I N C L U D E S A F F I L I A T E L I N K S
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Title: The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the FutureAuthor: David Wallace-Wells
Published: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 336
Rating: 4/5
Summary:
In this book, Wallace-Wells delves into the science of climate change and explores the different and devastating consequences and effects the warming of the Earth will have.
Review:
This is the most alarming nonfiction book I've ever read and it was almost a painful read. And yet, I think it's a really good book. It's informative and relatively easy to understand and it's alarming for a reason: the consequences of the rise of the planet's temperature are much worse than most of us think.
One thing I really like about this is that the book explores and explains all kinds of things that can and will happen when the temperature's rise; we've got the more obvious ones that a lot of us already know of, but then there are also things that at least I had never thought of before or knew about.
It's an unflinching book and it sugarcoats nothing and it feels surreal to be reading these chapters and take it in that this is, most likely, our future. I'm not going to lie; reading this has not made me feel very hopeful and I am left feeling entirely overwhelmed and I don't really know what to do about that. But I also think that's kind of the point of the book; I think a lot of us push these issues to the back of our minds and think that "it'll work itself out" which is entirely false.
There is a little part of me that wishes there was at least a glimmer of hope in this book though; I do feel like I've gotten all this information thrown at me and it kind of just makes me want to give up, not going to lie. Because the book so intensely focuses on the negative, it almost feels unreal. It's very difficult to take in all of it.
Some of what is in here is, of course, speculative, because it's hard to accurately predict what is going to happen, which the authors points out several times, and so sometimes the book feels like it wavers in its points a little bit, which is understandable. But it also shows us that the best case scenario is still absolutely horrific and I think that's important to be aware of.
You can read more about it on Goodreads
