The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  This is what it means to suggest that climate change is an enveloping crisis, one that touches every aspect of the way we live on the planet today. But the world’s suffering will be distributed as unequally as its profits, with great divergences both between countries and within them. Already-hot countries like India and Pakistan will be hurt the most; within the United States, the costs will be shouldered largely in the South and Midwest, where some regions could lose up to 20 percent of county income.

  Overall, though it will be hit hard by climate impacts, the United States is among the most well-positioned to endure—its wealth and geography are reasons that America has only begun to register effects of climate change that already plague warmer and poorer parts of the world. But in part because it has so much to lose, and in part because it so aggressively developed its very long coastlines, the U.S. is more vulnerable to climate impacts than any country in the world but India, and its economic illness won’t be quarantined at the border. In a globalized world, there is what Zhengtao Zhang and others call an “economic ripple effect.” They’ve also quantified it, and found that the impact grows along with warming. At one degree Celsius, with a decline in American GDP of 0.88 percent, global GDP would fall by 0.12 percent, the American losses cascading through the world system. At two degrees, the economic ripple effect triples, though here, too, the effects play out differently in different parts of the world; compared to the impact of American losses at one degree, at two degrees the economic ripple effect in China would be 4.5 times larger. The radiating shock waves issuing out from other countries are smaller because their economies are smaller, but the waves will be coming from nearly every country in the world, like radio signals beamed out from a whole global forest of towers, each transmitting economic suffering.

  For better or for worse, in the countries of the wealthy West we have settled on economic growth as the single best metric, however imperfect, of the health of our societies. Of course, using that metric, climate change registers—with its wildfires and droughts and famines, it registers seismically. The costs are astronomical already, with single hurricanes now delivering damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Should the planet warm 3.7 degrees, one assessment suggests, climate change damages could total $551 trillion—nearly twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. We are on track for more warming still.

  Over the last several decades, policy consensus has cautioned that the world would only tolerate responses to climate change if they were free—or, even better, if they could be presented as avenues of economic opportunity. That market logic was probably always shortsighted, but over the last several years, as the cost of adaptation in the form of green energy has fallen so dramatically, the equation has entirely flipped: we now know that it will be much, much more expensive to not act on climate than to take even the most aggressive action today. If you don’t think of the price of a stock or government bond as an insurmountable barrier to the returns you’ll receive, you probably shouldn’t think of climate adaptation as expensive, either. In 2018, one paper calculated the global cost of a rapid energy transition, by 2030, to be negative $26 trillion—in other words, rebuilding the energy infrastructure of the world would make us all that much money, compared to a static system, in only a dozen years.

  Every day we do not act, those costs accumulate, and the numbers quickly compound. Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel draw their 50 percent figure from the very high end of what’s possible—truly a worst-case scenario for economic growth under the sign of climate change. But in 2018, Burke and several other colleagues published a major paper exploring the growth consequences of some scenarios closer to our present predicament. In it, they considered one plausible but still quite optimistic scenario, in which the world meets its Paris Agreement commitments, limiting warming to between 2.5 and 3 degrees. This is probably about the best-case warming scenario we might reasonably expect; globally, relative to a world with no additional warming, it would cut per-capita economic output by the end of the century, Burke and his colleagues estimate, by between 15 and 25 percent. Hitting four degrees of warming, which lies on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current emissions trajectory, would cut into it by 30 percent or more. This is a trough twice as deep as the deprivations that scarred our grandparents in the 1930s, and which helped produce a wave of fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide. But you can only really call it a trough when you climb out of it and look back from a new peak, relieved. There may not be any such relief or reprieve from climate deprivation, and though, as in any collapse, there will be those few who find ways to benefit, the experience of most may be more like that of miners buried permanently at the bottom of a shaft.

  Climate Conflict

  Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to the country’s civil war, it is not exactly fair to say that the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures and remained stable.

  But wars are not caused by climate change only in the same way that hurricanes are not caused by climate change, which is to say they are made more likely, which is to say the distinction is semantic. If climate change makes conflict only 3 percent more likely in a given country, that does not mean it is a trivial effect: there are almost two hundred countries in the world, which multiplies the likelihood, meaning that rise in temperature could yield three or four or six more wars. Over the last decade, researchers have even managed to quantify some of the nonobvious relationships between temperature and violence: 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 likely more.

