Wallace-Wells, David: The Uninhabitable Earth

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.1, 2

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In fact, all [mass extinctions] but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas.

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In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.10 Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before.

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The U.N. projections are bleaker: 200 million climate refugees by 2050.

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One reason carbon emissions have accelerated so much in the last generation is also an explanation for why history seems to be proceeding so much faster, with so much more happening, everywhere, each year, even every day: this is what results when there are simply that many more humans around. Fifteen percent of all human experience throughout history, it’s been estimated, belongs to people alive right now, each walking the earth with carbon footprints.

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This is part of what makes climate change what the theorist Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”—a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.43 There are many features of climate change—its size, its scope, its brutality—that, alone, satisfy this definition; together they might elevate it into a higher and more incomprehensible conceptual category yet. But time is perhaps the most mind-bending feature, the worst outcomes arriving so long from now that we reflexively discount their reality.

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As Naomi Oreskes has noted, there are far too many uncertainties in our models to take their predictions as gospel.

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We will, almost certainly, avoid eight degrees of warming; in fact, several recent papers have suggested the climate is actually less sensitive to emissions than we’d thought, and that even the upper bound of a business-as-usual path would bring us to about five degrees, with a likely destination around four. But five degrees is nearly as unthinkable as eight, and four degrees not much better: the world in a permanent food deficit, the Alps as arid as the Atlas Mountains.

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Because the planet is as big as it is, and as ecologically diverse; because humans have proven themselves an adaptable species, and will likely continue to adapt to outmaneuver a lethal threat; and because the devastating effects of warming will soon become too extreme to ignore, or deny, if they haven’t already; because of all that, it is unlikely that climate change will render the planet truly uninhabitable. But if we do nothing about carbon emissions, if the next thirty years of industrial activity trace the same arc upward as the last thirty years have, whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of this century.

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A few years ago, E. O. Wilson proposed a term, “Half-Earth,” to help us think through how we might adapt to the pressures of a changing climate, letting nature run its rehabilitative course on half the planet and sequestering humanity in the remaining, habitable half of the world.

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It would take a spectacular coincidence of bad choices and bad luck to make that kind of zero earth possible within our lifetime. But the fact that we have brought that nightmare eventuality into play at all is perhaps the overwhelming cultural and historical fact of the modern era—what historians of the future will likely study about us, and what we’d have hoped the generations before ours would have had the foresight to focus on, too.

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Perhaps because of the exhausting false debate about whether climate change is “real,” too many of us have developed a misleading impression that its effects are binary. But global warming is not “yes” or “no,” nor is it “today’s weather forever” or “doomsday tomorrow.” It is a function that gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas.

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The same is true for wildfires: this one or that one may be “caused” by a cookout or a downed power line, but each is burning faster, bigger, and longer because of global warming, which gives no reprieve to fire season. Climate change isn’t something happening here or there but everywhere, and all at once. And unless we choose to halt it, it will never stop.

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In fact, with one exception—Australia—countries with lower GDPs will warm the most.

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… how desertification of the entire Mediterranean Basin will change our reading of the Odyssey, or how it will discolor the shine of Greek islands for dust from the Sahara to permanently blanket their skies, or how it will recast the meaning of the Pyramids for the Nile to be dramatically drained. We will think of the border with Mexico differently, presumably, when the Rio Grande is a line traced through a dry riverbed—the Rio Sand, it’s already been called.

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The imperious West has spent five centuries looking down its nose at the plight of those living within the pale of tropical disease, and one wonders how that will change when mosquitoes carrying malaria and dengue are flying through the streets of Copenhagen and Chicago, too. But we have for so long understood stories about nature as allegories that we seem unable to recognize that the meaning of climate change is not sequestered in parable. It encompasses us; in a very real way it governs us—our crop yields, our pandemics, our migration patterns and civil wars, crime waves and domestic assaults, hurricanes and heat waves and rain bombs and megadroughts, the shape of our economic growth and everything that flows downstream from it, which today means nearly everything.

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Eight hundred million in South Asia alone, the World Bank says, would see their living conditions sharply diminish by 2050 on the current emissions track, and perhaps a climate slowdown will even reveal the bounty of what Andreas Malm calls fossil capitalism to be an illusion, sustained over just a few centuries by the arithmetic of adding the energy value of burned fossil fuels to what had been, before wood and coal and oil, an eternal Malthusian trap. In which case, we would have to retire the intuition that history will inevitably extract material progress from the planet, at least in any reliable or global pattern, and come to terms, somehow, with just how pervasively that intuition ruled even our inner lives, often tyrannically.

