Cascades

Throughout The Uninhabitable Earth, Wallace-Wells uses the theme of "cascades" to illustrate how the effects of climate change build on, worsen, and warp one another -- often in ways that science is presently unable to predict with any degree of certainty. These cascades, he writes, thus make it impossible to use any present or future set of climate conditions as a firm predictive reference point, noting that "we have not, at all, arrived at a new equilibrium. It is more like we've taken one step out on the plank off a pirate ship" (19) -- a state of existence he calls "the end of normal" (18). If warming continues, Wallace-Wells suggests, the future we can expect will instead be a cascading state of environmental flux: a network of "complicated, countervailing systems" whose future interactions are unknown, "which pulls a dark cloud of uncertainty over any effort to plan ahead for...