The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

This is a must read book on climate change.

Reading this book honestly made me feel considerably more anxious about the state of our earth. However, he's right—the reality is that the situation is absolutely dire, and if we don't do anything about it soon then we're all f*cked.

I do have a couple of criticisms about the book: 1) I wish it was written in more straightforward language (yes the writing was beautiful but he could've said the same thing in less words), 2) some parts felt a little repetitive.

Overall, great book though. Honestly at this point everyone should be aware of the state we are in, and thus I'd highly recommend this to anyone and everyone.

This is a must read book on climate change.

Reading this book honestly made me feel considerably more anxious about the state of our earth. However, he's right—the reality is that the situation is absolutely dire, and if we don't do anything about it soon then we're all f*cked.

I do have a couple of criticisms about the book: 1) I wish it was written in more straightforward language (yes the writing was beautiful but he could've said the same thing in less words), 2) some parts felt a little repetitive.

Overall, great book though. Honestly at this point everyone should be aware of the state we are in, and thus I'd highly recommend this to anyone and everyone.

I didn't quite finish this before the audiobook zipped back to the library but I got close enough – and the reason I didn't finish before the due date is because this book is a slog. The author uses the phrase “which is to say” approximately a thousand times, is deeply enamored with adverbs, and writes in a dense and somewhat confusing way, vascillating between describing a catastrophic effect of climate change as a foregone conclusion and then writing something like “but actually, scientists don't know how this will play out and there are several things that might stop it.” (I mean, just admit that we don't know exactly what might happen up front?)

It's entirely possible that I had trouble engaging with this book because it's so very bleak. For the first couple hours I did feel weirdly empowered by getting a vision of what a heavily climate-change-affected world might look like – and hope because, in the introduction, the author notes that he decided to become a parent despite the bleak outlooks. Wallace-Wells does do a good job of describing scientific processes in laymen's terms (things like the Albedo effect and carbon capture). I do feel like I received a broad survey of the potential effects of climate change which I did not previously have appreciation for, though the sheer volume of information (and perhaps the audiobook format) made it difficult to hold onto the information. That said, the most concrete conclusion I got from this book was that we really have no damn clue what climate change will wreak upon us, except that it's probably going to be pretty damn bad. And that at this point, cutting emissions will not on its own be enough to change the course – that now, we do actually need to look at technology solutions in addition to drastic changes to our infrastructure and ways of life.