The Uninhabitable Earth

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon It is worse, much worse

Characters

David Wallace-Wells (10)

We still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Progress Narrative of History

Plastic panic has a strange relationship to climate change, in that it seems to draw on premonitions about the degradation of the planet while focusing on something that has very little to do with global warming.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Plastic panic

I is now estimated that New York City will suffer “500-year” floods once every twenty-five years.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Predictions

A paradise dreamscape erected in a barren desert, L.A. has always been an impossible city, as Mike Davis has so brilliantly written.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Los Angeles Impossible City

Climatologists can, today, predict with uncanny accuracy where a hurricane will hit, and at what intensity, as much as a week out from landfall; this is not just because the models are good but because all the inputs are known. When it comes to global warming, the models are just as good, but the ke…

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Climatology Climate

Western liberals have comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into performances of moral or environmental purity—less beef, more Teslas, fewer transatlantic flights.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

food Junk Food

We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Human Life Climate

More than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

carbon Global Warming

All climate change is governed by uncertainty, mostly the uncertainty of human action—what action will be taken, and when, to avert or forestall the dramatic transformation of life on the planet that will unfold in the absence of dramatic intervention.

— David Wallace-Wells, amazon.com

Climate Change

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