[ “It is worse, much worse, than you think," writes the author
of this study. "The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale,
perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at
all.”] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH  
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Dook Snyder
April 6, 2019
The Berkshire Edge
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_ “It is worse, much worse, than you think," writes the author of
this study. "The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps
as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all.” _

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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells
Crown
ISBN 9780525576709

This is a remarkable book, remarkable not only in its unflinching look
at the ravages of the climate crisis, but in its relentless
determination to rally us to action. There is nothing sappy or rah-rah
or unrealistic about David Wallace-Wells’ commitment to doing
whatever is necessary to avoid extinction. Rather, he possesses and
communicates a clear-eyed determination that as long as there are some
of us, there are things we can/must do.

Thankfully, for me, David Wallace-Wells leaves the hard science, and
where to find it, to the Notes at the end of the book. Instead, he
translates, offering a look at what the data means, how we see it,
feel it and, because it is so frightening, how often we try not to
know it.

Admittedly, he is new to this, an unlikely herald: “I am not an
environmentalist, and don’t even think of myself as a nature person.
I’ve lived my whole life in cities, enjoying gadgets built by
industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about. I’ve never gone
camping, not willingly anyway, and while I always thought it was
basically a good idea to keep streams clean and air clear, I also
always accepted the proposition that there was a trade-off between
economic growth and cost to nature_—_and figured, well, in most
cases I’d probably go for growth.

“I’m not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger,
but I’m also not about to go vegan. I tend to think when you’re at
the top of the food chain it’s okay to flaunt it, because I don’t
see anything complicated about drawing a moral boundary between us and
other animals, and in fact find it offensive to women and people of
color that all of a sudden there’s talk of extending
human-rights-like legal protections to chimps, apes, and octopuses,
just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-male
monopoly on legal personhood. IN THESE WAYS—MANY OF THEM, AT
LEAST—I AM LIKE EVERY OTHER AMERICAN WHO HAS SPENT THEIR LIFE
FATALLY COMPLACENT, AND WILLFULLY DELUDED, ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE …”
(_Emphasis added._)

Melting ice in the Arctic. Photo: Ralph Lee Hopkins/National
Geographic

He is, though, a journalist who collects stories, a collector who
gradually stumbled into the midst of our multi-faceted crisis: “a
group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated their
research center, on an island populated also by a group of polar
bears; a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing
reindeer carcass, which had been trapped in permafrost for many
decades … My file of stories grew daily, but very few of the clips,
even those drawn from new research published in the most pedigreed
scientific journals, seemed to appear in the coverage about climate
change the country watched on television and read in its newspapers
… the discussion of possible effects was misleadingly narrow,
limited almost invariably to the matter of sea-level rise. Just as
worrisome, the coverage was sanguine, all things considered …”

Like most of us non-scientists, he didn’t quite know what to make of
all these individual stories: “We felt confusion about the science
and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an
intuition that others would be easily confused about the science and
its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. We suffered from
slowness apprehending the speed of change … Perhaps we felt unable
to really trust scarier projections because we’d only just heard
about warming, we thought, and things couldn’t possibly have gotten
that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we
liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in
every other way and didn’t want to think too hard about that … or
because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we
were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again
… because we didn’t yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our
lives, and because, selfishly, we didn’t mind destroying the planet
for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would
inherit it from us, outraged.”

A lignite coal-fired power station in Poland. Photo: Florian Gaertner,
Getty Images

But these stories have led him to “The Uninhabitable Earth.” So,
let me give you just an idea of the picture he paints of the world he
and we know today. “The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) offers the gold-standard assessments of the
state of the planet and the likely trajectory for climate change …
[which] says that if we take action on emissions soon, instituting
immediately all of the commitments made in the Paris accords but
nowhere yet actually implemented, we are likely to get about 3.2
degrees of warming, or about three times as much warming as the planet
has seen since the beginning of industrialization—bringing the
unthinkable collapse of the planet’s ice sheets not just into the
realm of the real but into the present. That would eventually flood
not just Miami and Dhaka but Shanghai and Hong Kong and a hundred
other cities around the world. The tipping point for that collapse is
said to be around two degrees; according to several recent studies,
even a rapid cessation of carbon emissions could bring us that amount
of warming by the end of the century.”

Time, he tells us, is not on our side: “It is almost hard to believe
just how much has happened and how quickly. In the late summer of
2017, three major hurricanes arose in the Atlantic at once, proceeding
at first along the same route as though they were battalions of an
army on the march. Hurricane Harvey, when it struck Houston, delivered
such epic rainfall it was described in some areas as a ‘500,000-year
event’—meaning that we should expect that amount of rain to hit
that area once every five hundred millennia. Harvey was the third such
flood to hit Houston since 2015. And the storm struck, in places, with
an intensity that was supposed to be a thousand times rarer still.”

