Who is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth?

The author of The Uninhabitable Earth is David Wallace-Wells.

Nature & the Environment

The Uninhabitable Earth Book Summary - The Uninhabitable Earth Book explained in key points

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The Uninhabitable Earth summary

Name: The Uninhabitable Earth
Rating: 4.5 (157 reviews)
Author: David Wallace-Wells

David Wallace-Wells

A Story of the Future

4.5 (157 ratings)

32 mins

Brief summary

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells is a book that explores the potential impact of climate change on our planet. It presents a stark warning about the devastating consequences of inaction and the need for urgent action to mitigate the worst effects.

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Climate Change

Table of Contents

The Uninhabitable Earth
Summary of 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? Learn the chilling future of a warming Earth.

David Wallace-Wells lays out a terrifying vision: The world we live in is on the verge of dramatic and disastrous change. We have damaged our environment almost beyond repair. Complacency and negligence have finally caught up with us; soon, our once-prosperous ways of life will grind to a halt and collapse.

If this sounds grim and apocalyptic, that’s because it is. Earth’s delicate climate was brought to breaking point within a single generation, and the children have failed to set right the parents’ sins. We must now deal with the consequences and do what we can to improve this sorry situation.

The Uninhabitable Earth sets out exactly what humanity can expect from a warmer globe, and it doesn’t make for easy reading. From freshwater scarcity to biblical floods and perhaps the return of long-extinct diseases, we’re in for a rough ride in the next century.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why grain is becoming less nutritious;
why climate change threatens the internet; and
how climate cascades make everything worse.

The Paris climate agreement’s goals are hopelessly optimistic.

In 2015, most of the world’s leaders met in Paris to agree on a new set of goals to tackle climate change. Politicians had seemingly realized the gravity and urgency of our situation; many believed humanity had turned a corner on its dirty past. From these talks came the central objective of keeping global average temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, a figure widely regarded as the threshold at which disaster begins.

But there’s a problem: We’re going to smash right through this 2-degree ceiling.

Just take the report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in 2018. It states that if governments take aggressive action on global warming now, and immediately enact all policy changes agreed to in Paris, we’ll probably still get a global temperature increase of 3.2 degrees before warming stops. What’s worse, currently, no industrial country is even close to enacting all the policy changes.

What does this mean more concretely? Basically, that even our new best-case scenario looks pretty bleak.

If countries woke up tomorrow and miraculously met Paris’ emissions targets, the world’s ice sheets would still collapse within our lifetime. This would eventually cause over a hundred cities to flood, including Miami, Shanghai and Hong Kong. At 3 degrees of warming, southern Europe would be in permanent drought, and the annual area of the United States scorched by wildfire would increase by 600 percent.

And remember, this is an optimistic view.

Estimating a worst-case scenario by 2100, the UN put forward the staggering figure of 8 degrees. At this temperature, equatorial regions become completely uninhabitable. Huge firestorms would devastate our forests. Two-thirds of the world’s cities would flood, and tropical disease would thrive in what we once called the Arctic.

Perhaps the scariest thing about global warming, though, is its frantic pace. In geological terms, we’re used to thinking of Earth as a gradual, almost lethargic system which takes millions of years to change.

But this is a dangerous fallacy. More than half of carbon emissions have come in the last three decades and the overwhelming majority since World War II. It’s no exaggeration to say that the planet has been brought to its knees within a single generation – and that the task of saving it rests solely on our shoulders now.

To save the planet, though, we need to understand the consequences of climate change. And these are more complex than they seem.

The destructive effects of climate change act as chain reactions, triggering further warming.

If you feel distressed after the last blink, the blunt answer is that you should be. Things are not hopeless for humanity – not yet, anyway – but some level of catastrophe is unavoidable. Working out how severe this level will be is difficult, because climate change depends on so many different moving parts, like how much more carbon we emit or what technologies we might invent to reduce this.

But there are other, more complicated factors which warm the planet – factors we don’t understand well or don’t even know about.

Severe weather conditions are becoming the new normal.

Imagine waking up tomorrow, grabbing your smartphone and checking the week’s weather. Depending on where you live, you’ll probably see some bright, clear days punctuated by showers. If you see a severe weather warning, you’d most likely be shocked.

But this will change in the next few decades, as red and amber warnings will light up your screen with alarming frequency. After a while, storms and floods might feel as commonplace to you as your monthly haircut. And the truth is, this is already happening.

Rising sea levels will flood entire cities and countries.

Ever since Plato’s day, we’ve been captivated by the story of Atlantis – a mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean, drowned by wrathful gods. Soon though, we won’t need to use Atlantis as inspiration for our films and fiction – we’ll have plenty of our own in the twenty-first century.

The reason for this boils down to the best-known consequence of climate change: melting polar ice caps causing a rise in sea levels. Without reducing emissions, we’ll see our oceans rise between 1.2 and 2.4 meters in the next century.

Runaway warming will cause mass hunger and malnourishment.

The human-driven natural disasters we’ve seen so far have a clear impact on our wellbeing. Now though, let's explore impending climate catastrophes from a more personal angle. And it’s hard to think of a more personal subject than humankind’s food supply and the consequences of it deteriorating: famine and malnourishment.

It’s fair to say that civilization has been built on grain. Since the start of the Agricultural Revolution around 12,500 years ago, when we first began cultivating cereals such as barley, humans have had a food surplus. This allowed people to devote their lives to things other than feeding themselves, such as pottery, metalworking and religion. In this new world, trade flourished, cities grew and empires were forged.

The warmer it gets, the more disease there will be.

We rarely stop to think about the impact medical science has made on our lives. Life expectancy in the Roman Empire was about 25 years, and before mass production of antibiotics in the twentieth century, even a small infection could prove fatal.

But all the progress that medical science made over centuries could be wiped out in a single generation by climate change. In fact, we might be on the verge of a global health crisis that could come in two forms: old diseases revived and current ones rejuvenated. Let’s deal with dormant diseases first.

Plummeting air quality is suffocating us.

At this stage, you might feel like pausing and taking a deep breath. But depending on where you live, this may not be a good idea. We’re currently in the middle of a global air quality crisis, and some countries are suffering far worse than others. But even the lucky ones with cleaner air won’t stay lucky much longer, as polluted air becomes the new normal and chokes more people to an early grave.

Today’s air crisis is already severe. In the developing world, 98 percent of cities are above the World Health Organization’s (WHO) threshold of safety. In 2017, just breathing in New Delhi’s air was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

Freshwater is becoming an ever-more scarce resource.

We live on a blue planet. Water covers 71 percent of the globe and is quite literally the essence of our existence. We use it to grow our food, stay hydrated and keep ourselves clean. It was in water that life first developed, and from which the majority of our bodies are made.

Freshwater is by far the most important type of water to humans. But it accounts for only 2 percent of our world’s supply – the rest being saltwater. What’s more, only 1 percent of freshwater is accessible, with most of it being trapped either underground or in glaciers.

Human conflict increases on a hotter, dirtier globe.

As if the disasters described in the previous blinks weren’t terrifying enough already, climate change can also negatively influence human behavior.

Climate change plays a key role in driving human conflict. This can be small-scale and interpersonal, or widespread and international.

New technologies give us ways of softening these disasters, but they are currently impractical.

Things don’t look great, as you will have gathered by now. Increased suffering is unfortunately inevitable, and because of this, we often feel powerless. But we are still the authors of this tragic story, and we can change how brutally it ends. With such a dire future staring us in the face, it’s natural to ask: What can be done to fix it?

The answer to this question contains good news and bad news. Good news: We already have the technologies to clean up our climate. Bad news: they’re currently impractical.

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What is The Uninhabitable Earth about?

The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) is a terrifying rundown of the horrors which await in an ever-warming world. With poetic brilliance, Wallace-Wells draws from the latest research in climate science to give us an elegant final warning. Runaway wildfires, submerged cities, polluted air and global pandemics – these and other climate-induced catastrophes not only await in the very near future but in some cases have already arrived.

The Uninhabitable Earth Review

The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) by David Wallace-Wells is a thought-provoking exploration of the impending consequences of climate change. Here's why this book is worth reading:

It presents a compelling and urgent account of the potential catastrophes that await us if we don't take action to address climate change.
By drawing on scientific research and data, it offers a sobering and comprehensive examination of the impact of global warming on ecosystems, economies, and societies.
The book's unflinching honesty forces readers to confront the reality of the crisis, making it impossible to ignore and motivating us to take action.

Best quote from The Uninhabitable Earth

Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization.

—David Wallace-Wells

Who should read The Uninhabitable Earth?

Climate-conscious citizens who need it given to them straight
Anyone seeking to understand the cutting edge of environmental science
Everyone living on planet Earth

About the Author

David Wallace-Wells is a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He is also a national fellow at New America, a think tank focused on public policy issues ranging from health and gender to the environment.

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