ENGLISH 23
(A.K.A. CLIMATE CRISIS 101)
Deep Dive
“The uninhabitable (or at least unwelcoming) earth”
In all honesty, I thought this article would be like every other article addressing climate change that I had read before. I know that the Earth is warming up. I know that the rate at which it warms up is accelerating, and I know that if action isn’t taken now, the future of this planet and its inhabitants won’t look too bright. I thought that this article would just be a redundant embellishment of these three points. What I came to realize after getting only two and a half paragraphs deep into “The Uninhabitable Earth” was how incredibly pretentious my attitude towards the subject had been. There was so much more to learn. Rather than give a simple breakdown of the statistics, David Wallace-Wells challenges his readers to drop the past and present and instead project their thoughts into the future. He makes us realize that many parts of the world such as Bangladesh have next to no hope in surviving our current rate of climate change. In addition, Wallace-Wells firmly grounds his readers into the hard reality that we face: the world is on track to surpass the goals set by the Paris Agreement.
After reading the article “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells I felt more worried and scared rather than jumping up to take action. Although his article said nothing but the truth it left me feeling more discouraged than anything. As explained in the article the actions that need to be taken now are more drastic because the actions should have started years ago but instead the health of our world and atmosphere was put on the back burner.
I’ve come to understand that my mothers and grandparents’ generation set my generation up for failure due to not taking into consideration their anthropogenic climate impact. It is in the hands of my generation to save the planet earth… At the same time Wallace alarmist tone made me fear for the future of my kids I wish to have one day. However it fueled me with fear that motivated me to do something about it. Take for instance Ads and signs you see in regards to smoking tabaco, they defiantly use an alarmist tone to encourage people to stop consuming them. Perhaps setting up warning signs on gas pumps and flight tickets such as those seen of cigarette packs would motivate my generation and others to make a change for our earth.
One of the most eye-opening results of climate change that he mentions is heat death.
When I first started reading this week’s article it did not take me very long to realize that I had once been assigned to read the article in high school; however, I am now older and more in control of my daily actions and understanding the consequences of them. The section that I found the most intriguing was on Unbreathable Air. I feel as though many people are aware of the grave condition Earth is in, but rather accept it as a later problem for the future generations.
In David Wallace Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” he explains how climate issues are not being truthfully displayed. He argues if they were being shown in a more accurate manner, more people would suffer “climate anxiety” and act in “alarmist” ways. I was very shocked when he explained that 4 out of the 5 mass extinctions the Earth has suffered has been a result of greenhouse gases. Wells states that we are emitting more carbon than the most notorious extinction, almost ten times more to be precise. I wasn’t even aware that we were living through a mass extinction currently. With that said, it is even more frightening that individual changes we make to try to help really have no positive effects on the crisis.
If every high school student were to read Wallace-Wells’ work, I believe that the world would see rapid change. I especially found the section about climate plagues to be captivating.
To say the least, Wallace-Wells’s article is quite thought-provoking. If his goal with this article is to pull at our emotions and galvanize us into action, he certainly succeeds. The titles for each section of his article are clear examples: “Unbreathable Air,” “Perpetual War,” “Permanent Economic Collapse,” “Poisoned Oceans” to name a few. For many of us, “Unbreathable Air” and “Permanent Economic Collapse” allude to terrible situations that are hard to imagine, yet Wallace-Wells makes the argument that these events are not science fiction and are, in fact, in our (somewhat) near future.
I do believe David Wallace-Well’s article can feel alarmist, however, I believe that it is necessary to focus on such extreme effects of the climate crisis as the effects are consistently downplayed and even denied.
This article had me shocked. Wallace’s article gave out information that was somewhat ‘mind-blowing’ . some of his points were somewhat exaggerated but it provoked something to the public, meaning that it made the reader think about the situation that’s happening, the situation that was left for this generation to fix fast if we (the public) wanted our children to see.
I am especially amazed by the release of the massive amount of CO2 when the Greenland ice melted and the 500 years old bacteria being released when the ice and glacier are melted. The release of the bacteria makes me think about our current situation of COVID -19 and all the madness we have been experienced in these weeks.
Even though the situations he mentioned are when the temperature rises 2 to 4 celsius, we already reached the one celsius line and will soon break the standard of 1.5 celsius set by the Paris Agreement. Thus, what David Wallace-Wells mentioned might soon become one of our futures…
The perpetual war and economic collapse really makes the climate problems real to me. It pushes me to really think about these problems and I think it is totally possible that these scenarios might happen if we face the same climate situation.
I used to believe that I knew enough about the harmful effects of “global warming”, such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, shrinking land spaces, and more natural disasters, until I read Wallace’s article and realized how naive I was. “The Uninhabitable Earth” has completely turned my perception of global warming upside down…
How can you imagine that in a few decades nearly half of the world’s population will probably be living in hunger?
Before I read the article, I already witnessed some of the dire consequences of a warming climate, particularly the increase in destructive wildfires (which greatly degraded the air quality) and record-breaking heat waves. However, this article states other consequences of climate change that I have not thought much about, such as perpetual war and permanent economic collapse. The article states that even just half of a degree of warming would increase the likelihood of armed conflict by 10 to 20 percent, and on average, 1.2 percent of GDP is lost for every degree Celsius of warming.