Front Burner - The Uninhabitable Earth: A grim portrait of the future of climate change

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

Author David Wallace-Wells on his matter-of-fact book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and what happens if we don’t slow the pace of climate change.

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Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. We've seen a lot of news recently that shows us climate change is here. It's happening right now. Flooding in Ontario. The sandbags actually have to be brought in by boat because the water is up so high. Wildfires on the west coast. In the past two years, B., BC has seen its worst wildfire seasons on record. A mass species die-off. Around one million species now face extinction,

many within decades. Scientists say all these things are caused or exacerbated by the climate warming. So, how bad is it really going to get? David Wallace-Wells has written a whole book about this subject. It's called, quite matter-of-factly, The Uninhabitable Earth. That's today on FrontBurner. David, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. It's great to talk to you. So, I've read your book, And what I want to do with you today is try to get a real sense of the scale of where all of this is headed. At the rate that we're going right now, how much could the world warm by 2050? There's some scientific disagreement about that. But I would say a safe bet is that by 2050 we'll be at at least two degrees Celsius warming that's above the pre-industrial average. And conceivably we could be at about two and a half or maybe even a little bit north of there, say 2.7 or 2.8 degrees of warming by 2050. May sound small. It's a small number. But I think it's important to keep in mind, you know, we're already at 1.1 degrees of warming. And just that 1.1 degree has taken us entirely outside of the entire window of temperatures that enclose all of human history.

So the planet is now at 1.1 degrees, already warmer than any planet that any human has ever walked on before. and everything that we know of about human life, you know, the evolution of the human animal, the development of agriculture and rudimentary civilization, modern civilization, all of that developed under climate conditions that are no longer relevant. They no longer apply. We're already outside of the realm of those boundaries.

But two and a half degrees is, you know, obviously you can do the math. It's more than twice as much warmer than that. Right. And it could get even warmer than that, right? Four degrees or six degrees. Yeah. I mean, there basically is no upper limit depending on when, if we stop burning carbon and producing fossil fuels. So, yeah, by the end of the century, we're on track, the UN says, for about 4.3 degrees of warming.

And there's some feedback loops that could be triggered that might actually raise that a little higher, just to stick to the two, say two and a half degree level, which is so close. I mean, 2050, it's the length of a mortgage. If we're at two and a half degrees then, which is I think where we will be, that will mean that many of the biggest cities in South Asia and the Middle East will be unlivably hot in summer because of direct heat. That means you won't be able to go outside during the day during the summer. You certainly wouldn't be able to work outside during the day during the summer without risking heat stroke and death. And that means a whole cascading set of effects because these are cities that today hold as many as 10 or 12 or 15 million people.

And they're going to have to move, which is going to scramble everything about the world. Well one paragraph in your book which actually stopped me in my tracks was essentially that you know you said that even if we meet our Paris goals Canada is a signatory to the Paris agreement which the goal would be two degrees warming. Today with my signature, I give you our word that Canada's efforts will not cease. Climate change will test our intelligence, our compassion and our will. But we are all equal to that challenge. And, you know, you say in the book that even if we meet the goals of two degrees, Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable. And then at four degrees, and this is what really stopped me,

the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people, will now be a normal summer. As many as 2,000 people a day in total have killed 70,000 people. I'm sorry, you're right. Two straight weeks at around 40 degrees, hospital and police morgues have completely filled up. Retirement homes where many patients have died are storing bodies in their basements.

No, I mean, it's really horrible when you think about it, what kind of suffering and death and human pain will be possible if we continue to stand by and do very little. And I think, you know, in 2003, that heat wave was understood as completely catastrophic, as historic, as unprecedented, unconscionable, unlivable. But probably at some point down the line in the decades ahead, we will be living with that as an everyday reality

and not seeing it as historic, unprecedented, unlivable, but just the normal experience of human affairs. Some scientists who were studying just the impact of air pollution found that just between the threshold of 1.5 degrees of warming and 2 degrees, so just that half degree additional degree of warming, would kill, just through the impact of air pollution, 153 million additional people. That's unconscionable. How could we possibly live in a world where that kind of damage is done, where that many people are suffering and that many people are dying?

And yet, you know, 9 million people are dying every year from air pollution today, which means we are already effectively living in that future with that many people dying. And we're not paying that much attention to it. I mean, people like you and me, we may talk about it, we may read about it occasionally, but it's not like we've oriented our whole lives around helping those people. I want to go through with you some of these basic building blocks that you're talking about. But first, can you tell me, how do you know all of these facts and figures that you're giving me today? I've just spent the last few years following the news from the Academy really closely, reading a lot of new academic research, talking to a lot of scientists,

asking them who are the people doing the work that they are most interested in, that they find most credible. So I don't have much exclusive original insight here. I'm not bringing news that isn't yet in the public domain. I'm really just processing what has been published in our best scientific journals for a general readership. And partly I was motivated to do that because in encountering that research for the first time myself as a journalist, I thought, oh my God, nobody is talking about this research. Climate change was, it was not a story that was totally ignored, but when it was written about, it was always written about in a quite cautious, earnest way

that emphasized the sort of optimistic ends of what was possible and didn't really look closely at what scientists were discovering about the much scarier end of the spectrum. So I want to talk through some of these basic building blocks here. So wildfires, we're seeing them across the West Coast in Canada right now. Last year, this part of B.C. dealt with an enormous fire that burned for weeks. But that fire started in late July, not mid-May. The risk from wildfires remains extreme in northern Alberta, with the largest now covering more than 900 square kilometers. And how much worse are they going to get? Well, the science is a little, it's a little

unclear on this, in part because this is a really horrifying thing that I'm about to say. Scientists don't have a very good sense of how a particular ecosystem will respond once it has burned through entirely. And they think that probably over the next few decades, that will happen for the entire west of North America. That is to say, not absolutely every acre in every province will have burned by wildfire. But so much of those ecosystems will be burned that we can't make accurate projections down the line. They have a better sense of how things are going to function in the interim. So by 2050, scientists say a good rule of thumb is that wildfires are going to get at least twice as bad as they are today. And conceivably, maybe even probably four times as bad as they are today, and conceivably, maybe even probably, four times as bad as they are today.

Okay, and I mean, here in Ontario, we've seen flooding. Spring flooding is affecting dozens of communities in three provinces today, and many are the same areas that were hit hard by rising rivers in the last two years. We thought this was the 100-year flood. We didn't know it was going to be the two-year flood. At times, you know, it makes you tear up a bit, but you get used to it very quickly. And so can you give me a sense of what we're going to see with water levels rising? So sea levels are kind of an interesting part of the story.

We've heard a lot about them over the last few decades, I think, because scientists understood they were a quite dramatic teaching tool in that they threatened to completely redraw the map of the whole planet. But they also unfold, it's a story that unfolds very slowly. So if we lose all of the Arctic and Antarctic ice, all of the ice sheets that are on both poles, which scientists expect is inevitable, somewhere between two and three degrees, we will trigger the permanent loss of all of those ice sheets. That would bring ultimately about 260 feet, so 80, 85 meters of sea level rise, which would move the coastlines inland by many, many miles in nearly every part of the globe

and would flood two-thirds of the world's major cities. Wow. I think basically the fastest that scientists expect it would happen would be several centuries. So we would have, unlike some of these other impacts, we're talking about wildfires, you know, we can talk about drought and famine, you know, the agricultural impacts, the public health impacts. A lot of those, while ultimately maybe less dramatic than sea level rise, are going to happen much faster. And we will have time to adjust to sea level. But the ultimate impact is really eye-opening.

I think in the short term, what we're likely to see is much more flooding and also the more extreme weather. Right, the increase in hurricanes, for example. Exactly. Look down almost any street in Wilmington, North Carolina this morning, and the ferocity of Florence is evident everywhere. The official landfall of Hurricane Michael happened near Mexico Beach with winds of 155 miles per hour. And so I want to pick up on what you said, the agricultural impact. Let's talk about that for a second. So what's going to happen to our food supply here? Like, let's say a staple like rice. So what's going to happen to our food supply here?

Like, let's say a staple like rice. There are a number of different components to the food story, but the one that is probably most clear to understand is just that crops grow less well when it's hot out. And that means that just taking the direct heat effects just by the rising temperature over the rest of the century, if we don't change course and continue emitting carbon and end up at four degrees by the year 2100, we should have yields of rice and other grains

that will be half as bountiful as they are today. So the same plot of land with the same number of crops on it will produce only half as much food as they do today. And we'd probably be using those crops to try to feed 50% more people globally. So that alone is a recipe for widespread famine. We'll be back in a second. Discover what millions around the world already have.

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slash cbc to learn more. I have to say it's a really harrowing read. It's hard to read. I know that you have been criticized for being alarmist. And what would you say to the people who have criticized your writing around that? Well, I would say a couple things. The first is that I'm not alarming you. The science is alarming you. I think that as a journalist, I feel like the main job of all of us in this kind of storytelling field is to share our best understanding of the world.

And I think for a long time, scientists were really reluctant to share with the public their scarier findings. And I think that they had some sort of reasonable reasons, you know, some sort of reasonable explanations for that. Why do you think they were so reluctant? I think that they worried that people would become fatalistic and assume that it was all over and not mobilize to take action. Right, sort of throw up their hands. And do you think they have a point?

Basically, no. I think that those scientists and activists who spent a lifetime working in this field, they may themselves feel on the brink of despair and on the brink of fatalism. They may know others who are the same way, who, you know, go through dark nights of the soul and maybe give up hope over time. But when I look at the planet as a whole, I think it's very clearly the case that we are much more suffering from complacency than we are from fatalism. And, you know, the UN says that in order to avert catastrophic warming, we need to have our missions by 2030, which requires a global World War II scale mobilization against climate. And I think we know from history that

world war ii is not a war that was fought out of hope and optimism alone fear was a big part of that and justifiably so the same is true of climate if you're scared of the science it's because the science is scary i would have said all that to you if i was speaking to you in september when i turned in the manuscript but since then we've seen an incredible story unfold on climate, starting with the publication last October of a UN special report studying the difference between a world at 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees warming. Right, but it basically said we have 12 years to fix this or it's over. Yeah, they said if we want to safely avoid 2 degrees of warming,

we have 12 years to fix this or it's over. Yeah, they said if we want to safely avoid two degrees of warming, we have 12 years to have our emissions. For different regions, for extremes, for ecosystems, livelihoods, it's very clear that half a degree matters. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C implies changes on an unprecedented scale. It means deep emission reductions in all sectors. That was really an unprecedented messaging move. It was scientific community of the world trafficking in a completely different rhetorical approach than they'd ever done before. And the results have been astonishing. We're heading into a presidential election in which all of the Democratic candidates are engaged in a kind of arms race to show who is more serious and more committed to climate action, which was unthinkable just a year ago. We have got as a nation to reject Trump's idea that climate change is a hoax. Do everything in our power to free this economy from a dependence on fossil fuels.

The EPA has not dropped the ball. In this administration, the EPA has thrown the ball to the ground. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing all of this in the immediate aftermath of the scientific community's first honest statement about the threat that we're facing from climate change. I think that the world responds to that honesty. I think you have to say that sort of self-editing was probably damaging to the cause rather than helpful. We live in a relatively small country. I mean, it's big geographically, but we have, you know, far fewer people here.

And Canada produces just a fraction, one to two percent of global emissions. So, you know, what about people here who might think, like, we can't do anything that will really make a difference globally anyways? Well, I think it's a problem that afflicts almost every country in the world. And it may be somewhat more dramatic, the smaller the nation's carbon footprint is. But it's even really true for the US, which is the world's second biggest emitter at about 15% of global emissions. And even China, which is responsible for about 28% of emissions right now. It's a collective action problem that has bedeviled our effort to address this crisis at the international level for decades.

I mean, the Paris Accords were signed in 2016. No major industrial nation is on track to meet those commitments. Only Morocco and Gambia have even been judged compatible with the goals of the Paris Accords, and it's just three years in. When every single individual nation of the world looks at the sort of incentive structure, they see that from their own interests, even if they understand that we'll all be better off if we take action faster, they also say, really, for us, it'll be best if all the rest of the world takes fast action, and we take somewhat slow action. That's a really thorny problem. The

geopolitics is one part of it that really scares me tremendously, because, you know, if you had to imagine a crisis that was so dramatic and all-encompassing that it would really call into being a true cooperative spirit among all the nations of the world, climate change would be it. That is how dramatic it is. And yet, we're facing this crisis at the crisis moment, at a time when we're retreating from those commitments, from those organizations, from those alliances. But I hope that it can be reversed relatively quickly and that we can start to see ourselves as living in intertwined ways with all of the rest of the people in the world.

There's been this trend identified in young people, people of my generation. I have friends who are grappling with this decision, deciding whether or not to have kids based on how bad the world is going to look in this scenario. And are they right? What would you advise here? Well, I recently had a kid. Congratulations. My wife and I had a kid about 14 months ago. Thank you. I think part of that was honestly living in compartmentalization and denial about the climate crisis

and wanting to make the choices that we'd want to make if there weren't a climate crisis. But I also have thought quite a lot about this, as you can imagine. And my own feeling is basically that, you know, the story is not over. I don't want my own story to end either. I want my children to be living and exploring this magical world and keeping it livable for future generations themselves. So I wouldn't argue with someone or fault them for choosing not to have a child if they feel their conscience pushes them in that direction. But I think that it's also important to keep in mind that nothing about this story, this scary story, is inevitable. Right, right. It was great to hear that kind of hope in that answer.

I should mention, you know, I said that I have friends who are grappling with this decision, which is true, but it's also me. I am also grappling with this decision. So it was really great to have this conversation. David Wallace-Wells, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. So here's another event that has really made me take pause. Over the weekend, a group of women in a Siberian coal mining town started a campaign on YouTube where they begged Justin Trudeau to let them into Canada as environmental refugees.

In the videos, the women say their town has become unlivable because of dust from nearby mines. In the video, the women say they've chosen Canada because the climate is similar to Siberia, but cleaner. The video, it's already received over 100,000 YouTube views. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.

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