David Wallace-Wells Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. All told, the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to stall disaster and how quickly? Those are the only questions that matter. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

2. Climate tugs at the individual threads of conflict too; personal irritability, interpersonal conflict, domestive violence. Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media, and the liklihood that a major league pitcher, coming to the mound after his team mate has been hit by a pitch will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration. And even in simulations police officers are more likely to fire on intruders when the exercises are conducted in hotter weather. By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States would bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries and acts of larceny. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

3. Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we've been trained, by a bouyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss categorically as hyperbole. Here, the facts are hysterical, and the dimensions of the drama that will play out between those poles, incomprehensibly large. Large enough to enclose not just present day humanity but all of our possible futures as well. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming