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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
Worse horror story that I have ever read. And the worse part about it, is this will happen and on reading this book the future is not bright.
All people in power should read this book.
All people in power should read this book.
Both devastating and essential reading
Reviews
https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/uninhabitable-earth-review-david-wallace-wells-climate-change.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/opinion/aliens-climate-change.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/destruction-from-climate-change-will-be-worse-much-worse-than-you-think/2019/02/21/8cd6ea02-24cd-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html
Excerpts or adaptations:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/book-excerpt-the-uninhabitable-earth-david-wallace-wells.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/sunday/fear-panic-climate-change-warming.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/02/the-devastation-of-human-life-is-in-view-what-a-burning-world-tells-us-about-climate-change-global-warming
Author interview:
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/695874069/-uninhabitable-earth-draws-attention-to-3-major-misunderstandings-about-climate
Reviews
https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/uninhabitable-earth-review-david-wallace-wells-climate-change.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/opinion/aliens-climate-change.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/destruction-from-climate-change-will-be-worse-much-worse-than-you-think/2019/02/21/8cd6ea02-24cd-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html
Excerpts or adaptations:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/book-excerpt-the-uninhabitable-earth-david-wallace-wells.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/sunday/fear-panic-climate-change-warming.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/02/the-devastation-of-human-life-is-in-view-what-a-burning-world-tells-us-about-climate-change-global-warming
Author interview:
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/695874069/-uninhabitable-earth-draws-attention-to-3-major-misunderstandings-about-climate
Review supplement: I recommend this book strongly (more on that below), but (1) if you've read it and enjoyed it; or (2) if the book is daunting and you'd prefer to dip your toe in the water with a pocket-sized novella that's serious-as-can-be but packaged as speculative fiction, I strongly recommend Oreskes & Conway's The Collapse of Western Civilization. I found Collapse particularly gratifying (and frightening) as a companion/supplement to this (and a number of others)....
- - - [Original review]
Wow. ... Is it poetic or ironic or par for the course that I finished reading this book on the day that, in the words of the New York Times, the current Presidential administration "formally notified the United Nations that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot a way forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy...."
The book is a must read. I'd heard nothing but positive things about it ... and I wasn't disappointed ... yet, now, having read it, I don't feel it has received the attention it deserves. ... And I'm guessing I'm not alone in having put it off because it's just more bad news in an era that feels like a relentless, all-encompassing bad news cycle.
But it's a powerful book. It's startling and unnerving and disorienting and stark and frightening and sophisticated and eclectic and unrelenting and (trigger warning) depression inducing and deeply disorienting and dense (and thus, frequently, challenging, because the fire hose force delivery of bad news and statistics can be overwhelming ... which, for me, meant that I was constantly doubling back to read passages when I just couldn't process everything at the speed at which it was delivered) and organized and logical and, in parts, appropriately passionate and dispassionate and potent, and ... and ... it's an important, nay, a critical drop in the ocean of advocacy that ... somehow ... needs to quickly rise to the level of not-just-national-but-global clarion call....
My sense is there's not much debate that this book is excellent, important, informative, and worth reading, so I think I'll truncate this review with a quote that, for me, reflects the overall experience of reading the book:
If this[, the coming, inexorable devastation caused by climate change,] strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need to stop it .... That the solutions are obvious and available does not mean that the problem is anything but overwhelming....
Read the book. Buy an extra copy. Pass it on to a friend. ... When the paperback comes out in the Spring, I may order them in bulk.
A pointless anecdote: reading this reminded me of reading Tim Snyder's powerful slender volume On Tyranny, which, if you haven't read, you should, but, alas, the kind of folks who are open to the book aren't really the source of the problem, but I digress. There are problems that are obvious ... and there are obvious solutions ... but ... without political will to do the right thing compounded by a diffusion of responsibility and general indifference ... inertia leads to inaction and the status quo ... which only exacerbates the problem ... which can lead to disastrous results ... and yet.
- - - [Original review]
Wow. ... Is it poetic or ironic or par for the course that I finished reading this book on the day that, in the words of the New York Times, the current Presidential administration "formally notified the United Nations that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot a way forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy...."
The book is a must read. I'd heard nothing but positive things about it ... and I wasn't disappointed ... yet, now, having read it, I don't feel it has received the attention it deserves. ... And I'm guessing I'm not alone in having put it off because it's just more bad news in an era that feels like a relentless, all-encompassing bad news cycle.
But it's a powerful book. It's startling and unnerving and disorienting and stark and frightening and sophisticated and eclectic and unrelenting and (trigger warning) depression inducing and deeply disorienting and dense (and thus, frequently, challenging, because the fire hose force delivery of bad news and statistics can be overwhelming ... which, for me, meant that I was constantly doubling back to read passages when I just couldn't process everything at the speed at which it was delivered) and organized and logical and, in parts, appropriately passionate and dispassionate and potent, and ... and ... it's an important, nay, a critical drop in the ocean of advocacy that ... somehow ... needs to quickly rise to the level of not-just-national-but-global clarion call....
