The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth explains how humanity’s complacency and negligence have put this world on a course to soon be unlivable unless we each do our small part to improve how we care for this beautiful planet we live on.

There was an epic meeting of the world leaders in Paris about 4 years ago. These leaders working towards an agreement were trying to set new goals to tackle the mounting threat of climate change. Finally, politicians are recognizing the serious implications and urgency that can occur from this situation.

From these talks stemmed the objective of maintaining global average temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels. This figure was chosen because it is the temperature threshold at which disaster begins. The problem is that we are going to exceed this 2-degree threshold, and by a good measure.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report in 2018. The data indicates that even if the world governments take aggressive actions now, by enacting all proposed policies agreed to in the Paris talks, we will still continue to see global temperatures rise in excess of 3.2 degrees before warning halts. This is not good news.

What this means is that the world’s ice sheets will still collapse in our lifetime. This would lead to the eventual flooding of hundreds of cities, including Miami, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Southern Europe would experience permanent drought and wildfires in the U.S would increase 600 percent. And this is the optimistic scenario.

The best-known consequence of climate change is melting polar ice caps. This will cause a rise in sea levels. Without curbing our emissions output this can translate into ocean rises between 1.2 and 2.4 meters within the next century. To give you some idea of the impact of this, the city of Bangladesh, which has a population of 164 million people would be completely submerged. Other locations that would suffer a similar catastrophe, outside of all of the world’s most beautiful beaches, are Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, California’s Silicon Valley area, and Washington, D.C. At the current rate we are going, the Indonesian megacity, Jakarta will be entirely underwater by the year 2050. Dare we look further down the road? If we peak ahead as far as 2100, projections show things will become increasingly worse if we fail to reduce emissions now. The result will be oceans rising up to 6 meters higher in the coming centuries. Imagine the disappearance of ports, energy plants, military bases, farmlands along with major cities. Asia would experience the most severe devastation with cities like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Kolkata underwater. It’s estimated that the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons…