Exploring Cascades: Insights from the first chapter of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

It is worse, much worse, than you think. These are the words David Wallace-Wells uses to begin the first chapter of his timely and provocative work, "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming". In Wallace-Wells' own words, he does not consider himself an environmentalist. Most people, myself included, once believed that clean water and air quality are generally a good idea, but never truly gave it the time of day. Wallace Wells describes a trade-off between economic growth and the cost to nature, and how most individuals would typically favor growth over the health of the environment. He describes himself as being fatally complacent at some point in his life, falling in the same boat as millions of other Americans who remain willfully deluded about climate change.

Camp Fire in California, the deadliest fire in its history, killed dozens and left several others without a place to call home. This is just one of the countless disasters that have plagued our recent past—and continue to do so today. As Wallace-Wells explains, "It is tempting to look at these strings of disasters and think, Climate Change is here. And one response to seeing things long predicted actually come to pass is to feel that we have settled into a new era, with everything transformed. In fact, that is how California Governor Jerry Brown first described the state of things in the midst of the state's wildfire disaster: A new normal. The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again". The fact is, the very environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve are gone, and we have now entered uncharted territory. As Wallace-Wells explains, there is no longer such a thing as a natural disaster, and conditions will only continue to deteriorate. The more harm we inflict on our environment, in the form of greenhouse gases and emissions, the worse the devastation is when these storms strike back. It is like arming the environment, and when these disasters occur, the environment harnesses its growing arsenal against us. Wallace-Wells describes, "Some of those watching from afar wondered, incredulously, how a mudslide could kill so many. The answer is, the same way as hurricanes and tornadoes—by weaponizing the environment, whether man-made or natural".

The climate devastation that we are witnessing all around us is part of a best-case scenario. The Paris Agreement of 2016—an international treaty signed by 196 parties of the United Nations that covered climate mitigation, adaptation, and finance—had the goal of "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. The prospect of 2°C of warming by the turn of the century, 2100, once seemed like the worst-case scenario. However, as it becomes more and more evident that industrial nations are nowhere near reaching their emissions goals, this warming of 2 degrees Celsius has become our best-case scenario. What we are looking at now, realistically, is about 3-4 degrees of warming by the turn of the century, a devastating outcome for humans and our environment. Even if we cut back significantly in our carbon emissions, by 2100, the Earth will experience warming well over 2°C. As Wallace-Wells puts it, "This is what is meant when climate change is called an existential crisis—a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome makes extinction a plausible, if unlikely, future". Just half a degree of additional warming could cost another few hundred million lives, a gamble that we should not be willing to take. Even if humans ceased all carbon emissions right at this moment, the greenhouse gases we have produced in our recent past would still lead us to warming beyond 2°C by 2100.

Part of the climate delusion is that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth, and that growth, as well as the technology that it produces, can engineer a way out of environmental devastation. Advanced technologies, such as carbon capture or geoengineering, or through a drastic change in our political and economic standards, though promising, will be overshadowed by our continuous emissions. It is simply not a practical, and not yet reliable solution to what awaits us in our near future.

In section IV, the Anthropic Principle, David writes, "What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one". Much of what David Wallace-Wells emphasizes is that the future of our planet relies heavily on our actions today. He mentions that if we don't act quickly, the problem will become literally "insoluble". In other words, our actions in 50 years to come will have no impact in saving humanity from the ravages of climate change—it all relies on how we respond in the next decade.