The Uninhabitable Earth summary

If you feel distressed after the last blink, the blunt answer is that you should be. Things are not hopeless for humanity – not yet, anyway – but some level of catastrophe is unavoidable. Working out how severe this level will be is difficult, because climate change depends on so many different moving parts, like how much more carbon we emit or what technologies we might invent to reduce this.

But there are other, more complicated factors which warm the planet – factors we don’t understand well or don’t even know about.

Imagine waking up tomorrow, grabbing your smartphone and checking the week’s weather. Depending on where you live, you’ll probably see some bright, clear days punctuated by showers. If you see a severe weather warning, you’d most likely be shocked.

But this will change in the next few decades, as red and amber warnings will light up your screen with alarming frequency. After a while, storms and floods might feel as commonplace to you as your monthly haircut. And the truth is, this is already happening.

Ever since Plato’s day, we’ve been captivated by the story of Atlantis – a mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean, drowned by wrathful gods. Soon though, we won’t need to use Atlantis as inspiration for our films and fiction – we’ll have plenty of our own in the twenty-first century.

The reason for this boils down to the best-known consequence of climate change: melting polar ice caps causing a rise in sea levels. Without reducing emissions, we’ll see our oceans rise between 1.2 and 2.4 meters in the next century.

The human-driven natural disasters we’ve seen so far have a clear impact on our wellbeing. Now though, let's explore impending climate catastrophes from a more personal angle. And it’s hard to think of a more personal subject than humankind’s food supply and the consequences of it deteriorating: famine and malnourishment.

It’s fair to say that civilization has been built on grain. Since the start of the Agricultural Revolution around 12,500 years ago, when we first began cultivating cereals such as barley, humans have had a food surplus. This allowed people to devote their lives to things other than feeding themselves, such as pottery, metalworking and religion. In this new world, trade flourished, cities grew and empires were forged.

We rarely stop to think about the impact medical science has made on our lives. Life expectancy in the Roman Empire was about 25 years, and before mass production of antibiotics in the twentieth century, even a small infection could prove fatal.

But all the progress that medical science made over centuries could be wiped out in a single generation by climate change. In fact, we might be on the verge of a global health crisis that could come in two forms: old diseases revived and current ones rejuvenated. Let’s deal with dormant diseases first.

At this stage, you might feel like pausing and taking a deep breath. But depending on where you live, this may not be a good idea. We’re currently in the middle of a global air quality crisis, and some countries are suffering far worse than others. But even the lucky ones with cleaner air won’t stay lucky much longer, as polluted air becomes the new normal and chokes more people to an early grave.

Today’s air crisis is already severe. In the developing world, 98 percent of cities are above the World Health Organization’s (WHO) threshold of safety. In 2017, just breathing in New Delhi’s air was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

We live on a blue planet. Water covers 71 percent of the globe and is quite literally the essence of our existence. We use it to grow our food, stay hydrated and keep ourselves clean. It was in water that life first developed, and from which the majority of our bodies are made.

Freshwater is by far the most important type of water to humans. But it accounts for only 2 percent of our world’s supply – the rest being saltwater. What’s more, only 1 percent of freshwater is accessible, with most of it being trapped either underground or in glaciers.

As if the disasters described in the previous blinks weren’t terrifying enough already, climate change can also negatively influence human behavior.

Climate change plays a key role in driving human conflict. This can be small-scale and interpersonal, or widespread and international.

Things don’t look great, as you will have gathered by now. Increased suffering is unfortunately inevitable, and because of this, we often feel powerless. But we are still the authors of this tragic story, and we can change how brutally it ends. With such a dire future staring us in the face, it’s natural to ask: What can be done to fix it?

The answer to this question contains good news and bad news. Good news: We already have the technologies to clean up our climate. Bad news: they’re currently impractical.