Then he pulls back from Houston to show us what most of us never
noticed—extraordinary climate events happening across the globe at
the same time: “That same season, an Atlantic hurricane hit Ireland,
45 million were flooded from their homes in South Asia, and
unprecedented wildfires tilled much of California into ash … crises
so large they would once have been inscribed in folklore for centuries
today passing across our horizons ignored, overlooked, or forgotten.
In 2016, a ‘thousand-year flood’ drowned small-town Ellicott City,
Maryland, to take but one example almost at random; it was followed,
two years later, in the same small town, by another. One week that
summer of 2018, dozens of places all over the world were hit with
record heat waves, from Denver to Burlington to Ottawa; from Glasgow
to Shannon to Belfast; from Tbilisi, in Georgia, and Yerevan, in
Armenia, to whole swaths of southern Russia. The previous month, the
daytime temperature of one city in Oman reached above 121 degrees
Fahrenheit, and did not drop below 108 all night, and in Quebec,
Canada, fifty-four died from the heat. That same week, one hundred
major wildfires burned in the American West, including one in
California that grew 4,000 acres in one day, and another, in Colorado,
that produced a volcano-like 300-foot eruption of flames, swallowing
an entire subdivision and inventing a new term, ‘fire tsunami,’
along the way.

“On the other side of the planet, biblical rains flooded Japan,
where 1.2 million were evacuated from their homes. Later that summer,
Typhoon Mangkhut forced the evacuation of 2.45 million from mainland
China, the same week that Hurricane Florence struck the Carolinas,
turning the port city of Wilmington briefly into an island and
flooding large parts of the state with hog manure and coal ash. Along
the way, the winds of Florence produced dozens of tornadoes across the
region. The previous month, in India, the state of Kerala was hit with
its worst floods in almost a hundred years. That October, a hurricane
in the Pacific wiped Hawaii’s East Island entirely off the map. And
in November, which has traditionally marked the beginning of the rainy
season in California, the state was hit instead with the deadliest
fire in its history—the Camp Fire, which scorched several hundred
square miles outside of Chico, killing dozens and leaving many more
missing in a place called, proverbially, Paradise. The devastation was
so complete, you could almost forget the Woolsey Fire, closer to Los
Angeles, which burned at the same time and forced the sudden
evacuation of 170,000.”

Golfers in North Bonneville, Wash., playing while Eagle Creek burned.
Photo courtesy Reuters

What “The Uninhabitable Earth” does best is wrench us from our
day-to-day perspective, our particular place in time and space, to see
the biggest picture. And because David Wallace-Wells melds science
with the best of prose, his reports are multi-dimensional and so very
effective. When he tells the story of calamitous wildfires of the last
few years, there’s far more than heat, lost homes, lost lives.
There’s his added analysis: “climate change is finally striking
close to home. Some quite special homes. The California fires of 2017
burned the state’s wine crop, blowtorched million-dollar vacation
properties, and threatened both the Getty Museum and Rupert
Murdoch’s Bel-Air estate. There may not be two better symbols of the
imperiousness of American money than those two structures. Nearby, the
sunshiny children’s fantasia of Disneyland was quickly canopied, as
the fires began to encroach, by an eerily apocalyptic orange sky. 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. The following year, Americans
watched the Kardashians evacuate via Instagram stories, then read
about the private firefighting forces they employed, the rest of the
state reliant on conscripted convicts earning as little as a dollar a
day.”

He reminds us how tricky time has become in this new world. Because,
if I understand him, we are all living in some odd time-lag. All the
carbon dioxide we’ve spewed, all the methane that remains to be
released with the new melting, that’s climate change we’ve already
banked. Exacerbating. Multiplying. Perhaps the reason things are
happening so much faster than our smart climate scientists imagined.
Not that we took them seriously, convinced they were exaggerating
when, in fact, they were underestimating.

David Wallace-Wells writes: “It is tempting to look at these strings
of disasters and think, Climate change is here. And one response to
seeing things long predicted actually come to pass is to feel that we
have settled into a new era, with everything transformed. In fact,
that is how California governor Jerry Brown described the state of
things in the midst of the state’s wildfire disaster: ‘a new
normal.’

“The truth is actually much scarier. THAT IS, THE END OF NORMAL;
NEVER NORMAL AGAIN. We have already exited the state of environmental
conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place,
in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure.
THE CLIMATE SYSTEM THAT RAISED US, AND RAISED EVERYTHING WE NOW KNOW
AS HUMAN CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION, IS NOW, LIKE A PARENT, DEAD.And the
climate system we have been observing for the last several years, the
one that has battered the planet again and again, is not our bleak
future in preview. IT WOULD BE MORE PRECISE TO SAY THAT IT IS A
PRODUCT OF OUR RECENT CLIMATE PAST, ALREADY PASSING BEHIND US INTO A
DUSTBIN OF ENVIRONMENTAL NOSTALGIA. THERE IS NO LONGER ANY SUCH THING
AS A “NATURAL DISASTER,” BUT NOT ONLY WILL THINGS GET WORSE;
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, THEY HAVE ALREADY GOTTEN WORSE. EVEN IF,
MIRACULOUSLY, HUMANS IMMEDIATELY CEASED EMITTING CARBON, WE’D STILL
BE DUE FOR SOME ADDITIONAL WARMING FROM JUST THE STUFF WE’VE PUT
INTO THE AIR ALREADY. AND OF COURSE, WITH GLOBAL EMISSIONS STILL
INCREASING, WE’RE VERY FAR FROM ZEROING OUT ON CARBON, AND THEREFORE
VERY FAR FROM STALLING CLIMATE CHANGE. THE DEVASTATION WE ARE NOW
SEEING ALL AROUND US IS A BEYOND-BEST-CASE SCENARIO FOR THE FUTURE OF
WARMING AND ALL THE CLIMATE DISASTERS IT WILL BRING … THE LAST FEW
YEARS OF CLIMATE DISASTERS MAY LOOK LIKE ABOUT AS MUCH AS THE PLANET
CAN TAKE. IN FACT, WE ARE ONLY JUST ENTERING OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD, ONE
THAT COLLAPSES BELOW US AS SOON AS WE SET FOOT ON IT.” (_Emphasis
added._)

Here’s a chart that helps me see what we’ve been doing:

The rise of carbon dioxide. Image courtesy National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration

There’s a great irony at work here. What’s happening is happening
on a global level, events intertwined and interrelated, while still we
think of ourselves as Americans, Russians, Chinese, men, women, white,
black, brown, gay, straight, so much more conscious of our differences
than our shared fragility, still unwilling to confront the truth of
our dilemma—as if the burning forests, melting glaciers, raging
storms give a damn about the patriotic ditties we sing to highlight
our distinctions.

Telegraph Road in Houston, Tx., Aug. 27, 2017. Photo: Thomas B.
Shea/AFP/Getty Images

He explains cascading change: “A warming planet leads to melting
Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and
more absorbed by a planet warming faster still, which means an ocean
less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster
still. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which
contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is
currently suspended in the earth’s atmosphere, and some of which,
when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is
thirty-four times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as
carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged
on the timescale of two decades, it is eighty-six times as powerful. A
hotter planet is, on net, bad for plant life, which means what is
called “forest dieback”—the decline and retreat of jungle basins
as big as countries and woods that sprawl for so many miles they used
to contain whole folklores—which means a dramatic stripping-back of
the planet’s natural ability to absorb carbon and turn it into
oxygen, which means still hotter temperatures, which means more
dieback, and so on. 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 … We know what a
best-case outcome for climate change looks like, however unrealistic,
because it quite closely resembles the world as we live on it today.
But we have not yet begun to contemplate those cascades that may bring
us to the infernal range of the bell curve.”

Image courtesy New York Times

And while he looks to the world without flinching, at the firestorms,
the disappearing glaciers, the death of our coral reefs, the rising
seas, he’s also willing to look within: “I’ve also often been
asked whether it’s moral to reproduce in this climate, whether
it’s responsible to have children, whether it is fair to the planet
or, perhaps more important, to the children. As it happens, in the
course of writing this book, I did have a child, Rocca … I know
there are climate horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be
visited on my children—that is what it means for warming to be an
all-encompassing, all-touching threat. BUT THOSE HORRORS ARE NOT YET
SCRIPTED. WE ARE STAGING THEM BY INACTION, AND BY ACTION CAN STOP
THEM. CLIMATE CHANGE MEANS SOME BLEAK PROSPECTS FOR THE DECADES AHEAD,
BUT I DON’T BELIEVE THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO THAT CHALLENGE IS
WITHDRAWAL, IS SURRENDER. I THINK YOU HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO
MAKE THE WORLD ACCOMMODATE DIGNIFIED AND FLOURISHING LIFE, RATHER THAN
GIVING UP EARLY, BEFORE THE FIGHT HAS BEEN LOST OR WON, AND
ACCLIMATING YOURSELF TO A DREARY FUTURE BROUGHT INTO BEING BY OTHERS
LESS CONCERNED ABOUT CLIMATE PAIN. The fight is, definitively, not yet
lost—in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction,
because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that
the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less. And I
have to admit, I am also excited, for everything that Rocca and her
sisters and brothers will see, will witness, will do. She will hit her
child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees
in the many tens of millions; she will be entering old age at the
close of the century, the end-stage bookmark on all of our projections
for warming. In between, she will watch the world doing battle with a
genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making
a future for themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on
this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living
it—quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a
happy ending.” (_Emphasis added_)

