David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

Review:  

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth:  A Story of the Future (Penguin Random Hours, 2019)

Wallace-Wells provides another in a list of books warning of ecological disaster. He offers little new information, that is part of the problem.  We have a nagging feeling that we’ve heard the information before.  What Wallace-Wells does is to pull it together and provide an overview.  In a nutshell, the situation is dire, but not hopeless.

He starts with the dire.  Things are worse—much worse—than we imagine.  We are in the middle of the sixth extinction, as we have already learned in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2015 work by that name.  And in each extinction event over the past 800 million years a minimum of 75% of all species die off.  The problem is industrialization.  The rate of extinction has increased 100 times faster than in the pre-industrialization period.  And the pace of carbon release is increasing.  85% of the carbon in the air today was put there after WW II.  The threshold agreed to at Paris in 2016 was 44 ppm.  In 2018 we had already reached 411ppm.  And our attitude?  “Fatally complacent.”

The “we” here refers to humanity in general.  Ecological extinction events force us to think globally.  Which may be one reason we are uncomfortable with the implications.  Not only do all the nations, peoples and institutions in the world need to become aware of the gravity of the situation, we also need to find a way to deal with it cooperatively.  Tall order, given what we’ve seen in human history.

The symptoms of climate change will be numerous.  140 million refugees by 2050, worldwide.  Half of all invertebrate species gone in 40 years.  An increase of 2 degrees (C) by the end of this century will get us to 500 ppm.  That will also equal a 130’ rise in sea levels.  1.8 trillion tons of carbon will be released into the atmosphere when the Arctic permafrost melts.  And it’s not just about carbon release:  methane, also trapped under the permafrost, will be 34 times more powerful than carbon.  And the arguments tend to be narrowly focused.  Some have faith in technocratic solutions.  Some believe the market is sufficient to come up with a game-changing solution.  The degree of complacency is, in Wallace-Wells’ words, uncanny.  

I could go on.  But most people who listen are familiar with the arguments.  In the U.S. even (many) conservatives agree that global warming is real.  The terms he uses to describe the problem are dead-on:  fossil capitalism, heat island effect, willfully deluded, The real question is what to do.  The “wizards” respond with “reflexive optimism.”  The “prophets” with a discourse of collapse, and most of the rest of us are guilty of magical thinking.  As a student of religion I am obligated to add that much of the rhetoric has a strident, apocalyptic tone that is not always helpful.  Clearly the politicians have generally been inept at bringing about real change, although I still cling to a sliver of a possibility of progress.  The market and technological progress is where I’d rather place my bets, though innovation itself is insufficient.  To get China and India on board, and to effect change in lifestyles, some combination of inspired leadership with education and technological change is the only hope.

These options are my musings.  Wallace-Wells spends more time outlining the chaos and extinction possibilities than he does the engineering scenarios.  I miss the discussion of the full  range of possibilities, including nuclear power.  But the problem is spelled out loud and clear in these pages, which by itself is an exemplary move.