David Wallace-Wells
Auteur de The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de David Wallace-Wells
TRIAGEM DE MANCHESTER - eBook 1 exemplaire
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Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- unknown
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Professions
- non-fiction writer
journalist
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 4
- Aussi par
- 2
- Membres
- 1,513
- Popularité
- #16,995
- Évaluation
- 4.0
- Critiques
- 58
- ISBN
- 39
- Langues
- 12
--The unfolding speed of climate change and how individuals, societies, and governments could respond to it are discussed in mainstream media and national debates. We regularly view televised news stories about wildfires, floods, droughts, mutating infectious diseases, and ruined crops. All of these are connected to changing weather patterns and climate change. Not to mention climate change-induced human migration, which sees people move from their homelands to safer countries looking for work and a new life. However, the sheer scale of climate change means the significance of individual stories is lost. Our human minds struggle to comprehend the problems and find it easier not to think about climate change or dismiss it as an exaggerated problem. Wallace-Wells investigates the ‘collective understanding’ of the global threats of increasing temperature for nature, humanity, our economies and societies. Based on a temperature increase of 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, the picture of the future will see global societies emerge that function very differently from the current ones.
--In light of this, the book’s central argument accounts for the ‘human costs of human life continuing as it has for a generation’ and ‘what ongoing global warming spells for public health, for conflict, for politics and food production and pop culture, for urban life and mental health and the way we imagine our own futures as we begin to perceive, all around us, an acceleration of history and the diminishing of possibility that acceleration likely brings’ (pp.35-36).
--The book’s research originates from ‘interviews with dozens of experts’ and from reading hundreds of scholarly papers (p.35). Wallace-Wells highlights the book’s scientific research approach; however, he acknowledges that future events are unpredictable and science cannot predict the future. Instead, the science is ‘tentative, ever-evolving, and some of the predictions that follow will surely not come precisely to pass’ (p.35). In addition, the author declares that future scenarios of a ‘human-engineered’ climate analysed in the book focus on a temperature of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer. However, comments also discuss the consequences of higher temperatures (possibly 3 to 6 degrees Celsius).
--Still, Wallace-Wells remains somewhat 'optimistic' about the future while aware of and concerned about the growing ecological problems. For instance, carbon capture technology and geoengineering might assist us in cooling the planet. So, the author says, we should prepare for a ‘grim’ future, not an ‘apocalyptic’ one (p.31). Wallace-Wells comments that we should take responsibility for alleviating the causes and challenges of climate change. By doing so, we are helping ourselves and future generations (p.31).
--Wallace-Wells explains climate change as happening in a cascade-like fashion (also known as ‘systems crises’). It is something already underway. The author says the ‘cascades’ will occur at the global and regional levels but will be difficult to predict. The changes will not be ‘discrete’ (p. 20); ‘Instead they will produce a new kind of cascading violence, waterfalls and avalanches of devastation… in ways that build on each other and undermine our ability to respond, uprooting much of the landscape we have taken for granted, for centuries, as the stable foundation on which we walk’ (p. 21). Living outside of our historical environmental conditions, the ones we evolved in biologically, culturally and socially, is explored by Wallace-Wells: this ‘...reckoning is the subject of this book’ (p. 35).
--The book consists of four parts and 12 chapters. Part One (‘Cascades’) introduces Wallace-Wells’s main argument. Part Two (‘Elements of Chaos’) unpacks this argument and delves into several interrelated consequences linked with climate change. These short but well-argued topics are rising temperatures and heat deaths; agriculture, food production and hunger; rising sea levels and flooding; wildfires; increasing natural disasters; freshwater shortage and pollution problems; dying oceans; air pollution and the quality of life; economic demise; climate-induced conflicts; and systems crises.
--Part Three (‘The Climate Kaleidoscope’) looks at how our lives will have to radically change and adapt to the challenges caused by long-term fossil fuel burning. The topics cover how we make sense of our natural world and climate change through stories in movies, literature and journalism, the problems capitalists have with nature, the impact of technology, mass consumption, and ethics and climate change. Lastly, Part Four (‘The Anthropic Principle’) highlights how global societies and governments are better informed about addressing ecological problems should they wish to mobilise and implement policies accordingly.
--The single weakness of the book is the repetition in Part One. Nevertheless, Wallace-Wells’s strength is his message’s broad analysis. In summary, The Uninhabitable Earth (and Wallace-Wells’s recent observations) argue that Planet Earth is approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer today than before Britain’s 1760 to 1840 CE Industrial Revolution. However, most of the increase in global warming has occurred in the last 30 years (from about the 1990s onwards). Therefore, we live in a different natural climate from our not-so-distant ancestors. We inhabit a world different from the recent past. In short, carbon in the atmosphere has increased to the point that it has changed, or is changing, the Earth’s weather and ecology. We have a mental dilemma; our current mindset about nature is based on twentieth-century thinking. Yet, we need to evolve speedily to face the reality of climate change.
--Entrenched power structures and elites benefitting from the status quo and the establishment will resist the need for climate-induced social transformation. After all, climate change will disrupt cultural, intellectual, and ideological spheres. Despite this pushback, Wallace-Wells argues that the international community must address global warming promptly. Some elements of current socio-economic activities will remain to manage climate change, while society will rethink other socio-economic activities. At the same time, society will terminate some long-standing socio-economic activities. The author says ecological awareness is evident at the national government and grassroots levels. The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to make the global temperature no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (above pre-industrial levels) and below 2 degrees Celsius by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, we are entering a new climate history, and for the twenty-first century, climate change is the reality for all of humankind.… (plus d'informations)