53 pages • 1 hour read
David Wallace-WellsThe Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 2-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Elements of Chaos”
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary: “Heat Death”
Of the sheer peril of direct heat, Wallace-Wells writes that dangerous heat waves are 50 times more common today than in 1980. Going back 500 years, the five hottest summers in European history have all happened since 2002. By 2050, the city of Mecca, to which millions of Muslims make pilgrimages each year, could become uninhabitable.
On the question of politics, the author points to the 2016 Paris Accords, a pledge signed by 195 countries to keep global temperatures no greater than two degrees above pre-industrial levels. Though the pledge was celebrated by climate scientists and activists, only six of its signatories are in range of this commitment. Meanwhile, China—the nation with the world’s largest carbon footprint—saw emissions rise by four percent in the first three months of 2018, despite signing the Paris Accords and making a rhetorical commitment to curb climate change.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “Hunger”
Wallace-Wells views the relationship between food production and climate change from two perspectives. The first pertains to the grim scientific research suggesting that yields from cereal crops like wheat will decline by an average of 10% for every one-degree hike in the global temperature. Already there are 800 million undernourished people around the globe, and that number only stands to increase as the planet continues to warm.
The second concerns the fact that a full third of global emissions comes from food production. Meanwhile, consumption trends in China and India—which have both seen the growth of robust middle classes in recent years—stand to boost that percentage even further, as demand continues to rise in those areas for emission-heavy foods like milk and meat. The author cites Greenpeace research showing that to avoid catastrophic climate change, the world must reduce meat and dairy consumption by half. Given consumption trends in China and India, such a reduction may be an impossibility.
Finally, the author addresses the observation that although the world’s population has grown exponentially over the past century, there has been undeniable progress in the developing world across a host of metrics, from hunger to life expectancy. This progress leads some to adopt a blithe attitude toward environmental pressures of all kind, yet the author attributes most of that progress to the very technology that now threatens this growth: fossil fuels.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “Drowning”
A rise in sea levels caused by the melting of Arctic ice is among the most intuitive and commonly cited consequences of global warming. Wallace-Wells lists a series of locales that may be underwater by the end of the 21st century, including Miami Beach, most of Bangladesh, the entire country of the Maldives, and the city of Jakarta, Indonesia, now home to 10 million people.
Just how high and fast sea levels will rise is, again, an open question dependent on human inputs. With melting Arctic ice, there are added unknowns surrounding potential feedback loops, the exact impact of which is difficult for scientists to predict. For example, Arctic ice reflects sunlight because it is white, and therefore the loss of this ice due to global warming contributes to even more warming, a phenomenon known as the albedo effect. Moreover, warmed Arctic soil releases methane, a greenhouse gas up to several times more potent than carbon dioxide. Given the uncertainties surrounding these factors, end-of-century sea level rise projections vary wildly, from four feet to eight feet, either of which would cause an untold amount of devastation.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Wildfire”
Increased wildfires have quickly joined flooding as some of the most visible and devastating signs of climate change. In 2017 alone, California saw five of the 20 worst fires the state has ever experienced. Aside from the immediate damage they cause, wildfires result in unpredictable climate feedback loops, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and, in some cases, blackening ice sheets so that they reflect less sunlight. Ironically, increased frequency and severity of wildfires may be accompanied by unprecedented periods of rainfall, leading to deadly mudslides.
Finally, the author points out the danger of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s recent pledge to open the Amazon rainforest to deforestation. According to Brazilian scientists, doing so will release 13.12 gigatons of carbon between 2021 and 2030. As a point of comparison, the United States as a whole released five gigatons in 2018.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Disasters No Longer Natural”
In the near future, the author writes, massive storms will become so commonplace that phenomena previously described as natural disasters will simply be referred to as weather. He points to the record-breaking storm seasons of 2017 and 2018, during which Hurricane Harvey dumped billions of gallons of water on Houston, Typhoon Mangkhut caused over $3 billion in damage to the Philippines, and Hurricane Maria killed over 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and Dominica. The author characterizes US President Donald Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria as particularly heartless, viewing it as a worrying sign “of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene” (81).
For each new degree of global warming, scientists predict a 25% to 30% uptick in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes. The chief reason is that warmer air can hold more moisture. Perhaps counterintuitively, warmer Arctic air is also found to intensify blizzards in the Northern Hemisphere.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Freshwater Drain”
Although only 0.007% of the planet’s water is suitable to drink, that should theoretically be enough to feed the world’s 8 billion people. The problem at present, Wallace-Wells writes, is not a matter of natural scarcity but a political issue. The fact that 2.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water is largely the result of government neglect, poor infrastructure, and careless contamination.
