David Wallace-Wells opens his book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, with “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” And within the first 36 pages, the American writer races through evidence of damage already caused by climate change and forecasts humanity's future, peppering sentences with words like annihilation, Armageddon, extinction, and “existential crisis”. There are no safe zones of optimism or passages of hope in Wallace-Wells' book, even in his closing chapter where he avers “The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective.”
From his first sentence, Wallace-Wells, a deputy editor of New York magazine, sets himself and his analysis of climate change apart from the predominant voices of leadership in the field, such as Nobel laureate Al Gore and billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg. He has no patience for those who argue that climate news must be wrapped in a coating of positivism in order to be culturally and politically palatable. “Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we've been trained, by a buoyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss, categorically, as hyperbole”, Wallace-Wells argues. Humanity is asked to choose between two “hellish poles” of climate interpretation—death and suffering or extinction. “Here, the facts are hysterical, and the dimensions of the drama that will play out between those poles incomprehensibly large—large enough to enclose not just all of present-day humanity but all of our possible futures, as well. Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization,” he writes.
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