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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming Hardcover – February 19, 2019
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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.
An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD
“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist
“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post
“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTim Duggan Books
- Publication dateFebruary 19, 2019
- Dimensions5.8 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
- ISBN-100525576703
- ISBN-13978-0525576709
- Lexile measure1370L
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From the Publisher
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.” —The Washington Post
“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
"Most of us know the gist, if not the details, of the climate change crisis. And yet it is almost impossible to sustain strong feelings about it. David Wallace-Wells has now provided the details, and with writing that is not only clear and forceful, but often imaginative and even funny, he has found a way to make the information deeply felt." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated
“A brilliant new book. . . . a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet."—John Lanchester, The New York Times Book Review
"David Wallace-Wells argues that the impacts of climate change will be much graver than most people realize, and he's right. The Uninhabitable Earth is a timely and provocative work." —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
"An excellent book. . . . Not since Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature thirty years ago have we been told what climate change will mean in such vivid terms." —Fred Pearce, The Washington Post
"One of the very few books about our climate change emergency that doesn't sugarcoat the horror." —William T. Vollmann, author of No Immediate Danger
“Clearly and engagingly written, widely informed, with references supplied in extensive and detailed endnotes, this overview of the present status of the climate emergency and our response to it is completely captivating: it is our own story, happening here and now.”—Lydia Davis, Times Literary Supplement
“Powerfully argued. . . . A masterly analysis of why—with a world of solutions—we choose doom.” —Nature
"This gripping, terrifying, furiously readable book is possibly the most wide-ranging account yet written of the ways in which climate change will transform every aspect of our lives, ranging from where we live to what we eat and the stories we tell. Essential reading for our ever-more-unfamiliar and unpredictable world." —Amitav Ghosh, author of Flood of Fire
“Urgent and humane. . . . Wallace-Wells is an extremely adept storyteller. . . . A horrifying assessment of what we might expect as a result of climate change if we don’t change course.” —Susan Matthews, Slate
“If we don’t want our grandchildren to curse us, we had better read this book.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Black Earth
“Lively. . . . Vivid. . . . If you’ve snoozed through or turned away from the climate change news, this book will waken and update you. If you’re steeped in the unfolding climate drama, Wallace-Wells’s voice and perspective will be stimulating.” —David George Haskell, The Guardian
“Wallace-Wells has a gorgeous command of the English language, and knows how to lay down prose that moves the reader at such a clip that one feels like a Kentucky Derby–exhausted mare at the end of each chapter. . . . Wallace-Wells sets himself and his analysis of climate change apart from the predominant voices of leadership in the field.” —Laurie Garrett, The Lancet
“Beautifully written. . . . As climate change encroaches, things will get worse. Much worse. And David Wallace-Wells spares no detail in explaining how.” —Kate Aronoff, Bookforum
"Relentless, angry journalism of the highest order. Read it and, for the lack of any more useful response, weep." —Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times
"A brilliant and unsparing analysis of a nightmare that is no longer a distant future but our chaotic, burning present. Unlike other writers who speak about human agency in the abstract, Wallace-Wells zeros in on the power structures and capitalist elites whose mindless greed is writing an obituary for our grandchildren." —Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear
"A lucid and thorough description of our unprecedented crisis, and of the mechanisms of denial with which we seek to avoid its fullest recognition.” —William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
"David Wallace-Wells has produced a willfully terrifying polemic that reads like a cross between Stephen King and Stephen Hawking. Written with verve and insight and an eerie gusto for its own horrors, it comes just when we need it; it could not be more urgent than it is at this moment. I hope everyone will read it and be afraid." —Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Cascades
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life un-deformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not circumscribed and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in
staring it down.
None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, another 75 percent; 100 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 150 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before. The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, building a political consensus out of a scientific consensus and advertising it unmistakably to the world; which means we have now done as much damage to the environment knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance. Global warming may seem like a distended morality tale playing out over several centuries and inflicting a kind of Old Testament retribution on the great-great-grandchildren of those responsible, since it was carbon burning in eighteenth-century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today—and unfairly. The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is about 85 percent. The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime—the planet brought from apparent stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral.
