Must-read book: The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells

My third recent read on Climate Change, the most comprehensive, and the most alarming — by far.

Klein’s and Hickel’s books provide the overview, the stats, the effects, but Wallace-Wells goes even further. He tackles areas the other two leave out. His writing is accessible, intelligent throughout, and provides a great deal more food for thought as far as further reading goes.

The key takeaways were too many, and I regret not having taken notes. Far too many factoids and stats to keep track of, because warming and pollution impact pretty much every aspect of life. But it’s stunning to think about how little time we have left to reduce the deadly impacts, and that those impacts will be permanent. If we do nothing, we will literally be reshaping all ecosystems on earth for thousands of years, if not millions. And it’s too late to stop them, because they’re here, right now. Wallace-Wells makes the point that we can only reduce the damage to within parameters of survival.

The economic price tag, if we do nothing, is estimated to be in the hundreds of trillions by 2100. Deaths in the hundreds of millions, if not far, far more. Food production cut in half. Pandemics routine. Extinctions of thousands of species, routine. Cognitive functions radically diminished — our air pollution levels right now already do this. Even an extra degree of warmth slashes test scores by roughly 10% . . . . and our current levels of air pollution literally kill millions of humans around the world. Right. Now. Wallace-Wells says it’s close to 10 million a year for pollution in general.

And the only nation on earth with an actual denialist stance? The good old USA, thanks to Trump and the GOP. His and their policies will literally kill millions more.

As with the other two books, roughly the first two-thirds is incredibly depressing but necessary reading. The last section is more about possible solutions . . . though, again, Wallace-Wells takes as his starting point a much higher level of destruction baked in. That’s a given, as far as he’s concerned, almost no matter what fixes we implement. For him, it’s a matter of living in a radically degraded world, versus our own extinction.

Our choice. Right now, given that we’ve done virtually nothing about Climate Change, and emissions are still going up, we’re headed toward the latter.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabitable-earth-by-david-wallace-wells/

• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.