The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  “devil’s bargain”: Eric Holthaus, “Devil’s Bargain,” Grist, February 8, 2018, https://grist.org/article/geoengineering-climate-change-air-pollution-save-planet.

  millions of lives each year: This estimate of deaths from air pollution comes from the World Health Organization.

  tens of thousands of additional premature deaths: Sebastian D. Eastham et al., “Quantifying the Impact of Sulfate Geoengineering on Mortality from Air Quality and UV-B Exposure,” Atmospheric Environment 187 (August 2018): pp. 424–34, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2018.05.047.

  rapidly dry the Amazon: Christopher H. Trisos et al., “Potentially Dangerous Consequences for Biodiversity of Solar Geoengineering Implementation and Termination,” Nature Ecology and Evolution 2 (January 2018), pp. 472–82, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0431-0.

  negative effect on plant growth: Jonathan Proctor et al., “Estimating Global Agricultural Effects of Geoengineering Using Volcanic Eruptions,” Nature 560 (August 2018): pp. 480–83, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0417-3.

  Plagues of Warming

  diseases that have not circulated: Jasmin Fox-Skelly, “There Are Diseases Hidden in Ice, and They Are Waking Up,” BBC, May 4, 2017, www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up.

  “extremophile” bacteria: “NASA Finds Life at ‘Extremes,’ ” NASA, February 24, 2005, www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/livingthings/extremophile1.html.

  an 8-million-year-old bug: Kay D. Bidle et al., “Fossil Genes and Microbes in the Oldest Ice on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academies of Science 104, no. 33 (August 2007): pp. 13455–60, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702196104.

  a Russian scientist self-injected: Jordan Pearson, “Meet the Scientist Who Injected Himself with 3.5 Million-Year-Old Bacteria,” Motherboard, December 9, 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp3gg7/meet-the-scientist-who-injected-himself-with-35-million-year-old-bacteria.

  a worm that had been frozen: Mike McRae, “A Tiny Worm Frozen in Siberian Permafrost for 42,000 Years Was Just Brought Back to Life,” Science Alert, July 27, 2018, www.sciencealert.com/40-000-year-old-nematodes-revived-siberian-permafrost.

  remnants of the 1918 flu: Jeffery K. Taubenberger et al., “Discovery and Characterization of the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus in Historical Context,” Antiviral Therapy 12 (2007): pp. 581–91.

  infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 50 million: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Remembering the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” www.cdc.gov/features/1918-flu-pandemic/index.html; Jeffery K. Taubenberger and David Morens, “1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no.1 (January 2006): pp. 15–22, https://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1201.050979.

  3 percent of the world’s population: U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Estimates of World Population,” www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html.

  smallpox: “Experts Warn of Threat of Born-Again Smallpox from Old Siberian Graveyards,” The Siberian Times, August 12, 2016, https://siberiantimes.com/science/opinion/features/f0249-experts-warn-of-threat-of-born-again-smallpox-from-old-siberian-graveyards.

  bubonic plague: Fox-Skelly, “There Are Diseases Hidden in Ice.”

  among many other diseases: Robinson Meyer, “The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change,” The Atlantic, November 6, 2017.

  But in 2016, a boy: Michaeleen Doucleff, “Anthrax Outbreak in Russia Thought to Be Result of Thawing Permafrost,” NPR, August 3, 2016, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/488400947/anthrax-outbreak-in-russia-thought-to-be-result-of-thawing-permafrost.

  Haemagogus and Sabethes mosquitoes: World Health Organization, “Yellow Fever—Brazil,” March 9, 2018, www.who.int/csr/don/09-march-2018-yellow-fever-brazil.

  more than thirty million people: Ibid.

  kills between 3 and 8 percent: Shasta Darlington and Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Yellow Fever Circles Brazil’s Huge Cities,” The New York Times, March 8, 2018.

  Malaria alone kills: World Health Organization, “Number of Malaria Deaths,” www.who.int/gho/malaria/epidemic/deaths. See also Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Epidemiology,” www.cdc.gov/dengue/epidemiology/index.html.

  disease mutation: “Zika Microcephaly Linked to Single Mutation,” Nature, October 3, 2017, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-04093-x.

  appear to cause birth defects: Ling Yuan et al., “A Single Mutation in the prM Protein of Zika Virus Contributes to Fetal Microcephaly,” Science 358, no. 6365 (November 2017): pp. 933–36, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam7120.

  when another disease is present: Declan Butler, “Brazil Asks Whether Zika Acts Alone to Cause Birth Defects,” Nature, July 25, 2016, www.nature.com/news/brazil-asks-whether-zika-acts-alone-to-cause-birth-defects-1.20309.

  World Bank estimates that by 2030: World Bank Group’s Climate Change and Development Series, “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty” (Washington, D.C., 2016), p. 119, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/22787/9781464806735.pdf.

  Lyme case counts have spiked: Mary Beth Pfeiffer, Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2018), pp. 3–13.

  300,000 new infections each year: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Lyme and Other Tickborne Diseases,” www.cdc.gov/media/dpk/diseases-and-conditions/lyme-disease/index.html.

  fleas have tripled in the U.S.: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Illnesses from Mosquito, Tick, and Flea Bites Increasing in the U.S.,” May 1, 2018, www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0501-vs-vector-borne.html.

  encountering ticks for the first time: Avichai Scher and Lauren Dunn, “ ‘Citizen Scientists’ Take On Growing Threat of Tick-Borne Diseases,” NBC News, July 12, 2018, www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/citizen-scientists-take-growing-threat-tick-borne-diseases-n890996.

  winter ticks helped drop the moose population: Center for Biological Diversity, “Saving the Midwestern Moose,” www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/midwestern_moose/index.html.

  90,000 engorged ticks: Katie Burton, “Climate-Change Triggered Ticks Causing Rise in ‘Ghost Moose,’ ” Geographical, November 27, 2018, http://geographical.co.uk/nature/wildlife/item/3008-ghost-moose.

  a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses: Dennis Carroll et al., “The Global Virome Project,” Science 359, no. 6378 (February 2018): pp. 872–74, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap7463.

  More than 99 percent: Nathan Collins, “Stanford Study Indicates That More than 99 Percent of the Microbes Inside Us Are Unknown to Science,” Stanford News, August 22, 2017, https://news.stanford.edu/2017/08/22/nearly-microbes-inside-us-unknown-science.

  the case of the saiga: Ed Yong, “Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?” The Atlantic, January 17, 2018.

  nearly two-thirds of the global population: Richard A. Kock et al., “Saigas on the Brink: Multidisciplinary Analysis of the Factors Influencing Mass Mortality Events,” Science Advances 4, no. 1 (January 2018), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao2314.

  Economic Collapse

  “Whoever says Industrial Revolution”: Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 34.

  about one percentage point: Solomon Hsiang et al., “Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change in the United States,” Science 356, no. 6345 (June 2017): 1362–69, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4369.

  23 percent loss in per capita: Marshall Burke et al., “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production,” Nature 527 (October 2015): pp. 235–39, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725.

  There is a 51 percent chance: Marshall Burke, “Economic Impact of Climate Change on the World,” http://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php.

  a team led
by Thomas Stoerk: Thomas Stoerk et al., “Recommendations for Improving the Treatment of Risk and Uncertainty in Economic Estimates of Climate Impacts in the Sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 12, no. 2 (August 2018): pp. 371–76, https://doi.org/10.1093/reep/rey005.

  global boom of the early 1960s: World Bank, “GDP Growth (Annual %),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG.

  There are places that benefit: Burke, “Economic Impact of Climate Change,” http://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php.

  India alone, one study proposed: Katharine Ricke et al., “Country-Level Social Cost of Carbon,” Nature Climate Change 8 (September 2018): pp. 895–900, http://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0282-y.

  800 million: World Bank, “South Asia’s Hotspots: Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards” (Washington, D.C., 2018), p. xi.

  dragged into extreme poverty: World Bank Group’s Climate Change and Development Series, “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty” (Washington, D.C., 2016), p. xi, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/22787/9781464806735.pdf.

  chronic flooding by 2100: Union of Concerned Scientists, “Underwater: Rising Seas, Chronic Floods, and the Implications for U.S. Coastal Real Estate” (Cambridge, MA, 2018), p. 5, www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/global-warming-impacts/sea-level-rise-chronic-floods-and-us-coastal-real-estate-implications.

  $30 billion in New Jersey: Union of Concerned Scientists, “New Study Finds 251,000 New Jersey Homes Worth $107 Billion Will Be at Risk from Tidal Flooding,” June 18, 2018, www.ucsusa.org/press/2018/new-study-finds-251000-new-jersey-homes-worth-107-billion-will-be-risk-tidal-flooding#.W-o1FehKg2x.

  which is now commonplace: Zach Wichter, “Too Hot to Fly? Climate Change May Take a Toll on Flying,” The New York Times, June 20, 2017.

  Every round-trip plane ticket: Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve, “Observed Arctic Sea-Ice Loss Directly Follows Anthropogenic CO2 Emission,” Science 354, no. 6313 (November 2016): pp. 747–50, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag2345.

  From Switzerland to Finland: Olav Vilnes et al., “From Finland to Switzerland—Firms Cut Output Amid Heatwave,” Montel News, July 27, 2018, www.montelnews.com/en/story/from-finland-to-switzerland--firms-cut-output-amid-heatwave/921390.

  670 million lost power: Jim Yardley and Gardiner Harris, “Second Day of Power Failures Cripples Wide Swath of India,” The New York Times, July 31, 2012.

  13 degrees Celsius: Burke, “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature,” https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725; author interview with Marshall Burke.

  Already-hot countries: World Bank, “South Asia’s Hotspots.”

  up to 20 percent: Hsiang, “Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change,” https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4369.

  “economic ripple effect”: Zhengtao Zhang et al., “Analysis of the Economic Ripple Effect of the United States on the World Due to Future Climate Change,” Earth’s Future 6, no. 6 (June 2018): pp. 828–40, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EF000839.

  negative $26 trillion: The New Climate Economy, “Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century: Accelerating Climate Action in Urgent Times” (Washington, D.C.: Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, September 2018), p. 8, https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018.

  growth consequences of some scenarios: Marshall Burke et al., “Large Potential Reduction in Economic Damages Under U.N. Mitigation Targets,” Nature 557 (May 2018): pp. 549–53, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0071-9.

  Climate Conflict

  for every half degree of warming: Solomon M. Hsiang et al., “Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,” Science 341, no. 6151 (September 2013), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1235367.

  elevated Africa’s risk of conflict: Tamma A. Carleton and Solomon M. Hsiang, “Social and Economic Impacts of Climate,” Science 353, no. 6304 (September 2016), http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9837.

  393,000 additional deaths: Marshall B. Burke et al., “Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 49 (December 2009): pp. 20670–74, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0907998106. This would represent a 54 percent increase.

  The drowning of American navy bases: Union of Concerned Scientists, “The U.S. Military on the Front Lines of Rising Seas” (Cambridge, MA, 2016), www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/sea-level-rise-flooding-us-military-bases#.W-pKUuhKg2x.

  its islands will be underwater: “We show that, on the basis of current greenhouse-gas emission rates, the nonlinear interactions between sea-level rise and wave dynamics over reefs will lead to the annual wave-driven overwash of most atoll islands by the mid-21st century. This annual flooding will result in the islands becoming uninhabitable because of frequent damage to infrastructure and the inability of their freshwater aquifers to recover between overwash events.” Curt D. Storlazzi et al., “Most Atolls Will Be Uninhabitable by the Mid-21st Century Because of Sea-Level Rise Exacerbating Wave-Driven Flooding,” Science Advances 4, no. 4 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aap9741.

  the world’s largest nuclear waste site: Kim Wall, Coleen Jose, and Jan Henrik Hinzel, “The Poison and the Tomb: One Family’s Journey to Their Contaminated Home,” Mashable, February 25, 2018.

