“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” So begins journalist David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, a book about climate change that reminds you, chapter after chapter, that even if you think you know how bad things are, and even if you think you know how much worse they’re going to get, you probably have no fucking idea. Humanity, writes Wallace-Wells, is facing a crisis that is literally existential—one “in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of 25 Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome puts us on the brink of extinction.”
In the past decade, awareness of climate change has increasingly shaped our art—from Mad Max: Fury Road to First Reformed to Game of Thrones, a show that’s about to conclude its years-long story about humanity’s stubborn refusal to prepare for the end of the world. (As Tyrion puts it, “Peoples’ minds aren’t made for problems that large.”) Even works created when we were gleefully unaware of climate change have newfound relevance: In 1939, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath followed the unwanted, sweat-soaked refugees of a drought-strangled Dust Bowl; 80 years later, it reads less like history and more like prophecy.