  As is the case with nearly every aspect of climate chaos, meeting the Paris goals will not save us from this bloodshed, in fact far from it; even an astonishing, improbable effort to limit warming to two degrees would still, by this math, result in at least 40 percent, and perhaps as much as 80 percent, more war. This, in other words, is our best-case scenario: at least half again as much conflict as we see today, when few watching the news each night would say we are enjoying an abundance of peace. Already, climate change has elevated Africa’s risk of conflict by more than 10 percent; in that continent, by just 2030, projected temperatures are expected to cause 393,000 additional deaths in battle.

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  “Battle”—the word feels like a relic when you come across it. In the wealthy West, we’ve come to pretend that war is an anomalous feature of modern life, since it seems to have been retired as fully from our everyday experience as polio. But globally, there are nineteen ongoing armed conflicts hot enough to claim at least a thousand lives each year. Nine of them began more recently than 2010, and many more unfold at smaller scales of violence.

  That all of these counts are expected to spike in the coming decades is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I’ve spoken to has pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change, the Pentagon issuing regular climate threat assessments and planning for a new era of conflict governed by global warming. (This is still true in the Trump era, when lesser federal outfits like the Government Accountability Office deliver grim warnings about climate, too.) The drowning of American navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, and the melting of the Arctic promises to open an entirely new theater of conflict, once nearly as foreign-seeming as the space race. (It also positions the country primarily against America’s old rivals the Russians, now revived as adversaries.)

  Given the right war-gaming cast of mind, it is also possible to see the aggressive Chinese construction activity in the South China Sea, where whole new artificial islands have been erected for military use, as a kind of dry run, so
to speak, for life as a superpower in a flooded world. The strategic opportunity is clear, with so many of the existing footholds—like all those low-lying islands the United States once used to stepping-stone its own empire across the Pacific—expected to disappear by the end of the century, if not before. The Marshall Islands archipelago, for instance, seized by the U.S. during World War II, could be rendered uninhabitable by sea-level rise as soon as midcentury, the U.S. Geological Survey has warned; its islands will be underwater even if we meet the Paris goals. And what is taken down with them is quite scary. Beginning with the bombing at Bikini Atoll, these islands were ground zero for American atom bomb testing just after the war; the U.S. military has only ever “cleaned up” one island of radioactivity, which makes them the world’s largest nuclear waste site.

  But for the military, climate change is not just a matter of great-power rivalry executed across a transformed map. Even for those in the American military who expect the country’s hegemony to endure indefinitely, climate change presents a problem, because being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. And it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming—a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began to accelerate when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil. From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization, and the effect may be especially pronounced amid ethnic strife: from 1980 to 2010, a 2016 study found, 23 percent of conflict in the world’s ethnically diverse countries began in months stamped by weather disaster. According to one assessment, thirty-two countries—from Haiti to the Philippines and India to Cambodia, each heavily dependent on farming and agriculture—face “extreme risk” of conflict and civil unrest from climate disruptions over the next thirty years.

  What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics: when yields drop and productivity falls, societies can falter, and when droughts and heat waves hit, the shocks can be felt even more deeply, electrifying political fault lines and producing or exposing others no one knew to worry over. A lot has to do with the forced migration that can result from those shocks, and with the political and social instability that migration often produces; when things go south, those who are able tend to flee, not always to places ready to welcome them—in fact, recent history shows, often quite the opposite. And today migration is already at a record high, with almost seventy million displaced people wandering the planet right now. That is the outbound impact; but the local one is often more profound. Those who remain in a region ravaged by extreme weather often find themselves navigating an entirely new social and political structure, if one endures at all. And it is not just weak states that can fall at the hands of climate pressures; in recent years, scholars have compiled a long list of empires buckled, at least in part, by climate effects and events: Egypt, Akkadia, Rome.

  This complex calculus is what makes researchers reluctant to assign blame for conflict neatly, but complexity is how warming articulates its brutality. Like the cost to growth, war is not a discrete impact of global temperature rise but something more like an all-encompassing aggregation of climate change’s worst tremors and cascades. The Center for Climate and Security, a state-focused think tank, organizes the threats from climate change into six categories: “Catch-22 states,” in which governments have responded to local climate challenges—to agriculture, for example—by turning toward a global marketplace that is now more than ever vulnerable to climate shocks; “brittle states,” stable on the surface—but only by a run of good climate luck; “fragile states,” such as Sudan, Yemen, and Bangladesh, where climate impacts have already eaten into trust in state authority, or worse; “disputed zones among states,” like the South China Sea or Arctic; “disappearing states,” which they mean literally, as in the case of the Maldives; and “non-state actors,” like ISIS, which can seize local resources, such as freshwater, as a way of applying leverage against the nominal state authority or the local population. In each case, climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.

