The Uninhabitable Earth

Life After Warming

By: David Wallace-Wells

Narrated by: David Wallace-Wells

Length: 9 hrs

Publisher's summary

Number-one New York Times best seller • "The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon." (Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon)

With a new afterword

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible - food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars, and economic devastation.

An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation’s Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it - the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation - today’s.

"The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet." (Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times)

Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth

"Riveting.... Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too." (The Economist)

"Potent and evocative.... Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change.... He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose." (Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times)

"The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring." (The Washington Post)

"The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear.... I encourage people to read this book." (Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books)

©2019 David Wallace-Wells (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Most of us know the gist, if not the details, of the climate change crisis. And yet it is almost impossible to sustain strong feelings about it. David Wallace-Wells has now provided the details, and with writing that is not only clear and forceful, but often imaginative and even funny, he has found a way to make the information deeply felt. This is a profound book, which simultaneously makes me terrified and hopeful about the future, ashamed and proud of being a human." (Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated)

"David Wallace-Wells argues that the impacts of climate change will be much graver than most people realize, and he's right. The Uninhabitable Earth is a timely and provocative work." (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction)

“A brilliant new book...a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet." (John Lanchester, The New York Times Book Review)

For your grandchildren’s sake read this book

FOX NEWS IS THE FAKE NEWS
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As amazing as it is terrifying!

I knew climate change was a cataclysmic problem but my god, David has designed the most circumspect, informative, technical, yet graspable and humanistic explanation of climate change I've ever heard. A true masterpiece.

Abrasive yet thoughful

The story is incredible, presenting views from many perspectives including science and politics. Definitely made me challenge my views on the severity of the situation but left me feeling like I didn't have much choice in the outcome.

There were a couple audio artifacts in the recording and a pretty noticable speed up of the reading in several spots which compounded with the app speed controls.

We’re so screwed

The laundry list of how poorly we’ve treated the environment is staggering. By the end it’s pretty much a snuff film about how we’ve destroyed our planet.

Performance seems a little clunky but I’m okay with it. Good read but a grim outlook.

Breathtaking!

inspiring to want to fight for our planet's well-being. It gives a sense of hope that people will adapt through change and that if we continue down our path of destruction, it will be our own doing. A real eye opener that forces you to look!

A very current compilation of data and hypotheses

Highly recommend for the concerned intellectual. Listened, then reread for full understanding. It's necessarily deep.

Shocking and brilliant.

Each sentence siting a wide full scope.of reserach into every domain and dimension of climate change and its effects at every degree, in every sphere, continent, ecosystem, political realm, ethics, economy, history , philosophy, ect. Ive never learned so much from 1 book through my whole college career. The narrator author has a soothing deep voice as well.

Everyone should read this

Well-written, up to date, and terrifying. A call to action we should all heed.

Great book

This book takes a real world long term analysis of our climate problems. It gives me a good perspective of our possible future.

Probably better read

The book is exhaustingly researched. I imagine it has dozens of pages of footnotes. Hard to absorb so much data when you don't have a moment to lift your eyes from the page and think.
Also, the book is poorly written, (too wordy and imprecise predicate references), and very poorly read by the author. It's not exactly a monotone, but his reading voice is just awful and really hard to listen to. He's kind of a smug jerk.