 First edition | |
| Author | David Wallace-Wells |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | non-fiction |
| Publisher | Tim Duggan Books |
Publication date | April 16, 2019 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | 978-0-525-57670-9 |
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming is a 2019 non-fiction book by David Wallace-Wells about the consequences of global warming. It was inspired by his New York magazine article "The Uninhabitable Earth" (2017). [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
The book fleshes out Wallace-Wells' original New York magazine piece in more detail, dovetailing into discussions surrounding various possibilities for Earth's future across a spectrum of predicted future temperature ranges. Wallace-Wells' argues that even with active intervention, the effects of climate change will have catastrophic impacts across multiple spheres: rising sea levels, extreme weather events, extinctions, disease outbreaks, fires, droughts, famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and increased geopolitical conflict, among other calamities.
While the book is not focused on solutions, it recognizes solutions exist to prevent the worst of the damages: "a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture". [6]
The book has been both praised and criticized for its dramatic depictions of future life on Earth. [7] [4] [8] [6] As The Economist stated, "Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too." [7] It was also reviewed in The Guardian , [6] The New York Times, [4] and Slate. [8] A review in The Irish Times by John Gibbons was critical of the book's primary focus on effects of climate change on humans rather than also covering impacts on other species. [9]
In The New Climate War , the climatologist Michael Mann dedicates 12 pages to comment "The Uninhabitable Earth". [10] About the book, he notably writes that "while some of the blatant errors that marked the original article were largely gone, the pessimistic – and, at times, downright doomist – framing remained, as did exaggerated descriptions that fed the doomist narrative". [11]
In January 2020, it was reported that The Uninhabitable Earth would be adapted into an anthology series on HBO Max. Each episode will be about the dangers of climate change. Adam McKay will serve as the executive producer. [12]
Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.
William Ernest McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change, and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019), about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity and future prospects.
Wallace "Wally" Smith Broecker was an American geochemist. He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University. He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker popularized the term "global warming". He received the Crafoord Prize and the Vetlesen Prize.
Doomers are people who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about global problems such as overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, ecological overshoot, pollution, nuclear weapons, and runaway artificial intelligence. The term, and its associated term doomerism, arose primarily on social media. Some doomers assert that there is a possibility these problems will bring about human extinction.
Joseph J. Romm is an American researcher, author, editor, physicist and climate expert, who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency and green energy technologies. Romm is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America", and Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment (2009)", calling him "The Web's most influential climate-change blogger".
Naomi Oreskes is an American historian of science. She became Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University in 2013, after 15 years as Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
References to climate change in popular culture have existed since the late 20th century and increased in the 21st century. Climate change, its impacts, and related human-environment interactions have been featured in nonfiction books and documentaries, but also literature, film, music, television shows and video games.
A polar city is a proposed sustainable polar retreat designed to house human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes the equatorial and middle latitudes of the Earth to become uninhabitable for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts involved. High-population-density cities, to be built near the Arctic Rim and in Antarctica, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Patagonia, with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure, will require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are gray soils that are thin acidic and are largely poor in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing plants with the proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar cities priority list. James Lovelock's notion of a widely distributed almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also appears to have value.
Jeff Goodell is an American author of seven non-fiction books and a longtime contributing writer to Rolling Stone. Goodell's writings are known for a focus on energy and environmental issues. He is Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
Climate fiction is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.
Timothy Francis Ball was a British-born Canadian public speaker and writer who was a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 until his retirement in 1996. Subsequently Ball became active in promoting rejection of the scientific consensus on global warming, giving public talks and writing opinion pieces and letters to the editor for Canadian newspapers.
Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist and climate journalist. He is the founder of a weather service called Currently and started a publication called The Phoenix on Ghost. He was formerly a writer for The Correspondent, Grist, Slate and The Wall Street Journal and is known for his mentions of global climate change.
Guy R. McPherson is an American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He is known for inventing and promoting fringe theories such as Near-Term Human Extinction (NTHE), which predicts human extinction by 2026.
"The Uninhabitable Earth" is an article by American journalist David Wallace-Wells published in the July 10, 2017 issue of New York magazine. The long-form article depicts a worst-case scenario of what might happen in the near-future due to global warming. The story was the most read article in the history of the magazine.
David Wallace-Wells is an American journalist known for his writings on climate change. He wrote the 2017 essay "The Uninhabitable Earth"; the essay was published in New York as a long-form article and was the most-read article in the history of the magazine. Wells later expanded the article into a 2019 book of the same title. At the time, he was the Deputy Editor of New York Magazine and covered the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic extensively. He was hired in March 2022 by The New York Times to write a weekly newsletter and contribute to The New York Times Magazine.
Losing Earth: A Recent History is a 2019 book written by Nathaniel Rich. The book is about the existence of scientific evidence for climate change for decades while it was politically denied, and the eventual damage that will occur as a result. It focuses on the years 1979 to 1989 and US-based scientists, activists, and policymakers including James Hansen, Rafe Pomerance, and Jule Gregory Charney.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need is a 2021 book by Bill Gates. In it, Gates presents what he learned in over a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address global warming and recommends technological strategies to tackle it.
Genevieve Juliette Guenther is an American author and climate change activist. She is the founding director of the media watchdog organization End Climate Silence. She is currently affiliate faculty at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School.
Climate change and civilizational collapse refers to a hypothetical risk of the impacts of climate change reducing global socioeconomic complexity to the point complex human civilization effectively ends around the world, with humanity reduced to a less developed state. This hypothetical risk is typically associated with the idea of a massive reduction of human population caused by the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, and often, it is also associated with a permanent reduction of the Earth's carrying capacity. Finally, it is sometimes suggested that a civilizational collapse caused by climate change would soon be followed by human extinction.