53 pages • 1 hour read
David Wallace-WellsThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Cascades”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
In a lengthy introductory section, Wallace-Wells broadly sketches out the magnitude of the threat facing humanity as a result of climate change. While total human extinction is unlikely even under the most dire climate projections, most major extinction events on Earth were caused not by asteroid collisions like the one that killed the dinosaurs but by elevated levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is true of the so-called Great Dying 250 million years ago, which corresponded with an increase in global temperatures of five degrees Celsius. A comparable temperature increase by 2100 is firmly within the parameters of scientific projection, and it could occur at a rate ten times faster than it did during the Great Dying.
Global temperature increase since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century is the primary metric by which scientists measure the threat of climate change. At present, that metric sits at around one degree Celsius. At two degrees, scientists predict deadly heat waves, devastating droughts, coastal cities rendered uninhabitable by flooding, and daily hurricanes and monsoons of such size and severity that they used to occur only once every 500 years or longer. As recently as 1997, experts pegged two degrees as a worst-case scenario that must be avoided at all costs. As of 2019, however, two degrees is considered closer to the baseline threshold of what humanity can expect in terms of global temperature increases by 2100. Current projections are set at around 3.2 degrees, which would result in the collapse of the polar ice sheets and the flooding of over a hundred cities, including Miami, Dhaka, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Increases of four degrees or even higher are not outside the realm of possibility, a scenario in which vast regions of Africa, Australia, and the Americas would become uninhabitable due to direct heat and desertification. At the high end of projections is an unlikely yet not entirely implausible eight-degree increase, which would render a third of the world unlivable and most of the rest of it useless for agricultural purposes.
Even if countries take immediate and aggressive action to curtail carbon emissions, climate change will result in an unprecedented refugee crisis as residents of battered coastlines flee inland. On humanity’s current trajectory, the number of climate refugees worldwide could number anywhere between 200 million and 1 billion as early as 2050, according to the United Nations. Already since 2011, one million refugees have poured into Europe fleeing the Syrian Civil War, a conflict caused in part by a massive drought that decimated the fortunes of local communities. In Texas, there are a half a million Latino refugees as a result of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey and other extreme weather events. In other words, Wallace-Wells writes, “We know what a best-case outcome for climate change looks like, however unrealistic, because it resembles the world as we live on it today” (22).
The author characterizes climate change as a series of cascades; for example, the warmer the planet gets, the faster its ice sheets melt, thus reflecting less sunlight away from Earth’s atmosphere and causing even more warming. Next to go is the permafrost, the frozen soil in Arctic regions that contains double the amount of carbon currently suspended in the atmosphere. All of this corresponds with warmer oceans less capable of absorbing that carbon, resulting in, again, more warming.
In addressing the arguments against taking aggressive action on climate change, Wallace-Wells rejects the notion that any reduction in fossil fuel emissions constitutes an economic tradeoff. The monetary costs of the expected increases in natural disasters and decimated crop yields alone will far outstrip the costs of transitioning into a world powered by clean energy, he argues. In fact, for every degree of warming in a temperate country like the United States, there is an estimated 1% loss of GDP. As the effects of climate change become harder and harder to ignore, skeptics are today less likely to engage in outright denial and more likely to attribute these temperature increases and worsening storms to natural cycles as opposed to human activity. Aside from the fact that this argument is not supported by science, the author is mystified that such a conclusion should comfort anybody; after all, if humanity caused climate change, then it is more likely that humanity can fix it.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Analysis
Early on, Wallace-Wells articulates the mission statement behind his book, writing, “This is not a book about the science of warming; it is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet” (11). The author devotes a large portion of the book to summarizing the latest scientific projections surrounding climate change, but he spends just as much time writing about civil wars, the future of capitalism, and climate-based science-fiction—in other words, the social and cultural impact of climate change.
The author tends to use “climate change” and “global warming” as virtually interchangeable terms. In recent years, there has been a marked shift among scientists and journalists away from the term global warming and toward climate change. This is in part because warmer day-to-day weather is merely one consequence of climate change. Furthermore, it is not a consequence that is felt by all equally, nor at all times. For example, the author observes that warmer Arctic air actually makes North American blizzards more severe. Still, the primary factor driving the multitudinous cascades of climate change is, ultimately, a rise in global temperatures.
Another one of the main functions of the first chapter is to preview the arguments and ideas Wallace-Wells will explore across the rest of the book. Perhaps the most salient of these arguments involves the author’s efforts to debunk the myth that climate change is “a crisis of the ‘natural’ world, not the human one” (3)—which is to say, that the ultimate course taken by climate change will be determined in large part by humans, predominantly through political action. Moreover, here and elsewhere, the author emphasizes that the uncertainty surrounding climate projections is less the result of imperfect modeling and more a consequence of unknown human inputs. The extent to which humans curtail emissions and build out infrastructure to address global warming is a question that will be decided by elections and other displays of political, which are fairly unpredictable in the long-term. In sum, the author writes, “the uncertainty of what will happen—that haunting uncertainty—emerges not from scientific ignorance but, overwhelmingly, from the open question of how we respond” (43).
This idea leads to another important theme of the book: that instead of either ignoring or denying humanity’s role in causing global warming—as many still do— humans should take comfort in the scientific research showing that climate change is collectively their fault as a species. On this point, Wallace-Wells writes, “if the planet is warming at a terrifying pace and on a horrifying scale, it should transparently concern us more, rather than less, that the warming is beyond our control, possibly even our comprehension (30). That the conclusion that global warming is humanity’s fault is a comfort to the author is a reflection of both his broader sense of optimism and his specific hope that the natural anthropocentric narcissism of humanity will be redirected toward the cause of its own survival, a theme he explores in Part 4.
This emphasis on personal and cultural attitudes toward global warming is another persistent theme of the book, and Wallace-Wells introduces it here. The author is frank about the fact that he has never been an environmentalist nor a “nature person,” yet he is no less concerned than anyone about climate change, reflecting the existential threat global warming poses not only to animals and ecosystems but also to human systems—and, possibly, to humanity itself. Thus, the author works to decouple the issue of climate change from traditional environmentalism while also acknowledging the importance of the environmental movement in raising awareness of global warming over the years. Moreover, the author’s admitted anthropocentricism allows him to avoid the “climate nihilism” that has gripped so many environmentalists and caused a few of them to essentially give up on the fight against climate change. The author’s optimism is perhaps best reflected by his decision to have a child, despite the probability that the world she grows up in will be much hotter and harder than the one he knew in his youth.
Despite ultimately falling on the side of optimism, the author minces no words about the alarming projections and conclusions of mainstream climate science. This alarm is perhaps most justified through yet another major theme previewed here: that climate change is not some distant possibility to which humans can respond at their leisure; rather, the consequences of global warming are already here. The most visible of these consequences are the increased frequency and severity of devastating weather events. Another is the growing number of climate refugees around the world, which the author emphasizes as one of the more dramatic social and political effects of global warming.
The ongoing and worsening climate refugee crisis is related to one last pervasive theme of the book: environmental justice, or as the author puts it, the “climate caste system” (24). He writes, “With one exception—Australia—countries with lower GDPs will warm the most. That is notwithstanding the fact that much of the global south has not, to this point, defiled the atmosphere of the planet all that much” (24). The author will revisit these social and economic climate injustices again and again across the book, and he predicts that they will dramatically reshape the way in which citizens around the world view capitalism, existing political structures, and the legacy of globalization.
