Name: The Uninhabitable Earth
ISBN: 9780525576716

The Uninhabitable Earth

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--food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation's Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it--the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also 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--today's. Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth: "The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet."--Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times "Riveting.... Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells's outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too."--The Economist "Potent and evocative....

What Hacker News says

nsainsburyMar 2024

We're not going to make it to anywhere close to AGI before we see widespread and systematic societal and environmental collapse on almost all fronts due to climate change.

We're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction right now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction), we're in unparalleled territory with ocean warming: (https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/) and as a society we are utterly incapable of reducing CO2 emissions (https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/).

If you're scared of AGI, instead step away from your monitor, put down the techno-goggles and sci-fi books, and go educate yourself a bit about the profound ways we are changing the natural world for the worse _right now_

I can recommend a couple of books if you'd like to learn more:

Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (https://www.amazon.com/Our-Final-Warning-Degrees-Emergency-e...)

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (https://www.amazon.com/Uninhabitable-Earth-Life-After-Warmin...)

Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide (https://www.amazon.com/Hothouse-Earth-Inhabitants-Bill-McGui...)

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Willish42Nov 2023

This and the suggested article after it [1] were easily the most depressing things I've read since Uninhabitable Earth many years ago

Every time I read the "real" scientific outlook on climate change it's so disturbing I tend to disocciate for a bit and then move on to thinking about something else. I suspect a great portion of people intelligent enough to see the writing on the wall go through similar cycles.

If anybody has suggestions as to how to navigate one's life while holding the knowledge that earth / wildlife as we know it is probably circling the drain, I'd love to hear it. Personally, I don't understand how anybody else is able to function through their life with this knowledge, beyond denial and ignorance...

[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/12/03/climate-biodiversity-gre...

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liberabaciJul 2023

I agree citing scientific sources fortifies an argument, but I would advise you to take anything on Wikipedia as an unreliable source. Wikipedia is not a reputable source unfortunately.

Here are a few reliable sources you can look into for information about climate science and climate change:

Websites:

    NASA's Climate Change and Global Warming website (https://climate.nasa.gov/) offers an extensive collection of data, interactive features, and explanatory articles.
    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (https://www.ipcc.ch/) produces comprehensive reports about climate change.
    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate.gov (https://www.climate.gov/) provides climate news, data, maps, and more.

Books:

    "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming" by David Wallace-Wells: This book offers an uncompromising look at the potential impacts of climate change if left unchecked.
    "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate" by Naomi Klein: Klein makes a case for how addressing climate change requires major changes to our economic system.
    "Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Joseph Romm: This is a clear, concise primer on the key aspects of climate change.
    "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert:This Pulitzer-winning, discussing the ongoing mass extinction driven by human activity, including climate change.
    "Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming" edited by Paul Hawken: This book compiles and evaluates solutions to climate change.

It's worth mentioning that understanding climate science also involves learning about related disciplines like chemistry, physics, and earth sciences, so exploring resources in those areas may be beneficial as well. Good luck!

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drallisonJan 2021

Futurists prefer "forecasting" rather than "prediction" since the future is constructed from the past (that is, data) and not from the examination of pigeon entrails, tea leaves, or flakey models with deus ex machina solutions.

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming would be a good choice. It's a snapshot of forecast reality, not near-future sci fi, and scary.

https://smile.amazon.com/Uninhabitable-Earth-Life-After-Warm...

Also worthwhile, David Pogue's How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos. Similar to the Wallace-Wells book, but from a different perspective.

https://smile.amazon.com/How-Prepare-Climate-Change-Practica...

Cormack McCarthy's The Road is a disturbing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive when life on earth dies off from the bottom up. It is set a bit further in the future than the others, at a point where the die off of humans is happening. Collapse and death is mostly low tech.

https://smile.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0307387895/...

It does seem like we are living in a utopian sci fi novel these days (pandemic aside). We have ignored the warnings of pending collapse until there is no longer time to correct course or even adapt. So it's likely we wail be living in environmental chaos for the next 20 years and then slip into extinction over the next 10 as we experience first hand the last great die-off.

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thundergolferJul 2020

I would highly recommend “The Uninhabitable Earth”. I’m 27 and for at least 10 years I’ve been aware of the people trying valiantly to sound the alarm about climate change, but only recently has this disaster sunk in.

Maybe it’s because it was the right book at the right time, but reading through I could felt my connection with the emergency in my stomach.

I can only guess that this is true, but at times reading it I’d sense an uneasiness in myself like I was learning of an imminent world war. Given what Climate Change is and what destruction looms, it’s the most appropriate disposition I’ve had towards the problem.

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charliesomeDec 2019

I highly recommend reading David Wallace-Wells' "The Uninhabitable Earth" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41552709-the-uninhabitab...

The book is quite information dense, intellectually honest with regard to the likelihood of various outcomes, and offers the clearest and broadest assessment I've yet read of where we are and what lies for us in the future.

Describing the contemporary climate discourse as "alarmist" denies the severity and scale of the problem we face.

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