The Uninhabitable Earth

By David Wallace-Wells - A Story of the Future

• We are going to smash right through 2-degree celing (UN's IPCC 2018 report on Climate Change)
• Worst case scenario by 2100, UN predicts 8 degrees increase
  • Equatorial regions become completely uninhabitable
  • Huge firestorms would devastate our forests
  • Two-thirds of the world's cities would flood
  • Tropical disease would trive in Arctic
• Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization
• The destructive effects of climate change act as chain reactions, triggering further warming
  • cascades - occurs when an effect of climate change warms the planet even more, causing more effects and more warming in a destructive feedback loop
    • ex - Arctic ice sheets, act as reflector
    • Arctic permafrost - frozen rock and soil contains up to 1.8 trillion tons of carbon
    • Wildfires are another cascade
• Severe weather conditions are becoming the new normal
  • As air warms, it's able to hold more moisture. This increases the severity of storms by bringing heavier rainfalls and more severe flooding
  • Hurricans are powered by warm seas. As our ocean surface temperature increase, so do hurricane wind speeds
  • Number of storms has doubled since 1980
  • 1 degree of warming increase the frequency of Category 4 and 5 hurricans by 25 to 30 percent globally
• Rising sea levels will flood entire cities and countries
  • Oceans will rise between 1.2 to 2.4 meters in next century
  • Bangladesh - home to 164 million people - will be underwater
  • Indonesian megacity of Jakarta will be entirely underwater by 2050
  • Oceans 6 meters higher in the next few centuries
  • Shanghai, Mumbai, Kolkata flooded or entirely underwater
• Runaway warming will cause mass hunger and malnourishment
  • UN estimates by 2050, the world will need twice as much food as today
  • Huge challenge, since food production already accounts for a third of global emissions
  • For every degree of warming, cereal crop yields decline by about 10 percent
  • World's natural wheat belt moves 160 miles north every decade
  • Since 1950, the nutrient content of agricultural plants has declined by up to 33 percent
• The warmer it gets, the more disease there will be
  • Diseases love hot and humid climates
• Plummeting air quality is suffocating us
  • In 2017, just breathing in New Delhi's air was equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day
  • One in six deaths in the world are caused by air pollution - over 10,000 people die from air pollution everyday
  • Pollution linked to mental illness in children, risk of developing dementia
  • Carbon-dioxide level 930 parts per million causes congnitive ability decline by 21 percent. (we can hit this by 2100)
• Freshwater is becoming an even-more scarce resource
  • Natgeo calculated - Only 0.007 percent of Earth's water is needed to grow the crops and quench the thirst of seven billion people. 70-80 percent goes towards food production
  • By 2030, global freshwater demand is expected to exceed supply by 40 percent.
  • Many of the world's largest lakes started to dry up
    • Lake Chad in Africa lost 95 percent of its volume since 1960s
    • Aral Sea in Central Asia, 4th largest lake lost 90 percent volume
  • Half of the world relies on spring melts from high-altitude snow for their freshwater. Global warming poses a huge threat to these snow deposits, threatening to turn snow-capped peaks into barren and dusty hills
  • UN, five billion people could have inadequate access to freshwater by 2050
• Human conflict increases on a hotter, dirtier globe
  • Heat causes car drivers to honk their horns longer
  • Baseball pitcher will hit an opposition batter with their throw
  • Police officers likely to fire on suspects
  • High air pollution correlates to increase car theft, assault, rape and murder
  • Climate change would lead to additional 22000 murders and 3.5 million assaults in the US
  • Increase the number of refugees and forced migrants, sparking social and political tensions, thereby increasing armed conflicts
  • For every half degree of climate warming, the chance of an armed conflict erupting anywhere in the world increases by 10 to 20 percent
  • By 2030, predicted temperatures on the continent would cause an extra 393000 deaths in battle
• New technologies give us ways to softening these disasters, but they are currently impractical
  • Negative emissions
    • Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS)
      • burning biomass to produce bioenergy
      • Carbon Capture and Storage technologies (CCS)
    • CCS by using machines to suck the carbon from the air
• Actionable advice
  • Put pressure on politicians to act