Summary

“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” begins David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (3). In this opening section of the book “Cascades,” Wallace-Wells provides a précis of the five mass extinctions earth has experienced prior to the contemporary era, noting that “all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas” (3) – and suggests that, without serious efforts to curb human production of greenhouse gases, global climate change may yet lead to a sixth extinction. Wallace-Wells notes that “more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by humans’ burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades” (4), and that “we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance” (4).

Wallace-Wells provides a brief summary of his personal journey in researching global warming, sharing the...