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    The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells Summary

    The Uninhabitable Earth
    David Wallace-Wells
    4 (29448 Reviews)
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    Overview of The Uninhabitable Earth

    In "The Uninhabitable Earth," David Wallace-Wells delivers climate change's terrifying reality - called "this generation's Silent Spring" by The Washington Post. What frightens Pentagon strategists and made The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo declare it "the most terrifying book I've ever read"?

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    It is worse, much worse, than you think.

    ”
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    What if I told you that the greatest threat to human civilization isn't nuclear war or pandemics, but something we're actively creating every day? Climate change isn't a distant threat-it's unfolding with terrifying velocity. Most carbon emissions have occurred just in the past three decades, meaning we've done more damage knowingly than in all our ignorant history. We're adding carbon ten times faster than during any previous extinction event, one hundred times faster than before industrialization. This catastrophe has unfolded within a single human lifetime. When David Wallace-Wells' father was born in 1938, the climate seemed stable. By his death in 2016, we had crossed the 400 parts per million carbon threshold scientists had marked as catastrophic. Despite climate advocacy, we've produced more emissions in the twenty years since Kyoto than in the twenty before. Two degrees of warming, once considered catastrophic, now looks like a best-case scenario. The UN reports that even if we implement all Paris accord commitments (which we haven't), we're likely to reach 3.2 degrees of warming-three times what we've experienced since industrialization began. At two degrees, ice sheets collapse, 400 million more suffer water scarcity, and equatorial cities become unlivable. At four degrees, we face annual global food crises and $600 trillion in damages-twice today's global wealth.

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