People Alive Today Will Determine the Future of the Earth

Great power entails greater responsibility.

If you don't care about global warming, then you should read this book.  If you care about global warming, then you should read this book.

An excerpt of a good review from NYTimes:

. . . .“The Uninhabitable Earth” seems to be modeled more on Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” — or, at least, it’s a bid to do for greenhouse gases what Carson’s 1962 book did for pesticides. “Silent Spring” became a galvanizing force, a foundational text for the environmental movement. The overarching frame for Wallace-Wells’s book is an analogous call to action: “How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?”

Part of his strategy is to tell us how much we have already lost. “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,” he writes. Some of the technology we rely on to make the effects of climate change more bearable, like air-conditioning, also worsens them. The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.

Wallace-Wells avoids the “eerily banal language of climatology” in favor of lush, rolling prose. The sentences in this book are potent and evocative, though after a while of envisioning such unremitting destruction — page upon page of toddlers dying, plagues released by melting permafrost and wildfires incinerating tourists at seaside resorts — I began to feel like a voyeur at an atrocity exhibition. His New York magazine article already synthesized plenty of information about perilous climate risks and scared the bejeezus out of people; what are we supposed to do with this expanded litany of horrors?

“Fear can motivate,” Wallace-Wells writes. He’s aware of those who denounce the graphic doomsaying as “climate porn,” but he arrived at his own ecological awakening when he started to collect “terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives” about climate change. He describes himself as a Bitcoin-buying, non-recycling city-dweller who hates camping. He was scared out of his “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded” inertia when he became immersed in the awful truth and, his book suggests, you can be too.

Besides, it’s not as if any of the hair-raising material with which he has become intimately familiar has paralyzed him with fatalism — quite the opposite. “That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair,” he writes. What some activists have called “toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse — “should be empowering.” . . . .