The Uninhabitable Earth

by David Wallace-Wells;

  fifth-highest homicide rate: Nett and Rüttinger, “Insurgency, Terrorism and Organised Crime,” p. 35.

  second most dangerous country in the world for children: UNICEF, Hidden in Plain Sight: A Statistical Analysis of Violence Against Children (New York: United Nations Children’s Fund, 2014), p. 35, http://files.unicef.org/publications/files/Hidden_in_plain_sight_statistical_analysis_EN_3_Sept_2014.pdf.

  could make both of them ungrowable: Pablo Imbach et al., “Coupling of Pollination Services and Coffee Suitability from Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 39 (September 2017): pp. 10438–42, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617940114; Martina K. Linnenluecke et al., “Implications of Climate Change for the Sugarcane Industry,” WIREs Climate Change 9, no. 1 (January–February 2018), https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.498.

  “Systems”

  22 million of them: “In Photos: Climate Change, Disasters and Displacement,” UNHCR: The U.N. Refugee Agency, January 1, 2015, www.unhcr.org/en-us/climate-change-and-disasters.html.

  60,000 climate migrants: Emily Schmall and Frank Bajak, “FEMA Sees Trailers Only as Last Resort After Harvey, Irma,” Associated Press, September 10, 2017, https://apnews.com/7716fb84835b48808839fbc888e96fb7.

  the evacuation of nearly 7 million: Greg Allen, “Lessons from Hurricane Irma: When to Evacuate and When to Shelter in Place,” NPR, June 1, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/06/01/615293318/lessons-from-hurricane-irma-when-to-evacuate-and-when-to-shelter-in-place.

  13 million Americans: Andrew D. King and Luke J. Harrington, “The Inequality of Climate Change from 1.5 to 2°C of Global Warming,” Geophysical Research Letters 45, no. 10 (May 2018): pp. 5030–33, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078430.

  greatest in the world’s least developed: Ibid.

  In 2011, a single heat wave: Katinka X. Ruthrof et al., “Subcontinental Heat Wave Triggers Terrestrial and Marine, Multi-Taxa Responses,” Scientific Reports 8 (August 2018): p. 13094, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-31236-5.

  “current and existential national security risk”: Parliament of Australia, “Implications of Climate Change for Australia’s National Security, Final Report, Chapter 2,” www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Foreign_Affairs_Defence_and_Trade/Nationalsecurity/Final%20Report/c02; Ben Doherty, “Climate Change an ‘Existential Security Risk’ to Australia, Senate Inquiry Says.” The Guardian, May 17, 2018.

  More than 140 million: World Bank, Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (Washington, D.C., 2018), p. xix, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29461.

  as many as a billion migrants: International Organization for Migration, “Migration, Environment and Climate Change: Assessing the Evidence,” United Nations (Geneva, 2009), p. 43.

  more than two-thirds of outbreaks: Frank C. Curriero et al., “The Association Between Extreme Precipitation and Waterborne Disease Outbreaks in the United States, 1948–1994,” American Journal of Public Health 91, no. 8 (August 2001), https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.91.8.1194.

  more than 400,000 in Milwaukee: William R. Mac Kenzie et al., “A Massive Outbreak in Milwaukee of Cryptosporidium Infection Transmitted Through the Public Water Supply,” The New England Journal of Medicine 331 (July 1994): pp. 161–67, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199407213310304.

  in Vietnam, those who passed: Thuan Q. Thai and Evangelos M. Falaris, “Child Schooling, Child Health, and Rainfall Shocks: Evidence from Rural Vietnam” (Max Planck Institute working paper, September 2011), www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2011-011.pdf.

  In India, the same cycle-of-poverty pattern: Santosh Kumar, Ramona Molitor, and Sebastian Vollmer, “Children of Drought: Rainfall Shocks and Early Child Health in Rural India” (working paper, 2014); Santosh Kumar and Sebastian Vollmer, “Drought and Early Childhood Health in Rural India,” Population and Development Review (2016).

  diminishing cognitive ability: R. K. Phalkey et al., “Systematic Review of Current Efforts to Quantify the Impacts of Climate Change on Undernutrition,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 33 (August 2015): pp. E4522–29, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1409769112; Charmian M. Bennett and Sharon Friel, “Impacts of Climate Change on Inequities in Child Health,” Children 1, no. 3 (December 2014): pp. 461–73, https://doi.org/10.3390/children1030461; Iffat Ghani et al., “Climate Change and Its Impact on Nutritional Status and Health of Children,” British Journal of Applied Science and Technology 21, no. 2 (2017): pp. 1–15, https://doi.org/10.9734/BJAST/2017/33276; Kristina Reinhardt and Jessica Fanzo, “Addressing Chronic Malnutrition Through Multi-Sectoral, Sustainable Approaches,” Frontiers in Nutrition 1, no. 13 (August 2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2014.00013.

  In Ecuador, climate damage: Ram Fishman et al., “Long-Term Impacts of High Temperatures on Economic Productivity” (George Washington University Institute for International Economic Policy working paper, October 2015), https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/gwiwpaper/2015-18.htm.

  measurable declines: Adam Isen et al., “Relationship Between Season of Birth, Temperature Exposure, and Later Life Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 51 (December 2017): pp. 13447–52, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1702436114.

  An enormous study in Taiwan: C. R. Jung et al., “Ozone, Particulate Matter, and Newly-Diagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease,” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 44, no. 2 (2015): pp. 573–84, https://doi.org/10.3233/JAD-140855.

  Similar patterns: Emily Underwood, “The Polluted Brain,” Science 355, no. 6323 (January 2017): pp. 342–45, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.355.6323.342.

  “Want to fight climate change?”: Damian Carrington, “Want to Fight Climate Change? Have Fewer Children,” The Guardian, July 12, 2017.

  “Add this to the list of decisions”: Maggie Astor, “No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It,” The New York Times, February 5, 2018.

  a half of all those exposed: Janna Trombley et al., “Climate Change and Mental Health,” American Journal of Nursing 117, no. 4 (April 2017): pp. 44–52, https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NAJ.0000515232.51795.fa.

  In England, flooding: M. Reacher et al., “Health Impacts of Flooding in Lewes,” Communicable Disease and Public Health 7, no. 1 (March 2004): pp. 39–46.

  aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Mary Alice Mills et al., “Trauma and Stress Response Among Hurricane Katrina Evacuees,” American Journal of Public Health 97 (April 2007): pp. S116-23, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2006.086678.

  Wildfires, curiously: Grant N. Marshall et al., “Psychiatric Disorders Among Adults Seeking Emergency Disaster Assistance After a Wildland-Urban Interface Fire,” Psychiatric Services 58, no. 4 (April 2007): pp. 509–14, https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2007.58.4.509.

  “I don’t know of a single scientist”: Kevin J. Doyle and Lise Van Susteren, The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System Is Not Adequately Prepared (Merrifield, VA: National Wildlife Federation, 2012), p. 19, www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Global-Warming/Reports/Psych_Effects_Climate_Change_Full_3_23.ashx.

  “climate depression”: Madeleine Thomas, “Climate Depression Is Real, Just Ask a Scientist,” Grist, October 28, 2014, https://grist.org/climate-energy/climate-depression-is-for-real-just-ask-a-scientist.

  “environmental grief”: Jordan Rosenfeld, “Facing Down ‘Environmental Grief,’ ” Scientific American, July 21, 2016.

  Hurricane Andrew hit Florida: Ernesto Caffo and Carlotta Belaise, “Violence and Trauma: Evidence-Based Assessment and Intervention in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review,” in The Mental Health of Children and Adolescents: An Area of Global Neglect, ed. Helmut Rehmschmidt et al. (West Sussex, Eng.: Wiley, 2007), p. 141.

  soldiers returning from war: “PTSD: A Growing Epidemic,” NIH MedlinePlus 4, no. 1 (2009): pp. 10–14, https://medlineplus.gov/magazine/issues/winter09/articles/winter09pg1
0-14.html.

