Finally!!! A major news organization Breaking It Down!!!! This sorties ran as the cover of the New York Magazine on July 9th.
Make yourself a cup of tea, take a deep breath, turn on your reading for comprehension meat computer program, don't try to read it on your phone. It's long. It breaks distills and breaks down the impending and current effects of climate change into the 9 major categories of impact : the mass extinction underway, the extreme heat that will cook us alive, the collapse of our ability to rely on our food sources and our agriculture, plagues and the spread of diseases, the toxic chemical composition of the air, war and conflict provoked by rising temperatures and shrinking resources, permanent economic collapse, sulfide poisoning of the oceans, and finally the veil of denial and apathy that we are trapped in, and that will ultimately doom all current and future generations if we don't wake the fuck up right fucking now,
And if you really want to dig into the interviews and research informing the piece it's all there.
Here's the opening. Click on the title to go to the article.
The Unihabitable Earth, by David Wallace Wells.
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, 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, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.
