Review: Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know

"It is, I promise, worse than you think."

These are the words that David Wallace-Wells used to begin his epic New York Magazine article, The Uninhabitable Earth. In it he paints a picture: vast swaths of the Earth are heated to become inhabitable. Enormous cyclones and snowstorms bury civilization in seas of water. The soil dries up, chokes, and blows away. Mass food riots lead to millions of refugees, and diseases spread up and across the world.

"The basic resources that we rely upon. All of them are adversely impacted by climate change and with a growing global population. So you’ve got more competition over fewer resources among a growing global population. It’s a recipe for a conflict nightmare" David quotes Mike Mann, the bannermen held up as anti-alarmist by climate moderates for quibbling with a single satellite statistic.

In my mailbox was Wallace-Well's first and foremost citation, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know. I ordered it pretty much immediately. Wallace-Wells was simply being too poetic, too devasting to simply take him at his word. I knew climate change would be bad. But that bad, this fast? That seemed impossible!

But he literally just cribbed his essay from Climate Change's chapter 3.

Romm walks you through the science. Nearly every line is cited as we go from the beginning logic, "Carbon dioxide makes things warm up" to "These are the list of extreme weather events attributable to climate change" to "Vast destruction will rain down upon us". This overall structure is broken down into units of questions. This turns the book, in essence, into a 280 page FAQ. However, it turns out that it is the most readable FAQ I've ever seen. It became a page-turner as it builds out a sketch of what we can expect from global warming.

When I reviewed Klein's, "This Changes Everything", I pointed out that there was an inexorable logic to climate change:

Estimates of the number of tons of carbon that we can safely burn before we have to stop range from 250 gigatons of Carbon to 500 gigatons of carbon (the conservative answer that Klein quotes). The number of gigatons that we know about. The number of gigatons that we as a civilization have the power to burn in our lifetime? 2,000 gigatons.


Joseph Romm brought to my attention similarly inexorable mathematics: in order to stay below the "safe" 2-degree threshold, we have to stay under 450 ppm. We are currently raising the atmospheric content at a rate of 2ppm/year. We're at ~410 ppm. You ought to be able to do that math for yourself.

Wallace-Wells says, "Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope." He is right. You can reduce the chemistry to numbers or you can reduce the lives of the people endangered to numbers, but its scale is unfathomable.

But Romm's book helps make it a bit less unfathomable.