... brilliant ... At the heart of Wallace-Wells’s book is a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet ... gives readers’ emotions a thorough workout along that pessimism-to-despair spectrum, before we are brought round to the writer’s 'acceptance of responsibility.' I stress the emotional aspect because it is crucial: We are facing a call to action that we are, on the evidence of our behavior so far, likely to ignore, unless we directly feel its urgency.
If climate change is, as this book successfully argues, a game-changer for everyone, everywhere, all the time, then let’s reflect that in the discourse ... David Wallace-Wells offers a good starting point. His book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, scares us with tales from a future climate-changed world that transcend climate science. Not since Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature 30 years ago have we been told what climate change will mean in such vivid terms ... the dynamic of optimism vs. pessimism over the future [is] something Wallace-Wells deals with well ... The most interesting part of this excellent book is where Wallace-Wells moves on to wonder whether this pattern of climate denial might continue into a 'hothouse Earth' of supercyclones, megafloods, droughts without end and killer heat waves.
Wallace-Wells avoids the 'eerily banal language of climatology' in favor of lush, rolling prose. The sentences in this book are potent and evocative, though after a while of envisioning such unremitting destruction—page upon page of toddlers dying, plagues released by melting permafrost and wildfires incinerating tourists at seaside resorts—I began to feel like a voyeur at an atrocity exhibition ... I found this lurching between sweet hopefulness on the one hand and lurid pessimism on the other to be bewildering, like a heat wave followed by a blizzard. But then Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change and collective action, which 'is, dramatically, a snore.'
Forget uplift: Wallace-Wells offered no can-do optimism, no hopeful urges to stop using plastic straws. His was instead a relentlessly grim portrait of where we are today, and where, barring mass mobilization, we’re headed ... Every page presents a horror show of facts and figures ... While some climate journalists tend couch gloomy statistics within the softening context of narrative—poor fishermen! sad polar bears!—Wallace-Wells gives us the goods, neat. The resulting book is refreshingly clear-eyed: Wallace-Wells respects his readers enough not to scrub his message of its bleakness, and lets the facts speak for themselves. (His claims are backed up in a voluminous and surprisingly engaging notes section.) At times the prose collapses under its own weight, but mostly the sentences gust and howl, holding the reader with the hurricane-like force of their terrifying beauty ... Wallace-Wells is a true rhetorician, and in climate change he has found a subject well suited to the incantatory power of his voice.
... [the book offers] valuable perspectives ... One criticism of the book is that it favors worst-case scenarios. Indeed, when it comes to extrapolating the human impacts of climate change, researchers must rely on separate models of the planet, its ecosystems and, say, human economic behavior ... There is a broader point in The Uninhabitable Earth that Wallace-Wells makes eloquently — one that must become part of how we think about climate change ... To me, this is one of the great strengths of The Uninhabitable Earth. It's the recognition that we are already quite far down the road toward a different kind of Earth. Most importantly, keeping civilization up and running on this new version of the planet will depend on our collective actions right now. Wallace-Wells' instinct for telling this story is, more than anything, what makes the book worthwhile.
...a frightening, compelling text that re-raises the question: In the face of existential threat, what role can storytelling hope to play? ... Wallace-Wells is an extremely adept storyteller, simultaneously urgent and humane despite the technical difficulty of his subject ... he takes pains to explain where in the world things will be the worst (usually poorer places closer to the equator) ... Wallace-Wells does a terrifyingly good job of moving between the specific and the abstract ... Each chapter is complete enough to work as a standalone essay, and yet together they serve as....well, if I had to sum it up, a critique of our perception that the human story is one of progress ... One frustrating part of the book, though, is the way it simultaneously backs up its central thesis—it is worse than you think—while consistently reassuring us that there is still time to do something about it ... The Uninhabitable Earth isn’t a guide to how to actually do this, though it does suggest that the barriers to action aren’t as high as we think ... He inverts a somewhat classic debate on liberal hypocrisy so delicately I gasped ... What I can’t help but wish is that it also offered them a plan, in part because Wallace-Wells has proven himself to be such a skilled argument-maker and remarkable storyteller on the hardest subject of our time.
The book is extremely effective in shaking the reader out of that complacency. Some things I did not want to learn, but learned anyway ... For a relatively short book, The Uninhabitable Earth covers a great deal of cursed ground – drought, floods, wildfires, economic crises, political instability, the collapse of the myth of progress – and reading it can feel like taking a hop-on hop-off tour of the future’s sprawling hellscape ... But to read The Uninhabitable Earth – or to consider in any serious way the scale of the crisis we face – is to understand the collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism.
