Throughout The Uninhabitable Earth, author David Wallace-Wells describes the “cascades,” or cascading effects of interconnected climate and weather systems, that “form a latticework of climate crisis” beneath which humans live. From floods to wildfires to pollution to disease, the consequences of global warming may seem distinct—but in reality, they are all interconnected, and as one crisis cascades into another, the face of the Earth will change forever. The book suggests that humanity must first accept the interconnectedness of our climatological and social systems in order to recognize how damaging the collapse of one system is to the rest.
In a lengthy section titled “Elements of Chaos,” the book lays out the climate systems already cascading into one another as warming seizes the planet in order to show how interconnected the consequences of climate change truly are. The book devotes a single chapter to each threatening cascade: a chapter about famine, a chapter about flooding, a chapter about freshwater shortages, a chapter about the effect of global heat waves on increases in armed conflict the world over. Taken separately, each chapter describes a symptom of a larger disease: global warming. But when read together, in quick succession, it becomes clear that these many cascades fold into one another, compounding to create complex, rapidly worsening crises that don’t have one clear solution. For instance, Wallace-Wells describes how melting ice sheets are one example of a cascade that has reverberations throughout other climate systems. As the Earth’s temperature warms, its ice caps melt. As the bright white ice sloughs off into the sea, there is less white surface area on the planet to reflect the sun’s harsh rays back into the atmosphere (called the albedo effect). Not only do sea levels begin to rise due to the extra water in the oceans—but also the direct heat traveling to the planet is absorbed more widely, creating a dangerous feedback loop. Another example of a dangerous cascade is the example of warming’s effects on the proliferation of extant diseases in new regions—and even the resurfacing of long-extinct plagues in unexpected places. As carbon emissions and the albedo effect warm the planet, tropical climates will expand northward—taking with them bugs that carry diseases that have, until now, been confined to certain regions of the world. And while malaria and Zika spread northward, affecting populations that are poorly equipped to combat them, thawing permafrost can uncover strains of old plagues like the Black Death and dormant bacteria such as anthrax. Once again, the book shows how one falling domino sets off another until the whole world is entrenched in new, terrible battles.
It’s easy for humanity to see these cascades as separate or discrete—but if we don’t heed their warnings, the literal (and metaphorical) deluges from these cascades will pile up irreparably. By establishing how intertwined the various aspects of climate change are, the book suggests that there is no single solution to the problem of warming. Wildfires create air pollution, air pollution creates higher temperatures, higher temperatures lead to the proliferation of tropical diseases in new regions of the world—and so on. By laying out just how dependent the many aspects of life on Earth are upon one another, the book suggests that the response to climate change will need to be as complex and many-armed as the problem of warming itself. If humanity doesn’t pay attention to the cascades happening right now—disease-breeding, crop-destroying floods in the wake of hurricanes; cognition-impairing and lung-straining pollution from drought-induced wildfires—these systems crises will only continue to expand and take over more and more of the globe. The worse things get and the greater the financial toll in helping affected communities to recover, the more impossible it will be to stay ahead of warming and make the changes that must be made. There are solutions—carbon capture plants and legislation in favor of emissions reductions among them—but without an understanding of how the systems of the world are connected, the book suggests, humanity will only continue standing by as these cascades grow more and more “un-compartmentalizable.” By committing ourselves to discerning how these systems are connected now, the book posits, we may be able to head off rapid, intertwined feedback loops that could be triggered in the near future.
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Cascades, Systems Crises, and Interconnectedness Quotes in The Uninhabitable Earth
But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. […] You could [call the planet a] "war machine." Each day we arm it more.
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.
In recent years, researchers have uncovered a whole secret history of adversity woven into the experience of the last half century by the hand of leaded gasoline and lead paint, which seem to have dramatically increased rates of intellectual disability and criminality, and dramatically decreased educational attainment and lifetime earnings, wherever they were introduced. The effects of air pollution seem starker already. Small-particulate pollution, for instance, lowers cognitive performance over time so much that researchers call the effect "huge"…
Already, aerosols have been reflecting so much sunlight away from the earth that, in the industrial era, the planet has only heated up two-thirds as much as it would have otherwise. […] The result is […] a "devil's bargain": a choice between public-health-destroying pollution on the one hand, and, on the other, clear skies whose very clearness and healthiness will dramatically accelerate climate change.
The global halving of economic resources would be permanent, and, because permanent, we would soon not even know it as deprivation, only as a brutally cruel normal against which we might measure tiny burps of decimal-point growth as the breath of a new prosperity. We have gotten used to setbacks on our erratic march along the arc of economic history but we know them as setbacks and expect elastic recoveries. What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing—not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.
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.
Global warming [shows us] that we didn't defeat the environment at all. There was no final conquest, no dominion established. In fact, the opposite: Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame in any day-to-day way. But more than that: with our continued activity, we have rendered that system only more out of control. Nature is both over, as in "past," and all around us, indeed overwhelming us and punishing us—this is the major lesson of climate change, which it teaches us almost daily.
Big things make us feel small, and rather powerless, even if we are nominally "in charge." In the modern age, at least, there is also the related tendency to view large human systems, like the internet or industrial economy, as more unassailable, even more un-intervenable, than natural systems, like climate, that literally enclose us. This is how renovating capitalism so that it doesn't reward fossil fuel extraction can seem unlikelier than suspending sulfur in the air to dye the sky red and cool the planet off by a degree or two.
There is no good thing in the world that will be made more abundant, or spread more widely, by global warming. The list of the bad things that will proliferate is innumerable. And already, in this age of nascent ecological crisis, you can read a whole new literature of deep skepticism—proposing not only that history can move in reverse, but that the entire project of human settlement and civilization, which we know as "history" and which has given us climate change, has been, in fact, a jet stream backward.
These are the disconcerting, contradictory lessons of global warming, which counsels both human humility and human grandiosity, each drawn from the same perception of peril. The climate system that gave rise to the human species, and to everything we know of as civilization, is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity. But that instability is also a measure of the human power that engineered it, almost by accident, and which now must stop the damage, in only as much time. If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it.
The path we are on as a planet should terrify anyone living on it, but, thinking like one people, all the relevant inputs are within our control, and there is no mysticism required to interpret or command the fate of the earth. Only an acceptance of responsibility.
