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David Wallace-Wells
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming Hardcover

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,498 ratings
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100% Satisfaction is* For New condition books in our store; You will be the first user. You will be the first to open the book cover. For Used condition books in our store; It shows signs of wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and works perfectly. All pages and cover are intact , but may have aesthetic issues such as price clipping, nicks, scratches, and scuffs. Pages may include some notes and highlighting. For all our books; Cargo will be delivered in the required time. There are no problems in page content and in the paper. There are no problems except minor faults.
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  1. Language
    English
  2. Dimensions
    14.73 x 2.79 x 24.38 cm
  3. ISBN-10
    0525576703
  4. ISBN-13
    978-0525576709
  5. See all details
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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
3,498 global ratings
"New" but not really
1 out of 5 stars
"New" but not really
For a book sold as "new" it doesn't seem like it. Some of the cover is chipped off in several different parts. The back cover has the end bent and even the edge is creased. In other words, this is not a "new" book that you could gift someone for Christmas as I intended to do.
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Top reviews from United Kingdom

Mac McAleer
5.0 out of 5 stars It is worse, much worse, than you think
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 March 2019
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“It is worse, much worse, than you think”, says the opening line in the book. Later, at page 11, it says “This is not a book about the science of global warming; it is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet”. (1)

The first impression of this book is of starkness. The front cover is plain, with the book’s title, its subtitle and author on a plain off-white background. The only decoration is a small picture of a bee at the bottom of the cover. The bee looks inactive, probably dead. Inside the book is text. There are no charts, no illustrations, no maps, just text. The small picture of the author on the back inside cover is in black and white, and he is not smiling. The contents are equally stark (2). However, after the author David Wallace-Wells has made the reader look into the mouth of Hell, he then pulls you back and shows that redemption is still possible through prompt actions.

The author is a journalist, not a scientist. The book is readable. The book is well researched. The contents are disturbing. Everyone should read this book. Hurry up please. It’s time.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
(1) There is a long history of doomsday predictions. For Climate Change, Al Gore’s  An Inconvenient Truth  is the most recent and most famous. Earlier, there was Paul R. Ehrlich’s  The Population Bomb  and The Club of Rome’s  Limits to Growth . However, just because we are still here does not mean these books were wrong.
(2) The book is divided into sections titled: I Cascades, II Elements of Chaos, III The Climate Kaleidoscope, IV The Anthropic Principle, Acknowledgments, Notes, Index.
The first section, Cascades, is a single chapter of over 30 pages. It serves as a general introduction. The title comes from climate cascades, where multiple climate events occur. Towards the end of the section (page 35), the following section, “Elements of Chaos” is introduced as “The science that makes up the following twelve chapters has been culled from interviews from dozens of expert, and from hundreds of papers published in the best academic journals over the previous decade or so. Since it is science, it is tentative, ever-evolving, and some of the predictions that follow will surely not come to pass”.
Elements of Chaos - The chapters are: Heat Death, Hunger, Drowning, Wildfire, Disasters No Longer Natural, Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Economic Collapse, Climate Conflict, “Systems”.
Having survived the horrors of the chapters in “Elements of Chaos”, the next section, “Climate Kaleidoscope” is more discursive and thoughtful. It asks what stories we will tell ourselves when climate change is undeniable and can no longer be ignored. How will business react? What about Silicon Valley? If we really think that we are moving towards the end of days, what will happen to our belief systems?
The Climate Kaleidoscope - The chapters are: Storytelling, Crisis Capitalism, The Church of Technology, Politics of Consumption, History After Progress, Ethics at the End of the World.
The last section is “The Anthropic Principle”. This is a single chapter of ten pages that acts as a conclusion to the book. The science of climate change is persuasive, but there is still much to understand. The complexity of climate may contain feedback loops that we have not considered. The solutions to climate change are available to us, but we have to start implementing them in earnest. We have to start thinking like a planet. There is no second chance and no second planet.
83 people found this helpful
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Serghiou Const
5.0 out of 5 stars Man-made global warming gravely threatens the habitability of the planet
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 September 2019
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The book is justifiably alarmist.

And the reader should note that the book was published before the two huge natural disasters occurred - among the many anticipated by the book which would wreak havoc on the planet unless urgent and concerted global effort is invested to decarbonize the planet which, unfortunately, is not presently the case.

The two natural disasters I referred to, were the Hurricane Dorian which devastated the Bahamas with 43 dead at the present count and a biblical catastrophe in property and the nearly eighty thousand wildfires in the Amazon burning huge areas of its forests. In this regard, it should be noted that the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet's forests each year. The result is that carbon deposited in the trees is released in the atmosphere. More generally, forest fires means fewer tees, means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still. The preceding is just one of a page-long series of 'cascades' described in the book. I am tempted to cite a few more: a warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still; also warmer oceans contain less oxygen which is a doom for phytoplankton - which does for the ocean what plants do on land, consuming carbon and producing oxygen - which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further; also increased carbon dioxide in the oceans results in their acidification and the bleaching of the coral ecosystems. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the earth's atmosphere, and some of which, when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is dozens of times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

I have outlined in the preceding some of the consequences of global warming, there are many more such as heat waves, floods, droughts, desertification, unprecedented famines, mass immigration, and refugee crises, political instability, climate conflicts and rising of oceans to flood coastal cities.

It was in the light of the above that the 2016 climate accords were adopted - defining two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial level (we are already at one degree) as a must-meet target and rallying all the world's nations to meet it - and the results are grim. In 2017, carbon emissions grew by 1.4 percent, according to the International Energy Agency.

It has to be noted that the last twenty - five years of emissions is about half the total that humanity has ever - produced - a scale of carbon production that has pushed the planet from near - complete climate stability to the brink of chaos.

Just to give a single statistic, from 1992 to 1997 the Antarctic ice sheet lost, on average, 49 billion tons of ice each year; from 2012 to 2017, the corresponding number was 219 billion.

It is something of an irony that the graphs that show so much recent progress in the developing world - on poverty, on hunger, on education, on infant mortality, and life expectancy - are, practically, the same graphs that trace the dramatic rise in global carbon emissions, due to burning fossil fuels to obtain the requisite energy and in the process creating global warming that has brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe.

If we had started decarbonization in 2000s when Al Gore narrowly lost the election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it would require us to cut emissions by 30 percent per year. This is why U.N Secretary - General Antonio Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.

The measures to salvation which require collective and concerted global effort comprise a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy products in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.
13 people found this helpful
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Pete McClure
4.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling but sophisticated read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 April 2020
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I found this book to have some great information and some excellent quotable facts on climate change. Most of the facts inside were conveyed in layman's terms which really helped. The latter chapters are of a very high level in terms of difficult to understand information but overall a very good read.
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ARATI BAZAR COMERCIO MANUFATURA E SERVIÇOS LTDA
5.0 out of 5 stars O livro que todos devemos ler.
Reviewed in Brazil on 22 March 2024
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O melhor compendio do que nos espera, caso não tomarmos medidas imediatas para evitá-lo.
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Thomas Wikman
5.0 out of 5 stars What! Me worry?
Reviewed in the United States on 25 October 2020
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Drought, heat waves, freshwater scarcity, wildfires, sea level rise, extreme weather, floods, disease, changing eco-zones, crop yield decline, hunger, ocean acidification, dead zones in the ocean, mass extinction (of species), changes to oceanic and atmospheric circulation systems, plagues emerging from thawing tundra and melting ice, expanding tropics and expanding tropical diseases, economic collapse, climate refugees, violent conflicts rooted in climate change, the list of unfortunate consequences of climate change is long. Climate change isn’t just about polar bears and hurricanes, and it has already begun.

We have already left behind the narrow window (Goldilocks range) of environmental conditions and temperatures that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place. Island countries are disappearing, Bangladesh is likely to be largely submerged mid century resulting in tens of millions of refugees, the Yemen, Sudan, and Syrian conflicts were preceded by draughts caused by or made much worse by climate change. It will be much worse at 2 degrees Celsius, and much worse than that at 2.5 degrees Celsius, and even worse at 3 degrees Celsius, etc.

Climate change may not be the direct cause of all of these phenomena, but it is exacerbating them, or as the military calls it, it is a threat multiplier. This is not a book about the science of warming; it is about what it means to the way we live on this planet. The author notes that climate change doesn’t end in 2100 even though most projections do. He says that what follows 2100 is likely the century of hell. I should say that even though the book is not about the climate science, what he describes is based on the science and there are several hundred notes and references at the end of the book organized by page.

It is a frightening and perhaps a depressing book, but it doesn’t predict the end of the world, it predicts a world that is much worse and partially unlivable, but how bad it gets depends on what we do today. What is missing is political will. The author does not discuss solutions much, but he seems to support a carbon tax, but I believe his chief intention is help his readers understand the seriousness of the situation as well as pointing out wrong attitudes. Believing we are all going to die in 10 years is not only inaccurate but fosters despondency and inaction. Denial or the downplaying of the problem is, of course, not helpful either. He states that personal choices, such as not eating meat, or driving less, are helpful but not enough. He stresses that political solutions are crucial. Personally, I favor a carbon fee and dividend approach, putting a price on carbon at the source and then returning the proceeds to households. It is very effective in reducing carbon emissions while not hurting the economy and helping the poor.

He said some things that may be controversial among some environmentalists but that I agree with. Nuclear Power is not as dangerous as it has been made out to be and it is a carbon free source. GMOs could help us fight hunger as the effects on agriculture from climate change set in. Some things I don’t agree with. He is dismissing Nick Boström’s concern about Artificial Intelligence gone wrong a little too quickly. As someone with a background in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics I have to say that this is a real concern. I also think that he is not characterizing neoliberalism and capitalism correctly, well it depends on what you mean. Denying the existence of economic externalities is plain stupid but free markets and free trade that includes regulations or price mechanisms to account for externalities such as climate change can be part of the solution rather than a cause of it.

In summary; the beginning of the book, with all the dark projections was a little bit heavy. However, overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read. I learned something from it.
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Evan
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice read
Reviewed in France on 20 June 2021
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A scary but wheel written book.
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Evan
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice read
Reviewed in France on 20 June 2021
A scary but wheel written book.
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cant reveal identity
5.0 out of 5 stars Just read the book
Reviewed in India on 29 May 2021
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If you have come across this book and if you care even a little about life, earth or future, just read this book. Not an easy read, the author even says so himself, but an important read.
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sean s.
5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Important Book on the Climate Change Crisis since Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything
Reviewed in Canada on 31 March 2019
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This is arguably the most important book on the climate change crisis since Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014). David Wallace-Wells writes:

‘When critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypothetical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits this disparity, but feeds and profits from it – this is what Thomas Piketty calls the ‘apparatus of justification.’ And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the EU average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent.’

Indeed, the 2018 Global Green Economy Index points out that the most environmentally-friendly countries in the world are 1. Sweden 2. Switzerland 3. Iceland 4. Norway 5. Finland – countries which also enjoy a high quality of life.

Hence Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is absolutely correct that it is possible to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Furthermore, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson has provided country-by-country plans for the world to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. So why the delay?

In his book Cultural Evolution (2018), Dr. Ronald Inglehart, leader of the World Values Survey, points out that following World War II, the advanced world shifted from materialist to postmaterialist values, including a growth in the environmental movement. However, this evolution in mindset was not reflected rapidly enough in our actions.

‘Many people perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades… The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime – the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral…

Due to global warming, in the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago…

The Indian capital is home to 26 million people. In 2017, simply breathing the air was the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day…

With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are at today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent…
The basic rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature, is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, when we have 50 percent more people to feed, we may also have 50 percent less grain to give them…

Beyond carbon, climate change means that staple crops are doing battle with more insects – their increased activity could cut yields an additional 2 to 4 percent, as well as fungus and disease, not to mention flooding…

Whole cultures will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited, Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States’ largest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nation of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh; all of Miami Beach and much of South Florida; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington…

Much of the infrastructure of the internet could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades; and most of the smartphones we use to navigate it are manufactured in Shenzhen, which is likely to be flooded soon, as well…

If no significant action is taken to curb emissions, one estimate of global damage is as high as $100 trillion dollars per year by 2100. That is more than global GDP today. Most estimates are a bit lower - $14 trillion a year, still almost a fifth of present-day GDP…

The International Panel on Climate Change furnishes us with a median prediction of an over four degrees rise in planetary temperature by 2100, should we continue down the current emissions path. That would deliver wildfires burning 16 times as much land in the American West, hundreds of drowned cities…’

Unfortunately, Canada has been a laggard on this critical issue. Prime Minister Trudeau seems to have only recently woken up to the existential threat posed by climate change, and has finally introduced a modest carbon tax. The Andrew Scheer Conservatives remain for their part firmly in the pocket of the fossil fuels industry, and are every bit as destructive to the environment as the Trump Republicans in the US.

On the other hand, organizations like 350.org, the Solutions Project and the Sunrise Movement, and political leaders like Germany’s Katharina Schulze, France’s Karima Delli, Sweden’s Isabella Lovin, the Netherland’s Jesse Klaver, Belgium’s Benoit Hellings, and Costa Rica’s Carlos Alvarado Quesada are leading the way to a sustainable future.

They are joined by youth leaders Greta Thunberg (Sweden), Varshini Prakash and Alexandria Villasenor (United States), Holly Gillibrand (UK), Luisa Neubauer (Germany), Louis Couillard, Sara Montpetit and Autumn Peltier (Canada), Jonas Kampus (Switzerland), and Anuna de Wever (Belgium).

The least we can do, is to give them our support – our future depends on it.
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