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We tell ourselves we are "developing" the land – in some cases, fabricating it from marsh. What we are really building are bridges to our own suffering, since it's not just those new concrete communities built right into the floodplain that are vulnerable, but all those communities behind them, built on the expectation that the old swampy coastline could protect them. Which does call into question just what we mean, in the age of the Anthropocene, by the phrase "natural disaster".

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 85)

By 2040, the summer of 2018 will likely seem normal. But extreme weather is not a matter of "normal"; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 82)

For a time, we had come to believe that civilization moved in the other direction – making the impossible first possible and then stable and routine. With climate change, we are moving instead toward nature, and chaos, into a new realm unbounded by the analogy of any human experience.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 75)

Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves. For far too long, casual climate observers have watched scientists draw pathways to a stable climate and concluded that the world would adapt accordingly; instead, the world has done more or less nothing, as though those pathways would implement themselves. Market forces have delivered cheaper and more widely available green energy, but the same market forces have absorbed those innovations, which is to say profited from them, while continuing to grow emissions. Politics has produced gestures of tremendous global solidarity and cooperation, then discarded those promises immediately. It has become commonplace among climate activists to say that we have, today, all the tools we need to avoid catastrophic climate change – even major climate change. It is also true. But political will is not some trivial ingredient, always at hand. We have the tools we need to solve global poverty, epidemic disease, and abuse of women, as well.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 47)

At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 44)

But climate change is not an ancient crime we are tasked with solving now; we are destroying our planet every day, often with one hand as we conspire to restore it with the other.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 38)

The zoos are already natural history museums, the children's books already out of date.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 32)

But climate change is not a discrete clue we can find at the scene of a local crime – one hurricane, one heat wave, one famine, one war. Global warming isn't a perpetrator; it's a conspiracy. We all live within climate and within all the changes we have produced in it, which enclose us all and everything we do.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 26)

The assaults of climate change do not end at 2100 just because most modeling, by convention, sunsets at that point. This is why some studying global warming call the hundred years to follow the "century of hell".

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 19)

There is almost no chance we will avoid that scenario. The Kyoto Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since, despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twenty years before.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 16)

The story of the industrial world's kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime – the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 12)

In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries – all the millennia – that came before. The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, advertising scientific consensus unmistakably to the world; this means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 12)

It is worse, much worse, than you think.

— The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Page 11)