‘Uninhabitable Earth’ spotlights 3 climate change misunderstandings
Interview between Rachel Martin and David Wallace, NPR
Author David Wallace-Wells opens his new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” outlining three misunderstandings about climate change – first its speed…
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: More than half of all of the fossil fuel emissions that we’ve ever put into the atmosphere have come in the last 25 years, which means that we’ve now done more damage to the climate than in all of the millennia before and all of the centuries before.
MARTIN: …Then its scope…
WALLACE-WELLS: We were sort of taught the problem was really about sea level and coastlines. We’re starting to see that climate change is really an all-enveloping threat, which promises to transform, probably deform every life lived on the planet in some way.
MARTIN: …And finally, its severity.
WALLACE-WELLS: It was basically considered irresponsible to consider scenarios north of about 2 degrees of warming. It was called the threshold of catastrophe, and nobody really wanted to think about it. It turns out that 2 degrees looks basically like our floor for warming rather than our ceiling. And so we really need to start thinking about what the impacts will be at 2 1/2, 3 and even 4 degrees of warming.
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