The Uninhabitable Earth
The Uninhabitable Earth
David Wallace-Wells
Vinod Khosla
A look into the future and how global warming will impact everything. - Vinod Khosla
Tim Urban
[The author's] been scaring the shit out of me with this research for the past few years, and now it's a book I hope lots of people read/discuss/debate. - Tim Urban
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The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

David Wallace-Wells
By
David Wallace-Wells
4.0
4218
ratings on Goodreads

In "The Uninhabitable Earth," David Wallace-Wells paints a harrowing picture of our planet's future, far bleaker than many dare to acknowledge. Beyond the familiar warnings of rising sea levels and melting polar ice caps lies a future rife with ceaseless wildfires, devastating superstorms, and unprecedented food shortages. Wallace-Wells leverages the latest scientific research to forecast a world on the brink of becoming inhospitable, a reality that could unfold within the span of a single century. With each page, the book serves as a clarion call to humanity, urging an immediate and radical reshaping of our lifestyles and our global economy. Yet, Wallace-Wells's narrative goes beyond mere doomsday prophesizing. It meticulously examines how the fabric of our daily lives, our political systems, and even our cultural and historical understanding will be irrevocably altered by the climate crisis. "The Uninhabitable Earth" is not just an exploration of environmental degradation but a profound contemplation on human resilience and our capacity for innovation in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. This book stands as a pivotal work, akin to "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Silent Spring," that not only maps the looming catastrophe but also inspires a collective and transformative response to avert it.

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Released
2019
19 Feb
Length
310
Pages

2

recommendations

recommendation

[The author's] been scaring the shit out of me with this research for the past few years, and now it's a book I hope lots of people read/discuss/debate. - Tim Urban
A look into the future and how global warming will impact everything. - Vinod Khosla
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, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
— David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth

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