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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes and notes:

“In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before. … this means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance. (4) emphasis mine

What the fuck is wrong with us?

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

What the fuck is wrong with us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the fuck is wrong with us?

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

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

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

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

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

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