The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  The climate effects on extreme precipitation events—often called deluges or even “rain bombs”—are even clearer than those on hurricanes, since the mechanism is about as straightforward as it gets: warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air. Already, there are 40 percent more intense rainstorms in the United States than in the middle of the last century. In the Northeast, the figure is 71 percent. The very heaviest downfalls are today three-quarters heavier than they were in 1958, and only getting more so. The island of Kauai, in Hawaii, is one of the wettest places on Earth, and has in recent decades endured both tsunamis and hurricanes; when a climate-change-driven rain event hit in April 2018, it literally broke the rain gauges, and the National Weather Service had to offer a best-guess estimate: fifty inches of water in twenty-four hours.

  When it comes to extreme weather, we are already living in unprecedented times. In America, the damages from quotidian thunderstorms—the unexceptional kind—have increased more than sevenfold since the 1980s. Power outages from storms have doubled just since 2003. When Hurricane Irma first emerged, it was with such intensity that some meteorologists proposed creating an entirely new category of hurricane for it—a Category 6. And then came Maria, rolling through the Caribbean and devastating a string of islands for the second time in a single week—two storms of such intensity that the islands might be prepared to endure them once a generation, or perhaps even less often. In Puerto Rico, Maria wiped out power and running water for much of the island for months, flooding its agricultural lands so fully that one farmer predicted the island wouldn’t produce any food for the next year.

  In its aftermath, Maria also showcased one of the uglier aspects of our climate blindness. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and live not far from the mainland on an island millions of Americans have visited personally. And yet when climate disaster struck there, we processed their suffering, perhaps out of psychological self-interest, as foreign and far away. Trump barely mentioned Puerto Rico in the week after Maria, and while that may not surprise, neither did the Sunday talk shows. By the weekend, a few days after the hurricane traversed the island, it was off the front page of The New York Times as well. When Trump’s feud with the heroic mayor of San Juan and his problematic visit to the island—during which he tossed paper towels into a crowd without power or water like T-shirts at a Knicks game—made the hurricane a partisan issue, Americans did begin to focus on the destruction a bit more. But the attention paid remains trivial compared to the humanitarian toll—and when compared to the response to natural disasters that have recently hit the American mainland. “We’re getting some intimations of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene,” as the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, of the New School, wrote. “We’re on our own.”

  And in the future, all that was once unprecedented becomes quickly routine. Remember Hurricane Sandy? By 2100, floods of that scale are expected as many as seventeen times more often in New York. Katrina-level hurricanes are expected to double in frequency. Looking globally, researchers have found an increase of 25 to 30 percent in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes for just one degree Celsius of global warming. Between just 2006 and 2013, the Philippines were hit by seventy-five natural disasters; over the last four decades in Asia, typhoons have intensified by between 12 and 15 percent, and the proportion of Category 4 and 5 storms has doubled; in some areas, it has tripled. By 2070, Asian megacities could lose as much as $35 trillion in assets due to storms, up from just $3 trillion in 2005.

  We are so far from investing in adequate defenses against these storms that we are still building out into their paths—as though we are homesteaders staking claim to land cleared each summer by tornadoes, committing ourselves blindly to generations being punished by natural disaster. In fact, it is worse than that, since paving over stretches of vulnerable coast, as we’ve done most conspicuously in Houston and New Orleans, stops up natural drainage systems with concrete that extends each epic flood. We tell ourselves we are “developing” the land—in some cases, fabricating it from marsh. What we are really building are bridges to our own suffering, since it’s not just those new concrete communities built right into the floodplain that are vulnerable, but all those communities behind them, built on the expectation that the old swampy coastline could protect them. Which does call into question just what we mean, in the age of the Anthropocene, by the phrase “natural disaster.”

  Dreamtime weather won’t stop at the shore, but will blanket the life of every human living on the planet, no matter how far from the coast. The warmer the Arctic, the more intense the blizzards in the northern latitudes—that’s what’s given the American Northeast 2010’s “Snowpocalypse,” 2014’s “Snowmageddon,” and 2016’s “Snowzilla.”

  The inland effects of climate change are being felt in warmer seasons, too. In April 2011—just one month—758 tornadoes swept the American countryside. The previous April record had been 267, and the most for any previous month in recorded history was 542. The next month, there was another wave, including the tornado that killed 138 people in Joplin, Missouri. What’s called America’s “tornado alley” has moved five hundred miles in just thirty years, and while, technically, scientists aren’t sure that climate change increases tornado formation, the paths of destruction tornadoes leave are getting longer, and they are getting wider; they arise from thunderstorms, which are increasing—the number of days on which they are possible growing as much as 40 percent by 2100, according to one assessment. The United States Geological Survey—not a notably alarmist corner of even the temperamentally conservative federal bureaucracy—recently “war-gamed” an extreme weather scenario they called “ARkStorm”: winter storms strike California, producing flooding in the Central Valley three hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, and more destructive flooding in Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Bay Area up north, altogether forcing evacuation of more than a million Californians; wind speeds reach hurricane levels of 125 miles per hour in parts of the state, and at least 60 miles per hour throughout much of it; landslides cascade down from the Sierra Nevada mountains; and damage, all told, reaches $725 billion, nearly three times the estimate for a massive earthquake in the state, the much-feared “Big One.”

