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Week1TheUninhabitableEarth.pptxThe Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition
The facts, research, and science behind the climate-change article that explored our planet’s worst-case scenarios.
July 14, 20172:06 pm
By David Wallace-Wells http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html
The Uninhabitable Earth
Most-read article in New York Magazine’s history… Within hours, the article spawned a fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and Twitter, much of which came from climate scientists and the journalists who cover them.
Why so much interest, controversy?
Is Complacency the Problem?
When it comes to the challenge of climate change, public complacency is a far, far bigger problem than widespread fatalism — that many, many more people are not scared enough than are already “too scared.”
The science says climate change threatens nearly every aspect of human life on this planet, and that inaction will hasten the problems. In that context, I don’t think it’s a slur to call an article, or its writer, alarmist. I’ll accept that characterization. We should be alarmed.
[A]bsent 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. Some alarming scenarios……
Heat Death
Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015.
At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.
As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.”
The End of Food
[I]f the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.
Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China.
Climate Plagues
There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.
What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming.
You don’t worry much about dengue or malaria if you are living in Maine or France. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. You didn’t much worry about Zika a couple of years ago, either.
Unbreathable Air
Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
Ozone levels, Particulate matter from forest fires, smog (the Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country).
And the list goes on….
Perpetual War
Permanent Economic Collapse
Poisoned Oceans
Some key points
more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent.
no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster. Instead, he puts his faith in carbon capture.
climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.
The debate this article has kicked up is less about specific facts than the article’s overarching conceit
Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are?
How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be?
What are the risks of terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue, and what should a journalist make of those risks?
What Past Mass Extinctions Can Teach Us About Climate Change Today
Peter Ward is one of the paleontologists responsible for overturning our understanding of most of the Earth’s mass extinctions, which, long thought to be caused by asteroid impacts, turned out to have been the result of climate change produced by greenhouse gases (all but the one that killed the dinosaurs, anyway).
July 10, 2017 6:42 pm ‘The Models Are Too Conservative’: Paleontologist Peter Ward
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