The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

“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.

The first lines of the book forecast many of the broader themes Wallace-Wells will explore. For example, he outlines the sheer urgency of the matter. Moreover, the author contradicts the notion that climate change is either slow or remote, emphasizing the extent to which even citizens living far from the coast in prosperous countries will be affected by the phenomenon. Finally, Wallace-Wells introduces what is perhaps the book’s most salient argument: that climate change is not a natural problem but a human—and therefore political—problem.

“As recently as the 1997 signing of the landmark Kyoto Protocol, two degrees Celsius of global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons we used to call ‘natural disasters’ but will soon normalize as merely ‘bad weather.’ More recently, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands offered another name for that level of warming: ‘genocide.’” 

This quote functions in a few ways. For one, it introduces a benchmark for measuring the severity of climate change through the metric of post-Industrial global temperature increases. Throughout the book, Wallace-Wells relies heavily on this benchmark as a way of quantifying a phenomenon like climate change, which can at times feel too complex and wide-reaching in its consequences to comprehend. In addition, the quote hints at the author’s broader mission, which is to ponder what it will feel like to live in a world where the ravages of climate change are normal. Finally, the invocation of genocide plays into Wallace-Wells’s contention that climate change is less an accident of nature and more a human conspiracy.