  In the past, even the recent past, disasters like these arrived with otherworldly force and incomprehensible moral logic. We could see them coming, on radar and by satellite, but could not interpret them—not legibly, not in ways that really made sense of them in relation to one another. Even atheists and agnostics might find themselves whispering the phrase “act of God” in the aftermath of a hurricane, or wildfire, or tornado, if only to express how inexplicable it felt to endure such suffering with no author behind it, no one to blame for it. Climate change will change this.

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  Even as we settle into thinking of natural disasters as a regular feature of our weather, the scope of devastation and horror they bring will not diminish. There are cascade effects here, too: ahead of Hurricane Harvey, the state of Texas cut off Houston’s air-quality monitors, fearing they’d be damaged; immediately afterward, a cloud of “unbearable” smells began drifting out of the city’s petrochemical plants. Ultimately, nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater surged out of a single petrochemical plant into Galveston Bay. All told, that one storm produced more than a hundred “toxic releases,” including 460,000 gallons of gasoline, 52,000 pounds of crude oil, and a massive, quarter-mile-wide discharge of hydrogen chloride, which, when it mixes with moisture, becomes hydrochloric acid, “which can burn, suffocate, and kill.”

  Down the coast in New Orleans, the storm hit was less direct, but there the city had already been knocked offline—without a full complement of drain pumps after an August 5 storm. When Katrina had hit New Orleans in 2005, it was not walloping a thriving city—the 2000 population of 480,000 had declined from a peak of over 600,000 in 1960. After the storm, it was as l
ow as 230,000. Houston is a different case. One of the fastest-growing cities in the country in 2017—greater Houston even included the fastest-growing suburb in the country that year—it has more than five times as many residents as New Orleans. It’s a tragic irony that many of those new arrivals who moved into the path of this storm over the last decades were brought there by the oil business, which has worked tirelessly to undermine public understanding of climate change and derail global attempts at reducing carbon emissions. One suspects this is not the last 500-year storm those workers will see before retirement—nor the last to be seen by the hundreds of oil rigs off the coast of Houston, or the thousand more bobbing now elsewhere off the Gulf Coast, until the toll of our emissions becomes so brutally clear that those rigs are finally retired.

  The phrase “500-year storm” is also very helpful on the question of resilience. Even a devastated community, buckled in suffering, can endure a long period of recovery if it is wealthy and politically stable and needs to rebuild only once a century—perhaps even once every fifty years. But rebuilding for a decade in the wake of spectacular storms that hit once a decade, or once every two decades, is an entirely different matter, even for countries as rich as the United States and regions as well-off as greater Houston. New Orleans is still reeling from Katrina, a dozen years on, with the Lower Ninth Ward barely one-third as populated as it was before the storm. And it surely doesn’t help that the entire coastline of Louisiana is being swallowed by the sea, with 2,000 square miles already gone. The state loses a football field of land every single hour. In the Florida Keys, 150 miles of road need to be raised to stay ahead of sea level, costing as much as $7 million each mile, or up to $1 billion, total. The county’s 2018 road budget was $25 million.

  For the world’s poor, recovery from storms like Katrina and Irma and Harvey, hitting more and more often, is almost impossible. The best choice is often simply to leave. In the months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, thousands of islanders arrived in Florida, thinking it might be for good. Of course, that land is disappearing, too.

  Freshwater Drain

  Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered in water. Barely more than 2 percent of that water is fresh, and only 1 percent of that water, at most, is accessible, with the rest trapped mostly in glaciers. Which means, in essence, as National Geographic has calculated, only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its seven billion people.

  Think of freshwater shortages and you probably feel an itch in your throat, but in fact hydration is just a sliver of what we need water for. Globally, between 70 and 80 percent of freshwater is used for food production and agriculture, with an additional 10 to 20 percent set aside for industry. And the crisis is not principally driven by climate change—that 0.007 percent should be, believe it or not, plenty, not just for the seven billion of us here but for as many as nine billion, perhaps even a bit more. Of course, we are likely heading north of nine billion this century, to a global population of at least ten and possibly twelve billion. As with food scarcity, much of the growth is expected in parts of the world already most strained by water shortage—in this case, urban Africa. In many African countries already, you are expected to get by on as little as twenty liters of water each day—less than half of what water organizations say is necessary for public health. As soon as 2030, global water demand is expected to outstrip supply by 40 percent.

  Today, the crisis is political—which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix—and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development. There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it. Some cities lose more water to leaks than they deliver to homes: even in the United States, leaks and theft account for an estimated loss of 16 percent of freshwater; in Brazil, the estimate is 40 percent. In both cases, as everywhere, scarcity plays out so nakedly on a stage defined by have-and-have-not inequities that the resulting drama of resource competition can hardly be called, truly, a competition; the deck is so stacked that water shortage looks more like a tool of inequality. The global result is that as many as 2.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water, and 4.5 billion don’t have safely managed water for sanitation.

