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1-Page Summary of The Uninhabitable Earth
Overview
David Wallace-Wells paints a picture of a bleak future. We have damaged our environment and now the consequences are catching up with us. Our way of life is going to change drastically, and we’re going to have to deal with it.
The Uninhabitable Earth explains exactly what the world will be like if global warming continues. Freshwater scarcity, biblical floods, and extinct diseases are predicted to occur in the next century.
In this article, you’ll learn about the following topics:
Why grain is becoming less nutritious and what can be done about it?
How climate change threatens the internet and how to prevent that from happening?
What are climate cascades and why they make everything worse?
Big Idea #1: The Paris climate agreement’s goals are hopelessly optimistic.
In 2015, most of the world’s leaders met in Paris to discuss climate change. They realized that it was a serious issue and decided to work together on fixing it. Their goal was to keep the temperature from rising 2 degrees higher than before industrialization.
But there’s a problem. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report says we’re going to exceed the 2-degree global warming ceiling. If we enact aggressive policies now, and follow through with commitments made in Paris, it’ll probably still be 3.2 degrees of warming by 2100, according to the IPCC’s projections. Even worse is that no industrial country has even started enacting all those policies yet.
Essentially, this means that even in the best case scenario, things will still be pretty bad.
If countries were to meet the Paris Agreement, they would still have to deal with sea level rise and drought. This will be a problem because cities like Miami, Shanghai and Hong Kong will flood. If temperatures increase by 3 degrees Celsius, southern Europe will experience permanent droughts and wildfires in the United States will become much more common.
Global warming is a serious problem that’s not as bad as it could be. The UN estimates that the temperature could rise by 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which would make parts of the world uninhabitable. Fires would burn through our forests, two-thirds of cities would flood, and tropical diseases like malaria would thrive in what used to be called the Arctic. However, global warming can’t change at a slow pace; it changes quickly over time because we’re using so much energy on Earth.
Climate change is a serious problem that has been growing worse over the years. It’s not just an exaggeration to say that we have brought the planet to its knees and need to save it within a single generation. To do so, we need to understand what climate change means for us as individuals and how it will affect our lives in the future.
Big Idea #2: The destructive effects of climate change act as chain reactions, triggering further warming.
If you feel distressed after the last key point, it’s because things are not good. We can’t avoid some level of catastrophe and we don’t know how bad that will be. The answer depends on so many factors like how much more carbon we emit or what technologies come to our rescue.
But there are other factors that affect the climate. These factors often have a negative effect and can accelerate global warming. One of these effects is called a cascade, which happens when an initial change causes another change in turn, which then causes yet more changes until we’re left with what we started with but worse. An example of this is Arctic ice melting, because as white ice melts it absorbs sunlight rather than reflect it back into space as black water does. This results in the Earth absorbing more heat and warms up even faster than before, causing the ice to melt faster still.
