Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Uninhabitable Earth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cascades, Systems Crises, and Interconnectedness
Human Responsibility and the Natural World
Optimism and Action vs. Despair and Nihilism
The Effects of Climate Change on Humanity
Summary
Analysis
Author David Wallace-Wells believes that climate change is “much worse than you think.” There are a number of myths about climate change: that it’s happening only in the Arctic, that it only affects the “natural” world, that economic growth and new technology will be able to reverse it, or that wealth has the power to insulate people against it. None of this is true.
The author wants to dispel many of the most pernicious, pervasive myths about climate change. The more barriers there are to a holistic, global understanding of what climate change really is, how it works, and whom it stands to affect, the less action there can be against it. By laying out the reality of climate change—and by alerting his readers that not only is climate change real, but it is already “worse” than many know—Wallace-Wells immediately engages his readers in a call to action.
Themes
The earth has already endured five mass extinction events, each one wiping out so many species that it constituted an “evolutionary reset.” The “most notorious” of these extinction events occurred 250 million years ago, when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius. Right now, humanity is adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate about ten times faster than preceded the last extinction event.
Here, Wallace-Wells puts our contemporary experience of warming into context on a much larger timescale. We are already living through an extinction event—and the one we’re bringing on ourselves through endless carbon output is going to be even more lethal than the last “notorious” “evolutionary reset.” With a scientific model for what’s in store, Wallace-Wells underscores that there can be no doubts about what’s coming for us.
Themes
Half of the carbon emitted through the burning of fossil fuels has been expelled in only the last three decades—decades during which politicians, scientists, and everyday citizens of the world were well aware of the costs of those emissions. The most nefarious myth about climate change is that humans are now paying for the sins of those who spurred the Industrial Revolution. This is a fallacy that “unfairly” allows those of us alive today to claim innocence. In reality, the self-destruction humanity has perpetrated is “the story of a single lifetime”: the story of David Wallace-Wells’ parents’ generation.
Climate change and global warming aren’t necessarily just the work of our distant ancestors—those who first harnessed the power of fossil fuels and began polluting the earth through emissions. Wallace-Wells warns the current generation against letting themselves off the hook or blaming climate change on the long-dead or the soon-dying. The fight against climate change requires immediate, collective action, and that can’t happen if humanity is still searching for a scapegoat.
Themes
In spite of the work of many scientists who raised alarms about the ravages of climate change throughout the second half of the 20th century, humanity is on track to warm the planet by more than four degrees Celsius by the year 2100—a milestone that, if hit, will render vast regions of every continent on earth unlivable. The responsibility of avoiding such a fate now belongs to a single generation: the current one.
By laying out a timeline that isn’t so far in the distant future, but rather well within the lifetimes of many who are being born in the present day, the author suggests that there’s no time left to think of climate change as a problem for the future. Its effects are already here, and it is this generation’s responsibility to recognize that and begin to make change.
Themes
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David Wallace-Wells admits that he is not an environmentalist or even a “nature person.” He is, like many other Americans, a person who has spent a large portion of his life “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded, about climate change.” Several years ago, though, he began collecting stories of warming from around the world. He was deeply perturbed—and quickly changed—by what he came to learn.
Here, the author admits to his own complicity in the line of thinking that posits that climate change is a problem for another generation. But what the author has come to see through his research for this book is that climate change is already here—and it is only getting worse. His language as he describes his own “deluded” denial of this fact is regretful but not self-pitying. This reflects the attitude he’s hoping to instill in his readers: he doesn’t want them to despair, but rather to recognize what’s happening and decide to begin making a change, even if that change starts only with their own self-concept of what it means to live responsibly on a warming planet.
Themes
The United Nations now projects that there will be 200 million climate refugees by the year 2050—a number equal to the population of the entire world at the peak of the Roman Empire. Though this figure is a high-end estimate, it shouldn’t lull humanity into complacency: it should instead galvanize the world for what’s to come.
Throughout the book, the author will introduce figures that illustrate the practical effects of climate change in stark, staggering new lights. David Wallace-Wells knows that he’s straddling a thin line: such figures could make people feel hopeless, and like it’s no use trying to combat climate change, or they could motivate people to finally do something about the ravages of climate change.
Themes
Most coverage of climate change is narrow and muted, mostly focused on sea-level rise rather than the myriad natural disasters that will envelop the globe as temperatures rise. There is “almost no chance” of avoiding floods, droughts, heat waves, and other meteorological phenomena. The global goal of stopping warming at two degrees Celsius, created in 2016 at the Paris accord, is now a best-case scenario rather than a hard upper limit.
