The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

"The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells is a necessary book. It comprehensively lays out the possible consequences for humans and the earth as a result of climate change. It is immensely sobering stuff. It really hits you hard. I hate to fault such an important book but I found that the parts of the book did not feel like they cohered together that well. The book is essentially divided into three parts - an introductory essay about his growing fears about climate change and fears about the cascading effects of changes that will compound each other. The second looks at twelve different areas that will most likely be affected by climate change. The final part looks at the possible sources of our lack of engagement with the topic or our lack of action. I found the later part the most interested while the introductory essay was something I really had to push myself through. What Wallace-Wells repeatedly reminds the reader is that human actions got us into this mess and human actions will be what will help us get it out. This is a book that I plan on purchasing and will return to. Perhaps I will like it more on a second read.

Save yourself eight hours of aggravation and avoid purchasing the Audible version of this book. The author is a horrible reader and the entire book sounds like an advanced undergraduate student attempting to sound erudite at an academic conference.

Beyond that, I found this book mostly in the alarmist, doomsday vein that constantly veered back and forth between worst case scenarios and more hedged bets on what our future will hold. He also seems to blame capitalist, free-market economies for the majority of our climate change problems while giving the command economies of the twentieth century a free pass on carbon contributions.

The author comes across as smug by filling the narrative with unnecessary name dropping, theory dropping, run-on sentences and run-on paragraphs. I doubt this book will convince climate change deniers and offers little in the way of solutions for climate change activists. Well, he does seem to believe that “governments can do something about it if they only try.”

What a let down.