to its future. The Uninhabitable Earth is a book both tied to history and unbound from it.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells