I would not be writing this book were it not for Central Park East, and especially Pam Cushing, my second mother. I’m grateful to everyone I work with at New York magazine for all of their encouragement and support along the way. This goes especially for my bosses Jared Hohlt, Adam Moss, and Pam Wasserstein, and David Haskell, my editor and friend and co-conspirator. Other friends and co-conspirators also helped refine and reconceive what it was I was trying to do in this book, and to all of them I am so thankful, too: Isaac Chotiner, Kerry Howley, Hua Hsu, Christian Lorentzen, Noreen Malone, Chris Parris-Lamb, Willa Paskin, Max Read, and Kevin Roose. For a million unenumerable things, I’d also like to thank Jerry Saltz and Will Leitch, Lisa Miller and Vanessa Grigoriadis, Mike Marino and Andy Roth and Ryan Langer, James Darnton and Andrew Smeall and Scarlet Kim and Ann Fabian, Casey Schwartz and Marie Brenner, Nick Zimmerman and Dan Weber and Whitney Schubert and Joey Frank, Justin Pattner and Daniel Brand, Caitlin Roper, Ann Clarke and Alexis Swerdloff, Stella Bugbee, Meghan O’Rourke, Robert Asahina, Philip Gourevitch, Lorin Stein, and Michael Grunwald.
My best reader, as always, is my brother, Ben; without his footsteps to follow, who knows where I’d be. I’ve been inspired, too, in countless ways, by Harry and Roseann, Jenn and Matt and Heather, and above all by my mother and father, only one of whom is here to read this book but to both of whom I owe it, and everything else.
The last and biggest thanks belong to Risa, my love, and to Rocca, my other love—for the last year, the last twenty, and the fifty or more to come. Let’s hope they’re cool ones.
Notes
All science is speculative to some degree, subject to some future reconsideration or revision. But just how speculative varies from science to science, from specialty to specialty, indeed from study to study.
Within climate change research, both the fact of global warming (about 1.1 degrees Celsius since humans first began burning fossil fuels) and its mechanism (the greenhouse gases produced by that burning trap heat radiating upward into the planet’s atmosphere) are, at this point, established beyond any shadow of a doubt. Exactly how that warming will play out, over the next decades and then the next centuries, is less certain, both because we don’t know how quickly humans will drop their addiction to fossil fuels, and because we don’t know precisely how the climate system will recalibrate in response to human perturbation. But the notes that follow are, I hope, a road map to the state of that science, in addition to being a bibliography for this book.
I. Cascades
five mass extinctions: Those are the end-Ordovician, the Late Devonian, the end-Permian, the end-Triassic, and the end-Cretaceous. A very good recent popular account of each can be found in Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).
86 percent of all species: These figures are all estimates, and different studies often come to different conclusions. Some accounts of the end-Permian extinction, for instance, suggest the extinction level is as low as 90 percent, while others are as high as 97 percent. These particular figures come from the Cosmos primer “The Five Big Mass Extinctions,” https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions.
all but the one: Brannen, Ends of the World.
began when carbon warmed: There is some considerable debate about the precise mix of environmental factors (volcanic eruptions, microbial activity, Arctic methane) that brought about the end-Permian extinction, but for a summary of the theory that volcanic activity warmed the planet and the warming released methane that accelerated that warming, see Uwe Brand et al., “Methane Hydrate: Killer Cause of Earth’s Greatest Mass Extinction,” Paleoworld 25, no. 4 (December 2016): pp. 496–507, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palwor.2016.06.002.
at least ten times faster: “Maximum rates of carbon emissions for both the PETM and the end-Permian are about one billion tons of carbon, and right now we’re at ten billion tons of carbon,” the Penn State geoscientist Lee Kump, among the world’s leading experts on mass extinctions, told me. “The duration of both of those events was much longer than fossil-fuel burning will go on, and so the total amount is lower—but not by a factor of ten. By a factor of two or three.”
The rate is one hundred times faster: Jessica Blunden, Derek S. Arndt, and Gail Hartfield, eds., “State of the Climate in 2017,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 99, no. 8 (August 2018), Si–S310, https://doi.org/10.1175/2018BAMSStateoftheClimate.1.
at any point in the last 800,000 years: Rob Moore, “Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Hits Record High Monthly Average,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, May 2, 2018. As Moore puts it: “Prior to the onset of the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels had fluctuated over the millennia but had never exceeded 300 ppm at any point in the last 800,000 years,” https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2018/05/02/carbon-dioxide-in-the-atmosphere-hits-record-high-monthly-average/.
as long as 15 million years: See, for instance, Aradhna K. Tripati, Christopher D. Roberts, and Robert A. Eagle, “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years,” Science 326, no. 5958 (December 2009): pp. 1394–97. “The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today—and were sustained at those levels—global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today,” Tripati said in the UCLA press release for the study. “The sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.”
more than a hundred feet higher: Ibid.
more than half of the carbon: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions” (Oak Ridge, TN, 2017), https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017. Accounts and estimates of historical emissions vary, but according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we have emitted 1578 gigatons of CO2 from fossil fuels since 1751; since 1989 the total is 820 gigatons.
the figure is about 85 percent: According to Oak Ridge, the total figure since 1946 is 1376 gigatons, or 87 percent of 1578.
Scientists had understood: R. Revelle and H. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades,” Tellus 9 (1957): pp. 18–27.
passing the threshold of carbon concentration: See, for instance, Nicola Jones, “How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters,” Yale Environment 360, January 26, 2017, https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-the-world-passed-a-carbon-threshold-400ppm-and-why-it-matters.
a monthly average of 411: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “Another Climate Milestone Falls at Mauna Loa Observatory,” June 7, 2018, https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/another-climate-milestone-falls-mauna-loa-observatory.
more than four degrees Celsius of warming: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers (Geneva, 2014), p. 11, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/.
would be rendered uninhabitable: Gaia Vince, “How to Survive the Coming Century,” New Scientist, February 25, 2009. Some of this assessment is a bit extreme, but it is incontrovertibly true that warming on that scale will render large parts of those regions brutally inhospitable by any standard we apply today.
a group of Arctic scientists: Alec Luhn and Elle Hunt, “Besieged Russian Scientists Drive Away Polar Bears,” The Guardian, September 14, 2016.
killed by anthrax released: Michaeleen Doucleff, “Anthrax Outbreak in Russia Thought to Be Result of Thawing Permafrost,” NPR, August 3, 2016.
one million Syrian refugees: Phillip Connor, “Most Displaced Syrians Are in the Middle East, and About a Million Are in Europe,” Pew Research, January 29, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/29/where-displaced-syrians-have-resettled.
likely flooding of Bangladesh: “By 2050, it is estimated that one in every seven people in Bangladesh is likely to be displaced b
y climate change,” Robert Watkins of the United Nations said in a 2015 statement: see Mubashar Hasan, “Bangladesh’s Climate Change Migrants,” ReliefWeb, November 13, 2015.
140 million by 2050: World Bank, Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (Washington, D.C., 2018), p. xix, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29461.
more than a hundred times Europe’s Syrian “crisis”: Connor, “Most Displaced Syrians.” “Nearly 13 million Syrians are displaced after seven years of conflict in their country,” Connor reported.
The U.N. projections are bleaker: Baher Kamal, “Climate Migrants Might Reach One Billion by 2050,” ReliefWeb, August 21, 2017, https://reliefweb.int/report/world/climate-migrants-might-reach-one-billion-2050.
Two hundred million was the entire: U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Estimates of World Population,” www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html.
“a billion or more vulnerable”: United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, “Sustainability. Stability. Security,” www.unccd.int/sustainability-stability-security.
Fifteen percent of all human experience: Eukaryote, “The Funnel of Human Experience,” LessWrong, October 9, 2018, www.lesswrong.com/posts/SwBEJapZNzWFifLN6/the-funnel-of-human-experience.
another name for that level of warming: “Marshalls Likens Climate Change Migration to Cultural Genocide,” Radio New Zealand, October 6, 2015, www.radionz.co.nz/news/pacific/286139/marshalls-likens-climate-change-migration-to-cultural-genocide.
bell curve of more horrific possibilities: Technically, this is not a bell curve but a distribution curve, because it has a long tail of negative outcomes, rather than a balanced distribution of optimistic and pessimistic scenarios (that is, there are many more worst-case-like outcomes that are possible than best-case-like outcomes).
about 3.2 degrees of warming: Perhaps the best reference for all of the various predictive models is the Climate Action Tracker, which calculates that all of the world’s existing pledges would likely yield global warming of 3.16 degrees Celsius by 2100.
planet’s ice sheets: Alexander Nauels et al., “Linking Sea Level Rise and Socioeconomic Indicators Under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways,” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 11 (October 2017), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa92b6. In 2017, Nauels and his colleagues suggested that warming of merely 1.9 degrees Celsius could push the ice sheets past a tipping point of collapse.
That would eventually flood: The total collapse of the ice sheets would raise sea levels by more than two hundred feet, it is estimated, but a much smaller rise would be necessary to flood these cities. Miami sits six feet above sea level, Dhaka thirty-three feet. Shanghai is at thirteen feet, and parts of Hong Kong are as low as zero feet—which is why, in 2015, the South China Morning Post reported that four degrees of warming could displace 45 million people in those two cities: Li Ching, “Rising Sea Levels Set to Displace 45 Million People in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin If Earth Warms 4 Degrees from Climate Change,” South China Morning Post, November 9, 2015.
several recent studies: Thorsten Mauritsen and Robert Pincus, “Committed Warming Inferred from Observations,” Nature Climate Change, July 31, 2017; Adrian E. Raftery et al., “Less than 2°C Warming by 2100 Unlikely,” Nature Climate Change, July 31, 2017; Hubertus Fischer et al., “Paleoclimate Constraints on the Impact of 2°C Anthropogenic Warming and Beyond,” Nature Geoscience, June 25, 2018.
