The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

They also take the official line that climate change is not a major issue, but again it is hard to take this seriously.

I would very much like to know what is really going on inside the Trump administration. But climate change acts to his advantage, so he welcomes it. I am sure he does not believe what he is saying. It is easy to see why Putin is overtly taking the position that climate change is a myth.

In addition, most of its income comes from fossil fuels. Russia may be the only country for which this is true. But for Russia, which is so far north that much of its area is currently Arctic wilderness, climate change could end up being a net plus. For India, it is not quite as bad, but still terrible. It sounds like the country may soon - within the next few decades - be rendered uninhabitable, primarily due to flooding caused by sea level rise.

For low-lying equatorial Bangladesh, it is a catastrophe. One of the things the author spells out, which I had not properly grasped before, is that climate change will affect different parts of the world very differently. The situation is even worse than I thought it was, and I was already far from optimistic. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.Ī well-written, straightforward and honest book about climate change. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await-food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. This is only a preview of the changes to come. Across the US, '500-year' storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells