“It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

These are very powerful words to start a book with. What follows is a horrifying picture of what we will face if climate change and global warming are allowed to progress at the current rate.

Unfortunately this book was not for me, it was a bit slower than I would like and it just didn't hold my attention. I am sure other people will love it!

This is a book that friends and family are annoyed I've read. As I get older I get more left, more hippy, more green and I drive people nuts about renewables. Some parts felt a bit wobbly but overall, a superb read that more people should read.

This is a brutal and hugely important book about the very real problem of global warming. Meticulously referenced, well researched and clearly written, this book sets out the stark message that climate change is happening now and we can no longer ignore it if we want to survive.
Everyone should read this book.
With grateful thanks to Netgalley, Penguin UK and David Wallace-Wells for my copy.

Frightening, detailed and intense, this is an admirable overview of the climate emergency we face. Far from an easy read, it's an essential one.

I really liked this book, although at times I disagreed with the views (for example, dismissing not having children as virtue-signalling by wealthy Westerners... Why not considering it as a way to reduce future damage? The author says at the beginning he has a young child, which probably explains his view and the way he seems to think having fewer children will have little to no impact), and found it contradictory. After chapters and chapters of bleak predictions - and a very bleak state of things as they are -, the final chapter is dismantling the most pessimistic environmentalists and accusing many of them of "fatalism".or being too alarmist.
Overall though, it was a very detailed and interesting read - maybe too American-centric, but I suppose this was the target audience -, with clear explanations about what we know and what are the possible scenarios for the future.

I’d been wanting to read The Uninhabitable Earth as I’d heard so many good things about it, and I found it really helped to give me motivation to make some changes.

Initially, the first few chapters are a stark look at the state of the ecosystem and how humans are affecting it. I struggled with the writing style at first – a continuous list of negative facts, which, as the chapters went on, I began to feel a bit desensitised to. The situation is truly terrifying, but I began to feel disengaged throughout the first few chapters. I found it overly dramatic, not in a necessary way, but it rather felt that each sentence had been written as if it was the ‘Worst Thing Ever’ – I felt that this was detracting from the real data, which is terrifying by itself without being hammed up.
Having said this, the rest of the book was excellent and enough to totally change my opinion. Wallace-Wells does not shy away from the facts and I really liked the references at the end of the book. It’s a hard-hitting read, but one that is sorely needed – constructive suggestions and information that really made me think. It’s not an easy read, and one that I will challenge myself to re-read, and find further value in those initial chapters that initially I didn’t get on with. The second part of the book gives depth and solutions whilst still being truthful about the stark reality of our situation. I’m glad I persevered!

We know all too well the effects of climate change and the effects it will have not only on the planet, but our lives as well. A terrifyingly true account of the journey our planet is taking through every fault of our own.

A very intense, no-holds-barred analysis of the true dangers of climate change. I found it very hard at times to read, just because it was so stressful and scary. But, I think, that's what's needed right now. Having read most climate change non-fiction being published, this has some interesting takes I'd never heard before. The comparison to supercomputer human brains futurists in silicon valley to an escape from climate change was really interesting.

I am not a climate change denier.
I was hoping for an unbiased meta-analysis of climate change data.

What I got was:
Odd phraseology: “(...) the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral.”

Strange choice of words: “disequilibrate” or “(...) we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history”

Confused logic: “(...) one million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change”

Meaningless comparisons: “ (...) the average drought in Central America would last nineteen months longer and in the Caribbean twenty- one months longer.” Than what?

Scare-mongering headline hunting: Statement: The methane “released” from the thawing Arctic will overwhelm the planet and has not been factored into climate predictions. Methane is NOT “released” from the thawing Arctic, rather soil-bound bacteria in a thawing permafrost soil may (!) turn carbon into carbon dioxide and methane. NASA considers this as being a minor occurrence since thawed permafrost soil also encourages plant growth which in turn would capture carbon. This scenario has been factored into climate predictions. But mentioning mitigating circumstances does not sell magazines.

Lack of direct referencing of relevant monographies, aka fudging.

Is Wallace-Wells a climatologist, a geophysicist, an athmospheric research scientist or a cold regions research scientist? No, he has an unspecified degree in history and, for some inexplicable reason, has bagsied the job of deputy editor at New York magazine.
The narrative oscillates wildly between facts and conjecture and back to facts, blurring the lines between reality and clairvoyancy.

