The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

By David Wallace-Wells (Tim Duggan, New York, 2019). 310 pp. $27.00. ISBN 978-0-525-57670-9.

In 2010 environmentalist Bill McKibben published Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, in which he writes, “global warming is ... no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality. We’ve changed the planet.” The rest of McKibben’s book is a narrative prescribing how we can live on this new planet he calls Eaarth.

Struck by the dire words in Wallace-Wells’s title, I expected to find in his book a follow-up to what McKibben had described almost a decade earlier. I did, but I felt that it was written in a nonlinear style that was difficult to follow. After completing the first section of 36 pages which Wallace-Wells calls “Cascades,” I gathered that it amounted to the following points:

  1. The conditions allowing humans to evolve have changed: “We have ... exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization is now, like a parent, dead.”
  2. An enumeration of what Wallace-Wells calls delusions about global warming: It's an Arctic saga that is unfolding remotely; it's strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines; it's a crisis of the natural world rather than the human world; wealth can be a shield against its ravages; fossil fuel burning is the price of continued economic growth; and technology will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster.
  3. It is expected that continued fossil fuel combustion would lead to an increased global temperature between 4o and 4.5oC by 2100.
  4. We can assign responsibility for reversing the trend: Earth has been brought to the brink of climate catastrophe by the generation of our parents. The generation with the responsibility to avoid it ... is ours. “We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can engineer our way out of it.”
  5. The purpose of the book: “This is not a book about the science of warming; it is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet. ...What will it mean to live outside ... [the] narrow window of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve ... probably quite far outside it. That reckoning is the subject of this book.”

The second section, “Elements of Chaos,” comprises twelve chapters based on “interviews with dozens of experts, and ... hundreds of papers published in the best academic journals over the previous decade or so ... an honest and fair portrait of the state of our collective understanding of the many multiplying threats that a warming planet poses to all of us. ...” These chapters cover the following topics associated with global warming, again, not always in a linear way: temperature increase, hunger, sea level rise, wildfires, unnatural disasters, freshwater drain, marine environment, air pollution, insect spread, economic consequences, military conflict, and impacts on physical and mental well-being.

The third section, “The Climate Kaleidoscope,” expresses Wallace-Wells’s concerns about six aspects of the human future related to global warming, including the following:

  1. Storytelling: Wallace-Wells writes that we have engineered Earth so that “ninety-six percent of the world’s animals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild.” But this was done at the expense of global warming, which, allowed to continue unabated, “will come to shape everything we do on the planet ... .” Climate scientists like James Hansen, who first testified to Congress about it in 1988, were guided by what Hansen called “scientific reticence” lest they be perceived as advocates rather than scientists and their advocacy spawn depression leading to inaction. Scientific reticence was based on the expectation that hope can be more motivating than fear—but after the alarming 2018 IPCC report, “scientific reticence” gave way to “tell it like it is.”
  2. The Church of Technology: Wallace-Wells regards the technological advance offered by Silicon Valley, which is focused on artificial intelligence, as a diversion from the reality that calls for mitigation against climate change in the form of a complete revamping of energy infrastructure. He also sees building an artificial ecosystem on Earth as more feasible than building one on Mars.
  3. Ethics at the End of the World: Wallace-Wells presents five types of responses to the present prospect of future climate change: withdrawal (in order to work things out for yourself), massive activist mobilization, climate fatalism (“an overabundance of humans but a dearth of humanity,” species loneliness (an anthropocentric view that values only human gratification), and climate apathy (continually acclimatizing ourselves to new norms).

The last section, 'The Anthropic Principle,” revisits many of the author's preceding ideas and the challenges raised for humans in charting their future. “The question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of science; it is a bet on human activity. ...How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly? ...[The] instability [of the climate system] is also a measure of the human power that engineered it ...and which must now stop the damage. ...If humans are responsible for the problem they must be capable of undoing it.”

In spite of the dire consequences he has written about the consequences of climate change, Wallace-Wales says he is optimistic that we will overcome them--with his confidence even taking the form of fathering a child in the course of writing this book. To do this, he points out “that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and the public investment in green energy and carbon capture.” But he doesn’t leave us a blueprint for using them.

John. L. Roeder
The Calhoun School, New York, NY
JLRoeder@aol.com

These contributions have not been peer-refereed. They represent solely the view(s) of the author(s) and not necessarily the view of APS.