"The
Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of
insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon."—Andrew
Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
It is worse, much
worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is
dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the
surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now
rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US,
“500-year” storms pummel communities month after month, and
floods displace tens of millions annually.
This is only a
preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a
revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of
the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts
horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
In his travelogue of
our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the
climate troubles that await—food shortages, refugee emergencies,
and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be
remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our
politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense
of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting
nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.
Like An Inconvenient
Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a
meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an
impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the
brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the
responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.