The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  “sunny day flooding”: Jim Morrison, “Flooding Hot Spots: Why Seas Are Rising Faster on the US East Coast,” Yale Environment 360, April 24, 2018, https://e360.yale.edu/features/flooding-hot-spots-why-seas-are-rising-faster-on-the-u.s.-east-coast.

  things accelerating faster: Andrew Shepherd, Helen Amanda Fricker, and Sinead Louise Farrell, “Trends and Connections Across the Antarctic Cryosphere,” Nature 558 (2018): pp. 223–32.

  melt rate of the Antarctic: University of Leeds, “Antarctica Ramps Up Sea Level Rise,” June 13, 2018, www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/4250/antarctica_ramps_up_sea_level_rise.

  49 billion tons of ice each year: Chris Mooney, “Antarctic Ice Loss Has Tripled in a Decade. If That Continues, We Are in Serious Trouble,” The Washington Post, June 13, 2018.

  several meters over fifty years: James Hansen et al., “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations That 2°C Global Warming Could Be Dangerous,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 16 (2016): pp. 3761–812, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-3761-2016.

  13,000 square miles: University of Maryland, “Decades of Satellite Monitoring Reveal Antarctic Ice Loss,” June 13, 2018, https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/4156.

  determined by what human action: Hayley Dunning, “How to Save Antarctica (and the Rest of Earth Too),” Imperial College London, June 13, 2018, www.imperial.ac.uk/news/186668/how-save-antarctica-rest-earth.

  never before observed in human history: Richard Zeebe et al., “Anthropogenic Carbon Release Rate Unprecedented During the Past 66 Million Years,” Nature Geoscience 9 (March 2016): pp. 325–29, https://doi.org//10.1038/ngeo2681.

  “damage mechanics”: C. P. Borstad et al., “A Damage Mechanics Assessment of the Larsen B Ice Shelf Prior to Collapse: Toward a Physically-Based Calving Law,” Geophysical Research Letters 39 (September 2012), https://doi.org/10.1029/2012GL053317.

  around ten times faster: Sarah Griffiths, “Global Warming Is Happening ‘Ten Times Faster than at Any Time in the Earth’s History,’ Climate Experts Claim,” The Daily Mail, August 2, 2013. See also Melissa Davey, “Humans Causing Climate to Change 170 Times Faster than Natural Forces,” The Guardian, February 12, 2017; this estimate for a rate of warming 170 times faster came from Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, “The Anthropocene Equation,” The Anthropocene Review, February 10, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019616688022.

  the average American emits: Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve, “Observed Arctic Sea-Ice Loss Directly Follows Anthropogenic CO2 Emission,” Science, November 3, 2016. See also Robinson Meyer, “The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year,” The Atlantic, November 3, 2016. And see also Ken Caldeira, “How Much Ice Is Melted by Each Carbon Dioxide Emission?” March 24, 2018, https://kencaldeira.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/how-much-ice-is-melted-by-each-carbon-dioxide-emission.

  1.2 degrees of global warming: Sebastian H. Mernild, “Is ‘Tipping Point’ for the Greenland Ice Sheet Approaching?” Aktuel Naturvidenskab, 2009, http://mernild.com/onewebmedia/2009.AN%20Mernild4.pdf.

  raise sea levels six meters: National Snow and Ice Data Center, “Quick Facts on Ice Sheets,” https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html.

  West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets: Patrick Lynch, “The ‘Unstable’ West Antarctic Ice Sheet: A Primer,” NASA, May 12, 2014, www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/antarctic-ice-sheet-20140512.

  a billion tons of ice: UMassAmherst College of Engineering, “Gleason Participates in Groundbreaking Greenland Research That Makes Front Page of New York Times,” January 2017, https://engineering.umass.edu/news/gleason-participates-groundbreaking-greenland-research-that-makes-front-page-new-york-times.

  raise global sea levels ten to twenty feet: Jonathan L. Bamber, “Reassessment of the Potential Sea-Level Rise from a Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” Science 324, no. 5929 (May 2009): pp. 901–3, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1169335.

  eighteen billion tons of ice: Alejandra Borunda, “We Know West Antarctica Is Melting. Is the East in Danger, Too?” National Geographic, August 10, 2018.

  permafrost contains up to 1.8 trillion: NASA Science, “Is Arctic Permafrost the ‘Sleeping Giant’ of Climate Change?” June 24, 2013, https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/24jun_permafrost.

  one Nature paper found that: Katey Walter Anthony et al., “21st-Century Modeled Permafrost Carbon Emissions Accelerated by Abrupt Thaw Beneath Lakes,” Nature Communications 9, no. 3262 (August 2018), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05738-9. See also Ellen Gray, “Unexpected Future Boost of Methane Possible from Arctic Permafrost,” NASA Climate, August 20, 2018, https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2785/unexpected-future-boost-of-methane-possible-from-arctic-permafrost.

  “abrupt thawing”: Anthony, “21st-Century Modeled Permafrost Carbon Emissions,” https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05738-9.

  Atmospheric methane levels have risen: “What Is Behind Rising Levels of Methane in the Atmosphere?” NASA Earth Observatory, January 11, 2018, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/91564/what-is-behind-rising-levels-of-methane-in-the-atmosphere.

  Arctic lakes could possibly double: Anthony, “21st-Century Modeled Permafrost Carbon Emissions,” https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05738-9.

  between 37 and 81 percent by 2100: IPCC, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis—Summary for Policymakers (Geneva, October 2013), p. 23, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/.

  as quickly as the 2020s: Kevin Schaeffer et al., “Amount and Timing of Permafrost Release in Response to Climate Warming,” Tellus B, January 24, 2011.

  a hundred billion tons: Ibid.

  a massive warming equivalent: Peter Wadhams, “The Global Impacts of Rapidly Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice,” Yale Environment 360, September 26, 2016, https://e360.yale.edu/features/as_arctic_ocean_ice_disappears_global_climate_impacts_intensify_wadhams.

  at least fifty meters: David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

  The U.S. Geological Survey: Jason Treat et al., “What the World Would Look Like If All the Ice Melted,” National Geographic, September 2013.

  more than 97 percent of Florida: Benjamin Strauss, Scott Kulp, and Peter Clark, “Can You Guess What America Will Look Like in 10,000 Years? A Quiz,” The New York Times, April 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/20/sunday-review/climate-flood-quiz.html.

  Manaus, the capital: Treat, “What the World Would Look Like.”

  More than 600 million: Gordon McGranahan et al., “The Rising Tide: Assessing the Risks of Climate Change and Human Settlements in Low Elevation Coastal Zones,” Environment and Urbanization 19, no. 1 (April 2007): pp. 17–27, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956247807076960.

  Wildfire

  Thomas Fire, the worst: CalFire, “Incident Information: Thomas Fire,” March 28, 2018, http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?incident_id=1922.

  “15% contained”: CalFire, “Thomas Fire Incident Update,” December 11, 2017, http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/pub/cdf/images/incidentfile1922_3183.pdf.

  “Los Angeles Notebook”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968).

  Five of the twenty worst fires: CalFire, “Top 20 Most Destructive California Wildfires,” August 20, 2018, www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets/Top20_Destruction.pdf.

  1,240,000 acres: CalFire, “Incident Information: 2017,” January 24, 2018, http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_stats?year=2017.

  172 fires broke out: California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, “October 2017 Fire Siege,” January 2018, http://bofdata.fire.ca.gov/board_business/binder_materials/2018/january_2018_meeting/full/full_14_presentation_october_2017_fire_siege.pdf.

  One couple survived: Robin Abcar
ian, “They Survived Six Hours in a Pool as a Wildfire Burned Their Neighborhood to the Ground,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2017.

  only the husband who emerged: Erin Allday, “Wine Country Wildfires: Huddled in Pool amid Blaze, Wife Dies in Husband’s Arms,” SF Gate, January 25, 2018.

  more than two thousand square miles: CalFire, “Incident Information: 2018,” January 24, 2018, http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_stats?year=2018.

  smoke blanketed almost half the country: Megan Molteni, “Wildfire Smoke Is Smothering the US—Even Where You Don’t Expect It,” Wired, August 14, 2018.

  in British Columbia: Estefania Duran, “B.C. Year in Review 2017: Wildfires Devastate the Province like Never Before,” Global News, December 25, 2017, https://globalnews.ca/news/3921710/b-c-year-in-review-2017-wildfires.

  L.A. has always been: Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990).

  burned the state’s wine crop: Tiffany Hsu, “In California Wine Country, Wildfires Take a Toll on Vintages and Tourism,” The New York Times, October 10, 2017.

  Getty Museum: Jessica Gelt, “Getty Museum Closes Because of Fire, but ‘The Safest Place for the Art Is Right Here,’ Spokesman Says,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 2017.

  wildfire season in the western United States: “Climate Change Indicators: U.S. Wildfires,” WX Shift, http://wxshift.com/climate-change/climate-indicators/us-wildfires.

  nearly 20 percent: W. Matt Jolly et al., “Climate-Induced Variations in Global Wildfire Danger from 1979 to 2013,” Nature Communications 6, no. 7537 (July 2015), https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8537.

  By 2050, destruction: Joseph Romm, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 47.

  ten million acres were burned: National Interagency Fire Center, “Total Wildland Fires and Acres (1926-2017),” www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html.

  “We don’t even call it”: Melissa Pamer and Elizabeth Espinosa, “ ‘We Don’t Even Call It Fire Season Anymore…It’s Year Round’: Cal Fire,” KTLA 5, December 11, 2017, https://ktla.com/2017/12/11/we-dont-even-call-it-fire-season-anymore-its-year-round-cal-fire.

  soot and ash they give off: William Finnegan, “California Burning,” New York Review of Books, August 16, 2018.

  dozens of guests tried to escape: Jason Horowitz, “As Greek Wildfire Closed In, a Desperate Dash Ended in Death,” The New York Times, July 24, 2018.

  Great Flood of 1862: Daniel L. Swain et al., “Increasing Precipitation Volatility in Twenty-First-Century California,” Nature Climate Change 8 (April 2018): pp. 427–33, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0140-y.

  globally, between 260,000 and 600,000: Fay H. Johnston et al., “Estimated Global Mortality Attributable to Smoke from Landscape Fires,” Environmental Health Perspectives 120, no. 5 (May 2012), https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1104422.

  Canadian fires have: George E. Le et al., “Canadian Forest Fires and the Effects of Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution on Hospitalizations Among the Elderly,” ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 3 (May 2014): pp. 713–31, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi3020713.

  42 percent spike in hospital visits: C. Howard et al., “SOS: Summer of Smoke—A Mixed-Methods, Community-Based Study Investigating the Health Effects of a Prolonged, Severe Wildfire Season on a Subarctic Population,” Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine 19 (May 2017): p. S99, https://doi.org/10.1017/cem.2017.264.

  “One of the strongest emotions”: Sharon J. Riley, “ ‘The Lost Summer’: The Emotional and Spiritual Toll of the Smoke Apocalypse,” The Narwhal, August 21, 2018, https://thenarwhal.ca/the-lost-summer-the-emotional-and-spiritual-toll-of-the-smoke-apocalypse.

  Peatland fires in Indonesia: Susan E. Page et al., “The Amount of Carbon Released from Peat and Forest Fires in Indonesia During 1997,” Nature 420 (November 2002): pp. 61–65, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01131. For a picture of how peatland emissions will change going forward, see Angela V. Gallego-Sala et al., “Latitudinal Limits to the Predicted Increase of the Peatland Carbon Sink with Warming,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): pp. 907–13.

  In California, a single wildfire: David R. Baker, “Huge Wildfires Can Wipe Out California’s Greenhouse Gas Gains,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 22, 2017.

  its second “hundred-year drought”: Joe Romm, “Science: Second ‘100-Year’ Amazon Drought in Five Years Caused Huge CO2 Emissions. If This Pattern Continues, the Forest Would Become a Warming Source,” ThinkProgress, February 8, 2011, https://thinkprogress.org/science-second-100-year-amazon-drought-in-5-years-caused-huge-co2-emissions-if-this-pattern-7036a9074098.

  the trees of the Amazon: Roel J. W. Brienen et al., “Long-Term Decline of the Amazon Carbon Sink,” Nature, March 2015.

  A group of Brazilian scientists: Aline C. Soterroni et al., “Fate of the Amazon Is on the Ballot in Brazil’s Presidential Election,” Monga Bay, October 17, 2018, https://news.mongabay.com/2018/10/fate-of-the-amazon-is-on-the-ballot-in-brazils-presidential-election-commentary/.

  deforestation accounts for about 12 percent: G. R. van der Werf et al., “CO2 Emissions from Forest Loss,” Nature Geoscience 2 (November 2009): pp. 737–38, https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo671.

  as much as 25 percent: Bob Berwyn, “How Wildfires Can Affect Climate Change (and Vice Versa),” Inside Climate News, August 23, 2018, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23082018/extreme-wildfires-climate-change-global-warming-air-pollution-fire-management-black-carbon-co2.

  ability of forest soils to absorb : Daisy Dunne, “Methane Uptake from Forest Soils Has ‘Fallen by 77% in Three Decades,’ ” Carbon Brief, August 6, 2018, www.carbonbrief.org/methane-uptake-from-forest-soils-has-fallen-77-per-cent-three-decades.

  an additional 1.5 degrees Celsius: Natalie M. Mahowald et al., “Are the Impacts of Land Use on Warming Underestimated in Climate Policy?” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 9 (September 2017), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa836d.

  30 percent of emissions: Quentin Lejeune et al., “Historical Deforestation Locally Increased the Intensity of Hot Days in Northern Mid-Latitudes,” Nature Climate Change 8 (April 2018): pp. 386–90, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0131-z.

  twenty-seven additional cases: Leonardo Suveges Moreira Chaves et al., “Abundance of Impacted Forest Patches Less than 5 km2 Is a Key Driver of the Incidence of Malaria in Amazonian Brazil,” Scientific Reports 8, no. 7077 (May 2018), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-25344-5.

  Disasters No Longer Natural

  tornadoes will strike much more frequently: Francesco Fiondella, “Extreme Tornado Outbreaks Have Become More Common,” International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University, March 2, 2016, https://iri.columbia.edu/news/tornado-outbreaks.

  their trails of destruction could grow: Joseph Romm, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 69.

  three major hurricanes: Congressional Research Service, The National Hurricane Center and Forecasting Hurricanes: 2017 Overview and 2018 Outlook (Washington, D.C., August 23, 2018), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45264.pdf.

  dropping on Houston: Javier Zarracina and Brian Resnick, “All the Rain That Hurricane Harvey Dumped on Texas and Louisiana, in One Massive Water Drop,” Vox, September 1, 2017.

  record-breaking summer of 2018: Jason Samenow, “Red Hot Planet: This Summer’s Punishing and Historic Heat in Seven Charts and Maps,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2018.

  In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers: U.S. Geological Survey, “Retreat of Glaciers in Glacier National Park,” April 6, 2016, www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers-glacier-national-park.

  Already, storms have doubled since 1980: European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, “New Data Confirm Increased Frequency of Extreme Weather Events, European National Science Academies Urge Further A
ction on Climate Change Adaptation,” March 21, 2018, https://easac.eu/press-releases/details/new-data-confirm-increased-frequency-of-extreme-weather-events-european-national-science-academies.

  New York City will suffer: Andra J. Garner et al., “Impact of Climate Change on New York City’s Coastal Flood Hazard: Increasing Flood Heights from the Preindustrial to 2300 CE,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (September 2017), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1703568114.

  more intense rainstorms: U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2014 National Climate Assessment (Washington, D.C., 2014), https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/heavy-downpours-increasing.

  In the Northeast: U.S. Global Change Research Program, “Observed Change in Very Heavy Precipitation,” September 19, 2013, https://data.globalchange.gov/report/nca3/chapter/our-changing-climate/figure/observed-change-in-very-heavy-precipitation-2.

  The island of Kauai: National Weather Service, “April 2018 Precipitation Summary,” May 4, 2018, www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/hydro/pages/apr18sum.php.

  the damages from quotidian thunderstorms: Alyson Kenward and Urooj Raja, “Blackout: Extreme Weather, Climate Change and Power Outages,” Climate Central (Princeton, NJ, 2014), p. 4, http://assets.climatecentral.org/pdfs/PowerOutages.pdf.

  When Hurricane Irma first emerged: Joe Romm, “The Case for a Category 6 Rating for Super-Hurricanes like Irma,” ThinkProgress, September 6, 2017, https://thinkprogress.org/category-six-hurricane-irma-62cfdfdd93cb.

  flooding its agricultural lands: Frances Robles and Luis Ferré-Sadurní, “Puerto Rico’s Agriculture and Farmers Decimated by Maria,” The New York Times, September 24, 2017.

  “We’re getting some intimations”: This was a comment Wark made on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/913382357230645248.

  seventeen times more often: Ning Lin et al., “Hurricane Sandy’s Flood Frequency Increasing from Year 1800 to 2100,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, October 2016.