Yikes!
David Wallace-Wells’ eye-opener novel The Uninhabitable Earth explores one of the hottest topics (literally) of the 21st century – Climate Change.
There is no doubt that we are all familiar with the continuous warnings of our warming planet. For some, perhaps it is anxiety-inducing, and for others, it goes in one ear and out the other.
Nevertheless, Climate Change is real, and it is happening now. Scarily so, we are only seeing the devastating effects more often as these ‘’1 in 500 years’’ natural disaster events are cropping up left right and center, in some cases multiple times in a single year. Yikes!
In this book, David Wallace-Wells explores the future predictions of the impacts of climate change across 11 chapters. Each chapter depicts a different ‘elements of chaos’, varying from heat death and dying oceans; to economic collapse and ‘plagues of warming’ – the chapter I found most interesting.
Before delving into the elements of chaos, David touches on the stark truth that is the fact earth’s temperature is warming – this is no lie and nothing new! We are on a trajectory to warming at least 2 degrees by 2100, and by the sounds of it, this is literally beyond a catastrophic worst-case scenario.
“150 million people would die from air pollution alone in a 2-degree-warmer world than a 1.5-degree-warmer one. Later that year, the IPCC raised the stakes further: in the gap between 1.5 and 2, it said, hundreds of millions of lives were at stake.”
“Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of twenty-five Holocausts.”
“This is what is meant when climate change is called an existential crisis – a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between 2 hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of 25 holocausts, and the worst-case outcome puts us on the brink of extension.”
I have no words – this scares the living daylights out of me! How can these comparisons, so clearly explained, not drive action from the world leaders? At this point, I take my hat off to Greta Thunberg.
Another interesting chapter is about the Plagues of Warming – also somewhat topical given the global pandemic we’re living through. Wells opens with an eye-opening message in the chapter intro:
“There are now, trapped in arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years – in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them.”…
“Already, in laboratories, several microbes have been reanimated: a 32,000-year-old “extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, a 7 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007.”
This book really puts into perspective just how many devastating elements lie ahead if we don’t change course now. From well documented rises in sea levels to lethal toxins and disease being released as the ice caps melt – something I knew nothing about. Wells brings together these combining elements to paint us the same picture, a future of destruction of our Planet Earth and mother nature, by the collective hand of us billions of humans.
I am by no means a scientist, but rather musing over this book. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you have read it too. Are there any other must-reads about climate change you recommend?