The book criticizes how climate change is covered in our contemporary media landscape. Flooding is just one of many problems that we will certainly face in the years to come, and focusing so narrowly on just one of climate change’s many consequences has left the general public uninterested in, and thus unprepared to confront, the reality of climate change. Already, awareness campaigns and mitigation techniques rolled out in the last half-decade are obsolete. Climate change is moving faster than anyone wants to recognize, and its interconnected effects will change everything we know of contemporary life.
Themes
There are many reasons—most of them rooted in fear and denial—that no major media outlets or politicians discuss the prospect of a world that warms beyond two degrees. The bottom line is that human beings have had too much faith in the idea that climate change will only affect some people, or that technology will save civilization as we know it: the world is not a “zero-sum resource competition” after all. It is time for humanity to look “squarely in the face of the science” and stop distorting—or ignoring—the facts of what’s to come.
Many people ignore climate change by conceiving of it as an issue that will only affect—and thus need only be solved by—future generations. Another pernicious problem is that many people believe even if climate change’s effects start to be felt more acutely in the years to come, this will only affect people in certain, vulnerable regions, so it’s not worth worrying about. But David Wallace-Wells stresses that climate change isn’t bound by borders, and it will not politely wait for humanity’s capitalistic competitions to reach their peaks.
Themes
The science of warming is complex because it’s built on multiple layers of uncertainty. Research doesn’t just have to take into account what humanity will do in the coming decades, but also how the planet will respond to our unending emissions. Groups like the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which offers the “gold-standard assessments” on climate change trajectories, do this complex work of drawing connections between which reductions in emissions will lead to which patterns of warming. Their latest report indicates that the planet is likely to reach about 3.2 degrees of warming—far beyond the “tipping point” of the ice sheets’ collapse.
This passage illustrates just how dependent the human world and the natural world are on one another. How humans act now—and how we react to the ravages of warming, once they become impossible to ignore—may impact how the Earth’s feedback loops operate and cascade into one another. While there’s no way of knowing exactly how much warmer the planet will get within a certain period of time, it’s safe to assume that if the world’s governments remain, as they are today, largely inert on climate reform, warming will continue exponentially.
Themes
It is difficult to model the future past the year 2100—but answers about what the planet will look like far into the future can be found within the geologic record of the planet. Looking backward, however, suggests that current climate models are conservative: the globe could reach temperatures double than what the IPCC currently projects, even if humanity hits the emissions-reductions targets laid out in the Paris accord.
This passage underscores the idea that climate change is “even worse than [we] think” it is, as Wallace-Wells noted in his book’s opening line. Comparing current warming models with data from the historical record only proves that the measures being taken, even at the level of international legislations, are insufficient. This passage implies that agreements like the Paris accord and projections from the IPCC only reinforce humanity’s sense that there’s nothing to be done—or that taking radical action to cut emissions entirely is simply too much work.
Themes
Even though the numbers seem small it’s important not to trivialize them: at two degrees of warming—the best-case scenario—400 million people will endure water scarcity, the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and rolling heat waves will kill tens of thousands each year. At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought. At four degrees, the damages incurred globally from flooding, tropical disease, and wildfires could pass $600 trillion, more wealth than exists in the world today.
This passage confirms that global society as we know it is profoundly unprepared to confront the effects of warming. Warming won’t just flood certain cities—the global damages, the interruptions to food production chains, and the displacements and refugee crises it will create are unprecedented in human history. There is never going to be enough wealth to repair climate change’s damages, and there is going to be an increasingly small amount of space to which humans can safely flee a cascading, multiplying series of natural disasters.
Themes
Climate change is irreversible and unavoidable. While it is difficult to picture the severity of its outcomes given the fact that many of them are decades or even centuries away, it is necessary to start doing so rather than simply focusing on what changes will arrive in this century. While there are many uncertainties about the specifics of what lies ahead, it is clear that the earth is headed for somewhere between two and five degrees of warming—and that those increased temperatures will test what human life is able to endure.
What is happening to the planet right now is already unstoppable—all humanity can do is resolve to mitigate these oncoming changes and crises by any means necessary. Right now, there is still time to come up with meaningful solutions and to prepare for the worst—but at two or three degrees of warming, the devastation may be so great that international cooperation (or human will) has broken down almost completely.
Themes
Within the bounds of a two-to-five-degree warming scenario, the biggest question is what the human response will be. Our own will and ability to change course is all that stands between humanity and a disastrous five degrees of warming. If humanity continues on its current trajectory of carbon emissions, changing nothing, many regions will become unlivable by the century’s end: humanity may have to sequester itself in the global north to survive.
The consequences of global warming are great, and Wallace-Wells encourages readers to picture the immense changes and sacrifices that will have to be made if nothing is done right now, in the present. An Earth that is only habitable in small, sequestered areas will present an unprecedented human rights crisis—and this is just one example of how warming’s practical effects will have devastating social, political and economic costs.
