Below is the introduction to "The Uninhabitable Earth". There is no need to write anything on this page. 

I. “Doomsday” 

It is, I promise, 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, even within

the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas— and

the cities they will drown— have so dominated the picture of

global warming and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate

panic that they have occluded our perception of other threats,

many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very

bad, but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. 

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of

humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become

close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable,

as soon as the end of this century. 

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable

to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days sixty

and seventy degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole,

melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed

vault— a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to

ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which

appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten

years after being built. [end of p. 271]. 

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been

secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news.

Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate

scientists because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed

permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion

tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released,

that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is thirty- four times

as powerful a greenhouse- gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on

the timescale of two decades, it is eighty- six times as powerful.

In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as

much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the

planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its

warming power eighty- six times over.

Maybe you know that already— there are alarming stories in

the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data showed the globe warming since 1998 more

than twice as fast as scientists had thought (in fact, the underlying story was considerably less alarming than the headlines). Or

the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice

shelf grew eleven miles in six days then kept going; the break now

has just three miles to go— by the time you read this, it may

already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea

one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as

“calving.”

But no matter how well informed you are, you are surely not

alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone

apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet

when it comes to contemplating real- world warming dangers, we

suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for [end of p. 272] that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which

the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence”

in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations

so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the

threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group

of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an

opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem

worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made

scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings;

the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we

are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our

uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi

Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as

though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million)

of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is

very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising

from fear is a form of denial, too. 

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science

itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and

exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields

and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate

change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will

happen— that will be determined in large part by the much- less certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our

best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will

be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way

will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the

present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule. [end of p. 273].

The present tense of climate change— the destruction we’ve

already baked into our future— is horrifying enough. Most people

talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving;

most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within

the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.

Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold

of  catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed

upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the

Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate

research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of

warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the

present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper

end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees— and

the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the

albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed

sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps

heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract

carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the history of the planet shows that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen

years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer,

Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were

hundreds of feet higher. 

The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one

we are living through now, each so complete a slate- wiping of the

evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary

clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best

analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into.

Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high- school

textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In [end of p. 274] fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious

was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the

planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered

the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent

of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the

atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at

least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen

Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species

needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive and

what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a

Mars habitat in forty to one hundred years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as

you or I. But the many sober- minded scientists I interviewed over

the past several months— the most credentialed and tenured in

the field, few of them inclined to alarmism, and many advisers

to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism— have

quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible

program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate

disaster. 

Over the past few decades, the term “Anthropocene” has

climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination— a name given to the geologic era we live in now and a

way to signal that it is a new era, defined on the wall chart of deep

history by human intervention. One problem with the term is that

it implies a conquest of nature (and even echoes the biblical

“dominion”). And however sanguine you might be about the

proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which

we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance

and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with

us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what

Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who

coined the term “global warming,” means when he calls the planet [end of p. 275] an “angry beast.” You could also go with “war machine.” Each day

we arm it more. [p. 276].