About a third of the way through, we’re congratulated, and believe
me we deserve it: “If you have made it this far, you are a brave
reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough
horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those
considering it. But you are not merely considering it; you are about
to embark on living it. In many cases, in many places, we already
are.”

I imagine David Wallace-Wells understands exactly what he’s putting
us through. It must have been many times harder to keep researching,
to continue to look for and find ever more evidence of the climate
crisis, to write on. There were several times I wanted to abandon
“The Uninhabitable Earth,” figuratively and literally.

Because, as he reminds us: “In fact, what is perhaps most remarkable
about all of the research summarized to this point—concerning not
only refugees, health, and mental health, but also conflict and food
supply and sea level and all of the other elements of climate
disarray—is that it is research emerging from the world we know
today. That is, a world just one degree warmer; a world not yet
deformed and defaced beyond recognition; a world bound largely by
conventions devised in an age of climate stability, now barreling
headlong into an age of something more like climate chaos, a world we
are only beginning to perceive.”

David Wallace-Wells has pried open our eyes, forced us to see the
living nightmare ahead, in his words “The mass extinction we are now
living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.”

This is more about the problem, less about the solution, mostly
because if there is a simple scientific, technological solution, no
one has found it yet. But the one thing David Wallace-Wells is sure of
is that now he wants/needs us awake, fully conscious and willing to
work as hard as possible to survive, to fight: “If humans are
responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it. We
have an idiomatic name for those who hold the fate of the world in
their hands, as we do: gods. But for the moment, at least, most of us
seem more inclined to run from that responsibility than embrace
it—or even admit we see it, though it sits in front of us as plainly
as a steering wheel.

“Instead, we assign the task to future generations, to dreams of
magical technologies, to remote politicians doing a kind of battle
with profiteering delay. This is why this book is also studded so
oppressively with ‘we,’ however imperious it may seem. The fact
that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and
that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in
the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it.

Flooding earlier this year in Hamburg, Iowa. Photo: Tim Gruber, New
York Times

“We do not know the precise shape such suffering would take, cannot
predict with certainty exactly how many acres of forest will burn each
year of the next century, releasing into the air centuries of stored
carbon; or how many hurricanes will flatten each Caribbean island; or
where megadroughts are likely to produce mass famines first; or which
will be the first great pandemic to be produced by global warming. But
we know enough to see, even now, that the new world we are stepping
into will be so alien from our own, it might as well be another planet
entirely … 

“There is one civilization we know of, and it is still around, 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? …
‘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. But reasoning from first principles is reasonable when
it comes to climate; in fact, it is necessary, as we only have a first
shot to engineer a solution. This goes beyond thinking like a planet,
because the planet will survive, however terribly we poison it; it is
thinking like a people, one people, whose fate is shared by all …

“There will be those, as there are now, who rage against fossil
capitalists and their political enablers; and others, as there are
now, who lament human shortsightedness and decry the consumer excesses
of contemporary life. There will be those, as there are now, who fight
as unrelenting activists, with approaches as diverse as federal
lawsuits and aggressive legislation and small-scale protests of new
pipelines; nonviolent resistance; and civil-rights crusades. And there
will be those, as there are now, who see the cascading suffering and
fall back into an inconsolable despair. There will be those, as there
are now, who insist that there is only one way to respond to the
unfolding ecological catastrophe—one productive way, one responsible
way …

“The Voyager 1 space probe gave us the “Pale Blue Dot”—the
inescapable smallness, and fragility, of the entire experiment we’re
engaged in, together, whether we like it or not. 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. At least I hope it does. But that
is another meaning of the climate kaleidoscope. You can choose your
metaphor. You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of
us will ever call home.”

If you have children, hope to have children, if you know children, and
care about the world they’ll inhabit, you need to read “The
Uninhabitable Earth.”

I’m going to end where David Wallace-Wells begins: “It is worse,
much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy
tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening
at all …”

You’ve been warned.

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