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
Though humans aren’t at risk of suffocating due to lack of oxygen, the changing climate means that people around the globe are ingesting harmful carbon dioxide particles that directly affect cognitive ability, causing declines in clarity of thought of over 20 percent. The planet’s air is only getting dirtier, and deaths from inhaling pollutants are expected to double as climate change seizes the planet. 10,000 people globally already die from air pollution each day—and as the air around the world becomes more toxic, that number will only skyrocket.
This passage, again, shows how most coverage of climate change looks at fatalist, far-fetched, worst-case scenarios, while ignoring the casualties of warming that are already present in our everyday lives. We are nowhere near a scenario in which there’s no longer enough breathable oxygen, but we’re ignoring the very real fact that the air we do breathe is not very good for us, and we’re delaying the social and political action that might have an impact on the air’s health.
Themes
Studies have shown that a person’s test scores, labor force participation, and lifetime earnings are all directly tied to the quality of the air they breathe. In significantly smoggy or toxic areas, these numbers are all in decline. From China to California to Delhi, pollutants often prove life-threatening; over 1.3 million people died during China’s “airpocalypse” of 2013. Pollutants affect heart rate, asthma, and pregnancy outcomes, and air pollution has been linked to cognitive issues such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Globally, about 95 percent of the world’s population is currently breathing air that is polluted enough to be dangerous.
Just as the book discussed hidden epidemics of hunger in the form of nutrient deficiencies in an earlier chapter, here, it examines another silent casualty of climate change. The very real effects of life on a warming planet are already here, and they are already ravaging the world’s most vulnerable. Climate change is already altering the outcomes of human lives all around the planet in unprecedented and unpredictable ways.
Themes
Chemical pollutants and carbon particles aren’t the only things compromising the air we breathe and the things we consume: microplastics, too, are a direct threat. Fish tested all over the world contain microplastics, as do honey, beer, and sea salt. Globally, most human bodies probably contain microplastics as well. By 2050, there may well be more plastics in the ocean than fish.
Microplastics are a human-engineered “element of chaos” in the fight against climate change. They are transforming our oceans, our animal life, and likely our own bodies, but nearly every level of our society relies on the plastic materials that create and emit these pollutants. Like every other aspect of climate change, microplastic pollution will only continue to build in power as the years go by, no doubt having unprecedented and frightening effects on food production, rising temperatures, and the quality of human life around the globe.
Themes
When plastics break down and degrade, they release methane—yet another airborne pollutant that threatens human life and accelerates warming. Aerosol pollution, too, poses a sinister threat: particles that hang in the earth’s atmosphere reflect heat back into space, keeping the temperature cool. Unfortunately, this places humanity in a terrible catch-22: halting or drastically decreasing emissions rapidly will undoubtedly now result in an even more hastened warming of about half a degree. Pollution is destroying global public health, but it’s also cruelly protecting humanity from something much worse: rapid warming.
This passage reveals the unsustainable position in which humanity has found itself when it comes to mitigating pollution. At this point, pollution is actually preventing more warming—a tragic and twisted fact that reveals just how insidious the invisible cascading effects of warming are. Taking apart one part of the climate system implicates all parts of the climate system. Everything is interconnected, and one change may trigger unforeseen feedback loops that actually hasten the whole process.
Themes
Get the entire The Uninhabitable Earth LitChart as a printable PDF.
Scientists and climatologists have managed to find a potential solution to this “devil’s bargain:” by dispersing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, the element’s change into sulfuric acid will reflect the sun’s rays back, keeping the planet cool as emissions decrease. This, however, would turn our skies red, create more acid rain, decimate plant life, and result in many more thousands of pollution-related deaths annually. And once humanity begins such a program, it can never stop.
This passage shows that the mitigation solutions available to us now require immense tradeoffs—and will still require us to live on a rapidly warming planet whose feedback loops are constantly creating new forms of destruction. There is no more time for half-measures when it comes to climate policy: if we don’t take action soon, there will be more and more of these terrible trade-offs to contend with.
Themes
