I’m still reeling after finishing David Wallace-Wells’s 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth, which begins with this rather foreboding opening paragraph:

“It’s worse, much worse, that you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the ‘natural’ world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and that the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.”

The first two-thirds of the book (the bulk of which is Part II: “Elements of Chaos”) provides excruciating—and convincing—detail on the scientific evidence of such impacts as increasing heat, flooding, wildfire, eroding fresh water, dying oceans, unbreathable air, and economic collapse. While discouraging and alarming (to say the least), this offers the most comprehensive overview I’ve read on what the world can expect with advancing climate change.

Here’s a sampling:

From the chapter, “Heat Death”:

“Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fifty-fold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves.”

“In 2010, 55,000 died in a Russian heat wave that killed 700 people in Moscow each day.”

“As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for many of the two million Muslims who currently make the pilgrimage each year.”

From the chapter, “Hunger”:

“The basic rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree [Celsius] of warming, yields decline by 10%.”

“The world’s natural wheat belt has been moving poleward by about 160 miles each decade.”

From the chapter, “Drowning”:

“By 2100, if we do not halt emissions, as much as 5% of the world’s population will be flooded every single year.”

“In 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 311,000 homes in the United States would be at risk of chronic inundation by 2045—a timespan, as they pointed out, no longer than a mortgage.”

When the Paris Agreement was drafted in 2015, it’s authors believed that the oceans could rise no more than three feet by the end of the century. The same year, NASA scientists suggested that three feet wasn’t a maximum, but a minimum. By 2017, NOAA scientists suggested that eight feet of sea level rise was possible in this century.

“From 1992-97, the [Antarctic] ice sheet lost, on average, 49 billion tons of ice each year; from 2012 to 2017, it was 219 billion.”

“Greenland…is now losing almost a billion tons of ice every single day.”

On the concern about methane release in the arctic: “…permafrost contains up to 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, considerably more than is currently suspended in the earth’s atmosphere.”

“The most recent IPCC assessment projects a loss of near-surface permafrost of between 37 and 87 percent by 2100.”

“More than 600 million people live within thirty feet of sea level today.”

From the chapter “Wildfire”:

“Five of the twenty worst fires in California history hit the state I the fall of 2017, a year in which over nine thousand separate fires broke out, burning more than 1,240,000 acres.”

“Over the last five decades, the wildfire season in the western United States has already grown by two-and-a-half months; of the ten years with the most wildfire activity on record, nine have occurred since 2000.”

“Peatland fires in Indonesia in 1997…released up to 2.6 billion tons of carbon—up to 40 percent of the average annual global emissions level.”

“In California, a single wildfire can entirely eliminate the emissions gains made that year by all of the state’s aggressive environmental policies.”

From the chapter “Disasters: No Longer Natural”:

“Power outages from storms have doubled just since 2003.”

“The warmer the Arctic, the more intense the blizzards in the northern latitudes.”

“What’s called Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles in just 30 years.”

“In the Florida Keys, 150 miles of road need to be raised to stay ahead of seal level, costing as much as $7 million each mile, or up to $1 billion total. The county’s 2018 road budget was $25 million.”

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There are eight additional chapters presenting this sort of information: Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Plagues of Warming, Economic Collapse, Climate Conflict, and Systems.

I found the last third of the book less compelling. Maybe I was too shell-shocked from reading the Elements of Chaos, but Part III, The Climate Kaleidoscope, didn’t hold together as well for me. I’d be interested in your thoughts if you read through that—post your comments below.

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Wallace-Wells is a journalist, the deputy editor of New York Magazine, and a national fellow at New America. His 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth is an expansion of an article with the same title that he published in New York Magazine in 2017. Wallace-Wells has focused his writing in recent years almost exclusively on climate change, and his research has been exhaustive—as evidenced by the 65 pages of notes and references in the book.

Some will say that Wallace-Wells is too much of an alarmist in the way he treats climate change and the impacts that we can expect. But I’ve done enough reading about the science that I believe he is generally correct in his account of expected impacts. The scientific community, over the past several decades, has been too conservative in its pronouncements on how climate change will unfold. Scientists have done this—bending over backwards—because they cannot know with certainly exactly how things will unfold. So they’ve been restrained.

The mainstream media—even respected publications and media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and PBS—has compounded this understatement of climate change risks by generally reporting “both sides” of these issues. The general public hears those two sides and assumes that the debate is about equal, even though the vast majority of climate scientists fall on one side of the science—arguing that the concerns are grave.

The Uninhabitable Earth is an important book. How I wish we could somehow convince our Congressional leaders in Washington to read it. The book reinforces the importance of doing everything we can to reduce our carbon emissions, to protect our natural resources that will help to lessen some of the impacts of climate change, and to increase the sequestration of carbon through reforestation and improving agricultural soils.

But the book also reinforces the importance of resilience. We won’t be able to avoid climate change—as we might have if the U.S., then the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, had followed President Carter’s leadership with energy conservation and renewable energy—and we need to do what we can to adapt to the changing conditions we will experience in the coming decades.

Wallace-Wells’s book inspires me to work harder in demonstrating the importance of resilience in today’s world.

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Along with founding the Resilient Design Institute in 2012, Alex is founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. To keep up with his latest articles and musings, you can sign up for his Twitter feed. To receive e-mail notices of new blogs, sign up at the top of the page.