A Picture of the World After Climate Change

It was very surprising when, in July 2017, David Wallace-Wells' New York magazine cover story “The Uninhabitable Earth” went viral immediately upon publication. It then went on to become the most widely read story in New York's 50-plus-year history, a distinction it held until an excerpt from Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury surpassed it last year.* As the editor of the science section of a magazine, I can tell you that normally stories about climate change are a tricky sell; it's a sprawling, slow-moving topic that has traditionally felt less urgent than basically all other news, and it also has the side benefit of making everyone depressed. Readers are generally not here for it, and the ones who are tend to be a self-selected group. Wallace-Wells inverted this problem by writing a piece that felt both urgent and terrifying. His premise was to ask, simply and effectively: What if climate change is actually going to be just a little bit worse than we think? The resulting disaster movie was horrifying enough to make everyone pay attention.