Hot Earth Dreams: What if severe climate change happens, and humans survive?

by Frank Landis

What will the Earth look like if severe climate change happens, and humans survive? What will the Earth look like if severe climate change happens, and humans survive? It is not an easy question to contemplate, let alone answer. If severe climate change happens, the Earth will continue to warm for centuries after we've exhausted our fossil fuels. Civilization will shatter, the great artworks and monuments vanishing as cities fall into rubble and coasts disappear beneath rising seas. There will be a mass extinction, coral reefs and ice sheets will disappear, and the survivors will migrate to new homes and habitats for generations as the climate continually changes. Only after hundreds of thousands of years will the climate to return to what we currently consider as normal. Right now, this is our most likely future. Scary as it sounds at first, it is a future that is very much worth exploring. It's crazy, then horrible, then tough, and then increasingly strange. This clear-eyed overview weaves together the latest scientific research on climate change, mass extinction, collapse, and evolution, to describe a deep future that is ever-changing but very knowable. Want to explore it? This is your sourcebook.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Environment

416 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2015

Reviews

[Natasha Hurley-Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realize we're floating in space?
Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize that everyone
you know
someday
will die?

It's difficult to read a book whose starting assumption is that our current technological civilisation will commit suicide by using up every last scrap of fossil and nuclear fuel in an effort to preserve business as usual. No one wants to be Ozymandius' serf. But I think we all know that this is the most likely scenario. So, starting from that premise, this book lays out the most-likely trajectory of the world's climate and ecosystems over the next 400,000 years.

Landis' presentation of the timescales of humanity really fascinated me. Modern humans have been around for ~100,000 years, but we only formed civilisations in the last 10,000. Why? Most likely because of the nice stable interglacial period. So, are stable climactic conditions a prerequisite for (obligate agriculture-based) civilisations? It sure looks that way.

Landis is an ecologist and knits together hundreds of scientific writings to work out a reasonable scenario, and makes a broad-brush attempt at predicting when our climate will once again favour civilisations. Not fossil-fuel burning, technological civilisations, since it will take hundreds of millions of years to restock those supplies, but sailing-ship, agricultural, warring civilizations, which we're used to thinking of as "typical", but only because they produce some form of history (oral or written). This unlike people living as "barbarians", the loose ~100-person groups of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and gardeners who really make up ~99% of human existence.

The whole book is immensely readable, broken into short (6-10 page) chapters, each of which is up-front about the author's deficiencies in whichever field is he attempting to tackle, or habits of thought that you might find yourself falling into in order to more easily (but incorrectly) parse the information given. It's a great style and really makes what might otherwise be a tough slog very engaging. And there are just so many interesting things to be considered. How long will coral reefs last and will they come back? What will live in the fisheries of the future? How fast do the climactic zones move once we get into positive ice-melting feedback? What will happen to all that carbon in the future? How does terrain affect the local weather, and can it preserve species? And running as a thread through all of it: where does humanity fit in, as a somewhat-aware but globally-uncoordinated keystone species?

I won't spoil the answers to these questions: you should read the book yourself. Suffice to say, this isn't a book about the apocalypse, or the singularity. It's about the middle ground, the actual likely grey area where we will end up. It's really quite hard to kill off an entire species as adaptable as us, and most likely, no matter what we cause the climate to throw at us, we're going to survive. The first part of this, the climbdown from ~10 billion humans to more the order of tens to hundreds of millions, is the most shocking and hard to think about. But we must. We will run out of non-renewable fuels. That is the definition of non-renewable. And how we get from where we are now to a sustainable society is the journey we still have control over.

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

[Jim Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and entertaining exploration of what we might expect from the future climate we have created. Landis has compiled the science from a number of disciplines and presents it in a way that is easy to read and compelling.

[N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book wasn't exactly what I expected it would be when I picked it up, but in the end I enjoyed it. I was expecting a more scholarly book on what climate would look like in deep time, and how surviving humans might adapt- although the book does look at future climate changes given a business as usual scenario re: carbon emissions, the tone of this book is much more speculative- imaginative?- informal- than I was expecting.

The best part of this book for me was the huge range of topics the author considers- e.g everything from how languages might evolve in the "High Altithermal" to how black flag weather will impact crops and human civilizations. The chapters are short and it is the type of book that you can read bits and pieces of, not necessarily in order.

[Andy Gibb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a mish-mash of stuff, so hit and miss. I like the idea of taking the long view and the likelihood of black swan events in the medium term. I tend to anticipate them far too frequently. On the other hand, I agree that pessimism is the most realistic course. No, change will not happen and when it becomes clear to even the elites that the shit is hitting the fan, you can be sure that the masses will shoulder all of the consequences, cf. Covid.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sobering, engaging and clearly explained. Perhaps the first book on climate change anyone should read. Speculative in parts, but such parts are always acknowledged.