It is absolutely time to panic about climate change.

“It is, I promise, worse than you think.”

A buffalo corpse seen rotting on the side of the road in
southern Iraq on November 11, 2018. Severe droughts,
caused by a combination of climate change, dams
and internal water mismanagement, are creating a
nightmare for buffalo herders in the region.

That was was the first line of David Wallace-Wells’s horrifying 2017 essay in New York magazine about climate change. It was an attempt to paint a very real picture of our not-too-distant future, a future filled with famines, political chaos, economic collapse, fierce resource competition, and a sun that “cooks us.”

Wallace-Wells has since developed his terrifying essay into an even more terrifying book, titled The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. And it is a brutal read. Wallace-Wells was criticized in 2017 for being too hyperbolic, too doom-and-gloomy. But as Vox’s David Roberts explained at the time, those criticisms were mostly misplaced.

Wallace-Wells isn’t counseling despair or saying all is lost; he’s merely laying out the alarming facts of what is likely to happen if we don’t radically change course.

Read the story from Vox by Sean Illing - “It is absolutely time to panic about climate change.”