The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

Wallace-Wells ponders the types of stories humans will tell through art in a world transformed by climate change. Already, images of apocalyptic despair seem to be everywhere in film and on television, he writes. Climate change is at the heart of television’s Game of Thrones, though the impending doom its characters fear is that of an everlasting winter rather than an everlasting heat wave. Mad Max: Fury Road heavily implies that its world is one ravaged by climate change without mentioning the phenomenon by name. From these examples, the author concludes that climate change is “everywhere you look, and yet nowhere in focus” (143).

These works, along with many others, offer different ways of coping with climate devastation. Some provide a persuasive fantasy of survival. Others provide catharsis by assigning guilt, thereby succeeding where law and policy have failed, the author writes.

Wallace-Wells is unsure if these apocalyptic trends in cinema and television will persist as global temperatures continue to rise. While he suspects climate to remain at the center of much of the world’s nonfiction—adding that the topic “may come to be regarded, at least by some, as the only truly serious subject” (145)—he questions whether there will be much appetite for movies like Fury Road when the planet is three or four degrees hotter than at present.