The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by Wallace-Wells, David
ISBN: 9780525576716
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Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "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

With a new afterword

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. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the 'eerily banal language of climatology' in favor of lush, rolling prose."--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"The book has potential to be this generation's Silent Spring."--The Washington Post

"The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book."--Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Wallace-Wells, David
  • ISBN: 9780525576716
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 7.90 x 0.80
  • Number Of Pages: 384
  • Publication Year: 2020

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  • Life after apathy - Don't read it and weep - read it and get to work!

    Morf M. - 5 years 6 months ago

    I have two enduring philosophical problems with books like this. The first is that a barrage of mind-numbing (though certainly real, measurable and relevant) facts and statistics tend to lead to a near-fatal case of "paralysis of analysis" and, second, the facts and stories, as dire and horrifying as they are, are not dire and horrifying enough. The pages of the book written not that long ago, are already approaching obsolescence if not a charming, child-like optimism regarding both the immensity (and ever expanding and intrusive feedback loops) of climate change and the even more disheartening capability - if not capacity - of humans at any level to respond to it. That something as obvious - and measurable - and impactful - as weather should become a political issue will be a prevailing topic of conversation in the future. If we have a future. And that is one of the conclusions of "The Uninhabitable Earth" - this is no geothermal phase, this is no natural cycle. Once the polar ice caps melt (and the sea level rises, and the saline level of the ocean is changed and the oceanic currents {thermahaline to use the technical term - slow or even stop, our (largely) predictable seasons essentially stop, agriculture ends, our usable/arable land mass shrinks dramatically - and permanently. Entire states - and several low-lying nations - will disappear entirely. Greta Thunberg, the teen Swedish climate activist describes the world as "on fire" - but even that is not enough. Fires consume and are extinguished. Reclamation - by nature or human beings - is possible - if not "natural". But once the polar ice caps are gone, they are gone. As good as humans are at problem avoidance, we are also good (at least as a species) at adapting. The human, financial and social cost of our climate neglect will be beyond measurement (far more than the combined GDP of every nation on earth) but humanity, ever clumsy but somehow resilient. The question is, in one generation, can we re-stabilize our climate in time or will the earth be thrown into semi-constant climate turmoil, when we, a generation with the means, at a pivotal time could have made a difference? Either way it will be our legacy. #BannedBook