book review the uninhabitable earth

• Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
• Climate Change
• Policy & Economics
• Biodiversity
• Conservation

Get focused newsletters especially designed to be concise and easy to digest

• ESSENTIAL BRIEFING 3 times weekly
• TOP STORY ROUNDUP Once a week
• MONTHLY OVERVIEW Once a month
• Enter your email *
• Comments This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Book Review: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

David Wallace-Wells ’ 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming presents a terrifying prognosis for the future of our planet – that if things continue at the present pace, large parts of the planet will become uninhabitable by 2100.

I nspired by his 2017 New York Magazine article of the same name, Wallace-Wells’ book builds upon his previously established arguments, outlining how the future can still be salvaged despite the damage humanity has already done. This book also addresses why we, as a species, are so indifferent to climate change despite all the information we have about its disastrous consequences. 

Wallace-Wells’ facts are generally well-presented and laid out. The opening chapter, “Cascades,” is particularly poignant, as it lays out exactly what is at stake if we do not take the steps to rectify the damage we have already wrecked upon the environment. He pulls no punches. “It is worse, much worse, than you think,” Wallace-Wells writes. “The force of retribution will cascade down to us through nature, but the cost to nature is only one part of the story; we will all be hurting.”

You might also like: UN Warns of Famine Risk in Four Countries

The Uninhabitable Earth, however, can be a dry read. Many of Wallace-Wells’ paragraphs are long barrages of statistics and speculation. After a hundred or so pages (this book is over three hundred pages in total), it is easy to get tired of Wallace-Wells’ repetitive writing style. His prose is not beautiful – it is unnecessarily arcane, and merely functional in that it serves the purpose of showing you how humanity is doomed, but is in no way memorable, fun or even easy to read. Some of his sentences take up nearly the whole page! 

Wallace-Wells’ scope is also quite narrow. He chooses to focus almost exclusively on what may happen to humanity once we go through the predicted 2 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming between now and 2100, which makes the scope of his work rather myopic for a work focused on the environment. As he freely admits, he is not and never has been an environmentalist. In fact, he admits, he is “like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and wilfully deluded, about climate change,” and has only recently awoken to the horrific future humanity may have unwittingly created for itself. Given his background, it is not entirely surprising that he says little about how climate change will impact other species. However, Wallace-Wells comes off as particularly insensitive about the impact of climate change on animals and other non-human lifeforms, even saying at one point that “the world could lose much of what we think of as nature, as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind.” Ultimately, his anthropocentric perspective is a missed opportunity to discuss just how dangerous climate change is for all living things, not just humanity. 

In general, the book says too little about what we can do to prevent this doomsday scenario from occurring. Accordingly, many of Wallace-Wells’ critics have criticised his book as being overly alarmist. Although we do not and cannot dispute any of the facts he has laid out, we will have to agree with his critics that his over-focus on past events, major incidents, and what may happen in the future as a result of our past actions detracts from the overall impact of his book. The Uninhabitable Earth would have been a much more powerful piece of work had Wallace-Wells provided more insight or suggestions as to how to fix the problems we are currently facing. Ultimately, he comes off as all talk and no action. 

Wallace-Wells’ research is also lacking at times, making his book unfocused and strikingly unfactual in places (despite, and perhaps in spite, of his barrage of facts). Certain chapters of this book – in particular, the chapter on the economic consequences of climate change – have surprisingly few citations for a work that is otherwise packed with facts. In a similar vein, when he mentions how “many of the planet’s largest lakes have begun drying up, from the Aral Sea in central Asia […], to Lake Mead […],” he provides no concrete proof that these changes are caused by climate change. After throwing names of various lakes and seas that are drying up at the audience, Wallace-Wells concludes this paragraph with a vague “[c]limate change is only one factor in this story, but its impact is not going to shrink over time.” 

All in all, I really wanted to like The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. It works as a cautionary tale, but Wallace-Wells’ abrasive bombardment of statistics without proper explanation, myopically anthropocentric perspective and lack of concrete suggestions for how we can protect our planet ultimately make this book an unenjoyable slog of a read. 

About the Author

15 Biggest Environmental Problems of 2024

4 Biggest Environmental Issues in the Philippines in 2024

Water Shortage: Causes and Effects

Hand-picked stories weekly or monthly. We promise, no spam!

Boost this article By donating us $100, $50 or subscribe to Boosting $10/month – we can get this article and others in front of tens of thousands of specially targeted readers. This targeted Boosting – helps us to reach wider audiences – aiming to convince the unconvinced, to inform the uninformed, to enlighten the dogmatic.

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• AP Investigations
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election results
• Google trends
• AP & Elections
• College football
• Auto Racing
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Review: ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ explores climate doomsday

• Copy Link copied

“The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” (Tim Duggan Books), by David-Wallace-Wells.

The science is clear: Massive fossil fuel use by humans is raising temperatures in the oceans and air, the seas are rising, and we aren’t building nearly enough green energy to slow the process.

But does preaching global doom inspire change, or just resignation? The worth of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells hinges on that question.

“The Uninhabitable Earth” originated as a long essay for New York magazine in 2017, and the book repeats the same formula. Wallace-Wells argues that it is past time to be very afraid about the devastation that humans and ecosystems will suffer.

Some scientists criticized the extreme tone of the magazine piece, but David Archer, a respected climate expert at the University of Chicago, said then that Wallace-Wells “is not wrong, wildly misleading, or out of bounds of the discussion we should be having about climate change.”

But if the book is justified in discussing worst-case scenarios, Wallace-Wells repeatedly confuses the message by bouncing between alarm and caution. There’s the title, yet soon we’re told that “it is unlikely that climate change will render the planet truly uninhabitable.” He writes that the Syrian civil war was “inflamed by climate change and drought,” but later adds that scientists say it is “not exactly fair to say the conflict is the result of warming.”

Books should also have deeper narratives than magazine pieces, and “The Uninhabitable Earth” doesn’t. Wallace-Wells speculates about climate doomsday from every possible angle, but says little about the tremendous global progress in reducing wind or solar power costs. A single wonky chapter on the benefits, costs and challenges of bringing a green energy revolution to New York City would have been welcome, and timely. Generals motivate troops by searching for ways to win, not by telling everyone they are doomed to die.

The book suffers from unnecessary hyperbole, too. Wallace-Wells loses credibility with claims that “global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization” and that three or more degrees of warming “would unleash suffering beyond anything that humans have ever experienced through many millennia.” One wonders where Wallace-Wells places the Bubonic plague and deaths from malaria, typhoid, AIDS, starvation, war, the Holocaust and the like.

Yet the time to slow climate change is running out, so perhaps the tone of “The Uninhabitable Earth” is a necessary response. If the book inspires a new generation of climate activists, more power to Wallace-Wells.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells review – our terrifying future

Enough to induce a panic attack ... a brutal portrait of climate change and our future lives on Earth. But we have the tools to avoid it

Y ou already know it’s bad. You already know the weather has gone weird, the ice caps are melting, the insects are disappearing from the Earth. You already know that your children, and your children’s children, if they are reckless or brave enough to reproduce, face a vista of rising seas, vanishing coastal cities, storms, wildfires, biblical floods. As someone who reads the news and is sensitive to the general mood of the times, you have a general sense of what we’re looking at. But do you truly understand the scale of the tribulations we face? David Wallace-Wells , author of the distressingly titled The Uninhabitable Earth , is here to tell you that you do not. “It is,” as he puts it in the book’s first line, “worse, much worse, than you think.”

The book expands on a viral article, also titled The Uninhabitable Earth, which Wallace-Wells published in New York in the summer of 2017, and which frightened the life out of everyone who read it. Writing at length, he is even more remorseless in his delineation of what the not nearly distant enough future probably holds for us. The book’s longest section, entitled Elements of Chaos, is composed of 12 short and brutal chapters, each of which foretells a specific dimension of our forecast doom, and whose titles alone – Heat Death; Dying Oceans; Unbreathable Air; Plagues of Warming – are enough to induce an honest-to-God panic attack.

Wallace-Wells identifies a tendency, even among those of us who think we are already sufficiently terrified of the future, to be strangely complacent about the figures. Yes, we know that climate change will cause sea level rises of between four to eight feet before the end of this century, but then again what’s a few feet if you happen to live a couple of miles inland? “That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans,” he writes, “should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we’d already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war – because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will bring.”

The book is extremely effective in shaking the reader out of that complacency. Some things I did not want to learn, but learned anyway: every return flight from London to New York costs the Arctic three square metres of ice; for every half degree of warming, societies see between a 10 and 20% increase in the likelihood of armed conflict; global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, by which point there will be more plastic than fish in the planet’s oceans. The margins of my review copy of the book are scrawled with expressions of terror and despair, declining in articulacy as the pages proceed, until it’s all just cartoon sad faces and swear words.

