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ndfarrell 's review for:
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
An extremely important topic, but not very readable. The first section serves as an introduction to climate change. The majority of the book focuses on what may happen after several degrees of warming. Each chapter has a different focus - for example, there is a chapter on water/melting ice caps/flooding, a chapter on air pollution, a chapter on famine, a chapter on increased wildfires, etc. The last section of the book is a kind of review of different theories regarding the political reaction in a hundred (or several hundred) years - will the rich buy up all the resources, or will we band together as an entire planet to save ourselves, what will happen to the climate refugees, etc. For such an engaging topic, this book was extremely dry, but managed to feel pretty incendiary at the same time. The most valuable and sobering part for me was reading the hard data on increasing environmental effects over the last hundred years or so. There has been a measured increase in nearly every kind of natural disaster that we track. The "what-ifs" and political speculation is not as helpful as seeing the hard data of what our consumption has done to our planet. I recommend with reservations, because the data is interesting, but I'll be looking for another better-written book about climate change.