I don’t know much about the author, David Wallace-Wells, beyond that he works for the New York magazine, does work for the Guardian and has written extensively on climate change since about 2017. He is also something called a National Fellow for an outfit called New America, which presumably means the US – not all those other pesky place to the north and south of it. The impression given is of someone who has taken care that personal and biographical detail should not leak into the public domain – detail which might otherwise have provided some collateral for his writing.
Preliminaries
We are presently at something over 400ppm of carbon in the atmosphere, and still rising, up from a pre-industrial figure, that is to say roughly up to the year 1750 when the industrial revolution started here in the UK, of something under 300ppm. A lot of this is down to burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Over some time – decades – these increase translate into temperature increases. Over much more time they translate into sea level rises.
One driver of all this burning of fossil fuels and deforestation is the increase in population, from 1 billion in 1750 to around 7 billion now. Some workers think it will stop at around 10 billion – for which see reference 9. And whatever the number, the many that are poor now want to be rich like us – and so to consume even more of the world’s limited resources.
While the current story from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that if we take robust action now we might contain warming from the long term, pre-industrial average to 3°C in the period to 2100, eighty years from now. Bearing in mind that we have not managed any reduction in carbon emissions since the Paris accords of two years ago, never mind the Kyoto protocol of thirty years ago, and that we are already at around 1°C warming now, perhaps it would be salutary to think about what might happen if we eventually get 5°C warming.
Bearing in mind that all these numbers are averages, average which smooth over a great deal of variation from time to time and from place to place. Carbon, for example, can easily shoot up to 1,000ppm in the confined space of a school classroom or an aeroplane. And part of the problem with temperature is that rising temperature seems to bring more and more drastic variation, of climate generally, with it.
Comments keyed to the book
The serious part of the book is organised into twelve short chapters: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, disasters no longer natural, freshwater drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues of warming, economic collapse, climate conflict and systems.
Lots of sweeping statements, lots of repetitions and some material about stuff which does not help, but which is not anything much to do with global warming. What follows is a series of snippets, taken from each of these twelve chapters in turn.
On heat death, if it gets hot, you cannot cool down, you overheat and die, with the process being rather unpleasant, much more so than dying of cold. If the world heats up by 5°C, it will be impossible to work outside in many parts of the world, particularly in the tropics. Before that, work outside can easily cause dehydration and kidney failure. And one negative feedback loop is that the Saudi’s, even now, never mind the future, burn lots of oil to drive their air conditioners – without which conditions in many of their houses, for large chunks of the year, would be pretty awful. And there is plenty of air conditioning in the US too.
On hunger, if it gets hot, crop yields start to fall. The wheat belt as a whole is already moving north into less fertile land. The north-south divide between range (the west) and farm (the mid west) in the US is already moving east towards the Appalachian mountains. The world’s biggest breadbasket is getting smaller. The divide between the Sahara (desert) and Sahel (arid) is moving outwards; the Sahara is getting bigger.
On drowning, if it gets hot, the ice of the polar regions melts and sea levels start rise. Millions of people live in coastal areas which will become liable to flood and which will eventually be under water. Bangladesh, already a very poor country, will be one of the first large countries affected. Jakarta, a very low lying city of around 10 million people, is one of those threatened.
On wildfires, you get more of them as it gets hotter. And there are already lots of wildfires in California, in British Columbia, in Australia and in Russia. There always were wildfires, but they seem to be getting a lot more frequent and a lot worse. And while these fires do direct damage, they also release lots of carbon and lots of particulate pollution into the atmosphere.
Disasters no longer natural is something by way of a recap. As it gets hotter, there are going to be more and more unpleasant events, particularly of the weather variety: heat waves, storms (including well publicised hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico), torrential rains, fires, floods, mudslides and landslides.
Freshwater drain is something by way of a digression. Many parts of the world are short of clean freshwater and things look to get worse – particularly in Africa and then in India and Pakistan. But global warming is only one part of this problem.
Dying oceans is partly about the oceans getting hotter, partly about them getting more acid. The first thing may disturb ocean currents like the Gulf Stream and so feed back into more climate disturbance. Both things are likely to impact the amount of food we can take from the oceans, presently an important part of the total.
Unbreathable air is about the poor air quality we already have in many parts of the world, a lot of which is caused by pollution arising from the consumption of fossil fuels. Hot, dry conditions can also result of a lot of dust in the air. Poor air quality – particularly in India and China where they have modern versions of the smogs that we used to get – already kills many people.
A complication is that aerosol pollution of the atmosphere is bad for people who breathe but good for global warming, as these aerosols tend to reflect rather than to absorb the heat from the sun.
Plagues of warming is speculation about possible health hazards arising from more bugs, more ticks and more fleas. From what are now diseases confined to tropical regions spreading further afield.
With economic collapse, climate conflict and systems we move onto ramifications of all this, apart from the direct damage, of the sort already suggested. People are less productive when it is hot. Some workers have drawn graphs of the relationship between rising temperature and lost economic growth.
People are more bad tempered when it is hot. There is more crime when it is hot. Hot people are more likely to get into fights, riots and wider conflicts.
People are also less productive when there is a lot of carbon dioxide in the air.
Homes and factories which are flooded – or perhaps burnt down – have to be replaced. And the people have to move.
Unpleasant events like floods and fires are likely to trigger mental disorders such as PTSD and worse.
There are likely to be conflicts in the years to come over water, food and living space. And migrant – not to say refugee – flows of a sort we have not seen in recorded history. And a lot of these migrants are going to be angry young men, up for almost anything.
Other sources of information about global warming
There is a huge amount of information about global warming out there, not least lots of accessible articles in Wikipedia. So most of the stuff which crops up in this book can be investigated on the Internet. There are respectable, public domain sources for all of the stuff that I looked into. Which is not to say that Wallace-Wells does not overdo it a bit.
So reference 3 offers a number of short articles about global warming matters. Including, for example, solar energy in India and nuclear power in South Korea. On this last, the Wallace-Wells view, which strikes me as reasonable, is that we have been far too quick to get out of nuclear power. There have been accidents, but in the near to medium term, nuclear power would do far less damage to the world and to the people in it than a comparable amount of coal capacity. Capacity which the world looks likely to want for some time to come, despite the great leaps forward of wind turbines and solar panels. We have been panicked by the accidents.
While reference 7 offers an analysis of the economic and geographical effects of sea level rises. We learn, for example, that in the year 2000 more than 600m people lived near the coast, within 10 metres of sea level, with 25m of those being in North America, 55m in Africa and 450m in Asia, of which 150m were in China. While the US Geological Survey puts the ultimate figure at 80 metres, without knowing when exactly ultimate might be – but we can take some comfort in that it is probably centuries rather than decades.
More generally, the authoritative Stern Review, more than 10 years old now, is an important - if rather heavy going – source. See references 5 and 6. The United Nations comes in at reference 4. One of the things that Stern offers is an economist’s estimate of how much it is worth spending now to mitigate climate change in the future – an estimate which seems to rest firmly on something called the discount rate, small changes in which can make a great deal of difference when one is looking at discounting over a hundred years or more. But all much too technical for me.
More straightforward is the fact that we are likely to see hundreds of millions of people on the move. It would not take many of these people to take desperate action for the world to become a very unpleasant place. So self interest alone suggests we need to do something.
And then there are the doomsday people, for example the people at reference 8. Maybe they have a point; we really do need to get a move on.
Other comments
Climate science is a very uncertain business, not least because we do not know how we will react to climate change. Nevertheless, it is worth spending a lot of money to mitigate the risk of large parts of the globe becoming – and staying – uninhabitable. Would you take a 10% cut in your standard of living to significantly reduce the chance of disaster in the lifetime of your children? Or would you take the chance?
Disaster yes, apocalypse no. Climate change in the next hundred years or so may come to do a great deal of damage and result in a great deal of conflict. But life for many of us, probably most of us, will go on, after a fashion at least.
A lot of the coming changes to the climate are the delayed effects of the industrialisation of the west.
Which, taken with the fact that we are rich and they are poor, means that it is only fair that we should shoulder more of the costs of mitigation. And it is not fair, for example, that the more or less innocent inhabitants of the Congo – set to become unhealthily hot – should have to pay.
Countries like Saudi Arabia are very dependent on oil revenues and are unlikely to support robust action – despite their vulnerability to overheating.
Conclusions
Global warming – even allowing for a touch of hyperbole – seems a lot more important than Brexit; it makes Brexit look like a foolish diversion from far more important matters.
But how are we going to get the world – its leaders and its peoples – to take it all more seriously, to do something effective about it? Something more effective than we seem to have managed so far, progress with wind turbines and solar panels notwithstanding. To forego cake next week that there might be bread next year? To stop expecting economies and the standard of living to go on rising forever? To stop the billions of poor people wanting to be rich people?
This morning it all seems a bit grim and I associate to the accounts of social collapse in the wake of plagues and wars. Of taking what one can from today because there is no tomorrow.
PS: © Pavliha/Getty Images. A sandstorm approaching in Merzouga, Morocco. New research finds that desert dust increases child mortality
References
Reference 1: The uninhabitable earth: a story of the future – David Wallace-Wells – 2019. Possibly also known as ‘The uninhabitable earth: life after warming’.
Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/advertisement.html. An advertisement for this post.
Reference 3: MIT Technology Review: welcome to climate change – David Rotman, James Temple and others – May/June 2019. Yours for a fiver or so.
Reference 4: https://www.ipcc.ch/. ‘The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change’.
Reference 5: Economic development, climate and values: making policy – Nicholas Stern – 2015. A follow-up to the widely cited Stern Review.
Reference 6: The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review – Nicholas Stern (now Lord Stern of Brentford) and others – 2006.
Reference 7: Future Coastal Population Growth and Exposure to Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Flooding - A Global Assessment – Barbara Neumann, Athanasios T. Vafeidis, Juliane Zimmermann, and Robert J. Nicholls, Lalit Kumar – 2015.
Reference 8: https://rebellion.earth/.
Reference 9: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=danny+dorling.
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