The Uninhabitable Earth

Acknowledgments

If this book is worth anything, it is worth that because of the work of the scientists who first theorized, then documented the warming of the planet, and then began examining and explicating what that warming might mean for the rest of us living on it. That line of debt runs from Eunice Foote and John Tyndall in the nineteenth century to Roger Revelle and Charles David Keeling in the twentieth and on to all of those hundreds of scientists whose labor appears in the endnotes of this book (and of course many hundreds of unmentioned others very hard at work). However much progress we manage against the assaults of climate change in the coming decades, it is thanks to them.

I am personally indebted to those scientists, climate writers, and activists who were especially generous to me, over the last several years, with their time and insights—helping me understand their own research and pointing me to the findings of others, indulging my requests for rambling interviews or discussing the state of the planet with me in other public settings, corresponding with me over time, and, in many cases, reviewing my writing, including portions of the text of this book, before publication. They are Richard Alley, David Archer, Craig Baker-Austin, David Battisti, Peter Brannen, Wallace Smith Broecker, Marshall Burke, Ethan D. Coffel, Aiguo Dai, Peter Gleick, Jeff Goodell, Al Gore, James Hansen, Katherine Hayhoe, Geoffrey Heal, Solomon Hsiang, Matthew Huber, Nancy Knowlton, Robert Kopp, Lee Kump, Irakli Loladze, Charles Mann, Geoff Mann, Michael Mann, Kate Marvel, Bill McKibben, Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Andrew Revkin, Joseph Romm, Lynn Scarlett, Steven Sherwood, Joel Wainwright, Peter D. Ward, and Elizabeth Wolkovich.

When I first wrote about climate change in 2017, I relied also on the critical research help of Julia Mead and Ted Hart. I am grateful, too, to all the responses to that story that were published elsewhere—especially those by Genevieve Guenther, Eric Holthaus, Farhad Manjoo, Susan Mathews, Jason Mark, Robinson Meyer, Chris Mooney, and David Roberts. That includes all the scientists who reviewed my work for the website Climate Feedback, working through my story line by line. In preparing this manuscript for publication, Chelsea Leu reviewed it even more closely, and incisively, and I cannot thank her enough for that.

This book would not have come to be without the vision, guidance, wisdom, and forbearance of Tina Bennett, to whom I now owe a lifetime of thanks. And it would not have become an actual book without the acuity, brilliance, and faith of Tim Duggan, and the enormously helpful work of Molly Stern, Dyana Messina, Julia Bradshaw, William Wolfslau, Aubrey Martinson, Julie Cepler, Rachel Aldrich, Craig Adams, Phil Leung, and Andrea Lau, as well as Helen Conford at Penguin in London.

I would not be writing this book were it not for Central Park East, and especially Pam Cushing, my second mother. I’m grateful to everyone I work with at New York magazine for all of their encouragement and support along the way. This goes especially for my bosses Jared Hohlt, Adam Moss, and Pam Wasserstein, and David Haskell, my editor and friend and co-conspirator. Other friends and co-conspirators also helped refine and reconceive what it was I was trying to do in this book, and to all of them I am so thankful, too: Isaac Chotiner, Kerry Howley, Hua Hsu, Christian Lorentzen, Noreen Malone, Chris Parris-Lamb, Willa Paskin, Max Read, and Kevin Roose. For a million unenumerable things, I’d also like to thank Jerry Saltz and Will Leitch, Lisa Miller and Vanessa Grigoriadis, Mike Marino and Andy Roth and Ryan Langer, James Darnton and Andrew Smeall and Scarlet Kim and Ann Fabian, Casey Schwartz and Marie Brenner, Nick Zimmerman and Dan Weber and Whitney Schubert and Joey Frank, Justin Pattner and Daniel Brand, Caitlin Roper, Ann Clarke and Alexis Swerdloff, Stella Bugbee, Meghan O’Rourke, Robert Asahina, Philip Gourevitch, Lorin Stein, and Michael Grunwald.

My best reader, as always, is my brother, Ben; without his footsteps to follow, who knows where I’d be. I’ve been inspired, too, in countless ways, by Harry and Roseann, Jenn and Matt and Heather, and above all by my mother and father, only one of whom is here to read this book but to both of whom I owe it, and everything else.

The last and biggest thanks belong to Risa, my love, and to Rocca, my other love—for the last year, the last twenty, and the fifty or more to come. Let’s hope they’re cool ones.