The key ideas

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

David Wallace-Wells, 2019

The book opens with the line: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” Journalist David Wallace-Wells shows how heat, hunger, fire, the economy and conflict hook into one another in cascades. At the same time he insists that the size of the disaster is not settled yet, and every fraction of a degree matters. The book was criticised for leaning on worst-case scenarios, so here we mark honestly what is a forecast and what is a fact.

Who it is for

For anyone who wants to understand why scientists worry about warming, and to tell a real risk from panic.

It is worse, much worse, than you think.

What the book is about

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” That is how this book begins, and the first line sets its tone.

David Wallace-Wells is a journalist, not a climate scientist. In 2017 he wrote an article for New York magazine about the darkest scenarios of warming. Millions read it, and scientists argued about it for a long time. Two years later the article grew into a book.

The author's method is to take the effects of warming and show how they hook into one another: heat and hunger, water and fire, disease, the economy and war. He calls these cascades. Beneath the frightening pictures runs a second line: the scale of the disaster is not settled yet, and people are the ones settling it.

An honest caveat up front. Many of the pictures in the book describe a high-emissions scenario, in which the world changes almost nothing. Climate scientists such as Michael Mann criticised the author for leaning too heavily on the worst cases. So here, forecasts are marked as forecasts. And ahead lies a question the author keeps alive to the very end: if things are this bad, why does he believe the outcome depends on us?

Idea 1. A catastrophe within one lifetime

The book's first shock is not about the future but about the past. More than half of the carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas has entered the atmosphere in roughly the last three decades. That means most of it came after the politician Al Gore published his first book on climate. Status: observation, emissions data.

From this the author draws his conclusion: in these years we have done as much damage to the planet knowingly as we did in all the centuries before, unknowingly. He compares it to a single human life: the road from apparent stability to the brink of catastrophe fits between a christening and a funeral. “The brink of catastrophe”, though, is the author's own judgement.

And here comes the first turn. If one generation brought the planet to this point, Wallace-Wells writes, then the responsibility for avoiding disaster also rests with one generation.

A Livria analogy: if most of a debt piled up in the last year, then the habit that creates it is alive right now.

For the author, the frightening speed cuts both ways. If so much has changed within one lifetime, the solution also lies within one lifetime. This is not a promise of success. It moves the responsibility from the past into the present.

Read in Livria

About the author

David Wallace-Wells is an American journalist. He was deputy editor of New York magazine, where his article “The Uninhabitable Earth” came out in 2017. Since 2022 he has written a column for The New York Times. His book on climate became a bestseller.

All books by this author: David Wallace-Wells

Terms from the book

  • Mann
  • feedback loop
  • Permafrost
  • Methane
  • High-emissions scenario: A version of the future in which the world barely cuts its greenhouse gas emissions. Climate scientists use it to assess risk, but it is not a forecast of what will certainly happen.
  • Al Gore: Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. His first book on climate, “Earth in the Balance”, came out in 1992, and in 2007 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change.
  • Cascades: The author's image for effects of warming that hook into one another and can amplify each other. It is an image from the book, not a separate scientific term.
  • Wet-bulb temperature: The reading of a thermometer wrapped in a wet cloth. It takes heat and humidity together and shows how hard it is for the body to cool itself by sweating.
  • Santa Rosa: A city in Northern California. In October 2017 wildfires destroyed thousands of homes there.
  • Correlations: A statistical link: two quantities change together. A correlation on its own does not prove that one causes the other.
  • Threat multiplier: A phrase from military analysts: a factor that rarely starts a conflict by itself but makes existing problems worse, such as poverty, disputes over water or weak government.
  • Carbon tax: A charge on carbon dioxide emissions that makes dirty energy more expensive and nudges people towards cleaner energy. One of the tools the author names.
  • Carbon capture: Technologies that take carbon dioxide from the emissions of factories and power plants, or straight from the air, and lock it away for a long time, for example underground.

All terms

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