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jdscott50 's review for:
The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future
by David Wallace-Wells
I remember reading the book 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson where humans take to the stars and terraform the planets, but Earth is facing climate catastrophe. When they spoke about the time period historically, they spoke about the years 2000-2060 as The Great Dithering. It is a time period where everyone knew what was happening but chose to do nothing. This is the quandary we face. There are not enough key people who are willing to make the needed changes or make the sacrifice to stop human influence on warming the planet.
Enter David Wallace-Wells who states, dear reader, you want to know what climate change looks like, let me show you the horrors. If reading this book gave a facial experesssion it would be when the opened the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark where everyone's face melted off. Part of the planet is unlivable, millions dead, the inability to grow food, and more. It isn't something that will happen tomorrow, but it is on the horizon. There is a tipping point that is right in front of us. If you wanted ammunition to stop our Great Dithering, here is a good resource to use.
NOTES FROM
Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells
September 13, 2019
[It is worse, much...]
because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted “normal,” and because we looked outside and things seemed still okay
September 14, 2019
Wildfire
The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. The wealthy used to build castles to defend themselves against the world; more recently it’s been a more modern kind of fortress—cities—enclosing more and more of us in an illusion of man-made security. All of a sudden, it’s getting a lot harder to protect against what’s coming.
September 15, 2019
Economic Collapse
to help buffer or offset the impacts, we have no New Deal revival waiting around the corner, no Marshall Plan ready. The global halving of economic resources would be permanent, and, because permanent, we would soon not even know it as deprivation, only as a brutally cruel normal against which we might measure tiny burps of decimal-point growth as the breath of a new prosperity. We have gotten used to setbacks on our erratic march along the arc of economic history, but we know them as setbacks, and expect elastic recoveries. What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing—not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.
September 15, 2019
Climate Conflict
For every half degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: a planet four degrees warmer would have perhaps twice as many wars as we do today. And possibly more.
September 15, 2019
Climate Conflict
In each case, climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.
September 17, 2019
Storytelling
James Hansen, who first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, has named the phenomenon “scientific reticence,” and in 2007 chastised his colleagues for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was. That tendency has metastasized over time, ironically as the news from research grew bleaker, so that for a long time each major publication would be attended by a cloud of commentary debating its precise calibration of perspective and tone—with many of those articles seen to lack an even balance between bad news and optimism, and labeled “fatalistic.” Some were derided as “climate porn.”
September 17, 2019
Storytelling
As a result, they were especially worried about burnout, and the possibility that storytelling about climate could tip so many people into despondency that the effort to avert a crisis would burn itself out. And
September 18, 2019
Politics of Consumption
But among the woke Left the inverted charge is just as often true: we navigate by a North Star of politics through our diets, our friendships, even our consumption of pop culture, but rarely make meaningful political noise about those causes that run against our own self-interest or sense of self as special—indeed enlightened. On perhaps no issue more than climate is that posture of enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.
September 19, 2019
[What if we’re...]
Instead we assign the task to future generations, to dreams of magical technologies, to remote politicians doing a kind of battle with profiteering delay. This is why this book is also studded so oppressively with “we,” however imperious it may seem. The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it.
All Excerpts From
David Wallace-Wells. “Life After Warming.” Crown Publishing, 2019-04-16. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Enter David Wallace-Wells who states, dear reader, you want to know what climate change looks like, let me show you the horrors. If reading this book gave a facial experesssion it would be when the opened the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark where everyone's face melted off. Part of the planet is unlivable, millions dead, the inability to grow food, and more. It isn't something that will happen tomorrow, but it is on the horizon. There is a tipping point that is right in front of us. If you wanted ammunition to stop our Great Dithering, here is a good resource to use.
NOTES FROM
Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells
September 13, 2019
[It is worse, much...]
because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted “normal,” and because we looked outside and things seemed still okay
September 14, 2019
Wildfire
The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. The wealthy used to build castles to defend themselves against the world; more recently it’s been a more modern kind of fortress—cities—enclosing more and more of us in an illusion of man-made security. All of a sudden, it’s getting a lot harder to protect against what’s coming.
September 15, 2019
Economic Collapse
to help buffer or offset the impacts, we have no New Deal revival waiting around the corner, no Marshall Plan ready. The global halving of economic resources would be permanent, and, because permanent, we would soon not even know it as deprivation, only as a brutally cruel normal against which we might measure tiny burps of decimal-point growth as the breath of a new prosperity. We have gotten used to setbacks on our erratic march along the arc of economic history, but we know them as setbacks, and expect elastic recoveries. What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing—not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.
September 15, 2019
Climate Conflict
For every half degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: a planet four degrees warmer would have perhaps twice as many wars as we do today. And possibly more.
September 15, 2019
Climate Conflict
In each case, climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.
September 17, 2019
Storytelling
James Hansen, who first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, has named the phenomenon “scientific reticence,” and in 2007 chastised his colleagues for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was. That tendency has metastasized over time, ironically as the news from research grew bleaker, so that for a long time each major publication would be attended by a cloud of commentary debating its precise calibration of perspective and tone—with many of those articles seen to lack an even balance between bad news and optimism, and labeled “fatalistic.” Some were derided as “climate porn.”
September 17, 2019
Storytelling
As a result, they were especially worried about burnout, and the possibility that storytelling about climate could tip so many people into despondency that the effort to avert a crisis would burn itself out. And
September 18, 2019
Politics of Consumption
But among the woke Left the inverted charge is just as often true: we navigate by a North Star of politics through our diets, our friendships, even our consumption of pop culture, but rarely make meaningful political noise about those causes that run against our own self-interest or sense of self as special—indeed enlightened. On perhaps no issue more than climate is that posture of enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.
September 19, 2019
[What if we’re...]
Instead we assign the task to future generations, to dreams of magical technologies, to remote politicians doing a kind of battle with profiteering delay. This is why this book is also studded so oppressively with “we,” however imperious it may seem. The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it.
All Excerpts From
David Wallace-Wells. “Life After Warming.” Crown Publishing, 2019-04-16. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.