Can the spectre of impending Armageddon rid people of their complacency? It’s a sore point for those scientists, journalists, activists, and scholars who are trying to explain what global warming means for the way we live, without losing the audience.

The odds are stacked against us. In 1999, media scholar Susan Moeller coined the term ‘compassion fatigue’ to describe the new status quo of dulled public sensitivity. She argued that it was the result of news media careening from one trauma to another, their formulaic coverage of poverty, disease, and death blurring multiple crises into one. Then along came the story of this century, of humanity speeding blithely along a course to more than four degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100. It’s a story with ‘enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it’ (that’s Wallace-Wells, saluting the ‘brave’ reader who has made it halfway through his book).

With catastrophic depictions of climate change ubiquitous in the media, many writers telling these stories are only too aware they risk understating its gravity, enhancing the mass tendency to turn away, or deepening political depression. Wallace-Wells has a sharper take on all this. The worst possibilities of climate change have ‘become somehow unseemly to consider’ – out of decency, or fear, or fear of fearmongering. He includes other potential reasons, from confused panic and semi-conspiratorial confidence to an overabundance of faith in the teleological shape of history (‘or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay’).

‘It is worse,’ the book opens, ‘much worse, than you think.’ The longest section, Elements of Chaos, presents twelve ‘dimensions’ of how bad things will become. Wallace-Wells presents a survey of the research that is broad yet detailed, cramming the insights of the science but also the politics and economics of climate change into wave upon wave of worst-case scenarios. The public-facing optimism of advocacy is granted little space here.

Melting polar ice caps, Arctic Circle (photograph via Flickr Creative Commons//Royal Opera House/NASA)

There are clear limitations. The author cautions that he is depicting each dimension as a discrete threat – from sea levels rising (a 2018 study shows the melt rate of the Antarctic ice sheet tripled in the past decade) to unnatural disasters, starvation, and economic stagnation. In contrast, the surviving populations must contend with a ‘latticework’ of impacts. There are other provisos, for better or worse: exactly how will the climate system recalibrate in response to human perturbation? How quickly will we shift away from a dependency on fossil fuels?

Where this work falls short is its failure to integrate the worst possibilities for non-human nature. Its human-centred or ‘weak-green’ approach is unsurprising; Wallace-Wells says he came to the topic just a few years ago when amassing his own file of climate stories. ‘I am not an environmentalist,’ he states on page six. Perhaps this is a ploy to align the writer with the mythic American ‘everyman’ he hopes might read the book. Yet I hear the echo of another image-conscious catchphrase of the moment, ‘I am not a feminist, but’. For all the fear of fearmongering The Uninhabitable Earth might seek to address, the way it positions the author belies another culture of fear.

That said, Wallace-Wells wants to scare us witless. His focus on humans and our nature is calculated: ‘Until now, it seems to have been easier for us to emphasise with the climate plight of other species than our own, perhaps because we have such a hard time acknowledging or understanding our own responsibility and complicity in the changes now unfolding, and such an easier time evaluating the morally simpler calculus of pure victimhood.’

Thus, about halfway in, the book strays from the environmental genre of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) into a short history of ideas on how culture is shaping climate. The optimism of environmental advocacy groups does get a run here – mostly in terms of why we can’t, don’t, or won’t hear the riot of alarm bells. In fact, it is a visual metaphor that Wallace-Wells takes up to greatest effect in the next section, The Climate Kaleidoscope, described as how ‘we can be mesmerised by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly’.

Again, the author is careful to speak not at but with his media-saturated primary audience, while imploring us to question our emotional prophylaxis. In six chapters, he weaves us through the cognitive biases fed by ‘crisis capitalism’, ‘the church of technology’, and ‘the politics of consumption’ (not to mention the ‘storytelling’ of The Day After Tomorrow et al.), citing a sweep of literature from the classic works of E.O. Wilson, Bill McKibben, and Naomi Klein to fringe texts on climate nihilism, climate fatalism, and ecocide.

Intriguingly, it is the latter tour of pessimism that delivers greater insights into how climate is reshaping culture. We hear from writers Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, who coined the term ‘human futilitarianism’ to remind us that political depression, no matter how crushing, is still a cry of protest. ‘If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings,’ they write, ‘then we are not really, or not yet, human.’

This book appears at a time when some scholars, educators, and journalists are advocating ‘solutions journalism’ and the embrace of humanity’s innate attraction to optimism as the means to create change. Journalism itself must adapt, argues scholar James Painter in the latest issue of global research journal Environmental Communication. In that respect, this version of The Uninhabitable Earth encourages readers to reflect on the present menaces. It warns us that we face a world where the scope of transformation may provoke not alarm but the perverse normalisation of climate suffering, and eliminate any efforts to narrativise warming. The more self-reflexively we can stare down that horrific possibility, the better.