The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Wallace-Wells isn’t counseling despair or saying all is lost he’s merely laying out the alarming facts of what is likely to happen if we don’t radically change course. But as Vox’s David Roberts explained at the time, those criticisms were mostly misplaced.

Wallace-Wells was criticized in 2017 for being too hyperbolic, too doom-and-gloomy. Wallace-Wells has since developed his terrifying essay into an even more terrifying book, titled The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. It was an attempt to paint a very real picture of our not-too-distant future, a future filled with famines, political chaos, economic collapse, fierce resource competition, and a sun that “cooks us.” That was was the first line of David Wallace-Wells’s horrifying 2017 essay in New York magazine about climate change. No.1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * 'The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.“It is, I promise, worse than you think.” I encourage people to read this book.'-Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

'The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. 'The book has potential to be this generation's Silent Spring.'-The Washington Post He avoids the 'eerily banal language of climatology' in favor of lush, rolling prose.'-Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. Wallace-Wells's outline of possible futures alarmist. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.'-Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. 'The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. 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-today's. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. 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-food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.Īn 'epoch-defining book' (The Guardian) and 'this generation's Silent Spring' (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it-the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells