“Even though we now have a decent picture of the planet's climatological past, never in the earth's entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed- by one estimate, around ten times faster than at any point in the last 66 million years.”
David Wallace-Wells examines the current issue of global warming in terms of its existing effects and those to come in the near future. He highlights the science behind the heat waves, rampant fires, tornadoes, and rising sea levels from the melting ice. Brought on by the increasing rate of warming than ever before, while high temperatures have been recorded in the past the dynamics were different. Specifically, the extreme carbon emissions in the modern climate are far more extensive and hike every day as the industrial economy soars.
“A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.”
Wallace-Wells takes a unique route in addressing the issue of climate change, unlike most writers and environmentalists. He describes the worst-case scenario and offers a pessimistic outlook on the damage already done to the earth. Nonetheless, the information is not to nurture a cynical mindset but to critique the human responses. The biggest villain to the climate at this point is not the damage already done but the skeptics and those denying. However, the problem further escalates when the rest of the public becomes passive and indifferent to the issue.
“That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies. That climate change touches each of these biases is not a curiosity, or a coincidence, or an anomaly. It is a mark of just how big it is, and how much about human life it touches—which is to say, nearly everything.”
Wallace-Wells does not pull any punches when addressing the irreversible damage of global warming and its scope. He states that it is unfortunate that the support for climate change is seen as a personal moral issue or rather a subjective experience. When in fact it is something that affects and will affect all of us in every way, shape, or form. The major conflict in geopolitics is the disparity in opinions regarding global warming when in actuality the issue levels of all of us. Climate change is mounting at a time when humanity has lost faith in the same structures that are needed to combat it. Therefore, global warming is a kind of reality check for the public, governments, and experts.