We all know those lifetimes. When my father was born in 1938—among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic air force of the industrial propaganda films that followed— the climate system appeared, to most human observers, steady. Scientists had understood the greenhouse effect, had understood the way carbon produced by burned wood and coal and oil could hothouse the planet and disequilibrize everything on it, for three-quarters of a century. But they had not yet seen the effect, not really, not yet, which made it seem less like an observed fact than a dark prophecy, to be fulfilled only in a very distant future—perhaps never. By the time my father died, in 2016, weeks after the desperate signing of the Paris Agreement, the climate system was tipping toward devastation, passing the threshold of carbon concentration—400 parts per million in the earth’s atmosphere, in the eerily banal language of climatology—that had been, for years, the bright red line environmental scientists had drawn in the rampaging face of modern industry, saying, Do not cross. Of course, we kept going: just two years later, we hit a monthly average of 411, and guilt saturates the planet’s air as much as carbon, though we choose to believe we do not breathe it.
The single lifetime is also the lifetime of my mother: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, and now enjoying her seventy-third year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the factories of a developing world that has, in the space of a single lifetime, too, manufactured its way into the global middle class, with all the consumer enticements and fossil fuel privileges that come with that ascent: electricity, private cars, air travel, red meat. She has been smoking for fifty-eight of those years, always unfiltered, ordering the cigarettes now by the carton from China.
It is also the lifetime of many of the scientists who first raised public alarm about climate change, some of whom, incredibly, remain working today—that is how rapidly we have arrived at this promontory. Roger Revelle, who first heralded the heating of the planet, died in 1991, but Wallace Smith Broecker, who helped popularize the term “global warming,” still drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side, sometimes picking up lunch at an old Jersey filling station recently outfitted as a hipster eatery; in the 1970s, he did his research with funding from Exxon, a company now the target of a raft of lawsuits that aim to adjudicate responsibility for the rolling emissions regime that today, barring a change of course on fossil fuels, threatens to make parts of the planet more or less unlivable for humans by the end of this century. That is the course we are speeding so blithely along—to more than four degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100. According to some estimates, that would mean that whole regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America north of Patagonia, and Asia south of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification, and flooding. Certainly it would make them inhospitable, and many more regions besides. This is our itinerary, our baseline. Which means that, if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too. We all also know that second lifetime. It is ours.
Product details
- Publisher : Tim Duggan Books; 1st edition (February 19, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525576703
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525576709
- Lexile measure : 1370L
- Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.8 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #474,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #436 in Climatology
- #1,042 in Environmental Science (Books)
- #1,086 in Environmentalism
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
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Customers find the content compelling, with ample references to relevant science. They also describe the reading experience as wonderful. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it well-written and joyous to read, while others say it's overwrought, confusing, and relentlessly bleak. Readers also differ on the tone, with others finding it scary but much more than that.
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Customers find the book has good information and sources. They also say the author makes a convincing and alarming case for climate change. Readers also appreciate the page-indexed reference notations at the end. Overall, they find the content rewarding and well-founded.
"...However, overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read...." Read more
"...of human-caused climate change, but this book provided me with enough verifiable detail to help me with climate-based speculative novel I wrote...." Read more
"...From the first sentence the author makes a convincing (and alarming) case that humanity will suffer greatly during the next 30 years..." Read more
"Excellent balanced blend of science, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Rare to find this depth with a broad perspective...." Read more
Customers find the book wonderful, easy to read, and compelling.
"...overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read. I learned something from it." Read more
"...He hopes it isn't inevitable.This a good and timely book though I doubt it will have much effect on the carbon trajectory of our so-..." Read more
"...Worth the read." Read more
"This is a wonderful book. It's about climate change and the news isn't cheerful, but this is so well written it's a joy to read...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the writing style. Some find the book well written, interesting, and clear. They also say it's a serious, well-founded, and a clear attempt to paint the picture of climate change. However, some find the prose overwrought, difficult to get the mind around, and shallow. They say some of the later chapters are confusing and poorly written.
"...However, overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read...." Read more
"...Some of the later chapters are confusing and poorly written, as the author struggles to make sense of humans' inability to address the causes..." Read more
"...He is a reasonably accomplished writer who helps us to see a particularly unattractive vision of our future...." Read more
"...: too many appositives, misplaced phrases and adjectives, lengthy run-on sentences, and a somewhat rambling, disjointed writing style, often detract..." Read more
Customers are mixed about the tone of the book. Some find it scary, shocking, and well-written, while others say it's depressing, flawed, and never settles down to a good read. They also mention the imagery is peppered with extremely cynical and condescending appraisals of our society. Additionally, readers are disappointed by the repetition of material and the narrative flow occasionally suffers.
