The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually.

This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.

Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.


I don’t know if I’m glad or not that I’ve finally run across a book about climate change that states that “things are worse, much worse, than you think,” and then delivers. That doesn’t give false hope. This particular train wreck has been coming at us for fifty years, and we’ve done next to nothing to stop it. To be asked to believe that we’re going to turn things around now, now that we have less than a decade to keep it at least a bit under control, is asking a lot.

The book is divided into chapters, each that covers a particular problem: heat, hunger, wildfires, dying ocean, and so on. It can be somewhat overwhelming.

The author does lose points by his wavering from time to time on whether any or all of what his written will actually happen. But I think it’s more hedging his bet rather than believing that it won’t. And for believing that, somehow, the next generation will step up and find a solution within a decade. I think that, is truly wishful thinking.

But the book was good enough to read twice. That's saying a lot.





Mount TBR 2022 Book Links


Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.

( TBR Book Links 1-70 )

71. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells