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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
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).
Not a light read, nor anything to escape into from the reality of heat waves, tornados, flooding that we are currently dealing with. Climate change is not coming, it's here and we must deal with it. As he closed the book with: You can choose your metaphor. You can't choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.
It is indeed much worse than we all think. Wallace-Wells gathers all manner of scientific research about climate change to highlight just how close we are to the point of no return - in certain ways we have already crossed it. The book's strongest point is, in my opinion, in the way the research is presented, the book is very readable and easy to follow, if hard to stomach when faced with the totality of the effects of global warming. However, I think Wallace-Wells hasn't given enough space to research into potential solutions. Perhaps that will be another book.
"The threat of climate change is more dramatic still, and ultimately more democratic, with responsibilities shared by each of us even as we shiver in fear of it; and yet we have processed that threat only in parts, typically not concretely or explicitly, displacing certain anxieties and inventing others, choosing to ignore the bleakest features of our possible future and letting our political and technological faith blur, as though we'd gone cross-eyed, into a remarkably familiar consumer fantasy: that someone else will fix the problem for us, at no cost."
Yep. That was one sentence. I picked it out at random. The first part of the book is pretty tight, but it starts devolving into this kind of sophomoric drivel by page 29.
I think what he meant was something like: dude, it's gonna be bad, really bad, and bad in ways you may not expect, and no one is gonna fix it for you. Yeah. I know that. I'm a conservation biologist. I wrote my thesis on species loss due to climate change.
So don't tell me again and again in different snarky ways that it's gonna be bad. If I'm reading this, I probably already know that. Also, you already said that in your title. The book part is where you explain yourself. You don't just restate the title in increasingly impenetrable and condescending ways.
The next sentence is shorter, but equally opaque: "Those more panicked are hardly less complacent, living instead through climate fatalism as though it were climate optimism."
That's the end of that paragraph. It started out by talking about the Cold War. I guess that means something like even the best of us are pretty lame. Hard to tell, because instead of supporting this claim, he veers off into know-it-all land, telling us whether we should or should not feel a sense of complete doom (we should not because he does not) and whether or not it's all right for us to have children (it's OK to have children because he had a child, but you have to feel bad about it because he feels bad about it).
As a die-hard, canvas bag toting, solar array owning, pesticide avoiding, composting, vegetable growing, recycling, Prius-driving, non-profit donating, vegetarian liberal, I have to say this book is yet another example of why people hate liberals. It oozes with condescending braggadocio.
The question I have is this: Is this book about describing worst-case scenario climate change to people who otherwise would not know about it? Or is it about the linguistic equivalent of some smarmy, self-indulgent, interminable guitar solo that is all about showing off, and not at all about music?
I believe it's the latter. Riffs like this get no panties from me.
Yep. That was one sentence. I picked it out at random. The first part of the book is pretty tight, but it starts devolving into this kind of sophomoric drivel by page 29.
I think what he meant was something like: dude, it's gonna be bad, really bad, and bad in ways you may not expect, and no one is gonna fix it for you. Yeah. I know that. I'm a conservation biologist. I wrote my thesis on species loss due to climate change.
So don't tell me again and again in different snarky ways that it's gonna be bad. If I'm reading this, I probably already know that. Also, you already said that in your title. The book part is where you explain yourself. You don't just restate the title in increasingly impenetrable and condescending ways.
The next sentence is shorter, but equally opaque: "Those more panicked are hardly less complacent, living instead through climate fatalism as though it were climate optimism."
That's the end of that paragraph. It started out by talking about the Cold War. I guess that means something like even the best of us are pretty lame. Hard to tell, because instead of supporting this claim, he veers off into know-it-all land, telling us whether we should or should not feel a sense of complete doom (we should not because he does not) and whether or not it's all right for us to have children (it's OK to have children because he had a child, but you have to feel bad about it because he feels bad about it).
As a die-hard, canvas bag toting, solar array owning, pesticide avoiding, composting, vegetable growing, recycling, Prius-driving, non-profit donating, vegetarian liberal, I have to say this book is yet another example of why people hate liberals. It oozes with condescending braggadocio.
