The hardest book I have read: The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming. Climate change is a ‘hyperobject’, ‘a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.’ We are burning more carbon than ever before when we should be slowing down. What if climate change happens faster than current models predict? Anyone notice that lakes and rivers are disappearing across continents? We assume that they will be coming back, amongst other assumptions. I pulled a few markings from the book, there are many more.
How much damage has been done in the last 30 years:
In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.
The problem of plastic:
And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
Expecting linear growth to continue:
Generations being as long as they are and historical memory as short, the West’s several centuries of relative reliable and expanding prosperity have endowed economic growth with the reassuring aura of permanence: we expect it, on some continents, at least, and rage against our leaders and elites when it does not come.
Climate change changes everything:
Nature is both over, as in ‘past.’ and all around us, indeed overwhelming us and punishing us–this is the major lesson of climate change, which it teaches us almost daily. And if global warming continues on anything like its present track, it will come to shape everything we do on the planet, from agriculture to human migration to business and mental health, transforming not just our relationship to nature but to politics and to history, and proving a knowledge system as total as ‘modernity.’
Fake news and mistrust:
That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies.
The scope of change and sacrifice required:
The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet.
Our responsibility towards future generations:
The possibility that our grandchildren could be living forever among the ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world seems almost inconceivable from the vantage of the present day, so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement.
How much time do we have:
… the world has at most three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.
Humans will go extinct before finding other civilizations and saving itself:
The natural lifespan of a civilization may only be several thousand years long, and the lifespan of an industrial civilization conceivably only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and then burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find on another.