There is a widespread inclination to think of climate change as a form of compound payback for two centuries of industrial capitalism. But among Wallace-Wells’s most bracing revelations is how recent the bulk of the destruction has been, how sickeningly fast its results. Most of the real damage, in fact, has taken place in the time since the reality of climate change became known. And we are not slowing down. One of the sentences I found most upsetting in this book composed almost exclusively of upsetting sentences: “We are now burning 80% more coal than we were just in the year 2000 .”

There’s also a temptation, when thinking about climate change, to focus on denialism as the villain of the piece. The bigger problem, Wallace-Wells points out, is the much vaster number of people (and governments) who acknowledge the true scale of the problem, and still act as if it’s not happening. Outright climate denialism as a political force , he argues, is essentially a US phenomenon – which is to say, essentially, a phenomenon of the Republican party – and the US is responsible for only 15% of the world’s emissions. “To believe the fault for global warming lies exclusively with the Republican party or its fossil-fuel backers is a form of American narcissism.” (I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone make quite so simplistic a case, but the point about denialism as largely a red herring is an important one.)

This all makes for relentlessly grim reading, particularly in that first section. As is generally the case in any sustained exposure to the subject of climate change – a subject that can seem increasingly like the only subject – a kind of apocalyptic glaze descends over even the most conscientious eyes, a peculiarly contemporary compound of boredom and horror. (“Human kind,” as the bird in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets sagely points out, “cannot bear very much reality.”) It’s a problem of which Wallace-Wells is clearly aware. “If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader,” as he puts it, somewhere past the halfway point, acknowledging the likelihood of the material he’s sifting through causing despondency in anyone considering it. “But you are not merely considering it,” he clarifies, “you are about to embark on living it. In many cases, in many places, we already are.”

That last point turns out to be one of the most crucial of the book’s warnings. Because as dire as the projections are, if you are surveying the topic from a privileged western vantage, it’s easy to overlook how bad things have already got, to accept the hurricanes and the heatstroke deaths as simply the unfortunate nature of things. In this way, Wallace-Wells raises the disquieting spectre of future normalisation – the prospect that we might raise, incrementally but inexorably, our baseline of acceptable human suffering. (This phenomenon is not without precedent. See, for example, the whole of human history.)

For a relatively short book, The Uninhabitable Earth covers a great deal of cursed ground – drought, floods, wildfires, economic crises, political instability, the collapse of the myth of progress – and reading it can feel like taking a hop-on hop-off tour of the future’s sprawling hellscape. It’s not without its hopeful notes: in a sense, none of this would even be worth talking about if there were nothing we could do about it. As Wallace-Wells points out, we already have all the tools we need to avoid the worst of what is to come: “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 public investment in green energy and carbon capture”. The fact that the route out of this hell is straightforward does not mean, of course, that it won’t be incredibly arduous, or that we should be confident of making it.

The book, however, is less focused on solutions than on clarifying the scale of the problem, the horror of its effects. You could call it alarmist, and you would not be wrong. (In the closing pages, Wallace-Wells himself accepts the charge as “fair enough, because I am alarmed”.) But to read The Uninhabitable Earth – or to consider in any serious way the scale of the crisis we face – is to understand the collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism. To fail to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem, and to fail to think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its solution.

• Science and nature books
• Book of the day
• Climate crisis

Most viewed

David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

Reviewed by Sarah Boon

Tim Duggan Books  |  2019  |  ISBN:  9780525576709 |  320 pages

The book is divided into four sections. Section I, “Cascades,” provides a bird’s eye view of climate change worldwide. Section II, “Elements of Chaos,” includes 12 chapters that cover individual aspects of the climate system: e.g., drought, wildfire, oceans, sea-level rise, air quality, and how they interact. Section III is about how we view climate change, and is thus called “The Climate Kaleidoscope;” it covers several viewpoints on dealing with climate change, from economics to storytelling to technology. Finally, Section IV, “The Anthropic Principle,” summarizes some of the key goals of his book.

Wallace-Wells is fully up-to-date with his examples, including events from the fall of 2018. He also excels at providing global rather than just regional examples. He clearly defines the issue of climate justice—which he calls the “climate caste system”: the less wealthy (and the browner) people are, the more they’ll be impacted by climate change. He also describes climate change as “weaponizing the environment,” creating hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, etc.

Wallace-Wells focuses specifically on the lifetime of the baby boomers, who have caused a climate disaster that will affect future generations. He therefore sees climate change as a fundamentally human rather than scientific problem, noting that “this book is not about the science of warming; it is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” This means impacts on human health, the economy, the social order (e.g., climate refugees), technology, and more. Because he focuses specifically on human animals, he provides minimal insight into how non-human animals will be affected. Do we not have a moral duty to also advocate for the non-human life that shares this warming earth with us?

He also focuses on the mid-range temperature change scenario: an average of 4° C of warming by 2100 (not the worst-case 8° C). But what are the odds of reaching this scenario? As Wallace-Wells writes, we can assume how natural systems will respond and interact with climate change to create feedback effects and tipping points, but the future is relatively unknown because we don’t know the key ingredient: human response.

Wallace-Wells is careful to state that we have not reached a “new climate normal.” The climate system is unstable enough, and interconnected in ways that we don’t fully understand, that we will continue to see change rather than stabilization. In fact, Wallace-Wells describes climate change as a “hyperobject—a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.” Our myopia is such that we’re unable to even think beyond 2100, the year in which our climate models end. He also describes climate change as “an existential crisis,” and notes that “climate nihilism” is one of our delusions. As Rebecca Solnit adds, “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world [i.e., climate nihilism], which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”

Despite the doom-and-gloom nature of the book, Wallace-Wells surprisingly writes that he is optimistic. However, his argument for optimism is relatively weak, and may be predicated on the fact that he had a daughter while he was writing, so his perspective on the coming climate apocalypse has shifted. He writes that “she will be living . . . quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.” Why? His argument for this is not entirely convincing. He also examines the trend towards not having children, and provides a wholly incomprehensible argument as to why a growing population isn’t a problem. He writes, “Further degradation isn’t inescapable; it is optional. Each new baby arrives in a brand new world contemplating a whole horizon of possibilities.” But is this really true? One more human ultimately means more resource use—there’s no way around that.

When it comes to how we can act on climate, Wallace-Wells notes in one instance that individual actions like eating less beef, flying less, and buying a Tesla have a minimal impact on carbon emissions, because industry and agriculture are by far the largest emitters of carbon pollution. He then changes his argument by saying that North Americans should reduce their footprint to that of Europeans, and lists a series of what he calls “low-hanging fruit” that would involve reducing the emissions of individual families: not wasting food, recycling more, reducing air-conditioning use, and not buying Bitcoin (which is a major energy user). It’s thus unclear whether he’s on the side of neoliberalism-based individual action, or getting major polluters to act.

He also doesn’t address the fact that, even though personal change may be driven by a neoliberal agenda and might not have a major climate impact, for some people it may be a case instead of personal morals: of living ethically in the world according to your own limitations.

One fascinating aspect of the book that I hadn’t considered was the extent of the impacts of climate change on human health. For example, outdoor laborers such as farm hands get heat stroke and kidney failure if they work in conditions that are too hot. Also, diseases can spread to warming regions, including ticks, the Zika virus, and malaria. There’s also concern about frozen bacteria being released as glaciers and permafrost melt. In Russia, a small child died when anthrax spores melted out of the snow. There are also public health impacts from wildfire-caused air pollution, with people across the West having to wear face masks to keep from breathing dangerous particulate matter.

I was also surprised by Wallace-Wells’s note that, while the world has been urbanizing for the past few decades, that trend may reverse as cities get more uncomfortable to live in due to the heat island effect, ozone pollution, melting asphalt, and the like. Repopulating rural landscapes will be an interesting shift in the demographics of the country; many post-apocalyptic novels describe cities emptying out after a climate catastrophe.

The economic impacts will likewise be severe. Not only will it cost more to recover from so-called natural disasters, but there will be less money coming into the economy as sea-level rise destroys waterfront real estate and more people become climate refugees and therefore less productive. This is highly similar to Kim Stanley Robinson’s book, New York 2140 , which describes a new, post-climate change economic system.

Wallace-Wells doesn’t reveal his key points until the end of the book. He writes that “the emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective . . . if humans are responsible for the problem, then they must be capable of undoing it.” Wallace-Wells argues that we have to go beyond astrophysicist Adam Frank’s idea of “thinking like a planet,” and instead “thinking like a people, one people, whose fate is shared by all.” The key, therefore, as outlined by many others, is that we must build in-person communities to increase resilience to climate change. That community will be first responders when disasters happen, with a variety of skills and services to share. Your community will also be the people who accept climate refugees. As Paul Kingsnorth quotes Leopold Kohr, “small states, small nations, and small economies are more peaceful . . . prosperous, and . . . creative than great powers or superstates.” By building these small, shared communities, we can also help each other deal with solastalgia, or what Canadian researcher Ashlee Cunsolo terms “environmental grief.”