Climate change, meanwhile, stands to eat into those tight margins even further. Much of the world’s clean water comes from seasonal melt of mountain and glacier ice, but by 2100, scientists predict that 40% of the glacier ice of the Himalayans will be gone, even with the emissions standards laid out in the Paris Accords. Lakes, too, including Lake Mead in Nevada and the Aral Sea in Central Asia, are losing volume due to global warming.
The author points to the 2018 Cape Town water crisis as an indicator of some of the uglier sociological consequences of climate change. As the city instituted severe yet necessary water use restrictions in the face of a potentially devastating shortage, residents turned against one another, often divided along racial lines. Wealthy white residents blamed poor black residents for wasting their free water allotments, while the poor pointed their fingers at the wealthy for maintaining vast green lawns and swimming pools. The author argues that both sides are wrong to pin the issue to personal consumption. For example, most water is consumed through commercial use, particularly through agriculture. In California, despite perennial drought-fueled outrages over pools and lawns, only 10% of the state’s total water is used by urban consumption.
Increasingly, water shortages also fuel violence. Citing research by the scientist Peter Gleick, the author points out that there have been 500 armed conflicts related to water issues since 1900, and almost half of these occurred since 2010. They include the Syrian Civil War and the current proxy war in Yemen, both of which were fueled at least in part by drought.
Part 2, Chapters 2-7 Analysis
In the chapter titled “Hunger,” Wallace-Wells introduces one of his more controversial themes: Not only is continued human progress far from a guarantee, but post-Industrial progress may been illusory to begin with, given its reliance on fossil fuels. He writes:
The graphs that show so much recent progress in the developing world—on poverty, on hunger, on education and infant mortality and life expectancy and gender relations and more—are, practically speaking, the same graphs that trace the dramatic rise in global carbon emissions (53).
This isn’t to say that the growth and prosperity aren’t real, the author writes, but only that they are less the result of human innovation and free market principles and more the result of extracting massive amounts of resources from the earth, to the planet’s great detriment.
Thus, the consequences of cutting fossil fuels on the developing world and world hunger more generally are not to be dismissed. This concern has caused many to revisit English economist Thomas Malthus’s famous 1798 prediction that “the power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race” (Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson. 1798). Given that the human race continued to grow and thrive over the two centuries following this prophecy, many have dismissed Malthus’s prediction as wrongheaded and alarmist. However, when Malthus wrote that prediction, England’s crop yields were growing more slowly than its population. That all changed as the Industrial Revolution enabled the use of mechanized farming powered by fossil fuels, particularly coal. Now that the bill has come due for all that fossil fuel use in the form of climate change, Wallace-Wells and others worry that humanity failed to avoid and in fact only forestalled the grim fate Malthus predicted.
The largest burden of avoiding the so-called Malthusian trap, Wallace-Wells writes, falls on China and India, whose industrialization and development patterns lag behind those of Europe and the United States, both of which benefited enormously from the use of fossil fuels before anyone realized these practices were “paths to climate chaos” (54). These development patterns bear out in recent emissions statistics from China and the United States. According to the Rhodium Climate Service, carbon emissions declined in the United States in 2019 by 2%, driven in part by an 18% decline in coal generation (Kusnetz, Nicholas. “U.S. Emissions Dropped in 2019. Here’s Why in 6 Charts.” Inside Climate News. 7 Jan. 2020). Conversely, China’s emissions rose by 2% that same year, driven in part by the fact that coal still comprises nearly 60% of China’s energy use.
In light of the 2016 Paris Accords, this reality reflects both the power and the limitations of political action. For example, Wallace-Wells lauds China for agreeing, if only in principle, to the commitments laid out in the Paris Accords. He even suggests that President Trump’s pledge to withdraw from the Accords “may ultimately prove perversely productive, since the evacuation of American leadership on climate seems to have mobilized China” (44). However, while China’s rhetoric on climate change may be welcome, its record on emissions is moving in the wrong direction. This trend shows that for all the emphasis the author places on political will, that will is easily outweighed by the will of markets, especially one as energy-hungry as China’s growing middle class.