  One especially detailed study: Armen K. Goenjian et al., “Posttraumatic Stress and Depressive Reactions Among Nicaraguan Adolescents After Hurricane Mitch,” American Journal of Psychiatry 158, no. 5 (May 2001): pp. 788–94, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.5.788.

  both the onset and the severity: Haris Majeed and Jonathan Lee, “The Impact of Climate Change on Youth Depression and Mental Health,” The Lancet 1, no. 3 (June 2017): pp.E94–95, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(17)30045-1.

  Rising temperature and humidity: S. Vida, “Relationship Between Ambient Temperature and Humidity and Visits to Mental Health Emergency Departments in Quebec,” Psychiatric Services 63, no. 11 (November 2012): pp. 1150–53, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201100485.

  spikes in proper inpatient admissions: Alana Hansen et al., “The Effect of Heat Waves on Mental Health in a Temperate Australian City,” Environmental Health Perspectives 116, no. 10 (October 2008): pp. 1369–75, https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.11339.

  Schizophrenics, especially: Roni Shiloh et al., “A Significant Correlation Between Ward Temperature and the Severity of Symptoms in Schizophrenia Inpatients: A Longitudinal Study,” European Neuropsychopharmacology 17, no. 6–7 (May–June 2007): pp. 478–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroneuro.2006.12.001.

  mood disorders, anxiety disorders: Hansen, “The Effect of Heat Waves on Mental Health,” https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.11339.

  Each increase of a single degree: Marshall Burke et al., “Higher Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in the United States and Mexico,” Nature Climate Change 8 (July 2018): pp. 723–29, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0222-x.

  59,000 suicides: Tamma Carleton, “Crop-Damaging Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in India,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 114, no. 33 (August 2017): pp. 8746–51, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701354114.

  III. The Climate Kaleidoscope

  Storytelling

  On-screen, climate devastation: One good academic survey of this phenomenon is E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

  “Dying Earth”: The genre really picks up steam with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, eventually finding a natural home in postapocalyptic cinema, e.g., The World, the Flesh, and the Devil and The Day After.

  “climate existentialism”: “Nihilism and defeatism in response to the climate crisis isn’t either brave or insightful and it’s deeply weird to see it treated as some beautiful, poetic intervention,” Kate Aronoff has written, on Twitter, referring probably to the writing of Roy Scranton. “Climate change is many things. One thing it’s not is a vehicle for literary men to opine on their existential dread and then dress it up as science.” See https://twitter.com/KateAronoff/status/1035022145565470725.

  literary theorists call metanarrative: See, especially, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

  as surely as screwball comedies: A great account of this is Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

  The Great Derangement: Ghosh’s book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) was published with the vivid subtitle Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

  “cli-fi”: The term has gained currency only over the last decade or so, but examples of the genre—typically speculative fiction driven by climate conditions—date back at least as far as J. G. Ballard (The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World) and possibly to H. G. Wells (The Time Machine) and Jules Verne (The Purchase of the North Pole). In other words, it’s more or less as old as the science fiction genre, from which it draws its name. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (which also includes The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake) surely qualifies, as does even Ian McEwan’s Solar. All of these test Ghosh’s thesis, since they are climate-powered novels with the narrative architecture of the classic bourgeois novel, more or less. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a bit of a different beast—a climate epic. But those who these days talk up cli-fi as a genre seem to mean something more…well, genre—for instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy and, later, New York 2140. Going back further, J. G. Ballard’s Drowned World trilogy is an exquisite example.

  especially in conventional novels: Ghosh is dealing here with a very narrow definition of the archetypal novel, emphasizing stories of protagonist journeys through emerging bourgeois systems. And while he raises the Cold War and 9/11 as examples of real-world stories that have inspired novels in that tradition, it’s not really the case that the best novels, and films, about the end of the Cold War are the ones that place their characters very precisely on a map of the 1989 world, like butterflies pinned to a screen. And the ones that have approached 9/11 have been mostly duds, as well, though an entire generation, especially the male half, sometimes seemed to feel called to literary action by it. “If September 11 had to happen,” Martin Amis wrote in The Second Plane, his meditation on the fate of the imagination in the age of terror, “then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.” Global warming has not made Martin Amis feel like George Orwell, as far as I know, though it has spawned a whole small genre of mourning essay: the fatalistic, quasi-poetic, first-person ecological lamentation—exemplified by Roy Scranton, with his Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What?—which may be the closest that climate change stories can get to the self-mythologizing moral clarity of Orwell.

