David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth expands on his 2017 article of the same name in New York, where he’s deputy editor. It quickly became that magazine’s most viewed article ever. Some accused Wallace-Wells of sensationalism for focusing on the most extreme possibilities of what may come if we keep spewing carbon compounds skyward (as suggested by his title and his ominous opening line, the answer “is, I promise, worse than you think”). Whatever the article’s lurid appeal, I felt at the time of its publication that its detractors were mainly evading the message by maligning the messenger. (...)
The preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 parts per million. We are now at 410 ppm. The last time that was the case, three million years ago, seas were about 80 feet higher. A rise of 2 degrees Celsius would be around 450 ppm, but, says Wallace-Wells, we’re currently headed beyond 500 ppm. The last time that happened on Earth, seas were 130 feet higher, he writes, envisioning an eastern seaboard moved miles inland, to Interstate 95. Forget Long Island, New York City, and nearly half of New Jersey. It’s unclear how long it takes for oceans to rise in accordance with CO2 concentrations, but you wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.
Unfortunately, we’re set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree increases in the next few decades and keep going. We’re presently on course for a rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more—our current trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase by this century’s end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics “would not be able to move around outside without dying,” Wallace-Wells writes. (...)
Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. “The way I see it,” she said, “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.” Like many other scientists Wallace-Wells cites, she has known for decades how bad things are, and seen how little the Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden administrations did about it—even in consultation with Obama’s prescient science adviser, physicist John Holdren, who first wrote about rising atmospheric CO2 in 1969. For the politicians, it was always, foremost, about the economy.
Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes:
He allows that through carbon-capture or geoengineering “or other now-unfathomable innovations, we may conjure new solutions,” but at best, he says, these will “bring the planet closer to a state we would today regard as merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.” Having read for years about geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight back into space by sending up planes to seed the stratosphere with sulfates, and to enhance the reflectivity of clouds by spraying salt to brighten them, and about machines that can suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I know of some who might challenge that—but so far, none of these ideas has reached even a pilot level, let alone commercialization scale.
Current carbon-capture prototypes filter CO2 from a polluter’s exhaust so that it can be converted back into more carbon-based fuel. But this would require building enough machines to cleanse the entire atmosphere of emissions from every company and cookfire, and then burying all that captured CO2 so it can never escape—a huge and dubious undertaking. Likewise, a program to deflect solar radiation by spraying particles—as Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption did in 1991, slightly cooling the climate for two years before its dust settled back to Earth—would have to continue in perpetuity to work. Such a program would alter planetary rainfall patterns in unpredictable ways and do nothing to curb ocean acidification. Imagine getting all the world’s nations to agree to tinker with the atmosphere if it meant some of them might end up even drier than before. Several major environmental organizations that once opposed such schemes are now willing to discuss them (the goals of the Paris Agreement depend on yet-uninvented mass-scale technologies to remove atmospheric carbon), underscoring Wallace-Wells’s argument that the situation is dire indeed.
The Uninhabitable Earth makes only scant reference to the holocaust that climate change is wreaking on biodiversity. (One million species are now at risk of extinction, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported recently.) But Wallace-Wells’s impulse to focus on our own selfish stake in unfolding events probably makes sense—this future is real, and it’s ours. As desperate as we are to know what to do next, enlightening us about that isn’t his objective: getting our attention is. (...)
So how do we go on? That has been Bill McKibben’s abiding concern ever since the publication in 1989 of The End of Nature, a book so well known that people who’ve never read it regularly refer to it. Its premise is that since humans altered the entire atmosphere, which touches everything on Earth, there is no truly pristine nature left. His latest book, Falter—much like his 2010 book, Eaarth, but nearly a decade deeper into the maw—begins with a clear-eyed, detailed assessment of what we’re now up against. McKibben describes just how much trouble we’re in, yet his voice is so calm, his examples so fresh and unexpected (the book begins with a meditation on roofing, of all things), that you easily glide into his lucid, engaging contemplation of the potential end of human civilization. Later in Falter, when he describes just as equably what we must do to prevent it, you believe it’s still worth trying. (...)
In a chapter that begins “Oh, it could get very bad,” he discusses a study in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology concluding that by 2100 the oceans may be too hot for phytoplankton to photosynthesize. (Another study I’ve seen, in Nature, suggests that since 1950 phytoplankton populations worldwide may have decreased by up to 40 percent, correlating to rising sea-surface temperatures.) Just as we fail to realize how much extra CO2 is in the air because it’s invisible, it’s hard to grasp how immense—and immensely bad—this news is. Tiny phytoplankton float in the ocean practically unnoticed, yet they constitute half the organic matter on Earth and provide, as McKibben notes, “two-thirds of the earth’s oxygen.” Their loss, he quotes the study’s author, “would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
And that’s just the effects from heat. Absorption of CO2 has already made the ocean 30 percent more acidic, with pH expected to decline “well beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate” by the end of this century, he writes, citing another paper. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current acidification rates of seas and lakes already may be the highest in 300 million years.
McKibben shares some other harrowing examples of threatened fauna, from insects to lions, but although it’s been understood since Noah’s time that we need other species, readers best relate to our own, so like Wallace-Wells McKibben soon circles back to humans. Major cities like Cape Town and São Paulo (and several in India and China) have come within mere days of running out of water; it’s just a matter of time until one does. Outdoor work and maintenance will be halted more frequently as urban thermometers exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Grain harvests will drop as temperatures rise. Insurance companies will go bankrupt after successive biblical storms destroy trillions of dollars of property. Refugees running everywhere. This won’t stop.
by Alan Weisman, NYRB | Read more:
The preindustrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 parts per million. We are now at 410 ppm. The last time that was the case, three million years ago, seas were about 80 feet higher. A rise of 2 degrees Celsius would be around 450 ppm, but, says Wallace-Wells, we’re currently headed beyond 500 ppm. The last time that happened on Earth, seas were 130 feet higher, he writes, envisioning an eastern seaboard moved miles inland, to Interstate 95. Forget Long Island, New York City, and nearly half of New Jersey. It’s unclear how long it takes for oceans to rise in accordance with CO2 concentrations, but you wouldn’t want to find out the hard way.
Unfortunately, we’re set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree increases in the next few decades and keep going. We’re presently on course for a rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more—our current trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase by this century’s end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics “would not be able to move around outside without dying,” Wallace-Wells writes. (...)Just before the 2016 elections, a respected biologist at an environmental NGO told me she actually considered voting for Trump. “The way I see it,” she said, “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.” Like many other scientists Wallace-Wells cites, she has known for decades how bad things are, and seen how little the Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden administrations did about it—even in consultation with Obama’s prescient science adviser, physicist John Holdren, who first wrote about rising atmospheric CO2 in 1969. For the politicians, it was always, foremost, about the economy.
Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes:
The entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power.This is our daily denial, which now flies in our faces on hurricane winds, or drops as hot ashes from our immolated forests and homes: growth is how we measure economic health, and growth must be literally fueled. Other than nuclear energy, which has its own problems, no form of energy is so concentrated, and none so cheap or portable, as carbon. By exhuming hundreds of millions of years’ worth of buried organic matter and burning it in a couple of centuries, we built our dazzling modern civilization, not noticing that its wastes were amassing overhead. Now we’re finally paying attention, because hell is starting to rain down. (...)
He allows that through carbon-capture or geoengineering “or other now-unfathomable innovations, we may conjure new solutions,” but at best, he says, these will “bring the planet closer to a state we would today regard as merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.” Having read for years about geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight back into space by sending up planes to seed the stratosphere with sulfates, and to enhance the reflectivity of clouds by spraying salt to brighten them, and about machines that can suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I know of some who might challenge that—but so far, none of these ideas has reached even a pilot level, let alone commercialization scale.
Current carbon-capture prototypes filter CO2 from a polluter’s exhaust so that it can be converted back into more carbon-based fuel. But this would require building enough machines to cleanse the entire atmosphere of emissions from every company and cookfire, and then burying all that captured CO2 so it can never escape—a huge and dubious undertaking. Likewise, a program to deflect solar radiation by spraying particles—as Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption did in 1991, slightly cooling the climate for two years before its dust settled back to Earth—would have to continue in perpetuity to work. Such a program would alter planetary rainfall patterns in unpredictable ways and do nothing to curb ocean acidification. Imagine getting all the world’s nations to agree to tinker with the atmosphere if it meant some of them might end up even drier than before. Several major environmental organizations that once opposed such schemes are now willing to discuss them (the goals of the Paris Agreement depend on yet-uninvented mass-scale technologies to remove atmospheric carbon), underscoring Wallace-Wells’s argument that the situation is dire indeed.
The Uninhabitable Earth makes only scant reference to the holocaust that climate change is wreaking on biodiversity. (One million species are now at risk of extinction, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported recently.) But Wallace-Wells’s impulse to focus on our own selfish stake in unfolding events probably makes sense—this future is real, and it’s ours. As desperate as we are to know what to do next, enlightening us about that isn’t his objective: getting our attention is. (...)
So how do we go on? That has been Bill McKibben’s abiding concern ever since the publication in 1989 of The End of Nature, a book so well known that people who’ve never read it regularly refer to it. Its premise is that since humans altered the entire atmosphere, which touches everything on Earth, there is no truly pristine nature left. His latest book, Falter—much like his 2010 book, Eaarth, but nearly a decade deeper into the maw—begins with a clear-eyed, detailed assessment of what we’re now up against. McKibben describes just how much trouble we’re in, yet his voice is so calm, his examples so fresh and unexpected (the book begins with a meditation on roofing, of all things), that you easily glide into his lucid, engaging contemplation of the potential end of human civilization. Later in Falter, when he describes just as equably what we must do to prevent it, you believe it’s still worth trying. (...)
In a chapter that begins “Oh, it could get very bad,” he discusses a study in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology concluding that by 2100 the oceans may be too hot for phytoplankton to photosynthesize. (Another study I’ve seen, in Nature, suggests that since 1950 phytoplankton populations worldwide may have decreased by up to 40 percent, correlating to rising sea-surface temperatures.) Just as we fail to realize how much extra CO2 is in the air because it’s invisible, it’s hard to grasp how immense—and immensely bad—this news is. Tiny phytoplankton float in the ocean practically unnoticed, yet they constitute half the organic matter on Earth and provide, as McKibben notes, “two-thirds of the earth’s oxygen.” Their loss, he quotes the study’s author, “would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
And that’s just the effects from heat. Absorption of CO2 has already made the ocean 30 percent more acidic, with pH expected to decline “well beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate” by the end of this century, he writes, citing another paper. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current acidification rates of seas and lakes already may be the highest in 300 million years.
McKibben shares some other harrowing examples of threatened fauna, from insects to lions, but although it’s been understood since Noah’s time that we need other species, readers best relate to our own, so like Wallace-Wells McKibben soon circles back to humans. Major cities like Cape Town and São Paulo (and several in India and China) have come within mere days of running out of water; it’s just a matter of time until one does. Outdoor work and maintenance will be halted more frequently as urban thermometers exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Grain harvests will drop as temperatures rise. Insurance companies will go bankrupt after successive biblical storms destroy trillions of dollars of property. Refugees running everywhere. This won’t stop.
Image: Richard Misrach: Untitled, 2007