Overall the book is somewhat long and repetitive, which occasionally buries the narrative. It also includes several unnecessary tangents such as the discussions of colony collapse disorder, alien life, and climate change affecting our art. Yet The Uninhabitable Earth doesn’t mention the role of shifting baselines: the idea that we will find conditions in 50 years “normal” because our conception of what’s normal has shifted over that time.

Finally, I question who the book’s audience is. Wallace-Wells covers such a wide range of topics across scales, and incorporates so many ideas, that it may not draw in the general interest reader. He may lose readers by not addressing conservation and related issues, or he may be otherwise be preaching to the converted.

Wallace-Wells obviously doesn’t believe that technology will save us. There are those who worship at “The Church of Technology,” Wallace-Wells writes. “Elon Musk—it’s not the name of a man but a species-scale survival strategy.” Basically, by relying on technology and not taking concrete climate action, we are, as Wallace-Wells quotes Kate Tempest, “Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.”

So after I all that, do I recommend the book? I do. The Uninhabitable Earth is the only book that comprehensively lays out what we can expect from the earth’s systems in the face of global climate change. Wallace-Wells has done the hard legwork of combing through scientific research and interviewing scientists to figure out what we’re up against and what we can expect in the near future. Though some argue that the doom-and-gloom approach doesn’t motivate people to act on climate and instead traumatizes people into thinking there’s nothing they can do, there is research suggesting that fear is effective in demonstrating the urgency of the situation. Once people understand that, they’re more likely to do something about it. There is no denying that David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth has widened the conversation about climate change—and that’s a very good thing.

Terrain.org is the first online literary journal of place, publishing award-winning literature, art, editorials, and community case studies since 1998.

In Terrain.org

• ARTerrain Galleries
• Unsprawl Case Studies
• Soundscapes Podcast
• Older Issues
• Latest News
• About Terrain.org
• Our Editors
• Teach Terrain.org
• Dear America
• Regular Submission Guidelines
• Contest Submission Guidelines
• Letter to America Submission Guidelines
• Sowell Emerging Writers Prize Submission Guidelines
• Terrain Publishing
• Terrain.org on Bookshop
• Donate to Terrain.org

• Politics & Social Sciences
• Politics & Government

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming Paperback – March 17, 2020

• Print length 384 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crown
• Publication date March 17, 2020
• Dimensions 5.16 x 0.82 x 7.98 inches
• ISBN-10 0525576711
• ISBN-13 978-0525576716
• Lexile measure 1370L
• See all details

Products related to this item

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (March 17, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525576711
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525576716
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1370L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.82 x 7.98 inches
• #27 in Climatology
• #65 in Environmental Science (Books)
• #66 in Environmentalism

About the author

David wallace-wells.

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 68% 19% 7% 3% 2% 68%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 68% 19% 7% 3% 2% 19%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 68% 19% 7% 3% 2% 7%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 68% 19% 7% 3% 2% 3%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 68% 19% 7% 3% 2% 2%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the book's research quality heavy and clear. They also say it's an excellent, engaging read. Opinions are mixed on the writing quality, with some finding it well-written and others saying it'll never settle down to a good read. Readers also disagree on the scariness level, with others finding it deeply disturbing.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the research quality of the book clear and compelling, with ample references to relevant, real science. They say the book is a superb, clear compendium of the known facts and models of climate change. Readers also mention the book points out some very interesting things about global warming and is thought-provoking. They also appreciate the excellent balanced blend of science, sociology, psychology, and philosophy.

"...However, overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read...." Read more

"...of human-caused climate change, but this book provided me with enough verifiable detail to help me with climate-based speculative novel I wrote...." Read more

"...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..." Read more

" Excellent balanced blend of science , sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Rare to find this depth with a broad perspective...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the readability of the book. Some mention it's excellent, important, and engaging. However, others say it never settles down to a good read, is disappointing, and flawed.

"...overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read. I learned something from it." Read more

"... Worth the read ." Read more

"...However, the sentence structure is generally awkward throughout: too many appositives , misplaced phrases and adjectives, lengthy run-on sentences,..." Read more

"...He hopes it isn't inevitable.This a good and timely book though I doubt it will have much effect on the carbon trajectory of our so-..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some mention it's well-written, easy to read, and clear. However, others say the prose becomes overwrought, confusing, and poorly written.

"...However, overall, I found this to be a well written , interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read...." Read more

"...: too many appositives, misplaced phrases and adjectives, lengthy run-on sentences , and a somewhat rambling, disjointed writing style, often detract..." Read more

"...He is a reasonably accomplished writer who helps us to see a particularly unattractive vision of our future...." Read more

"...Some of the later chapters are confusing and poorly written, as the author struggles to make sense of humans' inability to address the causes..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the scariness level of the book. Some mention it's scary, disturbing, and alarming. Others say it'll be the most depressing and terrifying thing they have ever read.

"...The content is factual, sobering, and frightening enough ...." Read more

"...Problem to solutions ratio is definitely 30:1. Ocerall, a good alarming read ." Read more

"...It is a frightening and perhaps a depressing book , but it doesn’t predict the end of the world, it predicts a world that is much worse and partially..." Read more

"This is by far the most frightening book I’ve read in years...." Read more

Reviews with images

Creating Hell (or not): The Choice Is Ours--Now

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Book Review: David Wallace-Wells' 'The Uninhabitable Earth' is a Brutal Account of Humanity's Imminent Self-Cull. Read It, But Be Prepared

By Petr Navovy | Books | September 24, 2019 |

A few weeks back, a commenter in my piece on climate anxiety recommended (and warned against) reading David Wallace-Wells’ recent smash hit, The Uninhabitable Earth . I picked it up the other day and I have been making my way through it. The need for a warning alongside the recommendation was immediately apparent. It is…not easy reading. Even for someone who tries to stay on top of climate collapse developments, reading The Uninhabitable Earth has been a constant struggle against being buried beneath an onrushing avalanche of desperately depressing facts, statistics, and projections. Honestly, I would struggle with recommending it to everyone. It is very well written, unafraid of using appropriately dramatic language to deliver devastating information, and Wallace-Wells takes periodic rhetorical steps back from the flood of statistics to let things settle in before diving in again. Yet those—like me—who struggle with climate anxiety, should consider that the book will not ease or soothe their mental anguish in any way. It will have the opposite effect. You will likely need to take breaks. And perhaps it might serve your mental health best if you don’t pick it up at all. For me personally, I have recently reached a conclusion that I would rather continue to stay as informed as possible, and to risk whatever wounding of my psyche may well follow as a result. That, however, must remain an individual, personal choice.

The book opens with a line that gives you an idea of the tone that follows: ‘It is worse, much worse, than you think.’ What follows justifies that opening line quickly, and dramatically. ‘Bleak’ doesn’t begin to cover it, as Wallace-Wells draws on a formidable amount of research and interviews to paint a picture that outlines how even our most (unrealistically) optimistic projections for carbon emissions and the attendant rise in global temperatures (2 degrees centigrade) are at levels that will doom the planet, with its flora and fauna—including our species—suffering truly apocalyptic outcomes. On the other end of the spectrum, the worst-case scenarios (4, 5, 6, or more degrees centigrade) make those apocalyptic outcomes look trivial by comparison. Wallace-Wells argues that humanity does have the means and the time to prevent the worst scenarios becoming a reality—but it is the balancing of the equation involving factors like political will and the power of entrenched industrial-capitalist structures that will determine whether or not our species faces near-total wipe out, or merely a major self-culling. As Wallace-Wells says in the book:

If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, 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, 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. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.

It has become commonplace among climate activists to say that we have, today, all the tools we need to avoid catastrophic climate change—even major climate change. It is also true. But political will is not some trivial ingredient, always at hand. We have the tools we need to solve global poverty, epidemic disease, and abuse of women, as well.

