The Looming Global Warming Disaster
What I read: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. Published March 17, 2020.
When I was reading this book, I had to put it down every few pages. It took a while to read. Why? The detailed information about how bad the climate change and resulting global warming situation actually are was so heart wrenching and depressing that I could only handle reading a few pages at a time. But I finished it and it’s an important book everyone should read. It’s only by having our eyes entirely open to the reality in front of us that can we properly address it as best we can. And address it we must. Now.
In Farhad Manjoo’s Pretend It’s Aliens article in The New York Times, in which he discusses this book, he starts out with this.
“The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet: death by water, death by heat, death by hunger, death by thirst, death by disease, death by asphyxiation, death by political and civilizational collapse.
Rather dire, huh? Rightly so. David Wallace-Wells so deftly and thoroughly details the looming global warming disaster that awaits us that reading it is truly terrifying. Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes the truth is scary. Sometimes the truth slaps us in the face and yells “Wake up!” I came away from reading the book with a wealth of information and insight to motivate me to do what I can to alter the horrific trajectory on which our planet is headed.
Using crisp and articulate writing the author pummels us with the science behind the warming of the planet, and it is the warming effect of climate change that is the specific focus of the book. Climate change may be the phrase most on our lips these days but it’s the warming effect that’s the culprit in our potentially dystopian future.
This is not a book about the science of warming; it is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.
In the first section of the book, Wallace-Wells signals to the reader the dark, realistic tone that awaits. He does not pull punches.
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a reliable shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will inevitably engineer a way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
None of this is true.
Throughout the book a mountain of data is presented that backs up the author’s contention that the situation we’re in is critical, indeed fueled by humanmade actions, and with ramifications approaching us like the proverbial speeding train that we’re staring at too often, that moment of tharn when a deer stares at oncoming disaster but is frozen in place by fear. We must shake off that fear and proceed bravely and strategically if we’re to avoid this generation and future generations from living in a hellscape.
Wallace-Wells leaves no doubt that humans have brought upon the nightmare that is here and that will increasingly disrupt life on Earth as we know it for decades to come.
Many 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. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before.
Throughout the rest of the first part of the book we learn of multiple activities and trends that have a cascading effect on the planet and are quickly resulting in rising warming. That warming is what will prove to be a thorn in our collective sides for the rest of our lives. There is no getting away from that. Climate change and the warming of the planet is not stoppable. At this point it’s about mitigation, not elimination. We’ve already done so much damage.
Mitigation, however, is something every nation on Earth, particularly those most responsible for heavy fossil fuel usage, must undertake because the only alternative is outright destruction of the entire planet ultimately. I know that seems like hyperbole and sensationalism, but it’s not. The situation is really that bad.
At one point, Wallace-Wells leaves no doubt about how all the cascading effects of human activity should be perceived. We must resist our tendency to position truly hellish realities with the optimism that often clouds what we need to do simply to make the masses believe everything is just fine. It isn’t fine. It won’t be fine. It will be bad. It is already bad. Really bad.
This is what is meant when climate change is called an “existential crisis”—a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome makes extinction a plausible, if unlikely, future. Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we’ve been trained, by a buoyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss, categorically, as hyperbole.
We are in the driver’s seat of this situation. We always have been. The author believes that knowing global warming is indeed the fault of humans should come as some comfort. Since global warming is a human invention we should therefore realize we remain in command of how to right the ship that is capsizing before our eyes. We are the authors of this story that is still being written.
We all share in the responsibility for global warming. All of us. Our grandparents may have begun the escalation, but we continue to fuel it, that fuel mostly being our reliance on fossil fuels that we are barely curtailing. No work we’re doing now is enough. We’re not on target to meet the stated goals of keeping temperature rise below certain levels regardless of what politicians might tell us. Politicians, especially conservatives, are continuing to put lipstick on the pig we’re all seeing before our eyes as each weather event seems to break the record set by the previous and the planet’s temperature continues to inch upward.
The book is not all doom and gloom. Throughout the author offers sound, science-based solutions to the global warming problem we face. The book rejects what some have referred to as “climate nihilism” as yet another delusion. Going forward what transpires will be our own doing. But it’s definitely an all hands on deck moment for the world because time is running out.