"...It is a frightening and perhaps a depressing book, but it doesn’t predict the end of the world, it predicts a world that is much worse and partially..." Read more
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We have already left behind the narrow window (Goldilocks range) of environmental conditions and temperatures that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place. Island countries are disappearing, Bangladesh is likely to be largely submerged mid century resulting in tens of millions of refugees, the Yemen, Sudan, and Syrian conflicts were preceded by draughts caused by or made much worse by climate change. It will be much worse at 2 degrees Celsius, and much worse than that at 2.5 degrees Celsius, and even worse at 3 degrees Celsius, etc.
Climate change may not be the direct cause of all of these phenomena, but it is exacerbating them, or as the military calls it, it is a threat multiplier. This is not a book about the science of warming; it is about what it means to the way we live on this planet. The author notes that climate change doesn’t end in 2100 even though most projections do. He says that what follows 2100 is likely the century of hell. I should say that even though the book is not about the climate science, what he describes is based on the science and there are several hundred notes and references at the end of the book organized by page.
It is a frightening and perhaps a depressing book, but it doesn’t predict the end of the world, it predicts a world that is much worse and partially unlivable, but how bad it gets depends on what we do today. What is missing is political will. The author does not discuss solutions much, but he seems to support a carbon tax, but I believe his chief intention is help his readers understand the seriousness of the situation as well as pointing out wrong attitudes. Believing we are all going to die in 10 years is not only inaccurate but fosters despondency and inaction. Denial or the downplaying of the problem is, of course, not helpful either. He states that personal choices, such as not eating meat, or driving less, are helpful but not enough. He stresses that political solutions are crucial. Personally, I favor a carbon fee and dividend approach, putting a price on carbon at the source and then returning the proceeds to households. It is very effective in reducing carbon emissions while not hurting the economy and helping the poor.
He said some things that may be controversial among some environmentalists but that I agree with. Nuclear Power is not as dangerous as it has been made out to be and it is a carbon free source. GMOs could help us fight hunger as the effects on agriculture from climate change set in. Some things I don’t agree with. He is dismissing Nick Boström’s concern about Artificial Intelligence gone wrong a little too quickly. As someone with a background in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics I have to say that this is a real concern. I also think that he is not characterizing neoliberalism and capitalism correctly, well it depends on what you mean. Denying the existence of economic externalities is plain stupid but free markets and free trade that includes regulations or price mechanisms to account for externalities such as climate change can be part of the solution rather than a cause of it.
In summary; the beginning of the book, with all the dark projections was a little bit heavy. However, overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read. I learned something from it.
Recommend.
Unfortunately, this book suffers from several flaws that I found annoying and distracting:
1) Some of the later chapters are confusing and poorly written, as the author struggles to make sense of humans' inability to address the causes of climate change, and to often even acknowledge the threat.
2) He repeatedly states that many actions which will slow climate change are available and known, but he should have written a clear chapter which summarized them.
3) The projections and various forecasts made during the book are sometimes inconsistent.
4) The chapter on Capitalism's future seemed mushy, but in fairmess, this topic deserves an entire book on its own.
Overall, this book would have greatly benefited from a thorough editing job by someone like Malcolm Gladwell, who I admit is one of my favorite "science writers". However, I applaud the author's courage to boldly show us our dismal future.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in France on June 20, 2021
‘When critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypothetical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits this disparity, but feeds and profits from it – this is what Thomas Piketty calls the ‘apparatus of justification.’ And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the EU average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.’
Indeed, the 2018 Global Green Economy Index points out that the most environmentally-friendly countries in the world are 1. Sweden 2. Switzerland 3. Iceland 4. Norway 5. Finland – countries which also enjoy a high quality of life.
Hence Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is absolutely correct that it is possible to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Furthermore, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson has provided country-by-country plans for the world to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. So why the delay?
In his book Cultural Evolution (2018), Dr. Ronald Inglehart, leader of the World Values Survey, points out that following World War II, the advanced world shifted from materialist to postmaterialist values, including a growth in the environmental movement. However, this evolution in mindset was not reflected rapidly enough in our actions.
‘Many people perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades… The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime – the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral…
Due to global warming, in the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago…
The Indian capital is home to 26 million people. In 2017, simply breathing the air was the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day…
With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are at today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent…
The basic rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature, is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, when we have 50 percent more people to feed, we may also have 50 percent less grain to give them…
Beyond carbon, climate change means that staple crops are doing battle with more insects – their increased activity could cut yields an additional 2 to 4 percent, as well as fungus and disease, not to mention flooding…
Whole cultures will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited, Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States’ largest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nation of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh; all of Miami Beach and much of South Florida; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington…
Much of the infrastructure of the internet could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades; and most of the smartphones we use to navigate it are manufactured in Shenzhen, which is likely to be flooded soon, as well…
If no significant action is taken to curb emissions, one estimate of global damage is as high as $100 trillion dollars per year by 2100. That is more than global GDP today. Most estimates are a bit lower - $14 trillion a year, still almost a fifth of present-day GDP…
The International Panel on Climate Change furnishes us with a median prediction of an over four degrees rise in planetary temperature by 2100, should we continue down the current emissions path. That would deliver wildfires burning 16 times as much land in the American West, hundreds of drowned cities…’
Unfortunately, Canada has been a laggard on this critical issue. Prime Minister Trudeau seems to have only recently woken up to the existential threat posed by climate change, and has finally introduced a modest carbon tax. The Andrew Scheer Conservatives remain for their part firmly in the pocket of the fossil fuels industry, and are every bit as destructive to the environment as the Trump Republicans in the US.
On the other hand, organizations like 350.org, the Solutions Project and the Sunrise Movement, and political leaders like Germany’s Katharina Schulze, France’s Karima Delli, Sweden’s Isabella Lovin, the Netherland’s Jesse Klaver, Belgium’s Benoit Hellings, and Costa Rica’s Carlos Alvarado Quesada are leading the way to a sustainable future.
They are joined by youth leaders Greta Thunberg (Sweden), Varshini Prakash and Alexandria Villasenor (United States), Holly Gillibrand (UK), Luisa Neubauer (Germany), Louis Couillard, Sara Montpetit and Autumn Peltier (Canada), Jonas Kampus (Switzerland), and Anuna de Wever (Belgium).
The least we can do, is to give them our support – our future depends on it.
And the reader should note that the book was published before the two huge natural disasters occurred - among the many anticipated by the book which would wreak havoc on the planet unless urgent and concerted global effort is invested to decarbonize the planet which, unfortunately, is not presently the case.
The two natural disasters I referred to, were the Hurricane Dorian which devastated the Bahamas with 43 dead at the present count and a biblical catastrophe in property and the nearly eighty thousand wildfires in the Amazon burning huge areas of its forests. In this regard, it should be noted that the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet's forests each year. The result is that carbon deposited in the trees is released in the atmosphere. More generally, forest fires means fewer tees, means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still. The preceding is just one of a page-long series of 'cascades' described in the book. I am tempted to cite a few more: a warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still; also warmer oceans contain less oxygen which is a doom for phytoplankton - which does for the ocean what plants do on land, consuming carbon and producing oxygen - which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further; also increased carbon dioxide in the oceans results in their acidification and the bleaching of the coral ecosystems. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the earth's atmosphere, and some of which, when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is dozens of times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
I have outlined in the preceding some of the consequences of global warming, there are many more such as heat waves, floods, droughts, desertification, unprecedented famines, mass immigration, and refugee crises, political instability, climate conflicts and rising of oceans to flood coastal cities.
It was in the light of the above that the 2016 climate accords were adopted - defining two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial level (we are already at one degree) as a must-meet target and rallying all the world's nations to meet it - and the results are grim. In 2017, carbon emissions grew by 1.4 percent, according to the International Energy Agency.
It has to be noted that the last twenty - five years of emissions is about half the total that humanity has ever - produced - a scale of carbon production that has pushed the planet from near - complete climate stability to the brink of chaos.
Just to give a single statistic, from 1992 to 1997 the Antarctic ice sheet lost, on average, 49 billion tons of ice each year; from 2012 to 2017, the corresponding number was 219 billion.
It is something of an irony that the graphs that show so much recent progress in the developing world - on poverty, on hunger, on education, on infant mortality, and life expectancy - are, practically, the same graphs that trace the dramatic rise in global carbon emissions, due to burning fossil fuels to obtain the requisite energy and in the process creating global warming that has brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe.
If we had started decarbonization in 2000s when Al Gore narrowly lost the election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it would require us to cut emissions by 30 percent per year. This is why U.N Secretary - General Antonio Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.
The measures to salvation which require collective and concerted global effort comprise 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 products in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.


















