Review - The Uninhabitable Earth 🔥🌏🔥

What Wallace-Wells puts down in this non-fiction story about our climate future properly disturbed me. While reading it, and for a little while after finishing it, I was noticeably a little more stressed, pessimistic, and tense. Only a little, but it’s really the only book besides Understanding Power that’s produced any sort of similar reaction in me.

In The Guardian’s review subheading is:

Enough to induce a panic attack … a brutal portrait of climate change and our future lives on Earth.

And the review begins, “You already know it’s bad. … But do you truly understand the scale of the tribulations we face?”.

That above about sums up what this book offers.

I am 28, so was still a teenager when the climate change issue really blew up in my country, around the time the Labor government started working towards a Carbon tax. Intellectually, I recognised that climate change was really fucking bad, but unlike now, I didn’t feel it. I was too young, optimistic, and unburdened by worldly concerns. Thanks in part to growing up, and reading books like this one, I’ve been cured of my ignorant, naive “it’ll be fine, pass me another sausage sizzle” disposition towards this crisis.

Sensible people have for years talked of enacting a “wartime effort” to fight climate change but it sometimes looks like people would rather fight in an actual war than take this crisis seriously. So now those that look at our climate future clear-eyed are consigned to waiting on the edge and looking at a situation that’s “quite bad, but will get worse”.

jusqu’ici tout va bie… jusqu’ici tout va bien… jusqu’ici tout va bien…

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