David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.From his Q&A with Amy Brady for Guernica:
Guernica: Let’s begin by discussing the speed at which climate change is happening, which you say is greatly misunderstood.--Marshal Zeringue
David Wallace-Wells: One of the largest and most problematic misunderstandings that we have about climate change is that it’s slow, that it unfolds on a timescale of many decades, or even centuries. Even [climate scientist] James Hansen’s big book about climate change is called Storms of my Grandchildren. But the truth is that half of all emissions produced from fossil fuels have taken place in the last thirty years—an astonishingly short amount of time. I’m thirty-six years old. I remember what it was like thirty years ago. My life contains the whole trajectory of this story that took us from a relatively stable climate to where we are now, on the very brink of climate catastrophe. This has all happened since Al Gore published his first book on warming and since the United Nations established the IPCC report.
Guernica: Do you see our understanding of climate change evolving as its effects grow worse?
Wallace-Wells: There are more people now that understand that climate change is real and happening—quite a lot of people, actually, and the numbers are growing. But what’s not yet clear is...[read on]