The Uninhabitable Earth Life After Warming
It is worse—much worse—than you think. The supposed slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all. It arrives bundled with a whole anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding at a safe distance; that it concerns only rising seas and distant coastlines, rather than an all-encompassing crisis that touches every place and transforms every form of life; that it is a problem of the “natural” world, not the human one. We tell ourselves that these two realms are separate, that we live somehow outside of nature, or at least insulated from it—when in fact we exist fully within it, and are increasingly overwhelmed by it.
We cling, too, to the belief that wealth can shield us from the ravages of warming, that the continued burning of fossil fuels is a necessary price for economic growth, and that growth itself—along with the technologies it yields—will eventually allow us to engineer our way out of disaster. We imagine that history offers precedents, that humanity has faced threats of comparable scale and survived, and that this experience should give us confidence now. None of this is true.
Consider, first, the speed of change. The Earth has already endured five mass extinctions before the one now unfolding, each so severe that it effectively reset the evolutionary record. Life expanded and collapsed in cycles, like a lung inhaling and exhaling across deep time: 86 percent of all species lost 450 million years ago; 75 percent seventy million years later; 96 percent after another 125 million years; 80 percent fifty million years after that; and 75 percent again 135 million years later.
Many of us were taught that these extinctions were caused by asteroid impacts. In reality, all but the one that wiped out the dinosaurs were driven by climate change triggered by greenhouse gases. The most catastrophic occurred around 250 million years ago. It began with carbon dioxide warming the planet by about five degrees Celsius. That warming then triggered the release of methane—an even more potent greenhouse gas—accelerating the process until nearly all life on Earth was extinguished.
What makes the present moment especially alarming is not just that we are altering the climate, but how quickly we are doing it. Today, humanity is adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate far exceeding those ancient events—by most estimates, at least ten times faster. In fact, the current pace of change is roughly one hundred times faster than at any other point in the geological record.
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