There is much to learn from this book. From media and scientific reports of the past decade, Wallace-Wells sifts key predictions and conveys them in vivid prose ... For those not steeped in news about climate change, this is a lively introduction to both the latest predictions and their uncertainties. Wallace-Wells not only summarises recent projections, but excavates important unifying themes ... If you’ve snoozed through or turned away from the climate change news, this book will waken and update you. If you’re steeped in the unfolding climate drama, Wallace-Wells’s voice and perspective will be stimulating ... The valuable core of the book is contained within a rind of unnecessary exaggeration ... This is not a book of solutions. Wallace-Wells outlines some political and economic pathways – taxes and public investments – but gives them little exposition. He’s dismissive about the value of changes in individual behaviours ... The book’s greatest omission is a lack of fieldwork. In its pages, we don’t go into the streets to talk to people, to hear their insights and perspectives.
The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. This book is meant to scare the hell out of us ... The Uninhabitable Earth might be best taken a chapter at a time; it’s almost too painful to absorb otherwise. But pain is Wallace-Wells’s strategy, as is his agonizing repetition of how unprecedented these changes are, and how deadly. 'The facts are hysterical,' he says, as he piles on more examples ... I encourage people to read this book. Wallace-Wells has maniacally absorbed masses of detail and scoured all the articles most readers couldn’t finish or tried to forget, or skipped because they just couldn’t take yet another bummer. Wallace-Wells has been faulted for not offering solutions—but really, what could he say? ... The Uninhabitable Earth makes only scant reference to the holocaust that climate change is wreaking on biodiversity ... 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.
... The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, is unabashedly pornographic. It is also riveting ... In the hands of a lesser writer, this litany of woe might have degenerated into one of the dry treatises on which he draws. But whereas his chapters—on the impacts of extreme weather, sea levels, human health, economic consequences and so on—echo reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, his elegant, accessible prose does not ... [Wallace-Wells] has a point when he says that exercising caution over warning signs is tantamount to complacency. Occasionally, however, he could exercise a bit more of it himself ... [Wallace-Wells] nevertheless gets the big things right.
The question is not so much whether climate change is alarming, but whether anything can be achieved through an attitude of alarmism ... On the cover of The Uninhabitable Earth lies the corpse of a single bee. Scaring people into action may be our best hope.
But if the book is justified in discussing worst-case scenarios, Wallace-Wells repeatedly confuses the message by bouncing between alarm and caution ... Books should also have deeper narratives than magazine pieces, and The Uninhabitable Earth doesn’t. Wallace-Wells speculates about climate doomsday from every possible angle, but says little about the tremendous global progress in reducing wind or solar power costs ... The book suffers from unnecessary hyperbole, too ... Yet the time to slow climate change is running out, so perhaps the tone of The Uninhabitable Earth is a necessary response. If the book inspires a new generation of climate activists, more power to Wallace-Wells.
Wallace-Wells has assembled the best of this already selective science to paint a picture containing 'enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic' ... A sense of such self-awareness occurs from time to time in the book ... Those looking for solutions are going to be disappointed, as Wallace-Wells offers very little. He is seemingly ambivalent about the environmental left and refuses to place much blame for inaction of climate policy on Republicans or fossil fuel interests in the US.
The Uninhabitable Earth is an example of the class of writing the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has described as ‘ecological information data dump’: quantities of frightening and confusing information, mostly out of date by the time of publication, ‘shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing facts’. Morton believes this approach is unhelpful, and that it is essentially a symptom of the diffuse psychological pain caused by climate change—an attempt to prepare us for what has in fact already happened. And most of what Wallace-Wells describes has already happened ... Wallace-Wells is scathing about the oil industry, whose disinformation clogs public discourse and waylays political processes ... What will real action look like, if and when it finally comes? Wallace-Wells reminds us that we have the tools to change things, and even—a rare moment of optimism—‘to stop it all.'
As a fellow non-environmentalist who stumbled journalistically into climate change as a 'story' some 15 or so years ago, I have some sympathy for Wallace-Wells ... What I found disappointing is that his grim journey of discovery does not yet appear to have widened his circle of empathy beyond the fate of humanity ... the author only filters this as a potentially cautionary tale for humans ... Rather than advancing and refining his original arguments, the book feels rushed, and might have benefitted from a good deal more editing to clarify and develop his arguments.
...a swift, abrasive, seemingly merciless book about the horrors that await us in our very near future ... David Wallace-Wells, speaks American, as Don DeLillo would say, or the well educated, articulate, ironic, vaguely amused, capable-of-being-engaged-yet-not-really-caring variety of American ... Right away, on page 6 actually, Wallace-Wells sassily and sincerely identifies himself just so you know there’s no need to feel guilty about anything. He is not an environmentalist ... A bit later comes this announcement: 'In the course of writing this book, I did have a child …' Rather vaingloriously put, perhaps, but once again reproduction is presented as the path of optimism ... This frothy, possibly even deranged enthusiasm, is front-loaded at the beginning of Uninhabitable and reappears only at the end when Wallace-Wells speaks of the new stories, the new metaphors and parables that our children (and their children’s children of course) will employ as they journey through the sparse and bony future ... Stylish jacket aside, the catchy title, The Uninhabitable Earth, is a bit of a misnomer because Wallace-Wells envisions the earth still inhabited by the likes of us, just nothing else ... Wallace-Wells’s major suggestion though is that we demand policy change. Which is so...quaint ... Uninhabitable is a text for the informed and the secularly comfortable. Reading it can make you feel bad but not bad enough to tear yourself apart. The cake was baked while we were eating pie.
David Wallace-Wells has written his book with the purpose of triggering every possible alarm for every possible impact global climate change could have on mankind and the environment ... Expect to be exhausted and unsettled after reading the first half of the book because that is the author’s goal. Wallace-Wells believes the evidence of the great harm global climate change will do is everywhere, it is irrefutable, and action must be taken now ... In the second half of the book, to some extent, he may undermine what he accomplished in the first half of the book by taking on ideological issues ... the purpose of the book is to provoke action, but Wallace-Wells fails to provide any detailed statement of the actions that should be taken, or the policies that should be put in place to prompt those actions. At best, he provides only short bursts of broad policy proposals.
The horrors that ensue play out on a biblical scale, from heat death to plagues of warming to economic collapse ... Wallace-Wells plays the dutiful guide ... stitching dozens of interviews and decades of scientific research, much of it dry and cautious, into a vivid narrative of how our world might end ... The Uninhabitable Earth instead translates the bleak, abstract math of climate change—parts per million and half degrees Celsius—into its tangible effects on human life, filtering phenomena like coral bleaching through the lens of what they mean for ocean ecosystems and the people who depend on them ... While beautifully written, it never makes for easy reading ... Wallace-Wells is careful not to slip into nihilism ... The Uninhabitable Earth makes one of its few missteps when it uses an oddball crew of doomists to frame a discussion about ethics at the end of the world ... In the end, no collection of characters could do full justice to the range of human experience that rising temperatures will destabilize. Wallace-Wells rightly posits climate change as the basis for an entirely new political economy.
... harrowingly informational ... For newcomers to the climate conversation, the book will be nightmare-inducing yet also welcoming, seeing as Mr. Wallace-Wells isn’t a preachy environmentalist but instead a direct and powerful writer who doesn’t 'even think of myself as a nature person' ... That is the frighteningly effective thing about Mr. Wallace-Wells’ approach — it demonstrates how climate change affects the environment and how, lest we forget, our bodies reside in the environment ... Although it’s likely to be overlooked by more scientifically oriented readers, one of the more fascinating chapters concerns storytelling.
The threats McKibben discusses are real enough, though his discussion of them tends toward shallow recapitulations of trendy think pieces and internet journalism. The bigger problem is that McKibben never bothers to clarify why it makes sense to think of the sum total of human existence on the planet Earth as a 'game,' especially one that has no rules and doesn’t end, since the very definition of game is that it is a structured form of play. The idea of a game with neither rules nor boundaries makes no sense. And while thinkers such as John von Neumann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roger Caillois, and Johan Huizinga have all used the idea of games to explore what it means to be human, McKibben doesn’t seem to care much about how games actually work. Rather, he seems to want to use the idea of the 'human game' as a secular framework for conceptualizing human values ... When [McKibben] turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption ... breezy and rambling ... a stupefying mix of cheerleading, moral hectoring, and small-is-beautiful nostalgia ... The all-too-real possibility we must confront — and which Bill McKibben notably refuse[s] — is that the story we’re living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.
It’s a gut punch of facts and figures ... The book wants you to freak out ... If you, like me, feel an agitated energy after finishing it, you might also be left wondering how to focus that energy ... the litany of terrors is enough to beat you down, both emotionally and intellectually. Especially seeing as the book offers relatively little guidance on what the likelihood of malady X will occur is ... But the piece that could have really brought climate terror home for me—the stories of human suffering and resilience, from Syria to Panama Beach to Paradise—is largely absent. From The Uninhabitable Earth’s God’s-eye view, the huddled masses are just that ... The Uninhabitable Earth could well tip the scales for some people to finally give a damn about climate change ... But human context for that panic can help direct the actions people take. So can offering guidance on what people can do, and yet such guidance is in short supply ... For those steeped in climate literature and on the alarmed end of the spectrum already, The Uninhabitable Earth is a clarion call to redouble their efforts ... But without context of how likely shit is to hit the fan, human narratives to ground the collective suffering, or what people can do to stop it all, I worry the nightmares of Wallace-Wells’ tome could be lost in the increasing stormy sea of white noise.
A closely argued look at what may be a turning point in human existence ... Wallace-Wells rightly muses over the fact that, for all our devotion to end-of-the-world scenarios in science-fiction books and films, too many of us continue to believe that the scientists warning of these dire matters are 'simply crying wolf' ... If you weren’t alarmed already, Wallace-Wells sounds the tocsin of toxicity. An urgent, necessary book.