Themes
While it’s unlikely that the entire globe will become uninhabitable, it’s not an impossibility. The fact that humanity has created the conditions for its own extinction is the “overwhelming cultural and historical fact of the modern era.”
This passage underscores the fact that it’s humanity and human industry that have brought the planet to this tipping point. While some warming is natural, the degree and rate of warming right now is undoubtedly hastened by human impact. Humans have created their own destruction—and now we must find the will to pull ourselves and our planet back from the brink.
Themes
Climate change is, in many ways, already here. Hurricane Harvey, which struck Houston in the summer of 2017, was the kind of event that happens once every 500,000 years. But Harvey was the third storm of such intensity to hit Houston in just two years. Hurricanes in Ireland, floods in Maryland, and record-breaking heat waves in Russia are all symptoms of warming that affect our present-day lives. Unprecedented wildfires, heat waves, floods, and storms across the globe aren’t just becoming humanity’s new normal: humanity has entered a new climate system entirely, far from the one that nurtured its growth over billions of years.
The Earth’s ecosystem is at once hardy and delicate. The superstorms, raging wildfires, and rapidly melting ice shelves that draw our attention around the globe today are increasing in intensity and urgency. So it’s not far off base to state that we are already seeing what it’s like to live on a planet that is warming past a temperature meant to sustain and nurture life. While humans aren’t yet being cooked by the sun’s rays, there are other more insidious symptoms of warming unfolding every day—and these symptoms will only make it progressively harder for humanity to continue to thrive and flourish. We have engineered our own greatest existential threat, and we have so altered the planet’s equilibrium that we have pushed the atmosphere outside of the bounds of the life-sustaining and into the realm of the lethal.
Themes
The changes humanity is seeing now are the effects of the last several decades of emissions. Even if humans were to stop emissions entirely right now, the climate would still continue warming well into the future—and the scale and frequency of these natural disasters will continue to increase.
This passage underscores why radical, collective action against climate change is needed right now. The effects don’t stop as soon as the problem stops—we will still be paying for the last several decades of emissions for many, many years to come, but a reduction or halt in emissions now could stop a problem that’s already difficult to manage from spiraling completely out of control.
Themes
The term “Anthropocene,” a name given to humanity’s present geologic era, is misleading: it implies that humanity has dominated nature. But Wallace-Wells quotes a prominent oceanographer who states that the planet is an “angry beast” or even a “war machine”—and each day, humans are responsible for arming and angering it further.
We currently live in an era whose very name tells us that we have conquered nature and dominated the planet. But Wallace-Wells stresses that this idea couldn’t be farther from the truth. In reality, the planet is more than equipped to fight back against our dominion and make survival difficult or even impossible. Every step we take to further cement our authority actually undercuts our ability to survive beyond the next several decades.
Themes
The “cascading violence” of warming that approaches will batter humanity with increasing intensity, making response and recovery difficult at best. The “cascades,” or rolling and compounding environmental effects, that climate change will create in the environment are interconnected and dangerous. For instance: warmer temperatures will melt Arctic ice. Less ice means less white ground that reflects sunlight back into space—and more of it absorbed into the atmosphere, which means the ocean can absorb less carbon, which warms the planet even faster.
This passage introduces the book’s central symbolic image: a “cascade” or cascades of compounding feedback loops that operate much like a cascade of waterfalls do: by feeding into one another, gathering strength and power until unleashing themselves in one mighty stream. The warming effect described here is just one example of a cascade: wildfires creating mudslides, flooding leading to an increase in disease, and many other compounded scenarios represent the intricate, interconnected latticework of our climate systems and their feedback loops. As these natural feedbacks cascade into one another, nature will become weaponized: wind will tug trees from the ground and turn them into battering rams, floods will cut off food deliveries and medical supplies from communities in need, and both rich and poor communities will suffer.
Themes
Another “wide-eyed climate delusion” is the idea that climate can be governed or changed by any institution, instrument, or piece of technology. The planet thrived before humanity’s arrival, and it will survive beyond its end. Climate disaster is the most direct and overwhelming threat human civilization has faced—greater than any human conflict or war. It will take unified resistance to halt the cascade that is the collapse of international trust and collective responsibility.
The natural world as we know it will be decimated by climate change—but on a long enough timeline, the planet will do the work of repairing itself and creating something new. But humanity, which needs an extremely narrow set of circumstances to thrive (or even just to survive) is not equipped to weather the coming storms. That’s why action is needed now—so that the disasters don’t continue to compound and cascade over the decades to come, annihilating us before we have a chance to fight for our survival.
Themes
Climate disaster’s effects aren’t just going to affect the human world—after all, nature is not as separate from modern human life as most would like to think. In the last 40 years, vertebrate animal and insect populations have declined immensely, and the weather has changed the way humans experience the world. The migration patterns of fish and pollinators have shifted enormously, and some species of bear don’t even hibernate during winter any longer. It’s important not to see stories about changes in nature as “allegories”—we are not sequestered from the natural world. Rather, the natural world in many ways governs the human one, influencing everything from crop yields to pandemics to crime waves.
