{"id":44027,"date":"2019-02-25T11:20:28","date_gmt":"2019-02-25T16:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=44027"},"modified":"2019-02-25T11:20:30","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T16:20:30","slug":"the-uninhabitable-earth-puts-words-to-a-future-you-dont-want-to-live-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=44027","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Uninhabitable Earth\u2019 puts words to a future you don\u2019t want to live in"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/grist.files.wordpress.com\/2019\/02\/earth-quotes.jpg?w=1024&amp;h=576&amp;crop=1\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/article\/the-uninhabitable-earth-puts-words-to-a-future-you-dont-want-to-live-in\/\">\u2018The Uninhabitable Earth\u2019 puts words to a future you don\u2019t want to live in<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Prepare yourself for grisly descriptions of how the body breaks down in overwhelming heat, predictions of prehistoric plagues springing back to life beneath melting permafrost, and the possibility of an economic collapse several times worse than the Great Depression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Wallace-Wells\u2019 dystopian vision of where we\u2019re headed is guaranteed to scare the bejesus out of readers of his new book,&nbsp;<em>The Uninhabitable Earth<\/em>. Some will surely have to look away. Wallace-Wells, perhaps surprisingly, seems OK with that. More than a hundred pages in, he writes, \u201cIf you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/grist.files.wordpress.com\/2019\/02\/uninhabitable-earth-e1550548885487.jpg?w=330\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-415651\"\/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Based on the viral&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2017\/07\/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html\">New York Magazine article<\/a>&nbsp;that portrayed out a hellish future for humanity, the 230-page book is an immersion in seemingly all of the worst-case climate scenarios. It\u2019s terrifying. The point is to get readers to confront \u201cthe scarier implications of the science,\u201d Wallace-Wells told me an in email. More terrifying still: There are scarier scenarios that he didn\u2019t touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When his original magazine article came out in 2017,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/science\/archive\/2017\/07\/is-the-earth-really-that-doomed\/533112\/\">science communicators<\/a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/climatefeedback.org\/evaluation\/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells\/\">climatologists<\/a>&nbsp;like Michael Mann criticized it for being \u201coverly bleak.\u201d Wallace-Wells argues that our dire situation merits an array of storytelling approaches, including ones that embrace the worst possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201c[T]here is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try,\u201d he writes in the new book. \u201cAny story that sticks is a good one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Probably to distance myself from the book\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2019\/feb\/03\/david-wallace-wells-on-climate-people-should-be-scared-im-scared\">intentionally upsetting<\/a>\u00a0depictions of our predicament, I started writing down all the new words and phrases I encountered while reading it. (Yes, Grist writers have coping mechanisms, too.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018The Uninhabitable Earth\u2019 puts words to a future you don\u2019t want to live in Prepare yourself for grisly descriptions of how the body breaks down in overwhelming heat, predictions of prehistoric plagues springing back to life beneath melting permafrost, and the possibility of an economic collapse several times worse than the Great Depression. David Wallace-Wells\u2019 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[24472,236,15759,21157,24471],"class_list":["post-44027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-david-wallace-wells","tag-economic-collapse","tag-grist","tag-kate-yoder","tag-the-uninhabitable-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44028,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44027\/revisions\/44028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}