Thread by @dwallacewells

Next month, @timdugganbooks will publish my big climate book, The Uninhabitable Earth, in which I try to take a very broad, and very long, view of the state of the climate crisis and all the ways it promises to transform how we live on this planet—all of us. (1/x)

https://twitter.com/CrownPublishing/status/1083056039266783232

The subtitle of the book is "Life After Warming," and while it is not a survey of worst-case scenarios, the portrait of our near-term future is harrowing enough, as anyone following the news from climate science knows.

Barring a change in our emissions trajectory, many major cities in India and the Middle East will become unlivably hot as soon as 2050. Many others, elsewhere in the world, will be fighting off constant flooding.

The number of climate refugees could reach the tens of millions, perhaps the hundreds of millions. Air pollution alone could kill 150 million—or more. And the economic cost of climate damages could top $600 trillion—more than double all the wealth that exists in the world today.

But this is not primarily a book about the science of warming. It is a book about the humanities of climate change—what warming will mean to our politics, and culture, our relationship to capitalism and technology and perspective on history and social justice.

In other words, about how climate change will touch, and transform, and in almost all cases damage, the lives of everyone on earth, should we not stop it.

In fact, "could" is a much better word than "will," because all of this suffering is, speaking both practically and profoundly, optional.

The speed at which the climate crisis has arrived is astonishing: you may think of global warming as a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, but in fact half of all emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have come in the last 25 years.

This means we have done more damage to the climate since Al Gore published his first book on the subject than in all the millennia before; more since the premiere of Seinfeld than in human history before; more since the UN established the IPCC than ever before.

The establishment of the IPCC signaled the problem of global warming unmistakably to all the nations of the world, which means that we have now engineered more damage to the environment and its ability to support human life knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance.

So we have brought the planet face to face with a crisis of a genuinely existential scale in just a single generation. But while this is terrifying, it is also empowering.

The flip-side of our real-time climate guilt is that we remain, collectively, responsible for how much damage is done going forward—for how much suffering climate changes brings, and how much we manage to avert.

Nothing is written in stone, and where we end up, as a planet, 20 years from now — and 50, and 100, and beyond — is almost entirely a matter of what action we take now, and what we do in the decades ahead.

This book is not a work of climate activism; it's a meditation on the meaning of climate change and the future of our planet.

But I hope it shows just how important that activism and action is, and just how much devastation would be unleashed should we continue to delay, as we have now for decades.

You can pre-order the book here: amazon.com/Uninhabitable-…
And here: indiebound.org/book/978052557…
And here: powells.com/book/-97805255…
And anywhere else where books are sold...

And if you're interested in making a media or publicity request, please DM me here or reach out to the great people in Crown's publicity department: [e-mail].

Thanks for enduring this announcement thread, and—more soon...

(For instance, here!: barnesandnoble.com/w/the-uninhabi…)