Humans depend on nature for many things—like temperature regulation, food sources, and unseen systems such as pollination and carbon capture that allow our food to grow and our air to stay clean. And nature depends on humanity for its survival, too. Already humanity’s excesses have ravaged the natural world, destroying whole species, systems, and patterns. But the idea that nature will the only thing to suffer is a fallacy: the natural world is part of our world, and so we have a duty to do all we can to repair it.
Themes
The economy, too, is directly tied to climate, and prosperity will come from aggressive action to curb warming. Hundreds of trillions of dollars in damages are at stake should the globe continue to warm—and turning away from economic growth as an “orienting beacon” will be necessary.
This passage declares the book’s intent not just to focus on the climatological and biological effects of climate change, but also on the effects warming will have on manmade systems such as politics and economics. Up until now, society has been organized around capitalism and economic growth—but warming will put a swift stop to that, rendering the metrics by which humans measure success entirely irrelevant.
Themes
There is no time to moralize or learn lessons from climate disaster: the threat is too imminent and too immense. Already, millions of people die each year from the effects of air pollution, and should the earth reach 2 degrees of warming, as many as 150 million could die each year. There is no available language or reference point for this kind of mass death—“the facts” are “hysterical.”
By calling the facts of climate change “hysterical,” Wallace-Wells isn’t suggesting that they’re ridiculous or far-fetched; rather, what he’s saying is that the projected numbers for the casualties associated with climate change are so staggering and so miserable that they should induce hysteria and mourning in anyone. But while these numbers have been vetted by international panels and carefully considered by scientists and climatologists, many people still can’t conceptualize the “hysteric” scale of climate crisis.
Themes
As serious as the threat of climate disaster is, people should not allow it to inspire passivity and hopelessness. While a dramatic threat, it’s also a democratic one—humanity has a collective responsibility to face it rather than become complacent. Global warming is unequivocally humanity’s doing—but this fact should be empowering. Humans are the “authors” of global warming, and so they must share in responsibility and continue to write its story until the end.
This is perhaps one of Wallace-Wells’s most urgent arguments: he suggests that humanity’s role in climate change is a cause for action and optimism rather than despair and passivity. According to his reasoning, humanity got itself into this mess, so surely it can engineer systems that will help to dig us all out of it together.
Themes
Wallace-Wells himself is optimistic. If humans could have engineered warming, they can engineer solutions to its threats as well. Carbon capture technology and other as-yet-unknown inventions still hold the potential to transform the fate of humanity from “apocalyptic” to “merely grim.” Over the course of the writing of this book, the author says, he and his wife had a child—and while many question whether it’s “moral” to reproduce given the threat of climate disaster, Wallace-Wells believe that the fight is not yet lost and that optimism is the key to winning. He knows his daughter will inherit an unknowable world—but that her generation will live “the greatest story ever told.”
Wallace-Wells positions himself as an optimist, even after an opening section that speaks unrelentingly of disaster. This is somewhat of a radical stance to take—but he believes it is the only one that will allow humans to come up with ways of mitigating or halting altogether the systems that have caused the planet to warm so rapidly. In other words, Wallace-Wells is an optimist because he knows he has to be: pessimism and inaction only ensure the annihilation of life as we know it.
Themes
A huge portion of emissions can be cut just through the end of inefficiencies in construction, food production, and the minting of currency. There are many actionable avenues to a drastic fall in emissions, including constricting the carbon footprints of the world’s richest 10 percent and issuing political mandates that place the onus of change not on individuals but corporations. But reaching these milestones will require a reframing of the story of human civilization from one of triumph over the Earth to a recognition of the fragile ecosystem made from human culture and the planet that sustains it.
By laying out these small ways that emissions can be cut, Wallace-Wells shows that there are no longer any reasonable excuses for inaction when it comes to climate change. He implies that human greed—and human obsession with a narrative of triumph and conquest—is all that is holding us back from taking the steps that must be taken to ensure the survivability of our planet for future generations.
Themes
The chapters to follow endeavor to provide a “kaleidoscopic accounting” of the costs that will accompany just one more generation of business as usual. The planet’s “force of retribution” is primed to cascade though nature—but humanity must not conceive any longer of the natural world as separate from our own. The world that is left behind once warming takes its toll on nature won’t be one that human beings can inhabit.
Just a few more years of ignoring climate change will effectively end any chance humanity has at surviving in the long term. The cascading effects of climate disaster will surely visit us no matter what—but there is a swiftly closing window of time in which we can mitigate those cascades’ effects and make sure that our one Earth does not become, as the title of the book warns it might, completely uninhabitable.
Themes
