The Uninhabitable Earth

Perhaps the best book that I've read in years, containing comprehensive and well presented data on the climate crisis. Easy reading, yet incredibly informative, and disturbing as it should be.

If you have come across this book and if you care even a little about life, earth or future, just read this book. Not an easy read, the author even says so himself, but an important read.

David Wallace-Wells delivers an unflinching look at the climate crisis in this book, that feels less like reading and more like being dunked in ice water. Even for someone who rarely ventures into non-fiction, this book lands like a brick wall to the face. The devastation of climate change is not some distant dystopia—it's closer than we think. The scope of this topic is massive, and the research is wide-ranging, though at times the facts and figures can feel overwhelming, even boring. The book doesn’t sugarcoat the damage humanity has inflicted, and it makes it very clear how long—even generations—it will take to undo the damages. And yet, we cannot abandon hope. through technology, engineering, and collective will, we can do better. But the clock is ticking.

A good intentioned and well written book. It covers other aspects of climate change not addressed in mainstream. A scary read but a wake up call we all need. I received my copy well packed. The pages are thick and print quality was top notch. If handled well, the book will last for generations to come!

Excellent book. Eye opening. Book is in great condition, promptly delivered by Amazon.

If u r looking for Indian perspective the its not meant for u...Otherwise USA centric and 'here and there' are examples of other countries as well. But as a whole good book compiling excerpts from various reports and integrating those facts into simplistic and easily understandable language.

Rollercoaster ride of the future and giving you concern about climate change.

If you belong to planet Earth, which I think you are, and you care about it, you should read this book. If you are anything like me this book will make you feel perturbed. Specially when you are from a country like India and if you know whats going on recently in terms of pollution, mainly carbon emission. The book is full of facts about what's happening around the globe, about which we hardly had any idea. Mostly the writer paints a clear picture about what's going to happen to our planet and to us within our lifetime if we don't curb our emission rates. Though I should also mention the book is not an easy read. At time it felt a bit uninteresting and tedious, specially when he's not talking about the climate change itself or it's direct ramifications, which can be forgiven as this is the Author's first book. Over all great book. Totally recommended.

Stunning. This is very late in coming -- maybe too late.

I can see no reason this shouldn't become a textbook for students in discipline areas such as business and biology. But more so, it is the book the politicians, environmentalists, naysayers and basically everyone on earth must read. It is a terrifying book, more so than any horror novel or work of science fiction. That we have done this to ourselves, and cannot likely undo it, makes this an even more compelling read. Read it now. Savour every dark turn of phrase, ever dark fact - and pray. Pray hard that humanity comes to its senses. If it was me I would award this work the Nobel prize in literature, that is how compelling its story is. Oh what might have been if we had just listened to ourselves. Well done dear author, well done.

A good read to know about the influences to climate changes and global warming. The font size is quite small for a comfortable read.

Boa introdução ao tema de mudança climática. Achei o livro muito bem escrito e bem organizado. Capítulos curtos, direto, mas sem perder estilo literário. O livro é grosseiramente dividido em duas partes. Uma apresentando os vetores resultantes do aquecimento global (queda da produtividade da agricultura, aumento no nível do mar, escassez de água potável, enchentes, secas, etc) e outro discutindo os vícios epistêmicos que engajamos, individual ou coletivamente, para não enfrentar o problema diretamente. A segunda parte é necessária, mas me interessou menos. A primeira parte do livro é onde está o melhor para mim, leigo no tema. A escala do problema é realmente difícil de exagerar e, mesmo em um canário otimista, veremos um bom número de tragédias climáticas nas próximas décadas. No pior dos casos, a própria existência da humanidade está em risco. O livro me chamou atenção também para as desigualdades climáticas. Tudo indica que o norte global será o menos afetado pelas mudanças climáticas (a Rússia provavelmente vai se beneficiar). O grosso da conta será pago pelo sul-global. Enfim, tem muitas descobertas que o livro oferece para um leigo. Se não leu nada ainda sobre o tema, recomendo iniciar com esse livro.

This is arguably the most important book on the climate change crisis since Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014). David Wallace-Wells writes: ‘When critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypothetical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits this disparity, but feeds and profits from it – this is what Thomas Piketty calls the ‘apparatus of justification.’ And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the EU average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.’ Indeed, the 2018 Global Green Economy Index points out that the most environmentally-friendly countries in the world are 1. Sweden 2. Switzerland 3. Iceland 4. Norway 5. Finland – countries which also enjoy a high quality of life. Hence Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is absolutely correct that it is possible to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Furthermore, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson has provided country-by-country plans for the world to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. So why the delay? In his book Cultural Evolution (2018), Dr. Ronald Inglehart, leader of the World Values Survey, points out that following World War II, the advanced world shifted from materialist to postmaterialist values, including a growth in the environmental movement. However, this evolution in mindset was not reflected rapidly enough in our actions. ‘Many people perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, 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… The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime – the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral… Due to global warming, in the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago… The Indian capital is home to 26 million people. In 2017, simply breathing the air was the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day… With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are at today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent… The basic rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature, is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, when we have 50 percent more people to feed, we may also have 50 percent less grain to give them… Beyond carbon, climate change means that staple crops are doing battle with more insects – their increased activity could cut yields an additional 2 to 4 percent, as well as fungus and disease, not to mention flooding… Whole cultures will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited, Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States’ largest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nation of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh; all of Miami Beach and much of South Florida; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington… Much of the infrastructure of the internet could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades; and most of the smartphones we use to navigate it are manufactured in Shenzhen, which is likely to be flooded soon, as well… If no significant action is taken to curb emissions, one estimate of global damage is as high as $100 trillion dollars per year by 2100. That is more than global GDP today. Most estimates are a bit lower - $14 trillion a year, still almost a fifth of present-day GDP… The International Panel on Climate Change furnishes us with a median prediction of an over four degrees rise in planetary temperature by 2100, should we continue down the current emissions path. That would deliver wildfires burning 16 times as much land in the American West, hundreds of drowned cities…’ Unfortunately, Canada has been a laggard on this critical issue. Prime Minister Trudeau seems to have only recently woken up to the existential threat posed by climate change, and has finally introduced a modest carbon tax. The Andrew Scheer Conservatives remain for their part firmly in the pocket of the fossil fuels industry, and are every bit as destructive to the environment as the Trump Republicans in the US. On the other hand, organizations like 350.org, the Solutions Project and the Sunrise Movement, and political leaders like Germany’s Katharina Schulze, France’s Karima Delli, Sweden’s Isabella Lovin, the Netherland’s Jesse Klaver, Belgium’s Benoit Hellings, and Costa Rica’s Carlos Alvarado Quesada are leading the way to a sustainable future. They are joined by youth leaders Greta Thunberg (Sweden), Varshini Prakash and Alexandria Villasenor (United States), Holly Gillibrand (UK), Luisa Neubauer (Germany), Louis Couillard, Sara Montpetit and Autumn Peltier (Canada), Jonas Kampus (Switzerland), and Anuna de Wever (Belgium). The least we can do, is to give them our support – our future depends on it.