And already at 1.1 degrees, we’re seeing a lot of really extreme climate events. So we are a little north of 1.1 degrees C of warming above the preindustrial baseline, which is the historical temperature conditions that we measure global warming against.
The future looks pretty dark from where we are now. How bad is it, really? David Wallace-Wells Your 2017 essay and your book both begin with the same sentiment: Things are much, much worse than we realize. See how your city’s weather will be different by 2050. I spoke with Wallace-Wells about just how dire the situation is, what it means for humans to survive in a climate that no longer resembles the one that allowed us to evolve in the first place, and if he believes we’ve already crossed a fatal ecological threshold for our species.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.Īmerica is warming fast. Or, as Wallace-Wells puts it, “We have now done more damage to the environment knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance.” It’s also the revelation that we’ve done more damage to the environment since the United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it. What makes the book so difficult to read is not just the eye-popping stats, like the fact that we could potentially avoid 150 million excess premature deaths by the end of century from air pollution (the equivalent of 25 Holocausts or twice the number of deaths from World War II) if we could limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or hold warming at 2 degrees without relying on negative emissions. 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. “It is, I promise, worse than you think.”