A review by alexvincoh
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
5.0
“If you strip out the perception of progress from history, what is left?” That is the biggest question raised in what is certainly the most bleak yet most brutally honest climate change book I’ve read (and I’ve already read 8-9 before this one). The descriptions of the likely impacts are nothing new, though seeing them all summarized one after the other in the first section of the book is unnerving – it really drives home how inescapable the impacts are.
What really sets this book apart is the discussion of what it means for us as a society (and a species) to live in a world where future generations will most assuredly be worse off than people today. And barring unforeseen technological miracles to pull gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere, there is no endpoint.
Climate change is not like a war that comes to an end, or a storm that passes by – it will never stop as long as the laws of physics mean that greenhouse gases will remain in the atmosphere. It will persist for centuries and millennia, and it will stress our species (and all other life) to its breaking point. So, no time like now to make a change.
What really sets this book apart is the discussion of what it means for us as a society (and a species) to live in a world where future generations will most assuredly be worse off than people today. And barring unforeseen technological miracles to pull gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere, there is no endpoint.
Climate change is not like a war that comes to an end, or a storm that passes by – it will never stop as long as the laws of physics mean that greenhouse gases will remain in the atmosphere. It will persist for centuries and millennia, and it will stress our species (and all other life) to its breaking point. So, no time like now to make a change.