“The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells

Recently Fareed Zakaria, on his Global Public Square program, interviewed author David Wallace-Wells, national fellow at the New America Foundation and deputy editor of New York Magazine, concerning his book “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” (2019, Tim Duggan Books).

In reviewing the book, I won’t try to predict how much warming in the next decades will happen for any set of policy choices, but it’s clear that as individuals we all inherit the moral dilemmas.

I can remember in the late 1980s people talked about global warming a bit when there were unprecedented western wildfires.  I recall the awakening from Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2005; it was the next-to-last movie my late mother would go to.  I thought that the science Gore offered in terms of calculus: the derivative of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere – the second derivative, in fact.

The book has four parts: “Cascades”, “Elements of Chaos”, “The Climate Kaleidoscope”, “The Anthropic Principle”.  The second part goes over in detail all the specific perils, and the third part more or less covers the politics and ethics of solutions, although speculatively and without much specifics that matter to individuals.

The chaos includes flooding and sea level rise, unpredictable methane release from permafrost (less so from cows),  ocean death, wildfires, air pollution, economic collapse, and wars. All of this is expected, but, yes, “it really will be so bad”, or worse. One of the most surprising predictions is that the pollution will lead to loss of cognitive function for most people, undermining the ability of people to really solve these problems technologically. That sets up the “escape Earth” filter that is set up in my own novel and screenplay drafts. It really could turn into survival of the fittest.

Wells doesn’t predict how much the various technological solutions (electrify everything, solar panels) cost or how workable they are.  One can imagine issues like rare earth metal shortages (or held by enemy countries);  maybe you do need to mine the Moon or asteroids.

In the third part, he makes some interesting comparisons to other problems, like plastic waste, or colony collapse disorder for bees.

He does say that individual lifestyle changes (going Vegan, avoiding driving fossil fuel cars, not flying) are unlikely to matter much, but policy changes will matter.

But a bigger problem is that the rich countries have already used more than any fair share of fossil fuels, and the biggest problems will be use by China and developing countries, whatever western countries do.

The last section discusses the Anthropic Principle and Drake Equation, and the question of why we don’t get visited by obvious aliens. (There is Roswell, of course.)  Wells makes the point that technological or industrial civilizations tend to destroy themselves in a few generations; so if there had been thousands in our galaxy since the beginning of time, they might all be gone now.  It’s like the fact that snow melts after it falls.  And people can’t look young forever.

There’s one more thing. Centrist politicians are able to make something out of a moral obligation of individuals today to future generations.  Religious traditions also do that. But as we know Trump seems to have joined the climate denial crowd, because the “sacrifices” proposed by neoliberals (Wells does criticize neoliberalism) tend to hit the rural working class the hardest.  A populist would say, we can just let our future progeny figure out how to deal with this for themselves as they grow up.  The immigration debate has a similar dilemma:  the right wing (especially in Europe) maintains that it is more important to take care of your own first.  So it is really hard to come to any consensus on the moral obligations of the individual in dealing with it.  But localism makes sense.

Author: David Wallace-Wells  (Andrea Lau, Richard Green, Paustius/Shutterstock

Title, Subtitle:    “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming“

publication date               2019

ISBN      978-0-525-57672-3

Publication:        Tim Duggan Books, 4 parts, hardcover, 310 pages, indexed, endnotes

Link:       Publishers Weekly

(Posted: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 8:30 PM EST)