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Part II, Chapter 2: Hunger
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
The sea is destined to “become a killer.” Four to eight feet of sea-level rise is expected by the end of the century. But humanity has convinced itself that a rise in sea level will be the worst ravage of climate disaster. Because of this, resources are so laser-focused on combating sea level rise that extreme weather events, diseases, and other effects get overlooked.
Wallace-Wells takes issue with how so much of our present discourse around climate change is steered by concern over sea-level rise. In many ways, it’s one of the most potent “elements of chaos”—higher seas threaten to erase entire cities. But before those cities are erased, there will be a slow and painful erosion of resources, an increase in tropical disease, and a sharp uptick in refugees who will need to be resettled in other still-inhospitable parts of the globe.
Themes
Whole cultures will be swallowed by the sea: the Maldives and the Marshall Islands, most of Bangladesh, Miami Beach, and the White House will all be condemned to an Atlantis-like fate, displacing hundreds of millions of climate refugees. By 2045, as many as 311,000 homes in the United States are at risk of chronic inundation; by 2100, the number expands to 2.4 million properties and domiciles. And the flooding won’t stop then: seas will continue rising for thousands and thousands of years.
By laying out the numbers-driven data about what, materially, we stand to lose should the sea levels continue rising at their current rates, David Wallace-Wells highlights just how profoundly humanity is at the mercy of the very catastrophes it’s engineered. The seas will keep rising until the ice caps stop melting—which, because humanity refuses to stop creating new carbon emissions, may continue for a very long time.
Themes
Coasts aren’t all that will be affected—inland flooding, which has affected 2.3 billion people around the globe just since 1995, will continue to devastate the planet as rainfall increases. At just 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, flood damages increase worldwide by between 160 and 240 percent. Even with a huge reduction in emissions, these predictions are all but guaranteed to come to pass.
People think of coastal regions—like Miami, Bangladesh, or New York City—as the places that will suffer the worst effects of sea-level rise. But flooding is an inland problem, too, and inland regions can be even more poorly prepared to combat flooding than regions that regularly contend with storm surges, typhoons, and more.
Themes
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Already, communities around the globe are struggling to adapt to the prospect of new coastlines. The melt rate of the Antarctic ice sheet tripled between 2008 and 2018—each year, the sheet loses over 200 billion tons of ice, meaning sea levels could rise several meters within just 50 years. All climate science is ruled by uncertainty, but sea-level rise is literally unprecedented: never before has the breaking-up of ice on such a scale been seen.
The sea-level rise we’re witnessing isn’t just steady—it’s in fact exponential. This paragraph is yet another example of how the effects of climate change build up and cascade down. Warmer temperatures mean that the ice melts even faster, contributing to levels of rising waters that are difficult to accurately predict.
Themes
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The melting of the Arctic threatens to trigger many more cascades of climate chaos. As ice melts, up to 1.8 trillion tons of carbon will be released from the ice in the form of methane gas, which is even more powerful than carbon dioxide. This flips the ice sheets and the permafrost in Canada, Russia, and other northern regions from carbon sinks—which absorb atmospheric carbon—to carbon sources. By 2100, the Arctic may have released 100 billion tons of carbon—half of all the carbon produced by humanity since the dawn of industrialization. Losing the “albedo effect,” in which white swaths of ice reflect sunlight back into space rather than absorbing it, also threatens to suck more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Through the potent example of ice sheets, Wallace-Wells illustrates how one climate cascade doesn’t just represent a single threat. Not only are ice sheets contributing to sea-level rise, but the melting of the ice caps creates many other problems. All of these things are interconnected—and each one hastens the pace at which our planet is warming and growing more and more inhospitable.
Themes
Some climatologists and ocean chemists predict 50 to 80 meters of sea rise at three degrees of warming—Montreal, London, New York City, Saint Petersburg, and Mumbai would be erased from the map at that level. Though this is the “ceiling” of sea-level rise, the Earth will get there eventually—it’s just a matter of when.
Even the experts are unclear on just how high the seas will rise, as it’s difficult to predict something that’s affected by so many disparate cascades. What is clear is that without immediate action, the amount of land we stand to lose to sea-level rise—and the reflective ice that stands to melt—will forever change the face of our planet.
Themes
