Just Finished Reading: The Uninhabitable Earth – A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells (FP: 2019) [238pp] 

You just know there will be no sugar coating of the issue of Global Warming/Climate Change when the author opens with this sentence: It is worse, much worse, than you think. Sitting in the affluent west it’s easy to be comforted by a number of pervasive climate myths – that climate change is happening slowly and that we have plenty of time to respond, or indeed that it’s happening slowly enough that we’ll be long dead before it happens, that it’s happening elsewhere, to other much poorer people and that although we care (and donate to various disaster appeals) it doesn’t really affect us, that we, in the rich western world, will be able to buy our way or build our way out of it and live full rich lives behind our flood defences. This, to an extent at least, has some truth to it. Poor countries will be hit harder by the effects of climate change and will be less able to cope with these changes. Rich countries can afford much more money to spend on mitigation strategies which will reduce the overall effect of climate change. But the one thing we can’t sidestep or talk our way around is the time argument. Global Warming isn’t coming in 100 years or even 50 years, it’s here now, today. What we see on our television screens or by simply looking out of the window is happening today and will continue to happen tomorrow, next month and in the years to come. But the droughts, floods, fires, mudslides, hurricanes and much else we’re experiencing isn’t the new normal – far from it. What we’re seeing now isn’t the new equilibrium, the new steady state. What millions of people are experiencing across the globe is the start of things, the tip, as it were, of the melting iceberg. We really haven’t seen anything yet. If nothing is done, as largely nothing has been done so far, we will experience longer hotter heatwaves, deeper longer droughts, much more flooding and sea level rises, more and stronger hurricanes as well as all the known knock-on effects we are becoming all too familiar with – the spread of ‘exotic’ diseases and pests, climate refugees growing year on year, increasing climate related conflict over basic resources such as water and on and on. It is not, indeed far from it, a pleasant picture to behold. 

As you can imagine this is FAR from an easy read. It is, to be honest, more than a little depressing and if you easily fall into that state looking at the world today, I’d recommend you don’t read this. If on the other hand you can face reality, no matter how bad, this will give you a good foundation on which to build. Covering the facts as we know them, plus the effects of feedback loops and possible cascade failures, the author gives a reasoned view on what will happen if we do nothing. As base temperatures increase things will get worse. Even holding the rise to the much talked about 2 degrees will still result in a lot of negative effects. Doing nothing, or nowhere near enough as we are now, might lead to a 3, 4 or 5 degree rise. This would literally make parts of the planet uninhabitable just from the heat experienced there to say nothing of the land inundated by sea level rises. All this well understood science is what should be driving us to avoid these futures the author maps out. They’re not inevitable. We created this situation, and we could do something about it if we just had the will to do so. It’s not rocket science. We’ve been adding ‘greenhouse’ gases into our atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution at a steady increasing pace. We need to start cutting that drastically. We also need to start paying more attention to taking out some of the gases that we’ve already put there. But we also need to plan for what's coming and start building our flood defences and increasing our drainage infrastructure before we desperately need it. We have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it. No matter what happens, the next 100 years are going to be rough. If you can handle it and want to be informed, then this is the book for you.