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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 $20 trillion richer than at 2 degrees.101, 102 Turn the dial up another degree or two, and the costs balloon—the compound interest of environmental catastrophe. 3.7 degrees of warming would produce $551 trillion in damages, research suggests; total worldwide wealth is today about $280 trillion.103, 104 Our current emissions trajectory takes us over 4 degrees by 2100; multiply that by that 1 percent of GDP and you have almost entirely wiped out the very possibility of economic growth, which has not topped 5 percent globally in over forty years.

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That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair, however incomprehensively large and complicated we find the processes that have brought it into being; that we know we are, ourselves, responsible for all of its punishing effects should be empowering, and not just perversely. Global warming is, after all, a human invention. And the flip side of our real-time guilt is that we remain in command.

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The planet’s future will be determined in large part by the arc of growth in the developing world—that’s where most of the people are, in China and India and, increasingly, sub-Saharan Africa. But this is no absolution for the West, where the average citizen produces many times more emissions than almost anyone in Asia, just out of habit. I toss out tons of wasted food and hardly ever recycle; I leave my air-conditioning on; I bought into Bitcoin at the peak of the market. None of that is necessary, either.

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Almost as a prophylactic against climate guilt, as the news from science has grown bleaker, Western liberals have comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into performances of moral or environmental purity—less beef, more Teslas, fewer transatlantic flights. But the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics

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In Saudi Arabia, where summer temperatures often approach that mark, 700,000 barrels of oil are burned each day in the summer, mostly to power the nation’s air-conditioning.

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The world’s natural wheat belt is moving poleward by about 160 miles each decade, but you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, and not just because it’s difficult to suddenly clear the land occupied now by towns, highways, office parks, and industrial installations. Yields in places like remote areas of Canada and Russia, even if they warmed by a few degrees, would be limited by the quality of soil there, since it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt. The lands that are fertile are the ones we are already using, and the climate is changing much too fast to wait for the northern soil to catch up. That soil, believe it or not, is literally disappearing—75 billion tons of soil lost each year. In the United States, the rate of erosion is ten times as high as the natural replenishment rate; in China and India, it is thirty to forty times as fast.

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In 1879, the naturalist John Wesley Powell, who spent his downtime as a soldier during the Battle of Vicksburg studying the rocks that filled the Union trenches, divined a natural boundary running due north along the 100th meridian. It separated the humid—and therefore cultivatable—natural farmland of what became the Midwest from the arid, spectacular, but less farmable land of the true West. The divide ran through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, and stretches south into Mexico and north into Manitoba, Canada, separating more densely populated communities full of large farms from sparser, open land that was never truly made valuable by agriculture. Since just 1980, that boundary has moved fully 140 miles east, almost to the 98th parallel, drying up hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland in the process. The planet’s only other similar boundary is the one separating the Sahara desert from the rest of Africa. That desert has expanded by 10 percent, too; in the winter, the figure is 18 percent.

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In the half century since, not only has the world’s population doubled but the fraction of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by a factor of about six—from just more than half of humanity to 10 percent. In the world’s developing countries, undernourishment has dropped from more than 30 percent in 1970 to close to 10 percent today.

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This is one reason that our global climate fate will be shaped so overwhelmingly by the development patterns of China and India, who have the tragic burden of trying to bring many hundreds of millions more into the global middle class while knowing that the easy paths taken by the nations that industrialized in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries are now paths to climate chaos. Which is not to say they won’t follow them anyway: by 2050, milk consumption in China is expected to grow to triple the current level, thanks to the changing, West-facing tastes of its emerging consumer classes, a single-item boom in a single country that is expected, all by itself, to increase global greenhouse-gas emissions from dairy farming by about 35 percent.

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To avoid dangerous climate change, Greenpeace has estimated that the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050; everything we know about what happens when countries get wealthier suggests this will be close to impossible

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A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism. It is the subject of William Vollmann’s grand, two-part Carbon Ideologies, which opens—beyond the epigraph “A crime is something someone else commits,” from Steinbeck—like this: “Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all.” For much of the book’s prologue, he writes in a past tense rendered from an imagined, devastated future. “Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say,” he writes. “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

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Precipitation is notoriously hard to model in detail, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: both unprecedented droughts and unprecedented flood-producing rains. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American Dust Bowl ever was.

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Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed.34 Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

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Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse.” “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history—[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

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A paradise dreamscape erected in a barren desert, L.A. has always been an impossible city, as Mike Davis has so brilliantly written. The sight of flames straddling the eight-lane I-405 is a reminder that it is still impossible. In fact, getting more so. For a time, we had come to believe that civilization moved in the other direction—making the impossible first possible and then stable and routine. With climate change, we are moving instead toward nature, and chaos, into a new realm unbounded by the analogy of any human experience.

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What is coming? Much more fire, much more often, burning much more land. Over the last five decades, the wildfire season in the western United States has already grown by two and a half months; of the ten years with the most wildfire activity on record, nine have occurred since 2000.15 Globally, since just 1979, the season has grown by nearly 20 percent, and American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970.

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By 2050, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again, and in some places within the United States the area burned could grow fivefold.17 For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple. What this means is that at three degrees of warming, our likely benchmark for the end of the century, the United States might be dealing with sixteen times as much devastation from fire as we are today, when in a single year ten million acres were burned.18 At four degrees of warming, the fire season would be four times worse still. The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017.19 “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.”

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By 2030, according to the same report, India will have only half the water it needs. In 1947, when the country was formed, per capita water availability in Pakistan stood at 5,000 cubic meters; today, thanks mostly to population growth, it is at 1,000; and soon continued growth and climate change will bring it down to 400.24

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In the last hundred years, many of the planet’s largest lakes have begun drying up, from the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the world’s fourth largest and which has lost more than 90 percent of its volume in recent decades, to Lake Mead, which supplies much of Las Vegas’s water and has lost as much as 400 billion gallons in a single year.25 Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second biggest, has completely disappeared; Iran’s Lake Urmia has shrunk more than 80 percent in thirty years.26, 27 Lake Chad has more or less evaporated entirely.28 Climate change is only one factor in this story, but its impact is not going to shrink over time.

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We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. But ultimately those choices are, in almost all cases, trivial contributors, ones that blind us to the more important forces. When it comes to freshwater, the bigger picture is this: personal consumption amounts to such a thin sliver that only in the most extreme droughts can it even make a difference.

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That doesn’t mean we are at risk of suffocation—oxygen is far too abundant for that—but we will nevertheless suffer. With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

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The effects are more pronounced indoors, where CO2 tends to build up—that’s one reason you probably feel a little more awake when taking a brisk walk outside than you do after spending a long day inside with the windows closed.

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In recent years, researchers have uncovered a whole secret history of adversity woven into the experience of the last half century by the hand of leaded gasoline and lead paint, which seem to have dramatically increased rates of intellectual disability and criminality, and dramatically decreased educational attainment and lifetime earnings, wherever they were introduced.

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Small-particulate pollution, for instance, lowers cognitive performance over time so much that researchers call the effect “huge”: reducing Chinese pollution to the EPA standard, for instance, would improve the country’s verbal test scores by 13 percent and its math scores by 8 percent.

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A higher pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to reduce earnings and labor force participation at age thirty, and the relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight of babies is so strong that the simple introduction of E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems, in the vicinity of toll plazas, by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, just by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars slowed to pay the toll.

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And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

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One theory is the negative cognitive effects of direct heat and air pollution, both of which are accumulating more research support by the day. And whether or not that theory explains the great stagnation of the last several decades, we do know that, globally, warmer temperatures do dampen worker productivity. The claim seems both far-fetched and intuitive, since, on the one hand, you don’t imagine a few ticks of temperature would turn entire economies into zombie markets, and since, on the other, you yourself have surely labored at work on a hot day with the air-conditioning out and understand how hard that can be. The bigger-picture perspective is harder to swallow, at least at first. It may sound like geographic determinism, but Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel have identified an optimal annual average temperature for economic productivity: 13 degrees Celsius, which just so happens to be the historical median for the United States and several other of the world’s biggest economies.17 Today, the U.S. climate hovers around 13.4 degrees, which translates into less than 1 percent of GDP loss—though, like compound interest, the effects grow over time.

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Over the last several decades, policy consensus has cautioned that the world would only tolerate responses to climate change if they were free—or, even better, if they could be presented as avenues of economic opportunity. That market logic was probably always shortsighted, but over the last several years, as the cost of adaptation in the form of green energy has fallen so dramatically, the equation has entirely flipped: we now know that it will be much, much more expensive to not act on climate than to take even the most aggressive action today.

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Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation.16, 17, 18 The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration; and even in simulations, police officers are more likely to fire on intruders when the exercises are conducted in hotter weather.

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In Ecuador, climate damage has been seen even in middle-class children, who bear the mark of rainfall shocks and extreme temperatures on their wages twenty to sixty years after the fact. The effects begin in the womb, and they are universal, with measurable declines in lifetime earnings for every day over ninety degrees during a baby’s nine months in utero.