  From Boko Haram to ISIS: Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger, “Insurgency, Terrorism and Organised Crime in a Warming Climate: Analysing the Links Between Climate Change and Non-State Armed Groups,” Climate Diplomacy (Berlin: Adelphi, October 2016).

  23 percent of conflict: Carl-Friedrich Schleussner et al., “Armed-Conflict Risks Enhanced by Climate-Related Disasters in Ethnically Fractionalized Countries,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 33 (August 2016): pp. 9216–21, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601611113.

  “extreme risk”: Verisk Maplecroft, “Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas 2015” (Bath, UK, October 2014), www.maplecroft.com/portfolio/new-analysis/2014/10/29/climate-change-and-lack-food-security-multiply-risks-conflict-and-civil-unrest-32-countries-maplecroft.

  What accounts for the relationship: Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011).

  the forced migration that can result: Rafael Reuveny, “Climate Change–Induced Migration and Violent Conflict,” Political Geography 26, no. 6 (August 2007): pp. 656–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.05.001.

  seventy million displaced: Adrian Edwards, “Forced Displacement at Record 68.5 Million,” UNHCR: The U.N. Refugee Agency, June 19, 2018, www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/stories/2018/6/5b222c494/forced-displacement-record-685-million.html.

  Egypt, Akkadia, Rome: William Wan, “Ancient Egypt’s Rulers Mishandled Climate Disasters. Then the People Revolted,” The Washington Post, October 17, 2017; H. M. Cullen et al., “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology 28, no. 4 (April 2000): pp. 379–82; Kyle Harper, “How Climate Change and Disease Helped the Fall of Rome,” Aeon, December 15, 2017, https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome.

  six categories: Center for Climate and Security, “Epicenters of Climate and Security: The New Geostrategic Landscape of the Anthropocene” (Washington, D.C., June 2017), pp. 12–17, https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/1_eroding-sovereignty.pdf.

  linguist Steven Pinker: For Pinker’s case for the world’s improvement, see Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2012); for his argument about why we can’t appreciate that improvement, see Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).

  increases violent crime rates: Leah H. Schinasi and Ghassan B. Hamra, “A Time Series Analysis of Associations Between Dai
ly Temperature and Crime Events in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” Journal of Urban Health 94, no. 6 (December 2017): pp. 892–900, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11524-017-0181-y.

  swearing on social media: Patrick Baylis, “Temperature and Temperament: Evidence from a Billion Tweets” (Energy Institute at Haas working paper, November 2015), https://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/research/papers/WP265.pdf.

  a major league pitcher: Richard P. Larrick et al., “Temper, Temperature, and Temptation,” Psychological Sciences 22, no. 4 (February 2011): pp. 423–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611399292.

  the longer drivers will honk: Douglas T. Kenrick et al., “Ambient Temperature and Horn Honking: A Field Study of the Heat/Aggression Relationship,” Environment and Behavior (March 1986), https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916586182002.

  police officers are more likely to fire: Aldert Vrij et al., “Aggression of Police Officers as a Function of Temperature: An Experiment with the Fire Arms Training System,” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 4, no. 5 (December 1994): pp. 365–70, https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2450040505.

  an additional 22,000 murders: Matthew Ranson, “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 67, no. 3 (May 2014): pp. 274–302, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2013.11.008.

  every single crime category: Jackson G. Lu et al., “Polluted Morality: Air Pollution Predicts Criminal Activity and Unethical Behavior,” Psychological Science 29, no. 3 (February 2018): pp. 340–55, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617735807.

  “food insecure”: Nett and Rüttinger, “Insurgency, Terrorism and Organised Crime,” p. 37.

  organized crime…exploded: Ibid., p. 39.

  Sicilian mafia was produced by drought: Daron Acemoglu, Giuseppe De Feo, and Giacomo De Luca, “Weak States: Causes and Consequences of the Sicilian Mafia,” VOX CEPR Policy Portal, March 2, 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/causes-and-consequences-sicilian-mafia.