Paul Hawken has perhaps illustrated: You can find his comprehensive survey of climate solutions (plant-based diets, green roofs, the education of women) in Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (New York: Penguin, 2017).
Fully half of British emissions: This is probably an overestimate, but it comes from “Less In, More Out,” published by the U.K.’s Green Alliance in 2018.
two-thirds of American energy: Anne Stark, “Americans Used More Clean Energy in 2016,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, April 10, 2017, www.llnl.gov/news/americans-used-more-clean-energy-2016.
$5 trillion each year: David Coady et al., “How Large Are Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies?” World Development 91 (March 2017): pp. 11–27, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.10.004.
cost the world $26 trillion: The New Climate Economy, “Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century: Accelerating Climate Action in Urgent Times” (Washington, D.C.: Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, September 2018), p. 8, https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018.
Americans waste a quarter of their food: Zach Conrad et al., “Relationship Between Food Waste, Diet Quality, and Environmental Sustainability,” PLOS One 13, no. 4 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195405.
mining it consumes more electricity: Eric Holthaus, “Bitcoin’s Energy Use Got Studied, and You Libertarian Nerds Look Even Worse than Usual,” Grist, May 17, 2018, https://grist.org/article/bitcoins-energy-use-got-studied-and-you-libertarian-nerds-look-even-worse-than-usual. See also Alex de Vries, “Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem,” Cell 2, no. 5 (May 2018): pp. 801–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.04.016.
Seventy percent of the energy: Nicola Jones, “Waste Heat: Innovators Turn to an Overlooked Renewable Resource,” Yale Environment 360, May 29, 2018. “Today, in the United States, most fossil fuel–burning power plants are about 33 percent efficient,” Jones writes, “while combined heat and power (CHP) plants are typically 60 to 80 percent efficient.”
U.S. carbon emissions: The World Bank estimated the 2014 U.S. carbon emissions per capita at 16.49 metric tons per year; the average citizen of the E.U., that year, was responsible for just 6.379 (so the savings would actually be considerably more than 50 percent). World Bank, “CO2 Emissions (Metric Tons per Capita),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC.
global emissions would fall by a third: The richest 10 percent of the world are responsible for about half of all emissions, Oxfam calculated in its “Extreme Carbon Inequality” report of December 2015, available at www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf. The average carbon footprint for someone in the global 1 percent, the study found, was 175 times that of someone in the world’s poorest 10 percent.
We have already left behind: Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this is the xkcd web comic “A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature,” September 12, 2016, www.xkcd.com/1732.
II. Elements of Chaos
Heat Death
At seven degrees of warming: Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber, “An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 21 (May 2010): pp. 9552–55, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0913352107.
after a few hours: Ibid. According to Sherwood and Huber, “Periods of net heat storage can be endured, though only for a few hours, and with ample time needed for recovery.”
eleven or twelve degrees Celsius: Ibid. “With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed,” Sherwood and Huber write. “Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel burning.”
at just five degrees: Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008), p. 196.
summer labor of any kind: John P. Dunne et al., “Reductions in Labour Capacity from Heat Stress Under Climate Warming,” Nature Climate Change 3 (February 2013): pp. 563–66, https://doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE1827.
New York City would be hotter: Joseph Romm, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 138.
median projection of over four degrees: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers (Geneva, 2014), p. 11, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/.
fiftyfold increase: Romm, Climate Change, p. 41.
five warmest summers in Europe: World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided (Washington, D.C., November 2012), p. 13, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/pdf/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf.
simply working outdoors: IPCC, Climate Change 2014, p. 15, www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/. “By 2100 for RCP8.5, the combination of high temperature and humidity in some areas for parts of the year is expected to compromise common human activities, including growing food and working outdoors.”
cities like Karachi and Kolkata: Tom K. R. Matthews, et al., “Communicating the Deadly Consequences of Global Warming for Human Heat Stress,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 15 (April 2017): pp. 3861–66, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617526114. The authors write, of the 2015 summer, “The extraordinary heat had deadly consequences, with over 3,400 fatalities reported across India and Pakistan alone.”
European heat wave of 2003: World Bank, Turn Down the Heat, p. 37, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/pdf/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf.
worst weather events in Continental history: William Langewiesche, “How Extreme Heat Could Leave Swaths of the Planet Uninhabitable,” Vanity Fair, August 2017.
a research team led by Ethan Coffeclass="underline" Ethan Coffel et al., “Temperature and Humidity Based on Projections of a Rapid Rise in Global Heat Stress Exposure During the 21st Century,” Environmental Research Letters 13 (December 2017), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa00e.
the World Bank has estimated: World Bank, Turn Down the Heat, p. 38, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/pdf/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf.
Indian summer killed 2,500: IFRC, “India: Heat Wave—Information Bulletin No. 01,” June 11, 1998, www.ifrc.org/docs/appeals/rpts98/in002.pdf.
In 2010, 55,000 died: In Moscow, there were 10,000 ambulance calls each day, and many doctors believed that the official death counts understated the true toll.
according to The Wall Street Journal: Craig Nelson and Ghassan Adan, “Iraqis Boil as Power-Grid Failings Exacerbate Heat Wave,” The Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2016.
700,000 barrels of oiclass="underline" Ayhan Demirbas et al., “The Cost Analysis of Electric Power Generation in Saudi Arabia,” Energy Sources, Part B 12, no. 6 (March 2017): pp. 591–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/15567249.2016.1248874.