My sense is there's not much debate that this book is excellent, important, informative, and worth reading, so I think I'll truncate this review with a quote that, for me, reflects the overall experience of reading the book:
If this[, the coming, inexorable devastation caused by climate change,] strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need to stop it .... That the solutions are obvious and available does not mean that the problem is anything but overwhelming....
Read the book. Buy an extra copy. Pass it on to a friend. ... When the paperback comes out in the Spring, I may order them in bulk.
A pointless anecdote: reading this reminded me of reading Tim Snyder's powerful slender volume On Tyranny, which, if you haven't read, you should, but, alas, the kind of folks who are open to the book aren't really the source of the problem, but I digress. There are problems that are obvious ... and there are obvious solutions ... but ... without political will to do the right thing compounded by a diffusion of responsibility and general indifference ... inertia leads to inaction and the status quo ... which only exacerbates the problem ... which can lead to disastrous results ... and yet.
Because 2020 was not frightening or depressing enough.
The author tried way too hard to make a case for nuclear energy and neoliberalism that I did not vibe with!!
I found it really, really hard to read this book. I found myself often, in the author’s own words, slipping into “climate despair.” But this book may be one of the most important of our generation: a clear-sighted and methodical out laying of the sheer scale of the catastrophe that awaits us, and an impassioned argument for the moral necessity that we act now to avert it.
Currently careening between absolute despair and eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we all may die and I feel like I failed to understand the message since there's supposed to be hope.
Page 138 - 'If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.' There is enough information and every page so far to produce a week long panic attack.
Wallace-Wells covers everything - flooding, species die off, food scarcity, climate-induced wars, refugees, disease, financial collapse, climate-induced violence, droughts, unpredictable weather patterns, wildfires, our choked and dying oceans and it's only getting worse. As China and India rise in population and enter their own industrial revolutions the strain on the Earth is shocking.
Our worst enemy may be our own optimism.
Wallace-Wells covers everything - flooding, species die off, food scarcity, climate-induced wars, refugees, disease, financial collapse, climate-induced violence, droughts, unpredictable weather patterns, wildfires, our choked and dying oceans and it's only getting worse. As China and India rise in population and enter their own industrial revolutions the strain on the Earth is shocking.
Our worst enemy may be our own optimism.
As I read this book (March 2019) many thousands of UK school children went on strike to join national and regional protests about climate change and lack of government action. As well as the very serious message there were funny placards - "There is No Planet B", "The Earth Didn't Consent" etc. It does give one hope that at least the younger generation is taking the problems described in David Wallace-Wells' book seriously.
The book itself, although successfully delivering its scary message is a bit of a slog to read. It's dry, long-winded and repetitive. There is lots of 'information dumping' and it is inconsistent - for example, temperatures are given sometimes in centigrade and sometimes in Fahrenheit. The author has a habit of describing a possible worse-case scenario and then saying that it probably won't happen.
All the data and estimates used are from reliable sources, and are listed comprehensively at the end of the book. There are also many fascinating and frightening anecdotes about climate-related disasters as reported around the globe. One chapter I particularly enjoyed was The Climate Kaleidoscope: Storytelling, partly about the literature, films and games that feature the subject of global Armageddon caused by climatic and environmental upheaval. The author wonders if we are displacing our anxieties, perhaps hoping that the apocalypse remains an escapist pleasure and if it's not then maybe we are "collectively persuading ourselves we might survive it". He points out that there is nearly always a distinguishable villain (alien, oil companies, corporate greed), whereas in real life the villain is us.
The book itself, although successfully delivering its scary message is a bit of a slog to read. It's dry, long-winded and repetitive. There is lots of 'information dumping' and it is inconsistent - for example, temperatures are given sometimes in centigrade and sometimes in Fahrenheit. The author has a habit of describing a possible worse-case scenario and then saying that it probably won't happen.
All the data and estimates used are from reliable sources, and are listed comprehensively at the end of the book. There are also many fascinating and frightening anecdotes about climate-related disasters as reported around the globe. One chapter I particularly enjoyed was The Climate Kaleidoscope: Storytelling, partly about the literature, films and games that feature the subject of global Armageddon caused by climatic and environmental upheaval. The author wonders if we are displacing our anxieties, perhaps hoping that the apocalypse remains an escapist pleasure and if it's not then maybe we are "collectively persuading ourselves we might survive it". He points out that there is nearly always a distinguishable villain (alien, oil companies, corporate greed), whereas in real life the villain is us.
Surprisingly optimistic given the urgency of the crisis and the necessity to start working aggressively now to fix the problem (and with no impetus to get going in sight).