The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Unabridged)
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4.4 • 139 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
With a new afterword
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.
An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.
Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth
“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist
“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post
“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Customer Reviews
Very insightful
This book is well-organized and informative. I would recommend it to anyone looking to inform themselves on the threat of climate change.
Four stars because the audio quality is suboptimal. It’s not a dealbreaker.
The slow boil we can’t ignore!
I’ve read The Uninhabitable Earth three times over the last few years, and each time it hits home harder for me. Wallace-Wells makes one thing absolutely clear: climate change isn’t a distant threat—it’s happening right now, right under our noses, and we’re barely noticing it.
He frames humanity as the classic frog in the slowly boiling pot. The temperature rises by fractions, storms shift slightly, fires burn a bit longer—and because the changes feel gradual, we stay in the water. His point is unmistakable: by the time it feels “too hot,” it’s already too late to get out.
Part I, “Cascades,” is where the book really lands its punch and sets the stage. Wallace-Wells lays out the compounding, interconnected risks—heat amplifying drought, drought fueling fires, fires choking cities, melting ice reshaping oceans. None of these threats act alone; they trigger one another. Even the low-end scenarios are uncomfortable, and the high-end projections—grounded in current scientific data—are enough to stop you mid-page. He makes it clear that those extreme outcomes are entirely possible, even if they aren’t the most likely, and that should never be an excuse for complacency.
Reading this book three times wasn’t repetition—it was reinforcement. Wallace-Wells crystallizes the reality that climate change is already reshaping the world, piece by piece, quietly and relentlessly. And unless we act before the boil, we won’t get a chance to climb out.
An excellent read for anyone trying to make sense of what’s unfolding in this crazy world we live in—and will continue to inhabit for the next few millennia.
Lacks a coherent perspective
While there’s quite a few illuminating and useful data points here, there’s a real lack of any organizing principle to the book. Instead it more seems like someone skimming through, and thinking out loud about, news clippings and synopses of scientific papers and other books, at random.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that it’s tough to know what the audience of this book is intended to be. If you’re caught up on the basics of the climate crisis, it often tediously belabors the obvious. And if you’re not already caught up, The endless spewing out of the minutia of facts and figures and names and reports makes it unlikely you’ll come away with a coherent understanding of the situation.
Combine that with the fact that the material is now at least six years out of date and it’s not a book I could really recommend.