The book’s main aim is to detail how climate collapse will affect the human animal that has spread its civilisation across the planet’s surface in such an unthinking way as we have. Wallace-Wells likens us, quite evocatively, to moss. Intriguingly, Wallace-Wells—deputy editor for ‘New York’ magazine—opens by saying that he never considered himself an environmentalist. That as a relatively progressive yet city-reared person, he always considered that our position on the food chain meant that we had earned a certain right to extract resources and to bend nature to our will. For the author of a book that is now being hailed as one of the definitive popular treatises on climate change, this initially comes across as quite a stark pronouncement, even a jarring one. As a long-time advocate of socialist environmentalism, the effect on me was certainly closer to the latter. Yet the framing this personal admission provides seems to resonate with the urgency of the problem under discussion, as the awareness of the issue of climate collapse has now reached critical mass, with even people who would have never considered themselves ‘into’ the topic now finding themselves in the know. In many ways it is similar to the financial collapse of 2008 after which millions of people basically had no choice but to become pseudo-experts in the machinations of capitalism. When the flood reaches your front door, it’s hard to stay ignorant of rising water levels.

Historically, human-made climate change has been a political and scientific issue clouded in ignorance, as well as obfuscation and deception. As has been noted many times before, the former was a direct result of the latter, with energy companies such as Exxon notoriously having been aware of the eventual catastrophic effects of their actions for decades, yet spending millions of dollars to fund a smokescreen campaign to muddy the issue and to sow doubt, as well as to purchase politicians to ensure they never act to impede their reaping of lethal profits. The main aim of The Uninhabitable Earth could be described as the total demolishing of any last vestiges of ignorance around the issue of human-made climate change. Rather than providing a rap sheet and detailed accounts of those responsible for mass ecocide, it concerns itself mainly with the practical effects that humanity is soon to see. Wallace-Wells may well describe himself as having never been an environmentalist, yet in his incredibly detailed forecast of the ways in which our destruction of the planet’s ecosystem will destroy us in turn, he touches on that age-old environmentalist ethos: Humanity, for all its delusions of grandeur, is not separate from the planet that birthed us. Nature is us; we are nature. The Uninhabitable Earth shows, with brutally unflinching honesty, what happens when we inadvertently turn this previously benevolent cradle into a weapon of unimaginable destructive power. Passages like these are the norm in the book:

In 2014, we learned that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were even more vulnerable to melting than scientists anticipated—in fact, the West Antarctic sheet had already passed a tipping point of collapse, more than doubling its rate of ice loss in just five years. The same had happened in Greenland, where the ice sheet is now losing almost a billion tons of ice every single day. The two sheets contain enough ice to raise global sea levels ten to twenty feet—each. In 2017, it was revealed that two glaciers in the East Antarctic sheet were also losing ice at an alarming rate—eighteen billion tons of ice each year, enough to cover New Jersey in three feet of ice. If both glaciers go, scientists expect, ultimately, an additional 16 feet of water. In total, the two Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea level by 200 feet; in many parts of the world, the shoreline would move by many miles. The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic.

Higher temperatures means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still—and so on. A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere, and, water vapor being a greenhouse gas, this brings higher temperatures still—and so on. Warmer oceans can absorb less heat, which means more stays in the air, and contain less oxygen, which is doom for phytoplankton—which does for the ocean what plants do on land, eating carbon and producing oxygen—which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further. And so on. These are the systems climate scientists call “feedbacks”; there are more.

As well as providing a veritable ocean of raw data and a multitude of varied projections, The Uninhabitable Earth grapples with the conceptual side of climate collapse. Wallace-Wells tackles the ignorance that has been associated with the issue; the rapid fading of that ignorance as we enter an era of new, catastrophic paradigms and norms; and of the existential conundrum that awaits a species considering itself in the face of a threat such that it has never seen before. Wallace-Wells uses a very effective and emotive device in describing this crisis: He describes the story of humanity now taking place as an incredibly compelling, two-act play of life or death. As the vast majority of all carbon emissions happened within the last few decades, the story is essentially one that shows one generation dooming the world, and the following one either saving it, or perishing.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is.

Another of Wallace-Wells’ most compelling conceptual turns in the book is to constantly remind the reader that climate change is not just a series of challenges, but the ‘all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met—a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world’s future problems.’ The possibilities—of interconnected and sometimes unforseeable covariants that can snowball irreversibly—are almost endless.

The content of this book is, to put it lightly, harrowing. It is a few hundred pages of statistics around the mass insect and animal extinction, the extreme weather events, the desertification, the ocean salification, and the human displacement and death—to name just a few—that our economic systems have already caused; and the projections of the horrors to come that will make those horrors pale in comparison. Yet this is the reality we face. There is no running from it.

You may be wondering: Is there any hope in all this? Some. But not much. Wallace-Wells doesn’t go quite as far as I personally would in his damming of industrial capitalism, but he does discount the delusion that the tech bros or the markets will save us, as well as detailing the unfathomable global North-South injustice of the crisis. The best case scenario, Wallace-Wells outlines, is one that involves the total cessation of all carbon emissions as of right now, and of the root-and-branch reformation of entire global industries and economies that must happen if that is to take place. Naturally, that is impossible. So the story unfolding now is one of minimising the apocalypse as much as possible. The Uninhabitable Earth is a vital book. But it is unforgiving—there is no time for forgiveness—and more chilling than anything else you might pick up. Read it, but be prepared.

Here is a great interview that Wallace-Wells did with Britain’s Novara Media, which outlines many of the topics under discussion in the book and gives you a taste of what you’ll find within:

'The Acolyte's Amandla Stenberg Got Thrown to the Wolves

Christina aguilera thinks it’s ‘corny’ when celebrities ‘do things intentionally’ to stay relevant, ryan reynolds uses his hollywood powers to push for an oscars stunt category, pat mcafee praises 'covid king' aaron rodgers, her majesty gwyneth paltrow shall grace us with her acting again.

Taylor Swift Has a Brittany Mahomes Problem

Review: ‘greedy people’ really wants to be a coen brothers film when it grows up, review: sweet sticky 'strange darling' is rom-com for psychopaths, ‘evil’ is over, spoilers: 'the umbrella academy' pulled off a great ending (even if nobody likes it), review: 'alien: romulus' falls into a black hole of fan service.

• social media
• pajiba love
• privacy policy

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

Embed our reviews widget for this book

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

September 9 – 13, 2024

• Natasha Wheatley profiles Eduard Habsburg
• What do we owe to language in times of unimaginable violence?
• Laura Wheatman Hill digs into the NaNoWriMo AI kerfuffle

The Earthbound Report

Good lives on our one planet

Book review: The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace Wells

Climate change campaigners face something of a conundrum. We want people to be inspired to act. We also need them to know what’s at risk. We don’t want people to slump into despondent inaction at the scale of the challenge, but to tell it like it is leaves us open to the accusation of being ‘scare-mongering’. It’s a no win situation, into which David Wallace-Wells has fearlessly strode with a deeply uncompromising book.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think”, he begins. And from that first sentence the book patiently outlines the full effects of climate change. A series of chapters explains the unfolding risk from heat, hunger, floods, fire and a host of other disasters. Then we consider the climate impact on the economy, how it will affect human health, or its potential as a threat multiplier in conflict .

The second half of the book then looks at how climate change will affect us culturally. What kind of stories will we tell? What will it mean for politics, or consumerism? How will we come to understand history, as climate change overturns our assumptions of progress? By the end of the book, there’s no aspect of life left untouched by the changes we are making to the atmosphere.

“Alarmism!” some of you will be thinking, but Wallace-Wells knows that and doesn’t care. He has good reasons for writing about worst case scenarios. “When we dismiss the worst-case possibilities” he writes, “it distorts our sense of likelier outcomes, which we then regard as extreme scenarios we needn’t plan so conscientiously for.” He’s entirely correct about this – almost all political discussion revolves around 2 degrees of warming and how it can be avoided. That suggests that it’s 2 degrees that we have to fear and work hard to avoid. In reality our current trajectory takes us to 4 degrees of warming, and 2 degrees is the low end of what we can expect.

Ignoring the catastrophic end of climate impacts for the sake of policital expediency is a recipe for complacency. While I try to focus on solutions myself, we shouldn’t shy away from telling the truth about how serious things are.

David Wallace-Wells is not the first person to have written a brutally honest book about climate change. ( Hell and High Water comes to mind, or the Dark Mountain Project ) There are several reasons why this one is worth reading. First, it may be bleak but it’s not sensationalised. The author is very clear where things are speculative, and there’s more than enough horror in observable trends. Second, Wallace-Wells is a journalist and editor, not an environmentalist. When editing his magazine, he looks for stories that aren’t being covered, and that’s exactly what this is. It goes places that the green movement doesn’t go to, and it’s not a piece of fearmongering environmentalism. It’s also exhaustively researched and if anything looks contentious, there are detailed notes at the back that put things in context.

Perhaps most importantly for any book if you’re going to actually read it, Wallace-Wells writes with real power and flair. He writes in long sentences that unfold and extend and build momentum. It’s a thunderclap of a book, and exactly what we need right now.

• Since there’s nothing on solutions in the book, don’t make this the one book you read on climate change this year. Read it alongside Drawdown .
• The Uninhabitable Earth is available from Hive , Amazon UK and Amazon US .

Share this:

• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Just finished reading, or at least skimming, this book. If there is a reader out there who is curious about just how bad our situation can get with even a degree or two of warming, and who finds statistical predictions relatable (20% more of this, 40% less of that), then this book could be an eye-opening read. Otherwise, it’s just chapter after chapter of an outline for the end times, marked by famine, mass extinctions, drowned cities, waves of refugees, drought, floods, hyperthermia, etc. Anyone who has been paying attention to climate research for the past few years has already heard it, and the numbers numb the comprehension after a short while. The lack of solutions or even positive trends left me with a feeling that I should probably eat, drink and be merry as soon as possible, since there is no way out of this mess.

Yes, it’s certainly bleak! It has it’s place – it’s important to calibrate our imaginations of the future by contemplating a worst case scenario, as long as we don’t let fatalism creep in and do nothing to prevent that worst case scenario. That’s why and I recommend reading this alongside a more solutions-based book such as Drawdown.

• Pingback: Book review: This is Not a Drill, an Extinction Rebellion Handbook – The Earthbound Report
• Pingback: Who gets to tell the story of climate change? – The Earthbound Report
• Pingback: Book review: Hope in Hell, by Jonathon Porritt – The Earthbound Report
• Pingback: The uninhabitable (parts of the) earth – The Earthbound Report

Leave a comment Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

The End of the Story

The uninhabitable earth paints a picture of the world after climate change—and suggests the limits of the way we think about the human narrative..

It was very surprising when, in July 2017, David Wallace-Wells’ New York magazine cover story “ The Uninhabitable Earth ” went viral immediately upon publication. It then went on to become the most widely read story in New York’s 50-plus-year history, a distinction it held until an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury surpassed it last year.* As the editor of the science section of a magazine, I can tell you that normally stories about climate change are a tricky sell; it’s a sprawling, slow-moving topic that has traditionally felt less urgent than basically all other news, and it also has the side benefit of making everyone depressed. Readers are generally not here for it, and the ones who are tend to be a self-selected group. Wallace-Wells inverted this problem by writing a piece that felt both urgent and terrifying. His premise was to ask, simply and effectively: What if climate change is actually going to be just a little bit worse than we think? The resulting disaster movie was horrifying enough to make everyone pay attention.

It was also not without controversy. Many scientists immediately took issue with the exact aspect of Wallace-Wells’ story that made it so readable and compelling, spurring an enormously self-defeating conversation in which many argued that it was somehow irresponsible to describe a potential, if slightly less likely, outcome of the most destructive threat facing humanity today. In the year and a half since, Wallace-Wells has stood his ground, defending his piece as the exact point of what journalism is supposed to do: tell people true things about the world they (might) inhabit, even if they are frightening. In a debate with one of his chief critics, Michael Mann, at New York University last year , Wallace-Wells placated Mann and others by reassuring them that they share the same goal: to steer humanity toward a course of climate change that is less catastrophic than the picture he has constructed in his written work. Meanwhile, though, he has also turned his piece into a book with essentially the same title, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming , which begins with nearly the same line as the piece—“It is worse, much worse, than you think”—and then, if anything, digs deeper into the original premise. The bulk of the book is an expanded, horrifying assessment of what we might expect as a result of climate change if we don’t change course. The result is a frightening, compelling text that re-raises the question: In the face of existential threat, what role can storytelling hope to play?

Wallace-Wells is an extremely adept storyteller, simultaneously urgent and humane despite the technical difficulty of his subject. That adeptness is tested by the same problem confronted by anyone who wishes to explain climate change’s impact: how to describe its scale in space and in time. Space is the easier of the two, which is not to say that it’s easy; one of the most impressive elements of the book is the way it manages, in its first section (called “Elements of Chaos,” and it delivers), to be truly global in its scope. As Wallace-Wells rattles through the crises we face, in chapters bearing titles like “Heat Death,” “Drowning,” and “Unbreathable Air,” he takes pains to explain where in the world things will be the worst (usually poorer places closer to the equator). But the problem of scope goes well beyond moving outside of our reflexive prioritization of our own homes; it also requires us to internalize a planetary system that is at once so large as to be incomprehensible, and yet so intimately connected that a shift in one place—perhaps a temperature increase in the ocean—will affect weather (and survival) in another by, say, increasing hurricane strength in the mid-Atlantic. Wallace-Wells describes these interconnected elements through the idea of “cascades,” an “if this, then that” approach to a world in chaos:

As with all else in climate, the melting of the planet’s ice will not occur in a vacuum, and scientists do not yet fully understand exactly what cascading effects such collapses will trigger: One major concern is methane, particularly the methane that might be released by a melting Artic, where permafrost contains up to 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, considerably more than is currently suspended in the earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws, some of it will evaporate as methane, which is, depending on how you measure, at least several dozen times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Writing about the future requires speculation, which is made even more speculative by the largest unknown: how much warming we will see at all. This reality forces Wallace-Wells to constantly shift between possibilities—warming of 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, 5 degrees, etc. The ultimate effect of all of this is to feel as if Wallace-Wells is scanning through the entire world with a sort of overactive bionic eye, zooming in on different problems, calculating the risk, and then zooming back out and over to something else.

If that sounds overwhelming, well, it is. And yet it’s the other problematic element, time, that worries me much more. Climate change is going to change everything, but the problem has always been that it is happening cataclysmically fast on a geological scale and far too slowly on a human perception scale. The book crystallizes this too-fast-and-yet-too-slow discrepancy as climate change’s most frustrating element, particularly in how the temporal disconnect separates action from consequence and trips up blame. The pace of “Elements of Chaos” takes its cue from the feeling of being roiled by natural disaster, but that’s only how it will feel if you’re everywhere at once, and no one will be. In his attempt to explain how climate change will kill, Wallace-Wells does a terrifyingly good job of moving between the specific and the abstract, describing the fates of two couples in California forced to take refuge in their swimming pools during wildfires (one couple survived, the other did not) and then calculating just how many people could be at elevated risk from each threat. The death toll from flooding, for example, will be 50 percent higher at 2 degrees warming than it is today; climate change’s collective harm to the world’s ability to grow rice could “imperil the health” of 600 million.

But, as Wallace-Wells points out, 800 million people are already food insecure, and thousands of people drown in floods (and die of asthma, and heat stroke, and forest fires). For me, this frequent reminder of the current baseline was one of the scariest parts of the book. Time’s slippery slowness prevents us from ever fully internalizing how much has already been made worse by climate change, causing us to discount an awfully large amount of harm and destruction as just a normal, unfortunate part of life. Eventually, climate change will just be the deadly water we all swim in, perhaps without even really noticing how much the temperature has changed.

Get Slate Culture in Your Inbox

Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

This fear is not allayed by the other substantive section of the book, the far more interesting “Climate Kaleidoscope.” Here, Wallace-Wells moves from explaining the range of possibilities for the destruction of our physical world to analyzing and considering how these changes will affect us as human beings—as people who tell stories and build societies and try, however imperfectly, to fix problems. Each chapter is complete enough to work as a standalone essay, and yet together they serve as … well, if I had to sum it up, a critique of our perception that the human story is one of progress. Through the Wallace-Wells climate change–focused lens, industrialized society is a tragedy in which we thought we had built something enduring while really, we had just exploited fossil fuels into a temporary mirage of an empire that would end up drowning the rest of the world. The harshest criticism of the book is directed, somewhat surprisingly but certainly satisfyingly, at tech giants and America’s current accommodation of the moral corruption that powers Silicon Valley. “That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes,” he writes, and yet it is “never ultimately fulfilled.” Instead, we watch “rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being.” This chapter (called “The Church of Technology”) is largely a rebuke of the idea that “technology will save us,” a refrain often grasped as a means of allowing us to carry on with our destructive habits without feeling too bad.

One frustrating part of the book, though, is the way it simultaneously backs up its central thesis—it is worse than you think—while consistently reassuring us that there is still time to do something about it. What should we do? It’s never fully described but is largely understood to be: organize collectively to insist that our governing bodies coordinate an immediate and dramatic reduction in emissions. The Uninhabitable Earth isn’t a guide to how to actually do this, though it does suggest that the barriers to action aren’t as high as we think. Wallace-Wells dispenses with the specter of denialism as the problem (“To believe the fault for global warming lies exclusively with the Republican Party or its fossil fuel backers is a form of American narcissism”). He inverts a somewhat classic debate on liberal hypocrisy so delicately I gasped:

It is a common charge against liberal environmentalists that they live hypocritically—eating meat, flying, and voting liberal without yet having purchased Teslas. But among the woke Left the inverted charge is just as often true: we navigate by a North Star of politics through our diets, our friendships, even our consumption of pop culture, but rarely make meaningful political noise about those causes that run against our own self-interest or sense of self as special—indeed enlightened.