  Like global warming, the water crisis is soluble, at present. But that 0.007 percent leaves an awfully thin margin, and climate change will cut into it. Half of the world’s population depends on seasonal melt from high-elevation snow and ice, deposits that are dramatically threatened by warming. Even if we hit the Paris targets, the glaciers of the Himalayas will lose 40 percent of their ice by 2100, or possibly more, and there could be widespread water shortages in Peru and California, the result of glacier melt. At four degrees, the snow-capped Alps could look more like Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, with 70 percent less snow by the end of the century. As soon as 2020, as many as 250 million Africans could face water shortages due to climate change; by the 2050s, the number could hit a billion people in Asia alone. By the same year, the World Bank found, freshwater availability in cities around the world could decline by as much as two-thirds. Overall, according to the United Nations, five billion people could have poor access to freshwater by 2050.

  The United States won’t be spared—boomtown Phoenix is, for instance, already in emergency planning mode, which should not surprise, given that even London is beginning to worry over water shortages. But given the reassurances of wealth—which can buy stopgap solutions and additional short-term supply—the United States will not be the worst hit. In India, already, 600 million face “high to extreme water stress,” according to a 2018 government report, and 200,000 people die each year from lacking or contaminated water. By 2030, according to the same report, India will have only half the water it needs. In 1947, when the country was formed, per capita water availability in Pakistan stood at 5,000 cubic meters; today, thanks mostly to population growth, it is at 1,000; and soon continued growth and climate change will bring it down to 400.

  In the last hundred years, many of the planet’s largest lakes have begun drying up, from the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the world’s fourth largest and which has lost more than 90 percent of its volume in recent decades, to Lake Mead, which supplies much of Las Vegas’s water and has lost as much as 400 billion gallons in a single year. Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second biggest, has completely disappeared; Iran’s Lake Urmia has shrunk more than 80 percent in thirty years. Lake Chad has more or less evaporated entirely. Climate change is only one factor in this story, but its impact is not going to shrink over time.

  What goes on within those lakes that survive is perhaps just as distressing. In China’s Lake Tai, for instance, the blooming of warmwater-friendly bacteria in 2007 threatened the drinking water of two million people; the heating-up of East Africa’s Lake Tanganyika has imperiled the fish stock harvested and eaten by millions in four adjacent, hungry nations. Freshwater lakes, by the way, account for up to 16 percent of the world’s natural methane emissions, and scientists estimate that climate-fueled aquatic plant growth could double those emissions over the next fifty years.

  We’re already racing, as a short-term fix for the world’s drought boom, to drain underground water deposits known as aquifers, but those deposits took millions of years to accumulate and aren’t coming back anytime soon. In the United States, aquifers already supply a fifth of our water needs; as Brian Clark Howard has noted, wells that used to draw water at 500 feet now require pumps at least twice as deep. The Colorado River Basin, which serves water to seven states, lost twelve cubic miles of groundwater between 2004 and 2013; the Ogallala Aquifer in part of the Texas Panhandle lost 15 feet in a decade, and is expected to drain by 70 percent over the next fifty year
s in Kansas. In the meantime, they’re fracking in that drinking water. In India, in just the next two years, twenty-one cities could exhaust their groundwater supply.

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  The first Day Zero in Cape Town was in March 2018, the day when the city, a few months earlier and enduring its worst drought in decades, had predicted its taps would run proverbially dry.

  Sitting in a living room in a modern apartment in an advanced metropolis somewhere in the developed world, this threat may seem hard to credit—so many cities looking nowadays like fantasies of endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy. But of all urban entitlements, the casual expectation of never-ending drinking water is perhaps the most deeply delusional. It takes quite a lot to bring that water to your sink, your shower, and your toilet.

  As climate crises so often do, in Cape Town the drought aggravated existing conflicts. In a memorable first-person account written at the time, Capetonian Adam Welz described the episode, which did end before the city went completely dry, as an operatic enactment of familiar local problems: mostly wealthy whites complaining that mostly poor blacks, many of whom receive a small allocation free, were draining the water supply; social media aflame with accusations of idle or indifferent black South Africans leaving water pipes running unattended and shantytown businesses running off stolen water. Black South Africans pointed the finger at suburban whites with pools and lawns, making hay over “orgies of flushing in the toilet stalls of upscale shopping malls.” Conspiracy theories circulated involving federal indifference and withheld Israeli technology, and accusations of bad faith bounced from local authorities to national ones to meteorologists—altogether serving, as is almost always the case when communities must respond collectively to climate threats, as a buffet of excuses to not act. At the peak of the crisis, the mayor announced that nearly two-thirds of the city, 64 percent, were failing to abide by the city’s new water restrictions, which aimed to limit water use to 23 gallons per person each day. The average American goes through four to five times that much; in arid Utah, founded on a Mormon prophecy predicting the arrival of an Eden in the desert, the average citizen goes through, each day, 248 gallons. In February, Cape Town halved the individual allotment to 13 gallons, and the army prepared to secure the city’s water facilities.