The Uninhabitable Earth by Wallace Wells is a very ominous piece of writing.  Throughout the entire text, there has been constant examples of things that have gone wrong in the world due to climate change and how mankind has brought about this destruction. So it is suprising to see Wallace say, “But those horrors are not yet scripted (31).”  He talks about the struggles that future earthwill face and yet talks about having a child that will experience this future. It made me realize that his previous comment, “The thing is, I am optimistic (31),” really defines the direction that he takes with the rest of his writing.  He is confident that these issues engineered by humans can be controlled by new innovative solutions that could be discovered. I found this approach counter productive because his optimism feels lackluster. He gave over 15 pages of reasons the world is doomed. Comparing the doom to events in history such as the holocaust “150 million is the equivalent of twenty-five Holocausts (28).”  He states things like, “By the end of the Cold War, the prospect of nuclear winter had clouded every corner of our pop culture and psychology (29).” He is very convincing with the world’s demise that it is hard to follow his optmistic logic.

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