Normally, the word cascades denotes a series of waterfalls—but throughout The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells uses the imagery of a cascading group of waterfalls to symbolize how the Earth’s many climate systems feed into one another, creating compounded destruction as one system after another begins to fall apart. By creating a clear, symbolic image of one stream of water pouring into another, gathering momentum as they descend together into a larger collecting pool, Wallace-Wells suggests that the systems that have already begun to break down as a result of global warming are not isolated. Instead, one affects the other intimately, as in the case of the albedo effect: when white space on planet Earth—like polar ice caps—reflects the Sun’s rays back into the atmosphere. But as the ice sheets melt, there is less white space on the planet to reflect the Sun’s rays back into the atmosphere, so the Earth absorbs heat and radiation faster, and thus warms faster. By referring to climate systems like the albedo effect as cascades, Wallace-Wells urges readers to picture for themselves an image that encapsulates the mounting, multiplying speed and power of climate change.
Cascades Quotes in The Uninhabitable Earth
The assaults will not be discrete—this is another climate delusion. Instead, they will produce a new kind of cascading violence, waterfalls and avalanches of devastation, the planet pummeled again and again, with increasing intensity and in ways that build on each other and undermine our ability to respond, uprooting much of the landscape we have taken for granted, for centuries…
Global warming, in other words, is more than just one input in an equation to determine carrying capacity; it is the set of conditions under which all of our experiments to improve that capacity will be conducted. In this way, climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met—a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world's future problems and all of its possible solutions.
But as "familiar" as sea-level rise may seem, it surely deserves its place at the center of the picture of what damage climate change will bring. That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we'd already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war-because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.
By accidents of geography and by the force of its wealth, the United States has, to this point, been mostly protected from the devastation climate change has already visited on parts of the less-developed world—mostly. The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. All of a sudden, it's getting a lot harder to protect against what's coming.
Extreme weather is not a matter of "normal"; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible.
But the ocean isn't the other; we are. Water is not a beachside attraction for land animals: at 70 percent of the earth's surface it is, by an enormous margin, the planet's predominant environment. Along with everything else it does, oceans feed us: globally, seafood accounts for nearly a fifth of all animal protein in the human diet, and in coastal areas it can provide much more. The oceans also maintain our planetary seasons, through prehistoric currents like the Gulf Stream, and modulate the temperature of the planet, absorbing much of the heat of the sun.
But wars are not caused by climate change only in the same way that hurricanes are not caused by climate change, which is to say they are made more likely, which is to say the distinction is semantic.
At what point will the climate crisis grow undeniable, un-compartmentalizable? How much damage will have already been selfishly done? How quickly will we act to save ourselves and preserve as much of the way of life we know today as possible? For the sake of clarity, I've treated each of the threats from climate change—sea-level rise, food scarcity, economic stagnation—as discrete threats, which they are not. Some may prove offsetting, some mutually reinforcing, and others merely adjacent. But together they form a latticework of climate crisis, beneath which at least some humans, and probably many billions, will live. How?
What does it mean to be entertained by a fictional apocalypse as we stare down the possibility of a real one? One job of pop culture is always to serve stories that distract even as they appear to engage. […] In a time of cascading climate change, Hollywood is also trying to make sense of our changing relationship to nature, which we have long regarded from at least an arm's length—but which, amid this change, has returned as a chaotic force we nevertheless understand, on some level, as our fault. The adjudication of that guilt is another thing entertainment can do […] in projecting rather than accepting guilt. […] In fictional stories of climate catastrophe we may also be looking for catharsis, and collectively trying to persuade ourselves we might survive it.
Cascades Symbol Timeline in The Uninhabitable Earth
