David Wallace-Wells does not call himself a climate activist, nor even a lover of nature. He lived his life in the complacency that most inhabitants of the Western world share. Until he started collecting stories of climate change: ‘a group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated them on an island populated also by a group of polar bears; a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass, trapped in permafrost for many decades.’ If they sound like hyperbolic visions of a biblical apocalypse, Wallace-Wells argues in his much-acclaimed The Uninhabitable Earth, that’s because we are generating one, at full speed.