In any case, the author’s broader contention that a citizen’s decisions at the ballot box have a greater impact than what they choose to eat is perhaps best-supported by the example of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Of Bolsonaro’s 2018 election and his pledge to open the Amazon rainforest to deforestation, the author asks, “How much damage can one person do to the planet?” (76). This example also supports the author’s hesitancy to frame climate disasters as natural. As fires in the Amazon rainforest increased 77% between 2018 and 2019, The Guardian’s David Miranda echoed this point, writing, “The ongoing destruction of the Amazon is taking place because of policy choices made by those who now rule Brazil” (Miranda, David. “Fires Are Devouring the Amazon. And Jair Bolsonaro Is to Blame.” The Guardian. 26 Aug. 2019).
Just as politics affects climate change, so, too, does climate change affect politics. In the author’s telling, nowhere is this seen more dramatically than in the example of the Syrian Civil War. Wallace-Wells revisits this topic on numerous occasions, and each time he is careful not to argue that the Syrian Civil War and the resulting refugee crisis were caused solely by climate change. Sectarian divisions and deep outrage directed at President Bashar al-Assad over corruption, political oppression, and high unemployment were key factors driving the war (“Why Is There a War in Syria?” The BBC. 25 Feb. 2019), yet so, too, Wallace-Wells argues, was a devastating five-year drought that began in 2006. It is very possible that better water management policies by Bashar al-Assad could have mitigated the effects of the drought, particularly on farmers, lending credence to the argument that the Syrian Civil War is predominantly a political crisis rather than a climate crisis. At the same time, the drought was due in part to increased desertification in the region, a direct result of climate change. Moreover, the author would likely argue that political crises and climate crises are one and the same.
The political ramifications of this climate-fueled drought extend far beyond the borders of Syria. The influx of 1 million Syrian War refugees in Europe, for example, is believed by many to be a key contributor to the rise of far-right populist movements on both sides of the Atlantic. According to an article in the New York Times, images of Syrian refugees “were used by politicians to fuel fears of Islam, and of Muslims. That lifted far-right European parties already riding on resentment of immigrants, from Finland to Hungary” (Barnard, Anne. “Syria Changed the World.” The New York Times. 21 Apr. 2017). This process, Wallace-Wells suggests, offers just one glimpse of how climate change stands to upend the social order in places far away from the regions directly affected by it, fueling racism and resentment. In other cases, racial resentments stay closer to home, as in the case he cites of the Cape Town water shortages.
Wallace-Wells discusses several scientific projections in these chapters, particularly surrounding sea level rise. Given the uncertainty of projecting sea levels—a concession the author makes—readers might interrogate some of the more extreme statistics he cites. At the start of the chapter on sea level, Wallace-Wells writes that sea level rises are projected at between four and eight feet by 2100. This is in line with projections put out in 2017 by US Global Change Research Program. Such projections are alarming enough and would stand to displace millions in Miami, Shanghai, Osaka, and other cities. However, the author also lists possible sea level rises in the range of 150 and even 250 feet. These projections are largely based on the continued use of fossil fuels for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Citing projections like these is part of why some respected scientists have labeled Wallace-Wells an alarmist. For example, when he published “The Uninhabitable Earth” as an article in New York magazine, some of the very scientists he cited spoke out against what they perceived to be misinterpretations of climate data. At the time, the scientists’ focus was on the author’s interpretation of overstated projections surrounding the dangers of methane released from melted Arctic ice—claims he mentions but somewhat walks back in the book version. However, accusations of alarmism are ones both scientists and journalists take seriously. On one side of the argument, climate researcher Michael E. Mann wrote on Facebook, “The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence” (Mann, Michael E. Response to “The Uninhabitable Earth.” 10 Jul. 2017.) In an interview with the Washington Post, Wallace-Wells defended his frequent use of worst-case scenarios, telling reporter Chris Mooney:
My purpose in writing the story wasn’t to survey the median scenario, it was to survey the worst-case scenarios, because I believed—and still believe—that the public does not appreciate the unlikely-but-still-possible dangers of climate change (Mooney, Chris. “Scientists Challenge Magazine Story About ‘the Uninhabitable Earth.’” The Washington Post. 12 Jul. 2017).
The merits of utilizing tactics that some may view as alarmist are a matter of intense debate within the climate community. In fact, this debate is an important part of the author’s broader survey of cultural attitudes toward climate change, which he explores in greater detail later in the book.