The question I have is this: Is this book about describing worst-case scenario climate change to people who otherwise would not know about it? Or is it about the linguistic equivalent of some smarmy, self-indulgent, interminable guitar solo that is all about showing off, and not at all about music?
I believe it's the latter. Riffs like this get no panties from me.
[14 December 2019]
This is a short book, but it's not really an easy read. It's frightening in its subject matter and not especially hopeful that we'll be able to turn things around in time to avert a worldwide disaster. But he does not say that there is no hope, just that time is running out and we need to make really major changes immediately.
The writer's style is also sometimes a little difficult to read. He has a tendency to long sentences -- so long that I frequently lost his train of thought and had to go back and reread. His sentences have multiple clauses, subordinate clauses, descriptive clauses, dependent clauses, appositive clauses, sometimes all in one sentence. It can be rather frustrating.
His handling of notes was also unusual to me. The actual text of the book comprises the first two thirds, but in that section there are no footnotes. Not a single one to point you to a supporting bit of data. There are a plethora of notes, however, in the final third of the book. They are organized by chapter and each note is headed by a bolded phrase from the main text to remind you of the point being supported. Unusual, but I actually think it works better than the standard footnote/note system.
Although this is not an easy book, I recommend it to anyone with an open mind.
This is a short book, but it's not really an easy read. It's frightening in its subject matter and not especially hopeful that we'll be able to turn things around in time to avert a worldwide disaster. But he does not say that there is no hope, just that time is running out and we need to make really major changes immediately.
The writer's style is also sometimes a little difficult to read. He has a tendency to long sentences -- so long that I frequently lost his train of thought and had to go back and reread. His sentences have multiple clauses, subordinate clauses, descriptive clauses, dependent clauses, appositive clauses, sometimes all in one sentence. It can be rather frustrating.
His handling of notes was also unusual to me. The actual text of the book comprises the first two thirds, but in that section there are no footnotes. Not a single one to point you to a supporting bit of data. There are a plethora of notes, however, in the final third of the book. They are organized by chapter and each note is headed by a bolded phrase from the main text to remind you of the point being supported. Unusual, but I actually think it works better than the standard footnote/note system.
Although this is not an easy book, I recommend it to anyone with an open mind.
The content of this book is unremittingly terrifying. Wallace-Wells lays out an inexorable litany of doom set to come our way without a total upheaval of our technological-industrial civilization. Because there is currently no political will to do such a thing anywhere on the horizon, that is a harrowing pronouncement indeed. Wallace-Wells describes the impending disruptions with a horror-story relish: he notes that nowhere and no one is safe from changing climate. Rising oceans, powerful storms, fires, droughts, climate refugees in staggering numbers, and shriveling food supplies are stalking us like Jason Voorhees. He's coming.
So the content of this book is 5 stars. I'd say the presentation is closer to 2 stars (I'll round up for rating it). Wallace-Wells casts himself in biblical prophet mode, with lots of portentous doom-saying and "woe unto you!" talk. The tone is very pompous and wearying in its rote litany. Further, his style really gets in the way of the material, because he's constantly reaching for the worst-case scenario to increase the terror. It introduces a niggling doubt into the mind of the reader that "maybe it isn't all so bad as it seems", and we shouldn't be allowed to flinch away so easily. I would prefer a sober account of the best-case scenario for our current emissions, which would be horrifying enough on its own.
I did enjoy some of his concluding speculations about the Drake Equation and whether climate change is a Great Filter. He does an excellent job of showing just how quickly we've effed ourselves: in essentially two human generations, we've done eons worth of damage. This generation will be in the unenviable position of witnessing the height and the fall of human flourishing. Sorry, kids. In the immensity of geological time, it's hard not to see us as likely to be a tiny, suicidally hubristic blip. Wallace-Wells makes a strong case that we managed to gin up a political and economic system containing an unchecked motor of self-destruction at its core.
This book is likely to be (and should be) massively depressing to most readers, but we ought to have the balls to stare the doom we've called down on ourselves in the face. Whether we'll do anything about it is a much dicier proposition. Wallace-Wells only offers a half-paragraph of suggested fixes, but it's not the job of Cassandra to lay out policy proposals. That's on us.
