THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH

Reviewed 6/03/2019

The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-West

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH Life After Warming David Wallace-West New York: Tim Duggan Books, February 2019				Rating: 4.5 High
ISBN-13 978-0-525-57670-9
ISBN-10 0-525-57670-3	310pp.	HC	$27.00

There is a saying in the world of politics: Only Nixon could go to China. It is said because Richard Nixon, with his long history of anti-communism, could be trusted when he approached the communist leaders of China to truly have the best interests of the United States at heart.

So it is with David Wallace-West. By his own admission, he is a lifelong city-dwelller, fond of growth and gadgets, and until recently complacent about climate change.

"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 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."

– Page 6

So when David Wallace-West writes a book to explain how horrible the ongoing effects of climate change look to be, he engenders a greater level of trust that someone who supposedly has devoted his entire life to promoting the idea of human-caused climate change. He is unlikely to be accused of having some ulterior motive, such as a hidden agenda to promote the United Nations' Agenda 21 and secretly steal away freedom from hard-working Americans.

And that is what I have just read: a litany of the horrors that the climate change we are bringing down on our own heads portends — in monetary terms, through lost productivity and required adaptations like sea walls; in ancillary costs like hordes of climate refugees; and in sheer difficulty living with stronger storms and a generally hotter outdoors. And a good many of them are with us already, as he documents in the first chapter of his book, which he calls "Cascades."

"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."

– Page 16

Here is a brief extract from Cascades, to illustrate some of those current and projected impacts.

"Every degree of warming, it's been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP, and according to one recent paper, at 1.5 degrees the world would be about $20 trillion dollars richer than at 2 degrees. Turn the dial up another degree or two, and the costs balloon—the compound interest of environmental catastrophe. 3.7 (sic) degrees of warming would produce $551 trillion in damages, research suggests; total worldwide wealth is today about $280 trillion."1 (page 27)
"Beginning in 2011, about one million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought—and in a very real sense, much of the 'populist moment' the entire West is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants. The likely flooding of Bangladesh threatens to create ten times as many, or more, received by a world that will be even further destabilized by climate chaos—and, one suspects, less receptive the browner those in need. And then there will be the refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the rest of South Asia—140 million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, meaning more than a hundred times Europe's Syrian 'crisis.' " (page 7)
"To dwell on the more common 500-year figure just for a moment, it would mean a storm that struck once during the entire history of the Roman Empire.

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"One storm in all that time, is what the meteorological record has taught us to expect. Just one. 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.
"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. And then there was the new category of quotidian nightmare, climate change inventing the once-unimaginable category of obscure natural disasters—crises so large they once would 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." (page 17)

What Are You Prepared To Pay?

The situation before us is dire — but not hopeless. We have the tools to survive climate change with our civilization intact; all we have to do is pick them up and use them. Such is this author's essentially optimistic message — that, and that while eating vegan and driving electric are helpful, only concerted political action can move things quickly enough.

The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and [to] endure.

– Page 220

To those who scorn this book as mere fearmongering, I say: look to the skies. They are not falling. They are blowing up storms the likes of which we haven't seen. Long-term, the choice is simple: play around and perish, or get serious and prevail.

He follows this with twelve chapters that delve into the details of climate-change effects. The first of these deals with sheer heat buildup: an aspect of the problem that is given too little coverage. It makes the news when a high-school football player collapses during practice on a sultry day, and so do the occasional heat waves like the one in 2003 that killed 35,000 in Europe. We all understand the difficulty of working outdoors in summer's highest temperatures. Yet few appreciate the meaning of the temperature window sliding to the right, gradually boosting that season's minimum and maximum temperatures. For one thing, it has given us a new disease.

This chapter on "Heat Death" meanders a great deal, making it hard to sort out what is the most likely temperature rise for any given future year. It also veers off topic at one point, discussing carbon capture. However, it clearly conveys the gravity of the situation.

Fortunately, the remaining chapters of this section largely stay on topic. They are well written, and the one on hunger is excellent. Hunger, especially the projected loss of crop yields, is another underappreciated aspect of the problem.

In "The Climate Kaleidoscope," the author investigates various contemporary reactions to climate change. We learn, for example, about Guy McPherson, who predicts the extinction of humans within ten years2 and who now lives in the jungle of Belize. Apocalyptic films, including Interstellar and Mad Max: Fury Road, are discussed. Silicon Valley's techno-optimism is examined — both the conventional hope for the invention of some "silver bullet" clean energy source and the transhumanist quest for the advent of "uploading": transferring human minds into robot bodies. The author's tone here is respectful, not mocking; but I believe his intent is to convey some sense of how crazy things are getting.

Finally, in "The Anthropic Principle," he returns to the cosmological speculation first broached on pages 42 & 43, musing at length that climate change, more pervasive and protracted a civilization-stomper than global thermonuclear war, may be the answer to Enrico Fermi's legendary question "Where are the aliens?" I don't agree, but be that as it may, the essential point of this section — indeed of the whole book — is that our fate is in our hands: We have the knowledge and the tools to solve the problem of global warming.

I was put off by the wordy, meandering nature of "Cascades" and "Heat Death," and by the one-star reviews on Amazon3 that came to broadly similar conclusions. Nevertheless, I persisted — and was rewarded. Overall, the book is well written and conveys a great deal of information. Its author is deeply insightful and well-informed. He gives us here a useful compendium of data on climate change, enhanced by a good set of notes and an excellent index. I think his sentences are overly wordy, as well as having too many m-dashes and dependent clauses; but those are minor shortcomings. Though I reduce its rating one notch, I consider this book a must-read.

1 Although he doesn't specify, these temperatures are in Celsius.

2 A flexible deadline, apparently.

3 They are an unusually coherent set. In my experience on Amazon, one-star customer reviews generally pan books that treat climate change as a real problem — and often do so in a less-than-sensible manner.

Table of Contents for The Uninhabitable Earth

Errata for The Uninhabitable Earth