“century of hell”: Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney, “Scientists Nearly Double Sea Level Rise Projections for 2100, Because of Antarctica,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2016.
underestimating the amount of warming: Alvin Stone, “Global Warming May Be Twice What Climate Models Predict,” UNSW Sydney, July 5, 2018, https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/global-warming-may-be-twice-what-climate-models-predict.
fire-dominated savanna: Fischer, “Paleoclimate Constraints on the Impact.”
“Hothouse Earth”: Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (August 14, 2018).
At two degrees, the ice sheets: Nauels, “Linking Sea Level Rise and Socioeconomic Indicators,” https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa92b6.
400 million more people: Robert McSweeney, “The Impacts of Climate Change at 1.5C, 2C and Beyond,” Carbon Brief, October 4, 2018, https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/impacts-climate-change-one-point-five-degrees-two-degrees.
thirty-two times as many: Ibid.
9 percent more heat-related deaths: Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera et al., “Temperature-Related Mortality Impacts Under and Beyond Paris Agreement Climate Change Scenario,” Climatic Change 150, no. 3–4 (October 2018): pp. 391–402, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2274-3.
eight million more cases of dengue: Felipe J. Colon-Gonzalez et al., “Limiting Global-Mean Temperature Increase to 1.5–2 °C Could Reduce the Incidence and Spatial Spread of Dengue Fever in Latin America,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 24 (June 2018): pp. 6243–48, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718945115.
The last time that was the case: As with all work in paleoclimate, estimates on this point vary, but this summary comes from Howard Lee, “What Happened the Last Time It Was as Warm as It’s Going to Get at the End of This Century,” Ars Technica, June 18, 2018.
“hyperobject”: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
due for about 4.5 degrees: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, p. 11, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/.
As Naomi Oreskes has noted: For instance, in “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?” in Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
Just running those models: Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman, Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 53–55.
the Nobel laureate William Nordhaus: “If productivity growth is high, global temperature in 2100 is 5.3 °C.” William Nordhaus, “Projections and Uncertainties About Climate Change in an Area of Minimal Climate Policies” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016).
humans at the equator: Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber, “An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 21 (May 2010): pp. 9552–55, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0913352107.
oceans would eventually swell: Jason Treat et al., “What the World Would Look Like If All the Ice Melted,” National Geographic, September 2013.
two-thirds of the world’s major cities: This is a common shorthand climate scientists use, expressed by Katharine Hayhoe in Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Where Can You Escape the Harshest Effects of Climate Change?” The New York Times, October 20, 2016. “Two-thirds of the world’s biggest cities are within a few feet of sea level,” Hayhoe says.
hardly any land on the planet: If, as David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor theorize, every degree of warming costs 10 to 15 percent of grain yields—with higher temperatures cutting into productivity more than lower ones—eight degrees of global warming will almost entirely eliminate the capacity of the world’s existing grain regions to produce food.
tropical disease would reach northward: As Peter Brannen documents in Ends of the World, the last time the world was even five degrees warmer, what we now know as the Arctic was, in places, tropical.
climate is actually less sensitive: Peter M. Cox et al., “Emergent Constraint on Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity from Global Temperature Variability,” Nature 553 (January 2018): pp. 319–22.
permanent food deficit: Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). This book is a valua
ble road map to the future of warming.
“Half-Earth”: Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).
three major hurricanes: Those were Irma, Katia, and Jose.
“500,000-year event”: Tia Ghose, “Hurricane Harvey Caused 500,000-Year Floods in Some Areas,” Live Science, September 11, 2017, www.livescience.com/60378-hurricane-harvey-once-in-500000-year-flood.html.
third such flood: Christopher Ingraham, “Houston Is Experiencing Its Third ‘500-Year’ Flood in Three Years. How Is That Possible?” The Washington Post, August 29, 2017.
an Atlantic hurricane hit Ireland: Hurricane Ophelia, that is.
45 million were flooded: UNICEF, “16 Million Children Affected by Massive Flooding in South Asia, with Millions More at Risk,” September 2, 2017, www.unicef.org/press-releases/16-million-children-affected-massive-flooding-south-asia-millions-more-risk.
“thousand-year flood”: Tom Di Liberto, “Torrential Rains Bring Epic Flash Floods in Maryland in Late May 2018,” NOAA Climate.gov, May 31, 2018, www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/torrential-rains-bring-epic-flash-floods-maryland-late-may-2018.
record heat waves: Jason Samenow, “Red-Hot Planet: All-Time Heat Records Have Been Set All over the World During the Past Week,” The Washington Post, July 5, 2018.
fifty-four died from the heat: Rachel Lau, “Death Toll Rises to 54 as Quebec Heat Wave Ends,” Global News, July 6, 2018, https://globalnews.ca/news/4316878/50-people-now-dead-due-to-sweltering-quebec-heat-wave.
one hundred major wildfires: Jon Herskovitz, “More than 100 Large Wildfires in U.S. as New Blazes Erupt,” Reuters, August 11, 2018, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wildfires/more-than-100-large-wildfires-in-u-s-as-new-blazes-erupt-idUSKBN1KX00B.
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