So the content of this book is 5 stars. I'd say the presentation is closer to 2 stars (I'll round up for rating it). Wallace-Wells casts himself in biblical prophet mode, with lots of portentous doom-saying and "woe unto you!" talk. The tone is very pompous and wearying in its rote litany. Further, his style really gets in the way of the material, because he's constantly reaching for the worst-case scenario to increase the terror. It introduces a niggling doubt into the mind of the reader that "maybe it isn't all so bad as it seems", and we shouldn't be allowed to flinch away so easily. I would prefer a sober account of the best-case scenario for our current emissions, which would be horrifying enough on its own.
I did enjoy some of his concluding speculations about the Drake Equation and whether climate change is a Great Filter. He does an excellent job of showing just how quickly we've effed ourselves: in essentially two human generations, we've done eons worth of damage. This generation will be in the unenviable position of witnessing the height and the fall of human flourishing. Sorry, kids. In the immensity of geological time, it's hard not to see us as likely to be a tiny, suicidally hubristic blip. Wallace-Wells makes a strong case that we managed to gin up a political and economic system containing an unchecked motor of self-destruction at its core.
This book is likely to be (and should be) massively depressing to most readers, but we ought to have the balls to stare the doom we've called down on ourselves in the face. Whether we'll do anything about it is a much dicier proposition. Wallace-Wells only offers a half-paragraph of suggested fixes, but it's not the job of Cassandra to lay out policy proposals. That's on us.
A very intense, no-holds-barred analysis of the true dangers of climate change. I found it very hard at times to read, just because it was so stressful and scary. But, I think, that's what's needed right now. Having read most climate change non-fiction being published, this has some interesting takes I'd never heard before. The comparison to supercomputer human brains futurists in silicon valley to an escape from climate change was really interesting.
Sophie’s final book of the month was The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. It is easily the most terrifying book she has read in a long time, probably ever, a no holds barred look at the realities of climate change. What is likely to happen to our planet, why, and what we need to do to try and slow it down – we’re already far beyond stopping it entirely.
Past the introduction, the book is divided into 12 “Elements of Chaos” with titles that will inspire anxiety in and of themselves. “Hunger”, “Downing”, “Unbreathable Air”, “Dying Oceans” and “Economic Collapse” are among them, each one an eye-opening exploration of just how bad the situation has become while we’ve looked the other way. However bad you think the situation is, you won’t be prepared, and Sophie found herself horrified again and again by the truth of what may happen in the coming decades. The Uninhabitable Earth isn’t 100% doom and gloom though. There are discussions of the ways we can fight back, we just need to get everyone on board. Fast.
The danger with a book like this is that, at a point, the news becomes so depressing, so thoroughly overwhelming, that it is easy to simply shut down. Indeed, Wallace-Wells devotes time to exploring the mental health implications of climate change and the people who have already cut themselves off from society, fearing its imminent collapse, and at one point he even turns to the reader and calls us “brave” for having made it through so far.
Sophie struggled to read The Uninhabitable Earth and had to stop reading at all before bed due to nightmares. She would still recommend you pick it up, however, because only by opening our eyes to reality do we stand a chance at changing the future.
Past the introduction, the book is divided into 12 “Elements of Chaos” with titles that will inspire anxiety in and of themselves. “Hunger”, “Downing”, “Unbreathable Air”, “Dying Oceans” and “Economic Collapse” are among them, each one an eye-opening exploration of just how bad the situation has become while we’ve looked the other way. However bad you think the situation is, you won’t be prepared, and Sophie found herself horrified again and again by the truth of what may happen in the coming decades. The Uninhabitable Earth isn’t 100% doom and gloom though. There are discussions of the ways we can fight back, we just need to get everyone on board. Fast.
The danger with a book like this is that, at a point, the news becomes so depressing, so thoroughly overwhelming, that it is easy to simply shut down. Indeed, Wallace-Wells devotes time to exploring the mental health implications of climate change and the people who have already cut themselves off from society, fearing its imminent collapse, and at one point he even turns to the reader and calls us “brave” for having made it through so far.
Sophie struggled to read The Uninhabitable Earth and had to stop reading at all before bed due to nightmares. She would still recommend you pick it up, however, because only by opening our eyes to reality do we stand a chance at changing the future.