The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 4,526 ratings

Price: 15.75

Last update: 02-25-2025


About this item

Number-one New York Times best seller "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.

"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)

Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth

"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)


Top reviews from the United States

  • Thomas Wikman
    5.0 out of 5 stars What! Me worry?
    Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2020
    Drought, heat waves, freshwater scarcity, wildfires, sea level rise, extreme weather, floods, disease, changing eco-zones, crop yield decline, hunger, ocean acidification, dead zones in the ocean, mass extinction (of species), changes to oceanic and atmospheric circulation systems, plagues emerging from thawing tundra and melting ice, expanding tropics and expanding tropical diseases, economic collapse, climate refugees, violent conflicts rooted in climate change, the list of unfortunate consequences of climate change is long. Climate change isn’t just about polar bears and hurricanes, and it has already begun.

    We have already left behind the narrow window (Goldilocks range) of environmental conditions and temperatures that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place. Island countries are disappearing, Bangladesh is likely to be largely submerged mid century resulting in tens of millions of refugees, the Yemen, Sudan, and Syrian conflicts were preceded by draughts caused by or made much worse by climate change. It will be much worse at 2 degrees Celsius, and much worse than that at 2.5 degrees Celsius, and even worse at 3 degrees Celsius, etc.

    Climate change may not be the direct cause of all of these phenomena, but it is exacerbating them, or as the military calls it, it is a threat multiplier. This is not a book about the science of warming; it is about what it means to the way we live on this planet. The author notes that climate change doesn’t end in 2100 even though most projections do. He says that what follows 2100 is likely the century of hell. I should say that even though the book is not about the climate science, what he describes is based on the science and there are several hundred notes and references at the end of the book organized by page.

    It is a frightening and perhaps a depressing book, but it doesn’t predict the end of the world, it predicts a world that is much worse and partially unlivable, but how bad it gets depends on what we do today. What is missing is political will. The author does not discuss solutions much, but he seems to support a carbon tax, but I believe his chief intention is help his readers understand the seriousness of the situation as well as pointing out wrong attitudes. Believing we are all going to die in 10 years is not only inaccurate but fosters despondency and inaction. Denial or the downplaying of the problem is, of course, not helpful either. He states that personal choices, such as not eating meat, or driving less, are helpful but not enough. He stresses that political solutions are crucial. Personally, I favor a carbon fee and dividend approach, putting a price on carbon at the source and then returning the proceeds to households. It is very effective in reducing carbon emissions while not hurting the economy and helping the poor.

    He said some things that may be controversial among some environmentalists but that I agree with. Nuclear Power is not as dangerous as it has been made out to be and it is a carbon free source. GMOs could help us fight hunger as the effects on agriculture from climate change set in. Some things I don’t agree with. He is dismissing Nick Boström’s concern about Artificial Intelligence gone wrong a little too quickly. As someone with a background in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics I have to say that this is a real concern. I also think that he is not characterizing neoliberalism and capitalism correctly, well it depends on what you mean. Denying the existence of economic externalities is plain stupid but free markets and free trade that includes regulations or price mechanisms to account for externalities such as climate change can be part of the solution rather than a cause of it.

    In summary; the beginning of the book, with all the dark projections was a little bit heavy. However, overall, I found this to be a well written, interesting and engaging book that in the end was a pleasure to read. I learned something from it.
  • Olive Avocados
    5.0 out of 5 stars Most Important Book of our Time
    Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2024
    I can't say enough great things about this important book. It's far and away the best book on climate change and its consequences that I have read. Clear, informative, well-researched and truly a riveting page-turner. I couldn't put it down, learned so much from it and have given several copies as gifts. Read this book and you will probably stop what you're doing and become an ardent environmental activist, if you are not already. It shows with compelling evidence and rich detailed narrative that the climate apocalypse is well underway, the disasters we keep hearing about are here now, not sometime in the future, changes are already happening and lives and communities are being lost and forever changed. Wide swaths of Earth are becoming uninhabitable and unfarmable. The oceans are dying. Species are rapidly going extinct and the continued existence of humanity is threatened. I refer back to this book again and again. I keep it at arm's length and I'm guessing many others do too. I even bought a Kindle copy too so I can find references and topics quickly by searching. Most people have heard of climate change but have no idea what's really going on.
  • Todd Myers
    4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging Apocalyptic Literature with a Dash of Pragmatic Hope
    Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2020
    As jeremiad, David Wallace-Wells Uninhabitable Earth does a fine job of covering a litany of threats with which global warming threatens us. Presenting a range of scientific studies to show us numerous worst-case scenarios, the author captures the reader's attention. Horrible weather, massive migration, economic collapse, shrinking food supplies, increasing conflict, spreading disease paint a dark future for the species. If all he sees comes to pass, our failure to address climate change is truly criminal.

    Is it possible that somebody can read science the way Hal Lindsey reads the Bible? David Wallace-Wells apocalypse may be such a work. Seventeen scientists at Climate Feedback conclude that Wallace-Wells book weighs the most catastrophic scenarios about climate change too heavily in his narrative. The good news if these scientists are correct is that we are unlikely to have an uninhabitable earth in the immediate future. The bad news is global warming is happening, and it poses some significant problems even if those problems are not apocalyptic for those living in the United States.

    It is prudent to try to manage greenhouse gas emissions to reduce global warming given the current temperature trajectories. Climate skeptics are probably wrong given the consensus of mainstream scientists. It is still possible they are right, but if 90% of people believe global warming is happening and sea levels will rise by an amount to flood your city, it would be prudent to build a flood management system. For a country like Bangladesh, climate change may displace 30 million people. If we use the statistical probability of this happening as 90%, the average displacement of people will be 27 million people. This problem is a huge problem and deserves considerable resources to try to manage harms of such great magnitude. The government of Indonesia is moving the capital of its country from Jakarta, already prone to flooding, to Borneo. Big problems require big solutions.

    As can be seen, climate change poses some substantial problems requiring substantial resources to mitigate the harms that it portends. The problem of Wallace-Wells' work is it is too likely to contribute to alarm and despair as opposed to thoughtful management of a range of problems that increasing temperatures will create. The greatest fear I had after reading his work is the potential of his work to empower some of the extreme responses that he so nicely chronicles in his book. Does a dark picture of the planet's future inspire eco-terrorists? Could it produce mono-maniacal political movements that lack the flexibility to deal with a range of governance issues that impact the quality of people's lives? Will alarmism empower radical policy actions that will negatively impact human welfare?

    Wallace-Wells has considered some of these negative possibilities, and he wants us to hopefully embrace the challenge of environmental stewardship. One of my favorite parts of the book is where he finds himself citing the musings of scientists who speculate the reason that we have not detected intelligent life in other parts of the universe is that such life may have been extinguished by the industrialized civilizations that they have created. This kind of grand cosmic pessimism is countered by the possibility that advanced civilizations have become so efficient at harnessing their energy that they emit no heat signals that we might be able to detect. These ending musings help to place Wallace-Wells' work in context. He is a reasonably accomplished writer who helps us to see a particularly unattractive vision of our future. Such literature is useful if it does not paralyze people from thoughtful engagement with the world and its problems and empowers them to improve the human condition at the margins.

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