Quite a few of Wallace-Wells’s facts are stretched, statements are inaccurate, simply wrong or are missing crucial context and that’s where the book becomes infuriating. Since those claims can be disproven fairly easily, there is a fair chance that climate change will be dismissed in the same breath. So, what could and SHOULD have been an informative and “sobering” topic, is lost in clumsy phraseology, half-truths and a good dose of scare-mongering.

A missed opportunity!
If it were possible... zero stars!

This is an eye opening and honestly depressing book about the fate of our planet.

Chapter by chapter we read how we have damaged mother earth and the facts are hard to swallow.

But the writer provides some hope, new technologies.

I would recommend this book for everyone really so that we understand the realities of what is happening.

At times we may feel that we can't do much but I would like to challenge that. Everyone of us needs to do our part in whatever small way we can to be more sustainable, use less plastic and have a more plant based diet.

Our future and that of the earth, does really depend on all of us playing a part.

This book is extremely comprehensive. I found it challenging, and had to go chapter by chapter with breaks in between - it's tough reading and confronting in terms of the way we are living and where that is heading. In that it's such an important read. It feels like a real authority on the rapidly heating world that we live in, and I'd recommend it highly. As fires break out around us, pandemics, flooding worsens it really did feel I was inhabiting the pages of the book - a world we don't like to look at but is right in front of our faces. Very much worth the heavy read!

Within the debate about climate change, I find a personal need to seek a balance between information and hope. What The Uninhabitable Earth tells me that I need also not to kid myself about what that balance is and to wake up to the stark realities of the changing world that we are living in. We are in the midst of an emergency that is only going to get worse, whatever we do, and the urgency to respond cannot be denied any longer.

Wallace-Wells guides us through 12 chapters in the first half of the book that lay out just how bad things could get and in how many ways. This is perhaps the biggest takeaway, there is not just one resulting catastrophe for mankind as a result of rising temperatures, it is a complex system of impacts that combine to create absolute chaos. Despite this, however, we know that there will be continued inertia in the way we respond because we are so tied to our comfortable lifestyles that we do not want to let them go. We hope for a scientific answer that allows us to carry on as we are but without causing the damage, but it is a fallacy.

As we sit in lockdown, seeking shelter from Covid-19, it feels like maybe we are receiving a further warning but also a lesson. We have been forced to radically change our lifestyles in order to stay safe from this new viral threat, so can we take these lessons in new ways of living forward into the post Covid-19 world and as a result improve our chances for the decades ahead as we seek to address a much more devastating threat in climate change?

Already I hear friends and colleagues talking about how they can’t wait to resume flying off for some summer sun and fear we will have learned nothing. We need to challenge every aspect of the way that we live to mitigate the impacts, as we are well beyond being able to avoid them, which means we will have to live a more local and simplified life. At the same time, we will need to keep space both physical and emotional for those who will be displaced by climate impacts that cannot now be stopped. These are practical and spiritual challenges that we have so far largely failed to rise to.

The latter part of the books looks at different models of response that we might see, but it is hard to pick out the oath that we will actually take beyond the selfishness, greed and isolationism that we have started to see in the Western World in recent years. Whatever the answer to the future of human life on Earth is, and the chances are we don’t entirely know what it looks like because we don’t know the full impact of what we are doing, it feels like it has to include a reduction in our use of the planet’s resources. Not just a replacement source of energy but a reduction in energy as well.

As Wendell Berry says “Land that is used will be ruined unless it is properly cared for” and to take this on a stage, human life will ruin the planet unless it is lived with care. In the last generation or so, we have replaced any consideration of care with a single-minded pursuit of profit. There needs to be a radical re-working of what a good life looks like. As Wallace-Wells discusses the focus of technologist billionaires in Silicon Valley though their goals seem to seek something even more radical, a post-human existence that takes us into a disturbing ethical place.

The Uninhabitable Earth makes absolutely clear how great the threat is that we face in climate change and how urgently we need to respond, but it also hints at how difficult we will find it collectively to understand and implement the proper response.

This was a difficult book to read because it wasn’t formatted correctly, so lots of beginnings of sentences were missing. However, this was an insightful book, with interesting facts.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

A wake up call to climate change deniers. It is indeed much worse than we all think.

Wallace-Wells gathers all manner of scientific research about climate change to highlight just how close we are to the point of no return - in certain ways we have already crossed it. The book's strongest point is, in my opinion, in the way the research is presented. The Uninhabitable Earth is very readable and easy to follow, if hard to stomach when faced with the totality of the effects of global warming. However, I think Wallace-Wells hasn't given enough space to research into potential solutions. Hopefully, that will be another book.

My thanks to Penguin Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review The Uninhabitable Earth. Highly recommended!

This book was a slow read - I felt that I couldn't binge my way through it and instead stuck to one chapter per night / every few nights. This is due to both it being nonfiction, and I don't tend to binge nonfiction as much as fiction, as well as the fact that it actually terrified me. I felt that if I read too much at one time, it would have really made me fear for everything the world has become. This, I think, was one of the objectives of the book - it was not meant to be an easy read.

This is an important book, so I wanted to love it, but oh my goodness, it's a hard read. It's turgid and repetitive, so reading it is such a slog. There's some valuable, interesting information in it, but it's buried under overly verbose prose. For someone who's a journalist, I'd have expected an easier read.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC without obligation.

The Uninhabitable Earth is one of the scariest books I have ever read, and I have never wished something was fiction as much as I wished that of this book. It’s a massive wake up call to all of us.

It certainly made for an uncomfortable read and the author is clearly passionate about the subject. It is thoroughly researched and his frustration at the scale of our destruction is clear.



Quotes



“The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the ‘natural’ world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can shield against the revenges of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth, and the technology it produces will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence of staring it down. None of this is true.”

“there are so many aspects to the climate change kaleidoscope that transform our intuitions about environmental devastation into an uncanny complacency that it can be hard to put the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or anyway didn’t look squarely in the face of the science.”

“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 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.”

“All hurricanes now unfold in the weather systems we have wrecked on their behalf, which is why there are more of them, and why they are stronger. The same is true for wildfires; this one of that one may be ‘caused’ by a cookout or a downed power line, but each is burning faster, bigger, and longer because of global warming, which gives no reprieve to the fire season. Climate change isn’t something happening here or there but everywhere and all at once. And unless we choose to halt it, it will never stop. “

“This is the time we should be working together instead “we are unbuilding these alliances – recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other.”

“Climate change means some bleak prospects for the decades ahead, but I don’t believe the appropriate response to the challenge is withdrawal, is surrender. I think you have to do everything you can to accommodate dignified and flourishing life, rather than giving up early, before the fight has been lost or won, and acclimating yourself to a dreary future brought into being by others less concerned about climate pain. The fight is definitively, not yet lost – in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction.”

“Fully half of British emissions it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, and clothing; two thirds of American energy is wasted, globally, according to one paper, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5 trillion each year. None of that has to continue.”

“In a 2018 paper, forty-two scientists from around the world warned that, in a business-as-usual scenario, no ecosystem on earth was safe with transformation ‘ubiquitous and dramatic’ exceeding in just one or two centuries the amount of change that unfolded in the most dramatic periods of transformation in the earth’s history over tens of thousands of years. Half of the Great Barrier Reef has already died, methane is leaking from the Arctic permafrost that may never freeze again, and the high-end estimates for warning will mean for cereal crops suggest that just four degrees of warming could reduce yields by 50 percent. If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all.”

This reads more like the worst horror book (you can pack your bags Stephen King). Why? This is going to happen soon. It was extremely depressive, but we'll researched and informative. You don't have to be extremely knowledgeable as the author is explaining things very well.
Highly recommend this to anybody who gives a 💩 and especially to the people who don't. This should be read and taught in schools!

David Wallace-Wells tackles an already very familiar topic in a fresh way, to deliver an absolutely terrifying read. The Uninhabitable Earth makes it unavoidably clear that we are already living in changed times in an uncomfortably confronting way, but at the same time it offers some hope for a maybe-slightly-inhabitable-after-all planet.
It's exactly the kick in the pants that humanity needs to make serious changes, not "before it's too late" (it's already too late) but right now.