For the last several decades, academics and scientists have called the current geologic era the “Anthropocene” to reflect how humanity has conquered the Earth. But the belief that humans have conquered the planet is a fallacy: what we have done since industrialization is more akin to arming a violent “war machine” (metaphorically, the planet) with all the tools needed to assure its own destruction. In other words, the hotter and more toxic the planet and its atmosphere become, the readier it is to annihilate humanity through climate system feedback loops. As the planet warms, the natural world won’t just suffer—the human one will, too, and the reverberations throughout our lives will be resounding. The Uninhabitable Earth outlines the social, political, and economic consequences of the Anthropocene, suggesting that as the physical world is remade through warming, the society we’ve built upon it will transform radically, too.
Climate change and rising temperatures have already been shown to have an effect on humans as individuals and as social creatures—no arena of human experience is spared from the effects of warming. Studies show that already, zones where pollution is more rife—the areas around toll plazas, for example, and parts of countries like China and India where smog blankets entire cities—produce citizens with lower test scores, more cognitive and developmental problems, and worse prospects for long term employment well into adulthood and middle age. Because carbon pollution directly affects the brain, psychological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral issues in highly polluted areas are much more common than in areas with clean, more breathable air. As the world’s atmosphere becomes more polluted with carbon and microplastics, these effects may only grow worse. Hotter temperatures, too, have statistically been associated with armed conflicts and crime waves the world over. From increases in violent crimes in cities during hot summers to the correlation between armed conflicts and water shortages or heat waves stretching back as far as 3,000 B.C., the relationship between heat, drought, and human volatility is undeniable. As temperatures increase—and as freshwater around the world becomes scarcer—small skirmishes and large-scale wars will become more frequent (and more intense) across the entire globe. When it comes to natural disasters, hurricanes and wildfires leave more than physical destruction in their wake: they create psychological casualties, too. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, more than 60 percent of those who evacuated were diagnosed with acute stress disorder; later, a third of people in the region were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. After Hurricane Mitch, a storm that struck Central America in 1998 and killed 11,000, a whopping 90 percent of adolescents in the area developed PTSD. So climate won’t just transform our social systems and our relationships to ourselves and one another by making us crankier in the summer or clogging our brains with pollutants. Its ravages will leave us psychologically transformed as we reckon with the destruction we have wrought.
The economy, too, is at the mercy of climate change: as natural disasters proliferate and the systems through which humans feed and sustain themselves begin to change, the neoliberal global economy in place right now will certainly change, too. Up until now, the world’s economy has been defined by capitalism, specifically neoliberal capitalism: a global economy in which endless, exponential profit is the only goal. In pursuit of more, humanity has engineered the systems that have poisoned our Earth perhaps past the point of no return. Faced with the prospect of cutting emissions or watching the planet destroy itself, global society needs to make a choice: more profits, enabled by fossil fuels, or continued existence, which requires an end to fossil fuels and carbon emissions for now and forever. The outsized natural disasters that are hallmarks of climate disaster—hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes—cost billions of dollar to recover from. Our planet is currently at just one degree of warming—by four degrees, damages could pass $600 trillion, more than twice the wealth that exists in the world today. So if the countries of the world decide not to reform emissions (and thus to keep the economy running as it is,) the global market will still be forcibly remade by the need to funnel money toward repairing cities that fall victim to warming.
Warming will also usher in a new era of global politics as socioeconomic dynamics change across the world, leading to a politics that could be steered by fear, anger, and austerity. As the neoliberal economy collapses, the book suggests, so too will neoliberal politics—and what political structures might rise up to fill the vacuum could be very different from the ones we accept now. While the creation of a collective “world-state” capable of collectively fighting back against warming might represent one end of the spectrum, a global descent into authoritarianism led by a population-dense, economically mighty country like China or Russia might represent another. Whether a single autocratic, hypercapitalist regime emerges to deny climate change and pursue total economic, social, and political control or whether the globe works together to create a new kind of world-state remains to be seen. But what The Uninhabitable Earth makes clear is that as the planet transforms, the political systems we have in place may not weather the storm. The planet is changing quickly—and our social, political and economic systems, which are inextricably bound together, will need to change, too, if humanity is to find new, collectively responsible ways of mitigating emissions, caring for one another in the wake of natural disasters, and ensuring that those most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change aren’t left behind.
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The Effects of Climate Change on Humanity 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…
This is among the things cosmologists mean when they talk about the utter improbability of anything as advanced as human intelligence evolving anywhere in a universe as inhospitable to life as this one: every uninhabitable planet out there is a reminder of just how unique a set of circumstances is required to produce a climate equilibrium supportive of life. No intelligent life that we know of ever evolved, anywhere in the universe, outside of the narrow Goldilocks range of temperatures that enclosed all of human evolution, and that we have now left behind, probably permanently.
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.
Today, the crisis is political—which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix—and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development.
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"…
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.
And while it may seem intuitive that those contemplating the end of the world find themselves despairing, especially when their calls of alarm have gone almost entirely unheeded, it is also a harrowing forecast of what is in store for the rest of the world, as the devastation of climate change slowly reveals itself. […] This may be why so many of them seem concerned with the risks of crying wolf about warming: they’ve learned enough about public apathy to worry themselves into knots about just when, and precisely how, to raise the alarm.
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.
We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it.
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.
One threat of climate catastrophe is that [certain] strains of ecological nihilism might find a home in the host of consensus wisdom—and that their premonitions may seem familiar to you is a sign that some of that anxiety and despair is already leaching into the way so many others think about the future of the world.
