Best 15 quotes of David Wallace-wells on MyQuotes

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

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. Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets- enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.

Global warming is not 'yes' or 'no', nor is it 'today's weather forever' or 'doomsday tomorrow'. It is a function that gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas. And so the experience of life in a climate transformed by human activity is not just a matter of stepping from one stable ecosystem into another, somewhat worse one, no matter how degraded or destructive the transformed climate is. The effects will grow and build as the planet continues to warm: from 1 degree to 1/5 to almost certainly 2 degrees and beyond. The last few years of climate disasters may look like about as much as the planet can take. In fact, we are only just entering our brave, new world, one that collapses below us as soon as we set foot on it.

If humans are responsible to the problem, they must be capable of undoing it. We have an idiomatic name for those who hold the fate of the world in their hands, as we do: gods. But for the moment, at least, most of us seem more inclined to run from that responsibility than embrace it- or even admit we see it, though it sits in front of us as plainly as a steering wheel. Instead, we assign the task to future generations, to dreams of magical technologies, to remote politicians doing a kind of battle with profiteering delay... The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so that we do not all share in the suffering- at least not all share in so sufferingly much of it.

If the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation too. We all know that second lifetime. It is ours.

If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.

If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it- the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kid of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances- recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

So that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely.

That is the course we are speeding so blithely along- to more than four degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100. According to some estimates, that would mean that whole regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America north of Patagonia, and Asia south of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification, and flooding. Certainly it would make them inhospitable, and many more regions besides. This is our itinerary, our baseline. Which means that, if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too. We all also know that second lifetime. It is ours.

The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher.

The map of our new world will be drawn in part by natural processes that remain mysterious, but more definitively by human hands.

The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.

The world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can't halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.

This is a kind of Frankenstein problem, and relates to widespread fears of artificial intelligence: we are more intimidated by the monsters we create than those we inherit. Sitting at computers in air-conditioned rooms reading dispatches in the science section of the newspaper, we feel illogically in control of natural ecosystems; we expect we should be able to protect the dwindling population of an endangered species, and preserve their habitat, should we choose to, and that we should be able to manage an abundant water supply, rather than see it wasted on the way to human mouths- again, should we choose to. We feel less that way about the internet, which seems beyond our control though we designed and built it, and quite recently; still less about global warming, which we extend each day, each minute, by our actions. And the perceptual size of market capitalism has been a kind of obstacle to its critics for at least a generation, when it came to seem even to those attuned to its failings to be perhaps too big to fail.

We are still, now, in much of the world, shorter, sicker, and ding younger than our hunter-gatherer forebears, who were also, by the way, much better custodians of the planet on which we all live. And they watched over it for much longer- nearly all of those 200,000 years. That epic era once derided as "prehistory" accounts for about 95 percent of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark. Which makes the history of mark-making-- the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history-- look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave us the modern world and the hurtling sensations of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climate catastrophe.