  “man against nature”: This is one of the archetypal “conflict narratives.” Other examples range from Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi.

  the richest 10 percent: Oxfam, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2015, www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf.

  many on the Left: The argument is a pervasive one, in part because it is so persuasive, but has been made with special flair by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything and The Battle for Paradise; Jedediah Purdy in After Nature but perhaps more strikingly in his essays and exchanges published in Dissent; and of course Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital.

  the socialist countries: History is not a much better guide, with Left industrialization during Stalin’s Five Year Plan or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or even Venezuela under Hugo Chávez not offering a more responsible approach than anything that was happening in the West.

  The natural villains: Accounts of the bad behavior of oil companies abound, too, but two good places to start are Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010) and Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

  a recent survey of movies: Peter Kareiva and Valerie Carranza, “Existential Risk Due to Ecosystem Collapse: Nature Strikes Back,” Futures, September 2018.

  less than 40 percent: According to the IPCC, the figure is 35 percent: see IPCC, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva, 2014).

  world’s ten biggest oil companies: Claire Poole, “The World’s Largest Oil and Gas Companies 2018: Royal Dutch Shell Surpasses Exxon as Top Dog,” Forbes, June 6, 2018.

  15 percent of the world’s emissions: According to the World Resources Institute, the figure was 14.36 percent in 2017: Johannes Friedrich, Mengpin Ge, and Andrew Pickens, “This Interactive Chart Explains World’s Top Ten Emitters, and How They’ve Changed,” World Resources Institute, April 11, 2017, www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/interactive-chart-explains-worlds-top-10-emitters-and-how-theyve-changed.

  the story of nature and our relationship to it: In 1980, the art critic John Berger called modern zoos “an epitaph to a relationship that is as old as man”: “the zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibili
ty of such encounters.”

  “Today those words could be applied to much of middle-class mass culture,” the legal scholar and environmentalist Jedediah Purdy wrote in “Thinking Like a Mountain” (n+1 29, Fall 2017), an essay on new forms of nature writing in the age of the Anthropocene. “It has become a kind of memorial to the nonhuman world, revived in a thousand representations even as it disappears all at once.” What he means is that we built a zoo out of nature, yes; but we live still inside those cages. “Alongside global domestication, an opposite and terrifying potential broods,” Purdy writes. “Every new superstorm, contagion, or annual heat record is pregnant with doom, most acutely for the world’s poor, but finally for nearly everyone. For all our deep and accelerating inequalities, life is less dangerous, and the natural world a more stable and fungible backdrop for human activity, than ever before. Yet the whole world also seems poised to come for us like a phalanx of piqued gods who have just switched sides.”

  half of them extinct: E. O. Wilson made this prediction in a New York Times op-ed, “The Eight Million Species We Don’t Know,” published on March 3, 2018—and it echoes, conceptually, his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). According to the 2018 Living Planet report, prepared by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, world wildlife has already declined that much—in fact, by 60 percent, all since 1970.

  Another such parable is bee death: I wrote a long magazine story about the phenomenon called “The Anxiety of Bees” (New York, June 17, 2015).

  Flying insects might be disappearing: The 2017 study was published in PLOS One under the unwieldy title “More than 75 Percent Decline over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas.” In 2018, a survey of insect populations in the rain forests of Puerto Rico was even more alarming—in fact, another researcher called their findings “hyperalarming.” Insects there have declined sixtyfold. (Bradford Lister and Andres Garcia, “Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 30, 2018.)