David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.From the transcript of his interview with Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: So, David, what makes you so worried, so alarmist, now? It feels like there's an urgency to what you're writing.--Marshal Zeringue
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: We're headed for some really bleak outcomes. So if we don't change course on fossil fuels, by the end of the century we'll get to about 4 degrees of warming. That would mean total global economic damages of $600 trillion, which is double all the wealth that exists in the world today. The U.N. says it would mean hundreds of millions of climate refugees, perhaps as many as a billion climate refugees.
It would mean twice as much war as we see today because there's a relationship between temperature and conflict. And that happens at the national level. It also happens at the individual level. So rates of murder and rape would go up. It has an impact on agricultural yields. It has an impact on public health because mosquitoes will be flying ever farther afield.
For all of these reasons, it is an all-encompassing problem. It changes, or threatens to change just about every aspect of modern life as we know it. And we have it within our power to change that course and to pull up short of 4 degrees, well short of 4 degrees, but we've done so little to signal that we're serious about that, that it makes me worried that we won't do enough in time to avert some of these catastrophic impacts.
ZAKARIA: But do you know the basic problem is with this -- with this analysis, which is that even you said, at the end of the century. So the problem is that, you know, it's -- the costs are very long-term for, you know, not doing something. And the pain is very short-term for doing something, carbon taxes, massive shift in your lifestyle, things like that. So at the end of the day people just don't worry about stuff that's so far in the future.
WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I think that we're beginning to learn that...[read on]