In July of 2017, in New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells published an article on climate change entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It began with th In July of 2017, in New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells published an article on climate change entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It began with these words: “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” Now Wallace-Wells has turned that article into a book, and—if anything—he has doubled down. “It is worse,” the book begins, “much worse, than you think.”
It is, it surely is. And Wallace-Wells pulls no punches. He does not fog the facts with statistics, or conceal his rage and sorrow under a scientist mask. No, for this is not a book of science; it is just what he says it is. “This is not a book about the science of warming; it is a book about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” He paints pictures of what human life will be like at various degrees of warming; grim even if we mitigate the rising temperature, horrific if we continue to do virtually nothing.
The entire book is good, but the opening sequence “Cascades”—a section of roughly thirty pages--is particularly powerful. Wallace-Wells makes it clear that our warmer future will not consist of isolable challenges; no, instead everything will hit the fan at once. As Hamlet’s uncle Claudius once said, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/ But in battalions.” Wallace-Wells puts it eloquently too:
The assaults will not be discrete—this is another climate delusion. Instead, they will produce a new kind of cascading violence, waterfalls and avalanches of devastation, the planet pummeled again and again, with increasing intensity and in ways that build on each other and undermine our ability to respond . . .”
The second sequence, “The Elements of Chaos,”—a hundred pages or so—artificially isolates twelve of these cascading dangers (Heat Death,” “Hunger,” “Drowning,” etc.) into individual chapters, and discusses the contribution of each. In these chapters Wallace-Wells often becomes frighteningly specific, mentioning deleterious effects I would never have anticipated. Consider this passage in “Hunger”:
Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. . . Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.
Or this little parable in “Plagues of Warming”:
But consider the case of the saiga—the adorable, dwarflike antelope, native to Central Asia. In May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global population died in the span of just days—every single said in an area the size of Florida . . . The culprit, it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella multocide, which had lived inside the saiga’s tonsils without threatening its hosts in any way, for many, many generations . . . Suddenly it had proliferated . . . Why? “The places where the saiga died in 2015 were extremely warm and humid . . . When the temperature gets really hot, and the air gets really wet, saiga die. Climate is the trigger, Pasteurella is the bullet.”
In the third section, “The Climate Kaleidoscope”—about seventy-five pages—Wallace-Wells treats briefly with some ways we can attempt to make sense of the climate crisis, as we contemplate the possible death of humankind, alone—at least as far as we can tell—in a vast universe (“Storytelling," “Crisis Capitalism,” The Church of Technology,” etc.), and he ends the books with a brief coda—”The Anthropic Principle”—in which he shares the somewhat optimistic way in which he has come to view the human dilemma. True, it is “a sort of gimmicky tautology” that reminds me of the circular logic that brought us, in earlier centuries, the dubious comforts of Anselm’s ontological argument and Pascal’s wager. It is certainly a leap in the dark. Still, it’s better than nothing:
[T]he Anthropic Principle . . . takes the human anomaly not as a puzzle to explain away but as the centerpiece of a grand narcissistic view of the cosmos. . . . [H]owever unlikely it may seem that intelligent civilization arose in an infinity of lifeless gas, and however lonely we appear to be in the universe, in fact something like the world we live on and the one we’ve built are a sort of logical inevitability, given that we are asking these questions at all—because only a universe compatible with our sort of conscious life would produce anything capable of contemplating it like this. . . .
There is one civilization we know of, and it is still alive and kicking—for now at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality, or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?
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