  This complexity may also be one reason we cannot see the threat of escalating war very clearly, choosing to regard conflict as something determined primarily by politics and economics when all three are in fact governed, like everything else, by the conditions established by our rapidly changing climate. Over the last decade or so, the linguist Steven Pinker has made a second career out of suggesting that, in the West especially, we are unable to appreciate human progress—are in fact blind to all of the massive and rapid improvements the world has witnessed in less violence and war and poverty, reduced infant mortality, and enhanced life expectancy. It’s true, we are. When you look at the charts, the trajectory of that progress seems inarguable: so many fewer violent deaths, so much less extreme deprivation, a global middle class expanding by the hundreds of millions. But again, that story is about the wealth brought by industrialization and the transformations of societies by newfound wealth powered by fossil fuel. It is a story written largely by China and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the developing world, which has developed by industrializing. And the cost of much of that progress, the balance come due for all the industrialization that made middle-class-ness possible for the billions of people in the global south, is climate change—which we are, ironically, far too sanguine about, Pinker included. Worse still, the warming unleashed by all our progress heralds a return to violence.

  Even when it comes to war, historical memory has a sadistically short half-life, horrors and their causes gauzily evanescing into familiar folklore in less than the span of a single generation. But most wars throughout history, it is important to remember, have been conflicts over resources, often ignited by resource scarcity, which is what an earth densely populated and denuded by climate change will yield. Those wars don’t tend to increase those resources; most of the time, they incinerate them.

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  The folklore of state conflict casts a long shadow—the patchwork quilt of nations tugged apart into a ghastly, mutually damaging disarray. Climate tugs at the individual threads of conflict, too: personal irritability, interpersonal conflict, domestic violence.

  Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration; and even in simulations, police officers are more likely to fire on intruders when the exercises are conducted in hotter weather. By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States would bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries, and acts of larceny. The statistics of the past are more inarguable, and even the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world in the middle of the last century did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.

  It’s not just temperature effects. In 2018, a team of researchers examining an enormous data set of more than 9,000 American cities found that air pollution levels positively predicted incidents of every single crime category they looked at—from car theft and burglary and larceny up to assault, rape, and murder. And then there are the ways that climate impacts can cascade into violence more circuitously. Between 2008 and 2010, Guatemala was hit by Tropical Storm Arthur, Hurricane Dolly, Tropical Storm Agatha, and Tropical Storm Hermine—this a country that was already one of the ten most affected by extreme weather and reeling in the same years from the eruption of a local volcano and a regional earthquake. All told, almost three million were left “food insecure,” and at least 40
0,000 needed humanitarian assistance; from the 2010 disasters alone, the country sustained damages totaling more than a billion dollars, or roughly a quarter of the national budget, devastating its roads and supply chains. In 2011, it was hit by Tropical Storm 12E, and, in the wake of the disasters, farmers turned to growing poppies; organized crime, already an enormous problem, exploded—which should perhaps not surprise us, given that recent research has shown that the Sicilian mafia was produced by drought. Today, Guatemala has the fifth-highest homicide rate in the world; according to UNICEF, it is the second most dangerous country in the world for children. Historically, the country’s cash crops have been coffee and sugarcane; in the coming decades, climate change could make both of them ungrowable.

  “Systems”

  What I call cascades, climate scientists call “systems crises.” These crises are what the American military means when it names climate change a “threat multiplier.” The multiplication, when it falls short of conflict, produces migration—that is, climate refugees. Since 2008, by one count, it has already produced 22 million of them.

  In the West, we often think of refugees as a failed-state problem—that is, a problem that the broken and impoverished parts of the world inflict on relatively more stable, and wealthier, societies. But Hurricane Harvey produced at least 60,000 climate migrants in Texas, and Hurricane Irma forced the evacuation of nearly 7 million. As with so much else, it will only get worse from here. By 2100, sea-level rise alone could displace 13 million Americans—a few percent of the country’s total population. Many of those sea-level refugees will come from the country’s southeast—chiefly Florida, where 2.5 million are expected to be flooded out of greater Miami; and Louisiana, where the New Orleans area is predicted to lose half a million.