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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Uninhabitable Earth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cascades, Systems Crises, and Interconnectedness
Human Responsibility and the Natural World
Optimism and Action vs. Despair and Nihilism
The Effects of Climate Change on Humanity
Summary
Analysis
Humans are “heat engines”—we must continually cool off to survive. As degrees of warming increase, this will become more and more difficult. At five degrees, most of the globe could become unsurviveable, and even at two or three, just stepping outside in parts of India and the Middle East could be lethal. Since 1980, dangerous heat waves around the world have increased fiftyfold. Soon, just working outside during the summertime will be unhealthy for people in many parts of the globe.
By beginning with an examination of heat, Wallace-Wells gets at the heart of climate crisis’s most threatening manifestation: temperatures that rise steadily with no end in sight. Our planet is already observably warmer than it has been in the past—but the many-armed machine of climate change threatens to compound these upticks in temperature exponentially.
Themes
Already, deadly heat waves are responsible for thousands of deaths each year: in 2010, 55,000 Russians died in a heat wave, and in one period during 2016, temperatures in Iraq only dipped below 100 at nighttime. Air conditioners burn nearly three-quarters of a million barrels of oil each day in Saudi Arabia during the summer—but air conditioning is not a permanent solution to the increasing number of heat waves and record-breaking single-day temperature spikes each year.
This passage shows that humanity can come up with helpful short-term solutions to rising temperatures—but running air conditioners on full blast throughout the hottest regions of the world is tantamount to putting a Band-Aid on a giant wound. Not only does air conditioning escalate emissions even further, but air conditioners are also only available in well-off, stable parts of the world to those who can afford them. A bigger solution to these skyrocketing temperatures is urgently needed.
Themes
It is unclear how much hotter it will get as we leave behind the “narrow Goldilocks range” of conditions hospitable to human life. The lack of clarity as to what’s coming is “eerie,” but it’s entirely dependent on what humans choose to do in the years to come. Even though global warming has been recognized as a problem for three-quarters of a century, there have been no meaningful changes to everyday life around the globe—if anything, market forces and politics have made things even worse. Carbon emissions continue to grow each year, and while 195 countries have signed the Paris treaty, many of those countries’ commitments are merely “rhetorical,” as in the case of China, whose emissions continue to grow each quarter.
This passage makes clear the fact that temperatures are rising because humans are doing nothing. The half-measures, empty gestures, and far-off plans for the future aren’t doing anything to stop the cyclical feedback loops in which people, seeking short-term solutions to rising temperatures, actually release more carbon and pollution into the atmosphere, thus warming the planet even faster and more quickly.
Themes
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Because of the increase in warming, the UN’s National Climate Assessment now suggests that negative emissions—technologies that suck carbon out of the air by machinery or by forest expansion—are needed in order to stay below an increase of two degrees. But these technologies aren’t entirely realistic, and there’s no time to wait for them to become real: humanity is behind, and even a change in emissions may yet trigger four degrees of warming by 2100.
Wallace-Wells stresses that just halting emissions is no longer enough—we need to actively start finding ways to pull pollution from the air. Every year wasted as the globe pursues difficult-to-enforce treaties and gradualist policies represents another part of a degree of warming.
Themes
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The world is urbanizing, and fast—but hundreds of millions of people living in cities means more heat trapped in tall buildings and cement sidewalks, released into the atmosphere in the creation of devastating “heat island” effects. Many millions who’ve migrated to cities in the last decades may find themselves forced out by melting roads and buckling infrastructure—already, 354 major cities have average maximum summer temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. Already, over a billion people worldwide are at risk for heat stress, and in spite of heat stress and heat stroke’s reputations as “pathetic” ailments, being cooked alive by heat death is one of the cruelest and most painful ways to die.
There are many ways in which our planet is ill-equipped to handle such a rapid rise in temperature. It makes sense, then, that human-engineered things like buildings, roads, and transportation structures aren’t equipped to deal with warming, either. There are many parts of the world where humans will soon be more vulnerable than ever to the terrifying effects of direct heat—billions of lives can be saved, but humanity has to act now.
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