July 22

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019)
By David Wallace-Wells

This is a scary book.  If it were a movie, I'd give it an R for mature - and disturbing - content.  But it's a warning we need to hear.

We hear the stories of rising seas and flooding, but little is done by the world's governments to alleviate the causes.  And, says writer David Wallace-Wells, climate change is so much worse than what ever heard.  The melting of arctic ice, for example, has cascading effects: it is not only causing our seas to rise but could release trillions of tons of carbon, and possible, methanol (powerful greenhouse gases that can trap heat in our atmosphere), less ice means less sunlight reflected back into space rather than being absorbed by the ice ("albedo effect").

Trees absorb much of the world's carbon, but as they die through fires or clearing, they release carbon back into the atmosphere.  The author believes the world has sufficient drinking water, but governments must take action in keeping it safe and available.  Oceans have sucked up 90% of the earth's carbon, but acidic oceans are now destroying much of coral life and impairing the growth of fish and shellfish.  Polluted air can cause disease and impair breathing, a problem in many of the world's large cities like Delhi.  Viruses and bacteria in the air have caused die-outs of various species (e.g., nearly 2/3 of the world's entire saiga population [saiga are a dwarf antelope-like native to central Asia]).

Wallace-Wells looks at the 2008 economic collapse, and surmises that the swift economic growth that began in the 18th century was "not the result of innovation or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and their raw power - a onetime injection of that new 'value' into a system that had previously been characterized by unending subsistence living."  (p 115)

Just as the industrial countries have benefited from the plundering of fossil fuels, they are int he best position to withstand the disruptions of climate change - almost a story of the world's rich drowning the world's poor in their waste.

How did Europe, a provincial backwater to the empires of China, India, and the Middle East, spears itself so dramatically from the rest of the world in the 19th century?  Coal (to cite Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence)

Though Wallace-Wells spends more text stating the problems than resolving them, he does note that there are new technologies to capture carbon, which are currently more affordable (he estimates ~$3Tr to capture carbon pollution) than the subsidies for fossil fuel (~$5Tr) but, in 2017, the same year the US withdrew from the Paris climate accord, it approved a $2.3 Tr tax cut for the country's richest.  He thus shows little optimism that the US, once the world leader in areas like climate control and human rights, has the interest in doing the hard work of stemming the climate change disaster.  [Let's hope and pray that a new administration will care!]