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
While experts caution that wars aren’t caused by climate change, this is half-true in the same way that hurricanes aren’t directly caused by climate change. Researchers claim that for every half degree of warming, societies the world over could experience a 10-20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. By 2100, there could be 40-80 percent more war—and this is a best-case scenario.
Warming affects violence and armed conflict in many ways. Melting ice opens up new territories to fight over and new arenas for those fights to take place. Countries at risk of losing army and naval bases seek to arm themselves in other ways. The race to build footholds in eroding areas heats up. Warming weather is shown to have psychological and cognitive effects on human beings—so in regions that are hot and getting hotter, such as the Middle East, warming produces not only a strain on resources but a more sinister, invisible sense of psychological pressure.
By laying out all the different ways in which the side effects of global warming stand to directly contribute to a rise in armed conflicts around the globe, the book reminds readers that the human world and the natural world are not separate: what happens in nature reverberates throughout humanity, and vice versa.
Themes
Compromised agriculture, stalled economics, forced migration, and rapid social change are all factors that contribute to the rise of violence in any given place as a result of warming. War is “an all-encompassing aggregation” of warming’s biggest cascades, and in places like Yemen, where the social, political, and economic situation is already fragile, warming could tip the scales irreversibly. Climate change won’t be the sole cause of the coming wars—but it will be the spark that ignites already-present “kindling.”
Because climate change threatens to compromise and change every aspect of the society we’ve engineered, it stands to reason that on newly shaky ground, humanity will be much more vulnerable to armed conflict. So while war isn’t as direct an effect of climate change as, say, melting ice caps, it’s nonetheless one of the cascades that threatens to plunge our planet past the tipping point.
Themes
Hotter weather and more highly polluted air are directly linked with increases in violent crime rates, robberies, and acts of larceny. Natural disasters that leave communities devastated and short on food by affecting their infrastructure and agriculture also, in their own way, lead to increases in crime rates. As the cascades mount, these chain reactions will compound and worsen.
Climate change doesn’t just deplete resources, shift boundaries, or open up new arenas of conflict: rising temperatures are statistically shown to make people less focused and more volatile. As “normal” temperatures around the globe continue to rise into unprecedented territory, humanity may become markedly more violent on the whole and less capable of regulating conflict.
Themes
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