David Wallace-Wells

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

An extremely well-written and deeply thought out exploration of the future of life on earth in a warming world.

The author has done his research, but beyond that, forces you to think about all the things that have already changed, let alone will likely change if action is not taken. Sure, it's climate alarmism - but alarmism based on what is already happening. This book would not work in 2000. It hits hard to recognize that most of our problem has come in our very generation - over my show more lifetime (38 years).

The author goes through all the cascading challenges to come: heat, hunger, drowning, wildfire, disasters, lack of freshwater, ocean death, air pollution, disease plagues, economic collapse, war, and systemic challenges. He then goes on to discuss the psychology of the issue and how it gets addressed, the limitations of technology, our progressive view of history, and what would make for a life well lived in an unrecognizable Earth. He concludes on a message of hope - not the fatalism of how all civilized worlds must end, but the hope that we can maybe salvage something out of all this.

It's by no means a cheery book. It will challenge you to your very core, since the author so deftly intertwines our current dilemma with the very quality of life we've come to enjoy because of it. No assumption is left unchallenged. A very different way of looking at the Industrial Revolution is offered, and one that might well end up becoming the historical consensus. We are quite possibly looking at the precipice of the end of all we have built over generations.

To that end the work is very prophetic. As one who has done some study in the prophets in the Bible, the forecast does not look good. It is only in the moment of crisis, when the consequences cannot be denied, that far too many have come to repentance, and as with climate, so with the judgments of old, by then it was far too late. People are far too likely to accept whatever justification they can to keep up the current perspective and attitude about things; it will take the destructive crisis to shake it out of them, and by then, alas; it will all be literally baked into the climate.

If so, it would be fitting, but woe to all of us and to our descendants for all the chaos, pain, and misery in store if even the most conservative forecasts come true. show less

It's kind of like a rant by one of the old testament prophets or those guys wearing signs that say "Repent for the end of the word is at hand". But in this case David Wallace-Wells makes his case frighteningly real. As he says: "I've always accepted that there was a trade-off between economic growth and cost to nature, and figured.......I'd probably go for growth.......I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent , and wilfully deluded, about climate show more change"...... and, "Because these numbers are so small , we tend to trivialise the differences between them - one, two, four, five (degrees C). Human experience and memory offer no good analogy for how we should think of these thresholds, but as with world wars or recurrence of cancer, you don't want to see even one."
What Wallace-Wells has done exceedingly well is raise my consciousness about the immediacy of climate change....the majority of the burning has come since the premier of Seinfeld. The story of the industrial world's Kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime.......we know those lifetimes.......the rolling emissions regime threatens to make parts of the planet more or less unliveable for humans by the end of this century. This is the course we are speeding so blithely along - to more than four degrees celsius of warming by the year 2100".
There is a torrent of facts and figures ....about the increasing frequency and severity of storms and drought; of rising sea levels, of desertification and falling crop yields, pandemics, and social disturbance, increased wars and huge numbers of refugees. (The UN predictions are 200 million climate refuges by 2050....the high end of the predictions are for 1 Billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.). In fact, I found myself somewhat overwhelmed with all the figures. Though, as my friend Richard, said when recommending the book to me....it is very well referenced. Virtually all the claims made in the book have some solid credentialed reference backing them up.
I must say that he is convincing. One can set aside all the usual apologies for climate change such as: the science is not yet conclusive, the earth has gone through hot periods before, something (technological) will turn up. Wallace-Wells, pretty much has a very strong answer for all of these responses. Generally he writes well and clearly. (Although he likes his flowery flourishes and tends towards overly long sentences.....I counted 77 words in one fairly typical sentence). However, there are some strange discrepancies ...his section on story-telling is convoluted, hard-going, and seems like it was written by someone else or for some other audience and he's just slotted it into this book. The same goes for the section on "Ethics at the end of the world". But by and large the message is so powerful it drowns out the flowery language and unnecessary literary allusions. For example: ...the true red-line for habitability is 35 degrees, beyond which human beings begin simply dying from the heat......What is called 'heat stress' comes much sooner. Actually, we are there already. Since 1980 the planet has experienced a fifty-fold increase in the number of dangerous heatwaves; a bigger increase is to come."
I felt that he gave insufficient attention to population growth as a driver of climate warming.....and potentially something that could be brought under control. But maybe he assumes that it is a given, and, anyway, even if population growth stabilises very rapidly the trajectory of climate change will not be altered.
"The world's suffering will be distributed as unequally as its profits......Already-hot countries like India and Pakistan will be hurt the most ; within the US , the costs will be shouldered largely in the south and southwest, where some regions could lose up to 20% of county income".
He muses about the development of human history in the years ahead and makes the point that modern humans have been around for 200,000 years but agriculture evolved only about 12,000 years ago. And if the planet reaches three or four or five degrees of warming, the world will be convulsed with human suffering at such a scale --- so many million refugees, half again as many wars, droughts and famines, and economic growth made impossible on so much of the planet ---that its citizens will have difficulty regarding the recent past as a course of progress or even a phase in a cycle, or in fact, anything but a true and substantial reversal."
Basically, it is a pretty impressive book. I give it five stars. show less

The first thing to know about this book is that it does not actually claim that climate change will make the earth uninhabitable. The first twelve chapters go through many negative consequences of climate change, and all of them talk not about how these consequences will end life on earth, but instead about how they will cause problems for our descendants, which indeed they will.

That title that claims too much is just one example of the book's overly polemical style. I learned more about how show more Wells wanted me to feel than about the consequences of climate change. But, in fairness, I did learn things I didn't know about those consequences. show less