And yet he never goes into explicit detail about how we could make meaningful political noise. His intent is clearly diagnostic. It is, poignantly so. In his concluding chapter, Wallace-Wells asks, “Will we stop? ‘Thinking like a planet’ is so alien to the perspectives of modern life—so far from thinking like a neoliberal subject in a ruthless competitive system—that the phrase sounds at first lifted from kindergarten.” It’s a testament to the book’s wrenching exploration of just how much we have to lose (and again, critically, just how much those who already have the least will lose) that the idea doesn’t sound so silly at all.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

By David Wallace-Wells. Tim Duggan Books.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.

Still, his optimism feels hard to square with the preceding 200 pages of detailed disaster. Ultimately, what I’m left wondering is: Who is this book for, exactly? Wallace-Wells’ response to the critics who argued that he was unproductively scaring people was to correctly point out that there are way more people not alarmed enough about climate change than there are people who are too alarmed. The book, then, is for them. It will undeniably alarm them. What I can’t help but wish is that it also offered them a plan, in part because Wallace-Wells has proven himself to be such a skilled argument-maker and remarkable storyteller on the hardest subject of our time.

In the end, though, I think it’s unfair to ask that he apply his narrative imagination not just to the worst-case scenario but to the solution; after all, the solution is both mind-numbingly obvious and impossible to imagine. In that way, one of the last lessons of The Uninhabitable Earth might be to show us the limits of storytelling. In the end, all David Wallace-Wells can really do is dare us to prove him wrong.

*Correction, Feb. 16, 2019: This piece originally misstated that “The Uninhabitable Earth” was still the most read story in New York Magazine’s history. It was surpassed by an excerpt of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury in 2018.

Advertisement

Supported by

Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis

• Share full article

By John Lanchester

• April 12, 2019

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH Life After Warming By David Wallace-Wells

LOSING EARTH A Climate History By Nathaniel Rich

Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, representation and rights.

The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.

The demand climate change makes on us is to feel empathy for the unborn poor of the global south, and change our economies to act on the basis of their needs. That’s something humanity has never done before.

Pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. It leads only to despair, despair to inaction, and inaction to a future world David Attenborough has described as “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.” To avoid the most terrible possible versions of our future, we have to stay positive; it’s the only moral response to this crisis. And there are grounds to do so, as David Wallace-Wells argues in his brilliant new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming”: “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 public investment in green energy and carbon capture.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH (ADAPTED FOR YOUNG ADULTS)

Life after warming.

by David Wallace-Wells ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2023

Heavy going, both in content and prose style, but filled with critical content.

This young readers’ adaptation of Wallace-Wells’ acclaimed 2019 adult original outlines the effects of human-caused climate change.

With sections on heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, loss of freshwater, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues, economic collapse, climate conflict, and the multiplying effects of these individual scourges, the author makes it clear just how many ways climate change caused by human activities has already affected us and is likely to affect us even more in the not-so-distant future. He goes on to consider the stories we tell, the dream that technology will save us, the politics of consumption, the loss of the historical idea of progress, and what can be done with our despair. This condensed version retains the substance of the adult edition, including much of the same language, which may lack appeal for many teen readers (“It is only intuitive, in other words, that impulses toward purity represent growth areas of our culture, destined to distend further inward from the cultural periphery as apocalyptic ecological anxiety grows, too”). The story presented here is terrifying. The afterword summarizes some more positive recent political decisions and shifts in public opinion. But the author ends with tentative positivity, noting that global action could yet result in a less unhappy future. The dense text is not broken up with sidebars or other design features, and the book is notably missing sources or further reading suggestions.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9780593483572

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by David Wallace-Wells

BOOK REVIEW

by David Wallace-Wells

THE NEW QUEER CONSCIENCE

From the pocket change collective series.

by Adam Eli ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

Small but mighty necessary reading.

A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.

Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More In The Series

by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky

by Gaby Melian

by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

New York Times Bestseller

THEY CALLED US ENEMY

by George Takei & Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott ; illustrated by Harmony Becker ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2019

A powerful reminder of a history that is all too timely today.

A beautifully heart-wrenching graphic-novel adaptation of actor and activist Takei’s ( Lions and Tigers and Bears , 2013, etc.) childhood experience of incarceration in a World War II camp for Japanese Americans.

Takei had not yet started school when he, his parents, and his younger siblings were forced to leave their home and report to the Santa Anita Racetrack for “processing and removal” due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The creators smoothly and cleverly embed the historical context within which Takei’s family’s story takes place, allowing readers to simultaneously experience the daily humiliations that they suffered in the camps while providing readers with a broader understanding of the federal legislation, lawsuits, and actions which led to and maintained this injustice. The heroes who fought against this and provided support to and within the Japanese American community, such as Fred Korematsu, the 442nd Regiment, Herbert Nicholson, and the ACLU’s Wayne Collins, are also highlighted, but the focus always remains on the many sacrifices that Takei’s parents made to ensure the safety and survival of their family while shielding their children from knowing the depths of the hatred they faced and danger they were in. The creators also highlight the dangerous parallels between the hate speech, stereotyping, and legislation used against Japanese Americans and the trajectory of current events. Delicate grayscale illustrations effectively convey the intense emotions and the stark living conditions.

Pub Date: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-60309-450-4

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Top Shelf Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2019

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More by George Takei

by George Takei ; illustrated by Michelle Lee

More About This Book

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• Science & Math
• Nature & Ecology

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } -31% $24.69 $ 24 . 69 FREE delivery Thursday, September 19 on your first order Ships from: Amazon Sold by: EKIZ BOOK

Save with used - good .savingpriceoverride { color:#cc0c39important; font-weight: 300important; } .reinventmobileheaderprice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricesavingspercentagemargin, #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricepricetopaymargin { margin-right: 4px; } $15.90 $ 15 . 90 free delivery thursday, september 19 on your first order ships from: amazon sold by: boss media canada, sorry, there was a problem..

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video, download Flash Player

Follow the author

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming Hardcover – Feb. 19 2019

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Tim Duggan Books
• Publication date Feb. 19 2019
• Dimensions 14.73 x 2.79 x 24.38 cm
• ISBN-10 0525576703
• ISBN-13 978-0525576709
• Lexile measure 1370L
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Products related to this item

From the Publisher

The uninhabitable earth by david wallace-wells.

Product description

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tim Duggan Books (Feb. 19 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525576703
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525576709
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 476 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.73 x 2.79 x 24.38 cm
• #155 in Public Policy (Books)
• #156 in Environmental Policies
• #358 in Environmental Conservation (Books)

About the author

David wallace-wells.

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 69% 18% 7% 3% 3% 69%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 69% 18% 7% 3% 3% 18%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 69% 18% 7% 3% 3% 7%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 69% 18% 7% 3% 3% 3%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 69% 18% 7% 3% 3% 3%

Reviews with images

Understanding the Threat of Climate Change at a Human Level

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon and Our Planet
• Modern Slavery Statement
• Investor Relations
• Press Releases
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• Amazon.ca Rewards Mastercard
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon Cash
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns Are Easy
• Manage your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Registry & Gift List
• Customer Service

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Interest-Based Ads
• Amazon.com.ca ULC | 40 King Street W 47th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5H 3Y2 |1-877-586-3230

• News and Blogs
• Research and Publications
• Member Login
• What is IFRF?
• Meet the Team
• IFRF Council
• History of IFRF
• IFRF Activities
• History of TOTeMs
• National Committees
• Become a member
• Member Benefits
• IFRF Member Network
• Combustion Industry News
• Editorial Board
• Submit a paper
• Latest Papers & Archive
• European Facilities
• Current Projects

Book Review: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (published March 2019)

Date posted: 22nd Jul 2019

• Share this post

Post Author

Combustion Industry News Editor

In the first of IFRF’s occasional book reviews, Patrick Lavery (editor of IFRF’s Combustion Industry News) offers his thoughts on a book that seems to capture the ‘2019 zeitgeist’…

Journalist David Wallace-Wells has received much attention for his book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (also called The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future ), published in March of this year.  It has been reviewed, with considerable praise, in The New York Times , The Financial Times , The Guardian , The Los Angeles Review of Books , The Economist , Vox.com , Gizmodo , and Slate.com , amongst others.  He has been interviewed also in Rolling Stone magazine , on the Talking Politics podcast (made by academics from the University of Cambridge), the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast , in GQ Magazine , and a range of others.  His book fits into a cultural current of heightened alarm about the present and future impacts of climate change, and a perception that action to date has not only been exceedingly inadequate but nonchalantly so.  The Green New Deal and Sunrise movements in the USA, recent school students’ strikes across Europe and other countries, and the Extinction Rebellion movement in the UK are manifestations of this.  Surprisingly, for a widely publicised and reviewed book, it has not received much scrutiny for the claims it makes – instead, reviews have tended to focus on the sense of horror that the book instils in the reader.  This may be because scrutiny takes time, but it may also be partly a reluctance to criticise a work seen as worthy, or simply because reviewers and/or their editors feel that would be missing the point of the book.  This review contains some scrutiny as well as a more general impression of the work, and is based on my listening to the audiobook version, read by the author.  (For this reason, when I quote passages of the book, I may not transcribe the punctuation exactly as it is written.)

Wallace-Wells should be congratulated for the breadth of coverage of his work.  It ranges from the physical impacts of climate change through to how it will affect the way in which we live our day-to-day lives in the future, and even goes as far as covering suggestions that climate crises on other planets may be the answer to Enrico Fermi’s paradox of why we appear to be alone in the universe.  Portions of the book are quite thought-provoking, and Wallace-Wells is good at describing the complexity of the challenge of climate change.   The Uninhabitable Earth succeeds, too, in giving a sense of how all-pervasive a problem climate change is, that it is not just about sea-level rises but also about heat stress, armed conflict, displaced peoples, species extinction, disruption to agriculture, and many other impacts.

It is, however, a difficult book to trust, one prone to sensationalism, misunderstandings, mischaracterisation and self-contradiction.  To a reader (or listener) with some level of knowledge in some of the ground the work covers, there are numerous points at which one asks oneself: “Really?”  The answer is often “not quite” .  In fact, just about every claim I took the time to investigate turned out not to be the full story.  Some of them I present below.

Wallace-Wells himself describes the title of the book as “a bit hyperbolic” .  An early passage seems to lay the foundation for that title: “…that is the course we are speeding so blithely along – to more than 4 o C of warming by the year 2100.  According to some estimates, that would mean that whole regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America north of Patagonia, and Asia south of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification and flooding.  Certainly it would make them inhospitable, and many more regions besides.”  The book would have more accurately been called ‘A Partly Uninhabitable Earth?’ , but this would not have been as arresting.

With the burning of fossil fuels being the chief cause of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the practice receives a fair amount of attention across the book.  However, it is presented in a kind of amorphous, Manichean way – ‘fossil capitalism’ is the chief evil of the world, and there is never any suggestion that the world could carry on using fossil fuels in a low- or zero-carbon way.  Carbon capture and ‘negative emissions’ receive mention, but there is little distinction between carbon capture as applied to point source industrial facilities, negative emissions technologies (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), and direct air capture, and no mention at all of carbon utilisation.  He writes “Both [CCS and BECCS] are something close to fantasy, at least at the present,” and refers to a 2018 assessment by the European Academy of Science Advisory Council which “found that existing negative emissions technologies have limited potential to even slow the increase in concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, let alone meaningfully reduce that concentration.”  Reference is also made to a Nature magazine editorial describing CCS and BECCS as “magical thinking” in their current state.  This is an example of the mischaracterisations, or more generously the misunderstandings, that riddle the book.  The Nature editorial is focused on enhanced weathering as a means of carbon capture and storage in agriculture – where materials like basalt are ground up and spread over pastures, helping carbon to be absorbed from the air – rather than industrial CCS.  The EASAC report of February 2018 stated that negative emissions technologies “may have a useful role to play but, on the basis of current information, not at the levels required to compensate for inadequate mitigation measures.”  For CCS at industrial facilities, it found that “efforts should continue to develop CCS into a relevant and relatively inexpensive mitigation technology” , and that “maximising mitigation with such measures will reduce the future need to remove CO 2 from the atmosphere” .  This is a far cry from Wallace-Wells’ implication that CCS is currently “magical thinking” , which is further underscored by the fact that there are some industrial facilities already equipped with CCS.  Moreover, it is an important mischaracterisation at a time when increased policy support for industrial CCS is necessary to step up action against climate change.

Wallace-Wells makes other important mischaracterisations, too.  He writes that “just two years [after the Paris Agreement] , with no single industrial nation on track to meet its Paris commitments, two degrees looks more like a best-case outcome.”  While it is true that limiting the global average temperature rise to 2°C would generally be considered an achievement (where in the 1990s it was considered a poor outcome), the claim that no single industrial nation is on track to meet its commitments is at best a half-truth.  The respected Carbon Action Tracker website shows, for instance, that the entire EU is on track to meet its 2030 Paris Agreement pledge based on current policy projections, as is Japan .  What I suppose Wallace-Wells must mean is that no current policy projection of any industrialised country sits in the Carbon Action Tracker’s category of being compatible with the world meeting the 2°C target of the Paris Agreement.  This leads him to be dismissive of international treaties: “ we’ve had a series of high-profile conferences, treaties and accords, but they increasingly look like so many acts of climate kabuki. Emissions are still growing, unabated.”  Yet this, too, is part mischaracterisation and part misunderstanding – the Paris Agreement assumed that emissions would continue to rise for some years, and had built into it an acknowledgement that countries would improve their targets and policies over time.  To judge targets and progress after only a few years isn’t a fair judgement on the agreement and gives the false impression that nothing is being done at an international level.

And this leads to a more general point about the book.  Much of the discussion of what we can expect from the future is premised on two assumptions – one, that emissions will not be reined in significantly (or at all), and two, that human activity will not adapt to changing conditions.  These assumptions combine to give an overly bleak picture of the future.  To be fair, Wallace-Wells does have some very justifiable grounds for the first assumption.  Current emissions levels are the highest on record, and are increasing , with emissions in developing countries – some which have much more development ahead – increasing most quickly .  It’s entirely reasonable to doubt emissions reductions until they happen, yet the book never mentions that all serious expectations are that global emissions will continue to increase before beginning to decrease.  Targets are beginning to be made by some countries – the UK, for instance – that are consistent with the world constraining the global average surface temperature rise to 1.5°C by reaching net-zero emissions around 2050 and then sucking carbon from the atmosphere until the end of the century.  It seems likely that other countries, though perhaps not all, will follow suit eventually, though timing is vital.  (In Australia, for instance, it has been reported that investors are already assuming a target of net-zero carbon by 2050.)  Wallace-Wells’ assessment is that there “is almost no chance” of the world limiting the global average temperature rise to 2°C – he expects something more around 3°C (roughly equivalent to emissions peaking around 2040-50, and still being around 1990 levels by 2100), although the book explores impacts up to 6°C at least, consistent with a peak of emissions around 2100 that is twice current levels.

The second assumption, that human activity will not adapt and innovate in response to changing conditions, is a strange one when one reflects for a moment on humans as a species.  Sections in The Uninhabitable Earth entitled ‘hunger’ , ‘drowning’ , ‘wildfire’ , ‘disasters no longer natural’ , ‘freshwater drain’ , ‘dying oceans’ , ‘unbreathable air’ , ‘plagues of warming’ , ‘economic collapse’ , ‘climate conflict’ , and ‘systems’ are indeed harrowing, and contain fascinating details, for example the increased rates of kidney failure in farmers in El Salvador due to dehydration.  Impacts will unquestionably be profound and wide-ranging, yet there is already evidence that adaptation is occurring .  This is not to say that impacts will become negligible, and with recent record June temperatures in Europe resulting in several deaths it feels churlish to discuss adaptation, but at least some impacts will be dampened.  A discussion of adaptation would have made the book more complete.

It may also have made the book more believable.  Listening to the descriptions of the various impacts, one is often left doubting, which is clearly not Wallace-Wells’ intention when the first line announces that “it is worse, much worse than you think” .  The section on hunger opens “Climates differ, and plants vary, but the basic rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10%.  Some estimates run higher, which means if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, when projections suggest we may have as many as 50% more people to feed, we may also have 50% less grain to give them.”  Climate impacts are already occurring, as Wallace-Wells reiterates throughout the book, but agricultural output has been rising , most recently evidenced by the finding that China and India have increased their food production by over 35% since the year 2000 (while China, at least, also increased its green leafed area – both from forests and croplands).  A more likely scenario than that proffered in the book is that yield increases through innovation and the spread of existing technology will be concurrent with decreases brought about by climate impacts, creating a mixed picture.

While The Uninhabitable Earth struggles to present balance, there is inconsistency, too, throughout.  Early on, for example, it argues that the story of emissions to date should not be “a fable about historical villainy” , but later asks the reader to “consider that the British Empire was conjured out of the smoke of fossil fuels, and that today, thanks to that smoke, the marshland of Bangladesh is poised to drown, and the cities of India to cook.”  Later still, Wallace-Wells reverses this again, writing “but while the climate crisis was engineered in the past, it was mostly in the recent past.”

One of the worst sections of the book is ‘economic collapse’ , which demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject matter as well as a willingness to dismiss mainstream expert views as “doctrinaire” .  (That The Economist review did not raise an objection to this makes me wonder how closely the reviewer read the work.)  Wallace-Wells cites “the most exciting research” by economists Solomon Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel (who are associated with highly respected institutions) that each additional degree of global average temperature rise will result in 1% lower global economic growth compared to the scenario of no warming.  He relays that, according to their research, there is a 51% chance that by the end of the century, global gross domestic production will be 23% less than it would have been without warming, and a 12% (1 in 8) chance that it will be 50% less than it would have been.  While this research itself seems reasonable (though one would expect economic impacts to worsen more greatly with each degree of temperature change), Wallace-Wells goes on to compare it to the Great Recession following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8, in which the global economy contracted by 2%, concluding that there is a 1 in 8 chance that climate change will produce an effect 25 times worse than the Great Recession.  This is highly confused.  Global economic output fell in absolute terms during the Great Recession, while a smaller growth rate with global warming is highly likely to still mean a growth in the economy in absolute terms.  An economic mega-depression involving a 50% reduction in absolute economic output over a period of several years is in no way a rational comparison to a steady period of lower-than-could-have-been growth.

Further material supports the idea that Wallace-Wells’ interpretation of economic research is lacking.  An April 2018 paper which received comments (before publication) from Burke, Hsiang and Miguel found “the [economic] impact of 1.5°C is close to indistinguishable from current conditions” , but went on to give median estimates that by 2100, a 1.5°C rise would result in GDP per capita 8% lower than without warming, and 13% lower at a 2.0°C rise.  (The paper also stressed the uncertainty of such modelling.)  Again, these suggest lower economic growth than what could have been, but the reference case against which they are compared, the ‘Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2’ used by the IPCC, a middle of the road projection of growth, still estimates dramatic growth in the global economy , as does every Shared Socioeconomic Pathway.  To Wallace-Wells, however, the “scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend” .

In his interviews, I find Wallace-Wells to be quite a bit more reasonable, and more optimistic, than in his book.  In interview with Joe Rogan, he states he thinks “we’ll see much more aggressive action in the decade ahead than we’ve had in the decades in the past” .  In the Talking Politics podcast, I could only agree when he said he felt there was “no time for a revolution” to change politics in some way so as to construct a system that allows more aggressive action on climate change.

At times, Wallace-Wells does seek to temper his tendency to sensationalism in his writing.  This may be a result of the response from the scientific community to the 2017 article in New York magazine also entitled The Uninhabitable Earth which led the author to writing the book.  Seventeen scientists reviewed the article and “estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘low’” on the climatefeedback.org website .  These included Professor Michael Mann, who wrote that the article “paints an overly bleak picture by overstating some of the science” and researcher Alexis Berg, whose opinion was that it “feels misleading, or at least confusing for the general public.”

In the book, Wallace-Wells makes what might be a response to that criticism.  He writes that “in 2018, scientists began embracing fear, when the IPCC released a dramatic, alarmist report illustrating just how much worse climate change would be at 2 degrees of warming compared with 1.5….the report offered a new form of permission, of sanction, to the world’s scientists…that it is ok, finally, to freak out.  It is almost difficult to imagine in its aftermath anything but a new torrent of panic issuing forth from scientists finally emboldened to scream as they wish to.”  He goes on to postulate that “worrying so much about erring on the side of excessive alarm has meant that [scientists] have erred so routinely it began a kind of professional principle on the side of excessive caution, which is effectively the side of complacency.”  In the light of the stretches and misrepresentations Wallace-Wells makes, I feel this is an unwarranted criticism.

Simplistic characterisations like this seem likely to me to lead the reader into a skewed picture of reality.  Fossil capitalism is the villain of the work, and while there certainly have been some nefarious acts on the part of the fossil fuel industry, the general reader may be surprised to learn that fossil fuel companies, utilities, heavy industries and research organisations are populated by engineers and scientists who understand the need to make power generation and industry cleaner, and have been working for more than half a century on doing so.  Huge reductions have been made in SO x and NO x emissions, for instance, and attention is now firmly on CO 2 .  The task of combating climate change will require these efforts to intensify.

A more accurate picture of how we have arrived in the current climate predicament makes a less Hollywood story, for it lacks a clear antagonist.  There is no cabal that directs the course of history.  It has been simple misfortune, more than anything else, that a by-product of the industrialisation that has brought higher standards of living across the world has been the problem of climate change.  The world began to comprehend this by-product only after the industrial way of life had been established in developed countries.  Since the widespread scientific acceptance of global warming in the 1970s and 80s, the countries that have industrialised have done so understandably seeking to bring higher living standards to their peoples.  Part of the nature of the misfortune, the part that Wallace-Wells does communicate, is that there is a huge inertia to the built environment of the modern world.  Wholescale changes cannot be made overnight – it is the work of several decades, if not more.

Understanding this and acknowledging that industry is and will be part of the solution, I feel, would lead to more united and concerted action on climate change, which is what Wallace-Wells wants.  I suspect that he believes that The Uninhabitable Earth’s overstated nature and misrepresentations are justified by the attention they bring to the urgent issue of climate change – as he puts it at one point, “any story that sticks is a good one” .  I am not so sure.  I fear that it will lead to further political polarisation (something Wallace-Wells himself decries), less agreement on action, and a growth in conspiracy thinking against a “fossil capitalism” cabal.  For those that take every word in the book to be fair, it will also produce a lack of comprehension of events as they unfold in the coming years, and this might have unhappy political consequences.  A more balanced writing of The Uninhabitable Earth could have avoided these dangers while still being evocative, driving home the message that a rapid transformation in the economy needs to take place, spurred on by political pressure and accompanied by modifications to our cultures and societies.

• Search Key words

You may also like

Hawaiian electric a microcosm of intersection of energy transition and climate change.

22nd April 2024

Britain goes two months without coal-fired power, marking remarkable transition away from the fuel

22nd June 2020

Announcing the 1st FERIA event – The European Conference on Fuel and Energy Research and its Applications

• Cookie Policy
• Accessibility

Members of the IFRF can have access to a range of exclusive benefits. To learn more about our membership options and what they currently offer click here .

Alternatively, to become a member fill out a form using the link below

• Become a Member
• Phone +44 114 222 3656
• Email [email protected]

Universe Today

Space and astronomy news

Book Review: Is Earth Exceptional?

A new book looks at the latest scientific insights versus a key question in astronomy and space science.

It’s tough to answer a scientific question, with a just data point of one. How special are we, and how common (or rare) is the story of how life arose on the Earth in the grander drama of the cosmos?

A new book out this week entitled Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life by Mario Livio and Jack Szostak looks at the scientific state of answering this key question. The book offers a sweeping view of the nascent science of astrobiology, a multi-disciplinary field melding biology, chemistry, astronomy and more.

Astrophysicist Mario Livio is also the author of Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe and The Equation That Couldn’t be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry.

Co-author and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak worked on the Human Genome Project and was the co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for discovering how telomeres defend chromosomes.

The basic premise of the book looks at the riddle of how the basic building blocks of life—from amino acids, RNA and the first cells—emerged on Earth. Could the same processes by common elsewhere?

Remember Rare Earth from about 20 years back? That book definitely made ripples in the fledgling field of astrobiology, by positing that a series of rare circumstances led to life to arise on the Earth. Is Earth Exceptional? Updates the science on this question and debate a generation later.

Exceptional Earth

The book doesn’t shy away from some pretty extensive organic chemistry in the first half. It’s rather tantalizing to researchers that simple life came into existence almost as soon as the conditions were ready for it. Was this a fluke, or a cosmic imperative? The chemistry of primordial life is a big mystery. Is Earth Exceptional looks at the latest findings, and what breakthroughs may be imminent in the field of astrobiology.

We live in an amazing time, a golden age of astronomy that may give us hard answers to these questions in our lifetimes. SETI searches, exoplanet surveys, and space telescopes such as TESS, JWST and the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (set to launch in 2027) could bare fruit this century. The book points out that even a null result—however disappointing—could still be profound.

The answer could come from missions to worlds in our own solar system searching for signs of life past or present on Mars, Europa or Titan. The book deals with prospects for life on worlds in our solar system, and implications of such a discovery. Farther afield, detections of signs in exoplanet spectra could also herald the detection of exobiology on distant worlds.

For example, we now have the ability to see what’s known as the Vegetation Red Edge . This would be a very strong hint that photosynthesis was afoot via chlorophyll. This is a molecule that—as far as we know—only arises due to life.

All amazing thoughts to consider, as you read Is Earth Special and ponder the state of modern astrobiology.

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .