David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth
b"At what point does Planet Earth become inhospitable to life \\u2013 let alone a flourishing human civilization? \\n\\nIn his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells explores how climate change will impact not just the planet, but human lives \\u2013 including how a five degree increase in temperatures would make parts of the planet unsurvivable. \\n\\n\\u201cThe more I learned about the science the deeper I got into it\\u2026 the more scared I was,\\u201d he admits, \\u201cand from where I sat as a journalist the importance of telling that story so that other people have the same reaction have the same response.\\n\\nParadoxically, though he has only been writing about it for a few years, Wallace-Wells has found climate change to invigorate him as a storyteller. \\u201cIt's an epic saga,\\u201d he says. \\u201cIt's the kind of thing that we only used to see in mythology and theology. We really do have the fate of the world and the species in our hands.\\u201d\\n\\nAnother climate communicator, Katherine Hayhow from Texas Tech University, recognizes the need for storytellers like Wallace-Wells to translate the work of scientists like her.\\n\\n\\u201cWe\\u2019re not missing the apocalyptic vision of the future, I think we've got that in spades,\\u201d she says. \\u201cWhat David\\u2019s book does is it takes what we've been saying in scientific assessments for years and even decades, and it rephrases in a way that\\u2019s hopefully more accessible for people to understand how bad this could be.\\u201d\\n\\nThat said, Hayhoe also recognizes a need for other writers and creative artists to tell climate stories that move us beyond doom-and-gloom. \\u201cWe scientists are terrible at positive visions of the future, all we\\u2019re good at is diagnosing the problem in greater and greater detail,\\u201d she laments. \\u201cWe need others to help us see what that future looks like. Because when you look at something that\\u2019s better than what we have today, you can\\u2019t hold people back from moving in that direction.\\u201d\\n\\nGuests:\\nDavid Wallace-Wells, Deputy Editor, New York Magazine; Author, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming\\nKatharine Hayhoe, Professor and Director, Climate Science Center, Texas Tech University \\n\\nThis program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on May 6, 2019\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices"