DO YOU WANT A SCARY GLIMPSE INTO OUR FUTURE?

DO YOU WANT A SCARY GLIMPSE INTO OUR FUTURE?

Every year millions of books are written, published, and sold around the world. Most of them deliver little impact and do not live long in the memory of the readers. I have just finished reading a book that I must recommend. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells is a very disturbing book, but very informative and well researched. And well worth reading!

Over the years there are four related books that have made strong impressions on me. Two were futuristic and two captured the current reality of the time in which they were written. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, with text and photos, helped elevate and expose the issue of global warming to the general public. One of my favourite authors, Thomas Friedman, wrote The World is Flat, wherein he described the impact of the use of personal computers by individuals in a globalized world and thus placing individuals on the same plane as corporations, in terms of conducting global business.

The two futuristic books are Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Wallace-Wells’ book above. Silent Spring documented the adverse environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides and was very prophetic. The Uninhabitable Earth extends the message of Gore’s book to the level of terrifying.

Wallace-Wells examines the effects of climate change and the accompanying environmental and social problems that have emerged in a warming world over the past twenty years. He then extrapolates such issues as hotter temperatures, more frequent wildfires, reduced farm lands, increased global hunger, diminished fresh water sources, rising ocean levels and the flooding of coastal cities around the globe.

His book does not just stop there, it further examines more current topics that can be traced to the Earth’s temperature increasing by one degree over the past couple of decades. The Paris Climate Accord warns the adverse effects of a two degree temperature rise. This very likely temperature increase doesn’t just escalate the above problems by a factor of two, but it increases the negative effects exponentially.

Wallace-Wells describes with actual real life examples the effects of the reduction of fresh water, more polluted oceans, unbreathable air, decreased insect and animal populations, force migration from lands that are unliveable and the impact of millions of displaced refugees from poor to richer countries. We do not have to look much farther than the refugees from Syrian or Sudan or Central America as a sample of the impact of this growing phenomenon.

With very little effort, the author paints a very dark and powerful picture of a world - over the next thirty to forty years - that is going to be very much impacted by the above issues.

This little blog cannot explain all of the ramifications of the different climatic elements that are addressed in the book. I am simply recommending the book to my readers as a very serious and well written examination of a very scary future. Perhaps not for us, but our children and grandchildren will be effected for sure.

Reserve a copy at your local library today! It is well worth reading!