Definitely the most bone-chilling of the books I've read this year about climate change. Great insights, and a powerful call to action.

If you aren't a climate denier but don't yet feel a sense of urgency, you really need to read The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by author David Wallace-Wells. He makes a whole lot of predictions and many of them are, by necessity, based on speculation but he backs them all up with facts and statistics. At times, it felt overwhelming not to mention terrifying but he makes it accessible to people who are not scientists, something that has been badly needed in the discussion.

I should say that I read this several months ago and have been struggling to write a review, not because it didn't make me think but, just the opposite, I just couldn't put those thoughts into words that didn't fill pages. However, given events in Canada as our federal government gives lip service to the need for immediate action while pushing through another pipeline and several of the provincial premiers are deniers and after the climate summit just this week, I need to recommend this book. So, without sounding as worried as I feel, all I will say is Read. This. Book. We are in the midst of a climate emergency and clearly our governments aren't paying enough attention so it's up to us.

<i> Thanks to Netgalley and Crown Publishing for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review</I>

I remember reading the book 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson where humans take to the stars and terraform the planets, but Earth is facing climate catastrophe. When they spoke about the time period historically, they spoke about the years 2000-2060 as The Great Dithering. It is a time period where everyone knew what was happening but chose to do nothing. This is the quandary we face. There are not enough key people who are willing to make the needed changes or make the sacrifice to stop human influence on warming the planet.

Enter David Wallace-Wells who states, dear reader, you want to know what climate change looks like, let me show you the horrors. If reading this book gave a facial experesssion it would be when the opened the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark where everyone's face melted off. Part of the planet is unlivable, millions dead, the inability to grow food, and more. It isn't something that will happen tomorrow, but it is on the horizon. There is a tipping point that is right in front of us. If you wanted ammunition to stop our Great Dithering, here is a good resource to use.

NOTES FROM
Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells

September 13, 2019
[It is worse, much...]


because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted “normal,” and because we looked outside and things seemed still okay




September 14, 2019
Wildfire


The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. The wealthy used to build castles to defend themselves against the world; more recently it’s been a more modern kind of fortress—cities—enclosing more and more of us in an illusion of man-made security. All of a sudden, it’s getting a lot harder to protect against what’s coming.




September 15, 2019
Economic Collapse


to help buffer or offset the impacts, we have no New Deal revival waiting around the corner, no Marshall Plan ready. The global halving of economic resources would be permanent, and, because permanent, we would soon not even know it as deprivation, only as a brutally cruel normal against which we might measure tiny burps of decimal-point growth as the breath of a new prosperity. We have gotten used to setbacks on our erratic march along the arc of economic history, but we know them as setbacks, and expect elastic recoveries. 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.




September 15, 2019
Climate Conflict


For every half degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: a planet four degrees warmer would have perhaps twice as many wars as we do today. And possibly more.




September 15, 2019
Climate Conflict


In each case, climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.




September 17, 2019
Storytelling


James Hansen, who first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, has named the phenomenon “scientific reticence,” and in 2007 chastised his colleagues for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was. That tendency has metastasized over time, ironically as the news from research grew bleaker, so that for a long time each major publication would be attended by a cloud of commentary debating its precise calibration of perspective and tone—with many of those articles seen to lack an even balance between bad news and optimism, and labeled “fatalistic.” Some were derided as “climate porn.”




September 17, 2019
Storytelling


As a result, they were especially worried about burnout, and the possibility that storytelling about climate could tip so many people into despondency that the effort to avert a crisis would burn itself out. And




September 18, 2019
Politics of Consumption


But among the woke Left the inverted charge is just as often true: we navigate by a North Star of politics through our diets, our friendships, even our consumption of pop culture, but rarely make meaningful political noise about those causes that run against our own self-interest or sense of self as special—indeed enlightened. On perhaps no issue more than climate is that posture of enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.




September 19, 2019
[What if we’re...]


Instead we assign the task to future generations, to dreams of magical technologies, to remote politicians doing a kind of battle with profiteering delay. This is why this book is also studded so oppressively with “we,” however imperious it may seem. The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it.




All Excerpts From


David Wallace-Wells. “Life After Warming.” Crown Publishing, 2019-04-16. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.

grim, sobering--a work meant to slap readers in the face about the human influence on the environment. Wallace-Wells confronts the willful ignorance of the mass of our population, stately plainly the facts, coldly accusing, and flatly offering solutions

I found this book very hard and unpleasant to read but necessary, this is a must read for everyone, It pulls no punches on how man has destroyed the environment and what is waiting for us.

This book is great but depressing.
Don't get me wrong now... I enjoyed reading it. However, it took me longer than many other books because I couldn't read more than a section at a time without needing to find something life-affirming to do as a break. He does reiterate a few times that one should not lose hope, but this is difficult looking into the Pandora's Box of misery he foretells.
David Wallace-Wells presents a straight forward, honest view of the world we currently live in send the world of the near future. He is very clear. This is not the best-case scenario or necessarily the worst case, it is the most realistic view of what our world will look like in the coming years if our behaviors don't change (or to an extent, even if they do).
Mr. Wallace-Wells breaks his book up into sections showing why we aren't worried enough, the current environmental plagues (12 horsemen of the Apocalypse kinda stuff), why we're not changing (and how we might), and why it matters still to try.
Each section is well researched, the problems and their causes are elucidated clearly, and the best and worst case scenarios are covered.
If you would like to know more about climate change or need some effective quotes for helping others understand the problem, this is the book for you.

I will finish with a quote I took from the middle of the book that gives an idea if the tone:
"If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it."

Thank you to the publisher and to Netgalley for the opportunity to preview this wonderful book.

This is one of the most valuable and thoughtful books I've run across. The first half runs through all the ways our planet and our species are being affected (and will be affected) by, let's face it, our own actions. Heat, hunger, drowning of land and countries, fire, weather disasters, lack of freshwater and reduction of crop production, ocean death, unbreathable air, plagues, economic collapse, massive refugee movements - to name some. The second half of the book is a look at a variety of possible responses by both individuals and humanity as a whole. This gets quite philosophical and is for me what makes the book essential.

The author says something early on that is seemingly so minor that it took my breath away once it sank in: the human race evolved in a climate that no longer exists. At just 1°C above pre-industrial global temperature, our current situation, we are in completely new territory. The planet has been here before, and beyond, and we know what that meant (hundreds of feet in ocean rise, massive extinctions, etc.), but fragile human bodies have not. From here the book details the ways in which climate factors will affect both the individual human and the larger human body (civilizations, societal structures, borders, the economy) at 2°, 3°, 4°, and so on. Conceivably much hotter than that.

After this horrific sketch, including all sorts of things I'd never considered, comes a look at the probability of the human race being able to generate the political will to avoid complete climate collapse. This is where depressives might want to walk away.

The futurist Alex Steffen is quoted as describing what we face in even contemplating being able to stabilize things:
The task of transitioning from dirty to clean electricity is smaller than
The challenge of electrifying almost every that uses power, which is smaller than
The challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than
The challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided (given the existing dirty infrastructure and the labor markets everywhere using dirty energy).
And then there is the need to get to zero emissions from all other sources (deforestation, agriculture, livestock, landfills).
And the need to protect all human systems from the coming onslaught of natural disasters and extreme weather.
And the need to erect a system of global government, or at least international cooperation, to coordinate above. All of which is smaller than
the cultural undertaking of imagining together a future that feels not only possible but worth fighting for.

Oh, and we have only a decade or two (maybe three) before we're past any possibility of stopping the process, and that's only if we start right now..

There was one suggestion I thought was especially useful for dealing with climate skeptics (or, the blind leading the blind): wouldn't it be better to think it was human-made and therefore potential fixable? Of course, most of the rest of the book will make you feel it may not matter in the long run. Global cooperation to eliminate all use of fossil fuels? In the next decade or three? Yeah, right, like that's going to happen.

Really, I don't think I can do justice to the sweep of this book. All I can say is, this is the only book I've seen that not only lays out what's coming down the pike but weighs all our possible responses.

If there a book that everyone should read this year... this is it. Very well done. Obviously scary, The future is now. Buy this for your friends and make them read it. Then talk about it and what we need to do. Buy this book now.

Wow. This is a powerful, beautifully written wake up call for the non scientist on climate change.q

There’s a level of detail here far beyond the usual newspaper article on how exactly our earth will change at various degrees of warming, and how late in the game we already are. The first portion of the book goes into the nitty gritty of how all of us will be affected in our daily lives by crop failures, flooding, population movements, etc.

Later in the book the author goes into the scale of efforts that will be required to counteract climate change: enormous now, and growing so fast with each month and year of delay.

I found the topic compelling and the treatment of it powerful. I admit to getting overwhelmed by all the data and doing some skimming. Nevertheless I am glad to have read this, and I thank NetGalley and Tim Dugan books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Summary: An exploration of our near future if projected increases in global temperatures occur and the multiple impacts of these increases.

This is a sobering book. It opens with the evidence that four of the last five episodes of planetary extinctions were related to climate warming. The premise of the title and this book is that there will be major repercussions if even the projected two degree Celsius increase in global temperatures occurs. If those temperatures increase by four or five degrees or more, the changes could be exponentially greater, affecting not merely the quality but the possibility of life for many of the planet's inhabitants.

The first part of Wallace-Wells book discusses "elements of chaos." There is heat, and the summer temperatures in tropical parts of the world, that will render them uninhabitable. Rates of death from heat will climb dramatically (remember the Chicago heat wave of 1995?). Rising temperatures will reduce crop yields in many food-producing parts of the world. Coastal cities throughout the world will be inundated due to sea level rise due to melting ice in Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets. Drought in many areas may lead to year round fire seasons over increasing areas, as has been the case in California and other parts of the western US. Terms like "500 hundred year" storms will become meaningless when they occur at five year intervals, and rebuilding in frequently hit areas will become increasingly costly and unlikely. Diseases once considered "tropical" will spread to more temperate regions: malaria, yellow fever, dengue will join the spread of diseases like East Nile Virus, Zika, and Lyme disease.

Economic projections suggest the possibility that each degree of global temperature rise may cut the GDP by 10 percent, or higher percentages as temperature levels continue to increase. Economic pressures and displaced populations will increase the level of conflicts, both civil wars within countries and international conflicts.

One of the sobering aspects of this book is that these changes are already upon us. Just in the last two years 50 percent of the Great Barrier Reef has died from warming ocean temperatures killing off the organism the coral depend upon for sustenance. Increasingly intense storms, greater flooding, more powerful hurricanes, year-long fire seasons are already part of life. Day time temperatures over 120 degrees Fahrenheit and night time temperatures that never drop below 100 degrees are already common place. Glaciers around the world are melting, jeopardizing water sources for many communities.

The second part of the book explores some of the non-scientific aspects of projected climate change, from economic systems no longer based on growth, a planet covered with carbon recapture facilities, what life might be like for those who survive when progress is no longer a part of life. He closes with a section on the anthropic principle and the discussion of why we haven't found life on other planets. He speculates that this might be because the trajectory of civilizations is to burn themselves out and self-destruct as we appear to be doing.

Many will object to the speculative character of parts of this book. In part, much of the discussion is not, but is based on well-established scientific findings, and current manifestations that fulfill prior predictions. It is true that we are notoriously bad at predicting the future. What I might suggest is that while things might be better, they could also be worse, perhaps in ways yet unforeseen. Yet this isn't a work of despair. Wallace-Wells observes that the reality that rising global temperatures have been caused by human causes (from rapidly burning carbon sequestered underground for years) to our taste for meat that multiplies methane-producing animals is good news. It means that humans can take measures to reduce and offset carbon dioxide emissions.

At the same time, the window for action is increasingly short, and in some cases, action will consist of adjusting to the "new normal" and preventing further degradation of the planet's climate. It is striking to me that many of our younger politicians and other youth are advocating climate action. While some of us may not see the world Wallace-Wells is describing beyond the present day harbingers, our youngest generations and their children will. If Wallace-Wells is right, the opportunity to avoid being cursed as the generation that made Earth increasingly uninhabitable may rapidly be coming to an end. His book asks me, and others of my generation whether that is the legacy we want to leave our children.

_____________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this an advanced review e-galley of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own

David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth is a good entry point into a very dense topic. The first few chapters are very compelling – although I wouldn’t call myself unknowledgeable on climate change, there were several points and statistical facts that struck me by how terrifying they are. I liked reading about carbon capture plants, the great nutrient collapse, and ocean acidification. However, about halfway through, it got somewhat repetitive. I skimmed a couple of chapters because I felt that I had already read them earlier in the book. The last several chapters were then somewhat disorganized. So much was touched on very briefly: science, history, economics, pop culture, and philosophy are very broad categories to refer to in a meaningful way in about only 1/3 of a rather short book. However, if you’re looking for a survey of the many ways that the climate crisis affects and will affect humanity and our planet, this would be a good place to start.

The most frightening thing about this book occurs early on. David Wallace-Wells is NOT an environmentalist, not a tree hugger, not one of us. And he is scared to death. He is frightened to the core, just as we baby boomer earth-mothers are. This is a book to open the eyes of those with their 'natural cycle' theories, their -'do something tomorrow' answers. Those with their fingers in the money pots of petroleum, coal and gas. Unfortunately he does give them another procrastinator excuse - maybe it's already too late.

Read this book before you buy another vehicle or AC unit or refrigerator. And then you, too, will do everything in your power to STOP the carbon accumulation in our world. Instead of petroleum you can treat yourself to a few solar panels on the roof.

BTW - David Wallace-Wells has an enviable writing style. I would read anything he cares to write. He is an artist with a pencil....

I received a free electronic copy of this excellent look at the science of climate from Netgalley, David Wallace-Wells, and Tim Duggan Books in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future
David Wallace-Wells
{Tim Duggan Books: February 2019}
To be published in the US on the 19th of February 2019.

I received an advanced electronic copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley.

The Uninhabitable Earth is a rendering of the status of global warming, and a projection of the life that humanity is approaching. Following a 2017 viral article about climate change, the book outlines the many possible fates of earth; wether that be through heat death, hunger, drowning or wildfires, and that is only just the first four chapters. Wallace-Wells’s writing style however is a fantastic balance of research and story-telling. Presenting clearly both what has been studied and the associated margins of error, Wallace-Wells brings into existence a tangible sense of what this may look like.

"Any of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it"

The success of the article is in itself an anomaly — climate change will drastically effect every living human in the next century, but is known for generating widespread apathy from the public and generally receives little online traffic. Both the style of the writing and the pace of the book breathes life into the subject of global warming. The book is both scientifically satisfying and socially engaging.

"There is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try"

Where science is at its strongest is the highlighting of patterns; whether it be identifying cycles, correlations or behaviors of systems large or small. With climate change however, the trend line of our progress is so off course, heading towards environmental conditions so unlike anything we have observed, that scientific predictions have few examples by which predictions can be explained. What will a world 6 degrees warmer look like? How will natural feedback mechanisms aggregate the issues? Finally, when and how will humans respond to climate change, and will it be as help or hindrance?

The Uninhabitable Earth has many parallels to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, a book that 57 years ago awakened the public's awareness to the environmental damage caused by the chemical industries. Silent Spring is considered a factor in leading to the ban of certain chemicals for agricultural use and seeding the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. If any book may turn on the public mind to climate change action again, the very readable, emotive, and quotable The Uninhabitable Earth may come close.

The Uninhabitable Earth reminds me of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. There are a million things wrong with how humans use, and abuse, the natural world, but there are things that can be done. The overall writing style makes a dull story, but the content made me want to keep reading.

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC.

This book should scare you to death and I am almost glad that I am an older human and probably won't be around for many of the predicted events. Heat death, droughts, floodings, drownings, crop failure...the list goes on. The only thing that gives me hope is that the inventiveness of the human race usually pulls us out. Let's hope.

The Uninhabitable Earth is not just depressing, David Wallace-Wells’ book is a merciless hammering of the reader, a bludgeoning to wake up to the horrors of climate change. It is both hard and unpleasant to read. Two-thirds through, Wallace unexpectedly pauses to say “If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.”

The structure is simple enough. Wallace divides the planet into 12 plagues. Every paragraph is jammed with facts and citations relating to that aspect. The 12 are: Heat Death, Hunger, Drowning, Wildfire, Disasters No Longer Natural, Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Plagues of Warming, Economic Collapse, Climate Conflict, and “Systems”. He groups them under Part 1: Elements of Chaos. I think they’re plagues, in the biblical sense.

The book is a compendium of the knowledge out there. Wallace’s own career focuses on climate change, and he has all the sources and resources at his command. It shows clearly in the breath of data he draws on. And they are all connected, with feedback loops and knock-on effects that can magnify a bad situation into a disaster. Wallace makes those connections clear.

I have long maintained that the easiest way to view the earth’s response to Man is to think of a wet dog. It shakes violently, flinging the annoying drops out in all directions. It then goes off and scratches itself all over, and eventually dries off and resumes its life. Earth will shake off the effects of Man, but it will take 100,000 years for the oceans alone to reset themselves, and another 100 million years for new life to take shape. In the mean time, everything will be erased. That is the true price of the Industrial Revolution. And as Wallace shows in several places, literally all the money in the world is not enough to fix it.

Although this has been coming for a long time, it really took off in just our lifetime. Fully half the carbon in the air was put there in just the last 25 years, he says. The rise in temperatures has led to the warmest five years in history – in just this short century. The intensity of the ramp up in pollution, invisible as most of it is for now, is breathtaking. Literally.

And we don’t have to wait to see the effects. Wallace says that deaths from air pollution are currently running at seven million per year – more than the Holocaust - every year. With a two degree rise in temperature, that will eventually hit 150 million a year more than it would at 1.5 degrees.
-21 Indian cities expect to have consumed all their groundwater in the next two years.
-Just as American Lyme disease is now active and increasing in Europe, Japan, Turkey and Korea, so malaria will spread all over North America as it warms. Ancient diseases frozen in arctic tundra will resume their conquest. This has already happened.
-Pointless Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than all the solar panels in the world can provide. That’s not what solar was for. Put another way, Bitcoin mining produces as much pollution as a million transatlantic flights.
-Cities absorb so much heat, they can actually raise nighttime temperatures by as much as 22 Fahrenheit degrees. This means when it’s 130 during the day, it might not drop below 130 at night.
-Ideal functional temperature is about 13C or 57F. Every degree the planet warms over where we are now reduces capacity, production, nutrients, availability and human productivity by several percent. Until there is nothing left to reduce. Construction already stops in the summer, as it is too hot for men to work, and asphalt melts. Humanity simply cannot survive outdoors in 120 degree heat.
-As carbon fills the air, the protein and nutrient content of every plant drops, currently down a third. When plants become useless nutritionally, most other living things will die.
-By 2030, Saudi Arabia will be consuming more energy in air conditioning the desert than it produces in oil. And thereby add that much more heat to it.

The last third of the book is a bit of a relief, quoting other people on their interpretations, theories, expectations and fears. But not necessarily new facts, which provides the relief, such as it is.

I have read so much in this field that I recognized many of the authors, facts and quotes. It is sadly familiar ground to me. Wallace picked good ones, with important points to make, fulfilling my own expectations as I read. In other words, he got it right. This is what we face. If you’re looking for an understanding of what we know at this time, you won’t do better than The Uninhabitable Earth.

About the best hope we have, and the maxim on which we are clearly relying, is that nothing ever turns out the way it first appears. It’s no way to run a planet.

David Wineberg