EARTH'S CLIMATE FUTURE.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, David
• Position: FEATURES - David Wallace-Wells talks about his book, "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming" - Interview

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): You're best known for your writing about the future of the climate, both at New York Magazine and in your book The Uninhabitable Earth. Can you explain for our readers what questions you set out to answer when you wrote these?

David Wallace-Wells (DWW): Well, the first big piece that I wrote, published in 2017, was really meant to answer the question "How bad can it get?" Most climate story-telling from scientists, advocates, and journalists focused on the optimistic end of the spectrum of possibility. As a result, it seemed to me that the public simply didn't understand the gravity of the threat we were facing.

As I understand it, we hold three big delusions. The first is about the speed of change. I think most people understand climate change to be a very slow process, that it is up to us to clean up the mess left behind by our grandparents so that our grandchildren won't have to deal with it. But half of all the emissions that have ever been produced from burning fossil fuels have come in the last thirty years, and we are now already beginning to see the effects of climate change in extreme weather, so this is happening currently.

The second big delusion is about the scope of change. I had heard a lot about Arctic ice melt and sea levels rise, but the deeper I got into the research, the more I understood that that was just one of many problems that would arise from climate change. There are economic impacts, agricultural impacts, effects on cognitive performance, and public health issues. Just about everywhere I looked in the modern world, I saw some kind of destructive impact about to unfold, and that meant we couldn't consider the climate crisis as a single issue among many. It is really the theater in which all of our lives were being conducted, and which all of our lives will be affected by as it unfolds.

The third big delusion is about the severity of change. It is rare to find coverage of warming scenarios north of two degrees Celsius. Scientists called that level catastrophic, island nations of the world called it genocide, but given where we are now, it's a best-case scenario. What I set out to do was to explore what it would mean to end up at three or four degrees. I realized that this is not a story that could be confined to climate science. It would shake out through our politics and our geopolitics, our culture, our relationship to capitalism, our sense of our place in nature and place in history. Climate change is going to be the defining meta-narrative of the entire twenty-first century.

JIA: Briefly, what will life be like if we fail to mitigate global warming?

DWW: The best-case scenario is that we limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius this century. In this scenario, the UN expects that damages from sea level rise and storms would multiply by a hundred. Many cities in South Asia and the Middle East would become so hot during summer that regular heat waves would make it impossible to walk around outside without...