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Heat produces violence and conflict between people, we know, and so it should probably not surprise us that it also generates a spike in violence against oneself. Each increase of a single degree Celsius in monthly temperature is associated with almost a percentage point rise of the suicide rate in the United States, and more than two percentage points in Mexico; an unmitigated emissions scenario could produce 40,000 additional suicides in these countries by 2050.

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In its swaggering twentieth century, the United States built two states of paradise: Florida, out of dismal swamp, and Southern California, out of desert. By 2100, neither will endure as Edenic postcards.

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Should anything save us, it will be technology. But you need more than tautologies to save the planet, and, especially within the futurist fraternity of Silicon Valley, technologists have little more than fairy tales to offer. Over the last decade, consumer adoration has anointed those founders and venture capitalists something like shamans, Ouija-boarding their way toward blueprints for the world’s future. But conspicuously few of them seem meaningfully concerned about climate change. Instead, they make parsimonious investments in green energy (Bill Gates aside) and fewer still philanthropic payouts (Bill Gates again aside), and often express the perspective, outlined by Eric Schmidt, that climate change has already been solved, in the sense that a solution has been made inevitable by the speed of technological change—or even by the introduction of a particular self-advancing technology, namely machine intelligence, or AI.

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Nick Bostrom, the pioneering philosopher of AI, has managed it. In an influential 2002 paper taxonomizing what he called “existential risks,” he outlined twenty-three of them—risks “where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.”3 Bostrom is not a lone doomsday intellectual but one of the leading thinkers currently strategizing ways of corralling, or at any rate conceptualizing, what they consider the species-sized threat from an out-of-control AI. But he does include climate change on his big-picture risk list. He puts it in the subcategory “Bangs,” which he defines as the possibility that “earth-originating intelligent life goes extinct in relatively sudden disaster resulting from either an accident or a deliberate act of destruction.” “Bangs” is the longest of his sub-lists; climate change shares the category with, among others, Badly programmed superintelligence and We’re living in a simulation and it gets shut down.

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That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled.6 In 1987, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Robert Solow famously commented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

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This has been, even more so, the experience of most of those living in the developed world in the decades since—rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being. It is probably one explanation for contemporary political discontent—a perception that the world is being almost entirely remade, but in a way that leaves you, as delighted as you may be by Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and Google Maps,

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This has been, even more so, the experience of most of those living in the developed world in the decades since—rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being. It is probably one explanation for contemporary political discontent—a perception that the world is being almost entirely remade, but in a way that leaves you, as delighted as you may be by Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and Google Maps, more or less exactly where you were before.

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All of that and much, much more: intensive infrastructure projects at every level and in every corner of human activity, from new plane fleets to new land use and right down to a new way of making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world—an industry that is booming, by the way, thanks to China, which recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century.15 If the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter.

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On perhaps no issue more than climate is that liberal posture of well-off enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.

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Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s. Xi, now the leader-for-life of the planet’s rising superpower, seems to feel mutual obligations to the country’s growing prosperity and to the health and security of its people—of whom, it’s worth remembering, it has so many.

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But on the matter of climate change, China does hold nearly all the cards. To the extent the world as a whole needs a stable climate to endure or thrive, its fate will be determined much more by the carbon trajectories of the developing world than by the course of the United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though how dramatic a decline, and how soon, is very much up in the air.

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In 2018, an illuminating study was published comparing how much a country was likely to be burdened by the economic impacts of climate change to its responsibility for global warming, measured by carbon emissions. The fate of India showcased the moral logic of climate change at its most grotesque: expected to be, by far, the world’s most hard-hit country, shouldering nearly twice as much of the burden as the next nation, India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt. China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden. Which, unfortunately, means it may be tempted to slow-walk its green energy revolution. The United States, the study found, presented a case of eerie karmic balance: its expected climate damages matching almost precisely its share of global carbon emissions. Not to say either share is small; in fact, of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.

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Kingsnorth is more of a true Stoic. “And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time?” He offers five tentative answers. Numbers 2 through 4 are variations on new transcendentalist themes: “preserving nonhuman life,” “getting your hands dirty,” and “insisting that nature has value beyond utility.” Numbers 1 and 5 are the more radical ones, and form a pair: “withdrawing” and “building refuges.”

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To the average citizen of each of these countries, the criticism may seem extreme, but it arises from a very clearheaded calculus: the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.

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When Robert Oppenheimer, the actual head of Los Alamos, later reflected on the meaning of the bomb, he famously said he was reminded, in the flash of the first successful nuclear test, of a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”12 But the interview was years later, when Oppenheimer had become the pacifist conscience of America’s nuclear age—for which, naturally, he had his security clearance revoked. According to his brother, Frank, who was also there when Oppenheimer watched the detonation of the device nicknamed “the gadget,” he said only, “It worked.”