2017-07-09 The Uninhabitable World

Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

David Wallace-Wells

It is, I promise, 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, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

I 'Doomsday' - Peering beyond scientific reticence.
II Heat Death - The bahraining of New York.
III The End of Food - Praying for cornfields in the tundra.
IV Climate Plagues - What happens when bubonic ice melts.
V Unbreathable Air - A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.
VI Perpetual War - The violence baked into heat.
VII Permanent Economic Collapse - Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.
VIII Poisoned Oceans - Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.
IX The Great Filter - Our present eeriness cannot last.

Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.