This book wasn't what I expected at all. Instead of providing some creative solutions to the ongoing global warming, it simply provides speculation about what life would look like with the consequences of global warming.

While I see some merit in that, I don't really see the purpose of this book, except for it being singularly alarmist. People who believe in climate change don't really get anything out of this except for some chaotically edited passages describing anxiety-inducing scenarios. Those who actually need to be converted won't be persuaded by anything written in here.



( )

Book publishers will drive me insane if they continue to give books titles that misrepresent the actual content of the book.

“The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” by David Wallace-Wells, isn’t really about the planet Earth after the current episode of global warming is completed.

It’s really about what we can expect from the planet while it is warming. Like right now. And that is what is so terrifying about the book. Instead of focussing on the future, Wallace-Wells is foremost telling us what is happening now under our noses, while our politicians dither.

Economic devastation. Political chaos. Destruction of innumerable species. Roving millions of climate migrants. Unbreathable air. Insufficient quantities of drinkable water. Intractable hunger. Entire metropolises under yards of seawater.

This is going on now. And, oh yes it will intensify to the extent the social world will look much different in even 100 years than it does now.

I must say I would have liked a book that will tell me what the world will look like when global warming is complete because that will surely shock the bejeezus out of most of us.

I think what strikes me most about the way Wallace-Wells tells his story is that climate isn’t this helpless character in a story about the human race. Nature in this story is more powerful than Poseidon himself, transforming great masses of ice into sea levels that will flood huge cities around the world.

Heat will generate more and more powerful storms, huge and I mean huge wildfires. And move human agriculture into areas it was never meant to be.

Wallace-Wells expresses hope at the end of the book — much like Tim Flannery or Bill McKibben — that the apocalypse can be averted. But we can all see with our own eyes that isn’t going to happened.

And there is not a single jurisdiction on the planet that is really planning for the inevitable. ( )

“The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective.” ( )

To be honest, the parts of this book that I did not like almost make me want to give it 2-stars, but that is unjustifiably harsh, I think.

The entire first section is, at best, 1.5 stars. I've seen reviews talking about the beautiful prose, the forceful language, etc. No. It's florid. Melodramatic. Hyperbolic in imagery, if not quite in detail (Mr. Wallace-Wells (WW) is open early on that he is describing the (scientific, respectable) worst-case scenarios, not most likely, not those based on any serious action being taken.) If you like your science presented by the most verbose, melodramatic member of your local high-school drama club, this section is for you.

He defends this approach (and, by extension, one assumes the presentation) on the logic that people haven't been paying attention. His theory is that it is because climate change is easy to ignore because it is presented so sanguinely and only as e.g. sea-level change and the occasional extra hurricane. This is... self-evidently false from An Inconvenient Truth to... what was the De Caprio movie, The 11th Hour or something like that... to pretty much every pop-article ever. Yes, actual climate scientists in actual scientific papers are "reticent", but blaming public apathy on that is, to put it kindly, a stretch.

It is in the second section where this knot gets sort-of tied: "because neoliberalism," my ongoing second most-hated "reason" (the first being the ubiquitous "them""they"".) Mostly because neoliberalism has lost most of its meaning ( )

The author tries to lay everything out for our terrifying edification, although only the details are really new here unless you’ve been sleeping for 40 years. Remember Al Gore in his cherry picker truck showing us the rise in carbon dioxide production? There has been more CO2 production since his movie than in previous recorded time, and it was 42°C in Paris last week. This may be the most disturbing book I have ever read. It makes Kafka look like your girl friend’s birthday party.

I was initially going to recommend that subsequent editions of this book be sold with a revolver, but the last chapters discuss various thinker's intellectual responses to our impending doom, and all responses are not completely negative. Mr. Wallace-Wells says,
Personally, I think that climate change itself offers the most invigorating picture, in that even its cruelty flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world, as one, to action. ( )

A useful book in that it provides a vivid artist's rendition of the worst-case scenarios for climate change, but that's as far as it goes.

Wallace-Wells revels in the doomed desert prophet role to the point where it undermines the credibility of his story. Over and over again he presents some hellscape that "will" come to pass, where the research he points to is full of caveats: "might", "could", "is projected under the most pessimistic emssions pathway", etc. I realise that the point of the book is to focus on those worst cases, but it's irresponsible to use the language of certainty where only probability or possibility is justified.

That said, it is important to grapple with these low-probability, high-cost outcomes instead of dismissing them and focussing all of our imaginative energy on the median projection. The intention is laudable, but the execution is a shame. ( )

Quotes and notes:

“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. … this means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance. (4) emphasis mine

What the fuck is wrong with us?

“… two degrees Celsius of global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves … There is almost no chance we will avoid that scenario. The Kyoto Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since, despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twenty years before. (9) emphasis mine

What the fuck is wrong with us?

“Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves … ” (40)

“… most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally.” (56)

All because men cannot keep their penises out of women’s vaginas.

“Much of the infrastructure of the internet, one study showed, could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades … “(61)

[During the California fires of 2017] “On local golf courses, the West Coast’s wealthy still showed up for their tee times, swinging their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not have been more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy.” (73)

” … the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops—that the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, would become carbon sources, unleashing all that stored gas. … In California, a single wildfire can entirely eliminate the emissions gains made that year by all of the state’s aggressive environmental policies. … At present, the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elicted president of Brazil promising to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? (76) emphasis mine

“Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London … costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.” (120)

So why aren’t such trips illegal? Why didn’t Trudeau approve the construction of a water pipeline from the melting glaciers in the north instead of an oil pipeline? (We’re going to have droughts worldwide, affecting agriculture, worldwide, and we’re just letting all that fresh water go to waste, do damage, in fact, by warming the oceans …)

What the fuck is wrong with us?

“It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.” (169)

“According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them [carbon emissions] in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, … we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today [2019], when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year.” (179-180)

“In 2003, Ken Caldeira, now of the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the world would need to add clean power sources equivalent to the full capacity of a nuclear plant every single day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change.” (181)

“If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent [the U.S. accounts for 15%; China, for 28% — https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions], reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.” (187)

In other words, it would have been no hardship. To save the planet. To save ourselves. ( )

There is so much in here to be scared about on climate change. I listened to this book but had to get the e-book because he was going over so many facts and statistics that I was having a hard time understanding it and keeping up. I liked that he broke the crisis into smaller pieces. I liked that he spoke of who would be most affected by the changes as well as how they would be affected. We all will be affected eventually but those in poorer countries and those who are poor will be affected earlier and more than those who are wealthy. I did find it interesting that as he was talking about wildfires, he explained that those who are wealthy, and living in those areas, are being affected as much as those who are poor. The increase of weather changes, floods, and fires was amazing, and it all happened within the last 50 years. He did not give solutions but shared who was doing what when it came to that. He lays out a convincing argument for climate change and what will happen to the planet and humans and how we have contributed to it in the past and today. Worth the read. ( )

Lots of books and articles want to waste time arguing about whether or not global climate change is real or not. The Uninhabitable Earth does not waste time on that nonsense. In fact, in one passage, the author notes that only in the United States is there any question of it. Nor is there any question that the rapid rate of the warming is the direct result of human activity.
Wallace-Wells notes that there have been 5 global extinctions in the past, only one of which was caused by an asteroid (the one that killed the dinosaurs). It is possible that our current race toward extinction is yet another of those natural extinctions as climate deniers argue, but it is not possible that the rate of our current, and inevitable, extinction is caused by anything other than human activity.
The book itself spends little tome on those issues and instead focuses on the impacts of the warming that we are already experience it and then talks about the trends in these impacts as possible predictors of the future. Thus, the economies of the world, population growth trends, immigration trends, trends in civil strife, political trends, and just about any other thing that could be related to climate change are all examined in detail and with ample, well-vetted and credible research to support them.
This is not an alarmist book. It is a reasoned and unemotional presentation of facts and the data that supports them. It is the same undeniable reasoning of a statement like, “If you pull the trigger of that gun you are pointing at me, I am very likely to die.” In this case, however, we have already pulled the trigger and the bullet is in mid-flight. Unfortunately, the greatest impact of the bullet will be felt by our grandchildren. ( )

Infonya penting tapi ga seneng sama penyampaiannya. Kinda repetitive and patronizing with a hint of white supremacy and classism? Trus kalimatnya ga efektif, satu halaman bisa dua kalimat aja. I appreciate the collection of up to date news on climate change, i just grow to dislike the author for nonsubstantial reasons as i read and i'm glad to finish the book and finally part with him.
I'd rather recommend The Crash Course by Chris Martenson. A bit different but more elaborate, holistic and successful in stirring up urgency (for me). ( )

I only read about half of it, because there just is too much to take in. I realize we are killing the earth and none of the right people care, but this book described the death of the earth many times over. I am sure it is true, but I could only read so much of it. ( )

DNF, honestly I'm amazed at anyone actually making to the end of this book. I mean, it's good. But stomach roiling, nightmare inducing, and sent me into a depression spiral that lasted two weeks. I didn't learn anything from the first half, but I'm the type of person who already reads all the articles on climate change, and the IPCC reports on the day they're released.
This book might be good for a person who doesn't really read the news as it's released and needs it in a narrative. Do not recommend if you're already in the throes of climate depression though. ( )

absolutely terrifying ( )

Central idea of the book is climate change and global warming. Author reviews and cites hundreds of collected documents. Goes through major incidents which happened in the past due to climate change and envisions what could have happened. The book is good as a reference of past events, but doesn't provide any insights or suggestions how to fix existing problems. ( )

DNF at page 131 (read aloud sections to Ian through page 119). Excellent book but I couldn't stand any more

This book led me down the path to an existential crisis. Between this book and The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail, I did just that, lapsed into a crisis. Why bother to keep on living? Why care about the environment? It's all going to end with an uninhabitable planet, so recycling aluminum cans and plastic just seems like a big waste.

I'm not kidding when I say that it caused me to think of life as a complete waste of time, and that it was perfectly acceptable to just end it all.

Fortunately that did not happen. My general underlying positive viewpoint fought back. I did not want to see my beautiful wife lapse into this "we have ruined the planet and humans deserve to die off" mindset. I kept reading. And I found a couple of books that saved my sanity.

One was The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey.

The other was Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger.

Those books literally saved my life.

This isn't about being a so-called 'climate change denier' or whatever label you want to sling out. This is about approaching science with a bit of healthy skepticism, about rejecting the concept of consensus as it has *no place* anywhere near the idea of science. It is about regaining hope. It is about learning to care for the earth and our legacy on this planet. ( )

Summary: We are royally fucked. 50 years from now, the survivors will be incredulous at how stupid the planet got ( )

Perhaps the best-written and most frightening book about climate change I've yet read. ( )

This book by David Wallace-Wells is a frightening book. Many, many people should read this book,

The book may come across as apocalyptic. It may come across as a book that spells doom and casts a shadow on our sunny lives.

Yet, the weather—the climate—is changing all around us.

David Wallace-Wells has divided the book into bite-sized sections, easy to digest.

The first part describes what will happen if we don’t act now.
In the second part, he writes about some discussions that are taking place around climate change—the controversies, scientific and political.

Last, he dives into some fringe groups that exist out there—somewhere.

More important, is his message—we have only one planet, one home.

Definitely read the book. ( )

Incredible book. A must read for everyone.

The book has three main parts and a fourth that is kinda an epilogue.

The first part introduces the problem really quickly and brutally, quickly stating the magnitude of the problem facing us, while also introducing the author, and where he is coming from with this book and with his own perspective.

The second part is the most scientific part of the book, as it goes into detail about each type of possible disaster and what that would mean to the world as a whole. This part, to me, represents the most what the problem actually is: it is not a debate about opinion, it's a debate about facts, but not of *if*, but of *when* and *how*.

The third part is the best one, for me. David analyses the aspects of our lives, such as capitalism, pop culture, ethics and the very idea of progress; and how the will respond to the effects of climate change. This session defined the books that I will read next.

I think this is a book to change the way you think about everything. ( )

Short, sweet, and brutal. The crisis is now, it's everywhere, and it manifests itself in every aspect of life. It's already too late to avert the worst, but - and this is the note of hope it ends on - if we made the crisis, we can ameliorate it too. ( )

In this truly terrifying book, Wallace-Wells outlines what is likely to happen to our planet and our societies if we don't get a grip on the climate crisis, and how slim are the possibilities that we will. In a readable, thorough and for the most part quite matter-of-fact approach, he outlines the effects we are already seeing and the probable outcomes. While he is often talking about what will happen with global temperature increases of 3-5C it he makes clear that this is almost inevitable unless we reverse CO2 emissions within the next decade. Early on he points out that nobody ever talks about anything beyond the end of this century, partly because even if we slow down the warming, reversing it will take centuries. It isn't a case of staying under a 2C increase on pre-industrial levels, it's trying to avoid getting there in the next 80 years.



Be quite clear, these are not outlandish predictions. The most we can do at this stage is mitigation, and adaptation to the changes.



As balance, the author does touch on more severe possibilities - climate changes of a level that could be literally apocalyptic instead of just horrendously difficult (while an increase of say 3C will kill many millions and make life immeasurably harder for the survivors, humanity will survive it) and some sketches of people who taken the nihilistic view that destruction is inevitable and withdrawn. Wallace-Wells does not end as [a:Naomi Klein|419|Naomi Klein|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1494619590p2/419.jpg] might with a cautiously optimistic call to arms in his final chapter, but he still offers tenuous hope. In closing the afterword, he addresses how universal talk of we acting together can obscure divergent solutions and disagreements but also give us a direction of travel for the only way out of this:


"The solutions, when we dare to imagine them, are global as well, which makes universal language, I think, even if not precisely accurate, nevertheless fitting and illustrative and indeed motivating, if there is to be any chance of preserving even the hope for that happier future - relatively liveable, relatively fulfilling, relatively prosperous and perhaps, more than only relatively just. Call me crazy, or better yet naive, I still think we can."



I think he considers that a hopeful ending, couched as it is parenthetical clauses and that, too, is sobering. ( )

The scariest book I've ever listened to. It deserves listening to it once more, because I am pretty sure I did not manage to "digest" it all. ( )

As suffocatingly depressing a book as I've ever read, especially as you get into the later chapters that branch out into threats you might not associate with global warming. The author himself admits that much of what he's talking about may turn out to be wrong, but the central premise, that the planet is warming because of us and we will suffer for it, has the ring of absolute truth. One can only hope that we will rise to the occasion and deal with the problems, and the author says he is optimistic--that was not my take on it. We've known about this for decades and done nothing. I don't believe we ever will. ( )

Couldn't make it through. One of the books that I just kept picking up and then putting back down to read something else or look at twitter or do the dishes.