What lies between the two possibilities before us, a warming planet that is horrifying or outright human extinction, is a bumpy road we’re going to have to all navigate. We all need to get involved in politics, more so than ever now. It’s only by making big changes on a massive scale that enough mitigation can take place. Yes, individuals can do their part on a micro scale, but it’s only the macro scale legislation, policies, and projects that will tip the scales enough.
The author explains in detail, alongside the climate and environmental science that bolster his explanations, how global warming is playing out and will continue to do so in varying degrees depending on our actions to blunt its impacts.
Rising heat will kill millions of people. We’re already dealing with frequent deadly heat waves and those will continue. Over time accounts of areas of the world regularly reaching deadly web bulb temperatures will increase. That so many of us live in dense urban cities makes things worse since asphalt, concrete and other such urban features absorb ambient heat and store it only to release it like a warm poison.
Climate change and warming will drastically hinder the growth of food crops around the world. Entire existing sources of food may be wiped out resulting in hunger on a massive scale. The United Nations estimates by 2050 we’ll need twice the food as we need today. Yet, global warming will make the production of that food increasingly more difficult.
Sea level rise will quite literally drown entire regions of the world. I have always tended to live in coastal areas or near large bodies of water. It’s distressing to realize many of those areas might be wiped out by the rising waters global warming is enabling.
Lately, the world’s climate news has been focused on the Thwaites Glacier (ominously nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier), the Antarctic glacier some scientists believe could fall apart within decades with some scientists now adjusting those possible timeframes to just five or ten years from now. If the whole glacier falls into the ocean, sea levels would rise by 26 inches (65 centimeters). 26 inches would wipe out entire coastal regions. Places like Florida in the United States, much of which is barely above sea level, will be under water. This doesn’t even take into consideration what increasingly bad weather and associated flooding will do to low-lying inland areas.
Wildfires will increase. I live in Northern California and recall the day last year I woke up and the entire sky in San Francisco was a glowing orange because of all the smoke from nearby out of control fires that decimated large swaths of land, and sadly homes. There were recent terrible wildfires in other parts of the world. There will be more. They will get worse.
OK, I know. This is really depressing. I haven’t even mentioned other horrors like the dying oceans, plagues, economic collapse, or unbreathable air. Nor have I touched upon the societal and cultural consequences of climate change. I’ll leave that to the rest of the book which I hope you’ll read. I know at this point you might want to stay away from reading it, but you should read it. As hopeless as all this might sound, there are definitely things humankind can do to help the situation.
In the third section of the book, the author examines the types of stories humans tell through art amid a world already being transformed by climate change and global warming. Whether it’s the climate change narrative thread present in a television series like Game of Thrones or the clear nod to life after extreme global warming in movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, climate change is everywhere right in front of our noses.
These types of cultural artworks and storytelling most certainly are helping to keep climate change front and center in our awareness, but will we continue to have an appetite for such stories and art once the planet temperatures rise three or four more degrees? Perhaps not. The stark reality facing humans each day of their lives may not prove to be the alluring entertainment fodder it is today.
This post is lengthy. So I’m going to conclude with one of the author’s points that resonates with me personally. Wallace-Wells says this in the book.
If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We don’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy change.
And this.
Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. And a perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only “wellness.”
Policy changes only come about one way. People need to vote. They need to vote for the people who will represent their climate change values. In my country, the United States, right now that means voting for Democrats.
I’m sure some reading this will disagree with me. We’re a seemingly politically polarized country at the moment. However, I believe as climate change and global warming ramifications continue to escalate at an ever increasing pace, even the most conservative among us will realize that their fate and especially the fate of their children rests in their hands in the voting booth. Voting for people who continue to be apologists and enablers for the fossil fuel industry while hobbling efforts to move to greener energy sources is a vote for the death of the planet.
My stance may appear partisan and highly biased, but so be it. Voting for Democrats (who I admit aren’t doing enough) is far more likely to encourage the addressing of climate change and global warming than voting for Republicans. I wish this were not true. I’ve always believed in the push and pull and checks and balances of political differences empowering better legislation and decisions. But that’s not happening right now. Republicans are blocking any meaningful legislation that seeks to improve the climate change situation.
If someone can point out a sitting Republican legislator who has a solid, science-based policy agenda to improve the climate change situation, I’ll happily acknowledge that. But at the moment, I can’t think of a single one.
So, I will end with an encouragement to vote for Democrats for the foreseeable future if you care about humanity surviving. We don’t have much time to course correct the planet’s destiny regarding global warming. The time is now. It is supremely urgent.
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