The planet is changing, and the human race is going to need to work towards a solution fast if we want to survive. David Wallace-Wells makes that message very clear in his
article,”The Devastation of Human Life is in View” in which he presents indisputable evidence of climate change that even he himself was blind to at first. In a way, his admittance of his own ignorance is a method of Ethos, as he proves himself to be credible as he appears as an average citizen living under the threat of climate change, just as his readers do. Wells begins the paper by elaborating on stories he has collected of both human and animal lives affected by shifting temperatures in years past. He admits that he once dismissed these stories as a unique type of sympathy causing (pathos) allegory media outlets had created, such as a group of researchers trapped in an arctic outpost supported by melting ice, but soon realized that these stories hinted at much more. he change in the weather was a major figure in global politics, a keystone in the Syrian Refugee crisis, and a time bomb that will lead to record numbers of migrants fleeing from a flooding Bangladesh and a drying Africa and Latin America. Wells uses a combination of fear and statistics (logos) explains that the human race will inevitably reach a level known as 2C, a threshold governments at the 1997 Kyoto Protocol believe coincide with “catastrophe”; as flooded cities, drying climates and monsoons clash with civilization in what foriegn minister of the Marshall Islands says will result in “genocide” (4). The article goes on to explain that since the Kyoto Protocol was reached just 20 years ago, our planet has produced more emissions than ever before. Planetary history gives us record of rising temperatures correlating with rising sea levels, and recent findings have suggested that Earth could be on course to a 4 or 5C environment as soon as the year 2100, a world hardly hospitable for any life at all.
Wallace-Wells begins to describe global affairs as it currently stands, as he explains that the majority of the burning in the atmosphere has occurred in the last 25 years. He encourages readers to take action, and calls attention to the numerous fires that have devastated the California landscape over the past year. He uses Logos to present statistics of the damage the caused by the most extreme of those, the Thomas Fire, growing 50,000 acres in one day and forcing 100,000 Californians out of their homes. Wallace-Wells explains that he used these numbers to show readers how much control we have over climate change, and writes that the 20 worst fires in California’s history took place in the autumn of 2017, putting the scale of the crisis into perspective.. Wallace-Wells ends the paragraph with a sad story of Pathos, telling the tale of an older couple who took shelter in the pool to escape the disaster, with only one of the two emerging. Several other rhetorical devices are used throughout the passage, such as the reference to recognizable figures, writing how these catastrophes humanized icons we looked up to, such as the Kardashians who the world watched the evacute their homes. He mentions a second force of other notable landmarks damaged by the fire, such as the burnt wine fields of Napa Valley and the gloomy orange skies encompassing Disneyland, emphasizing how locations we thought of as timeless could be damaged by the onset of climate change.
Wallace-Wells expands the piece to highlight how the increasing amount of natural disasters affect the rest of the world. He references other countries changed forever by disaster, and again uses Logos to make mention of the 260,000-600,000 worldwide citizens who die annually by way of self produced smoke. Wallace-Wells references the increasing threat of fires in the Arctic circle, burning thousands of acres of ice and forest in Greenland and Sweden. Fires erupt along the Greek seaside, the Russia-Finland Border, and the British countryside, each considered the biggest in their country’s history. Wallace-Wells highlights even more statistics with the threat of rainfall sparking mudslides in Santa Barbara, tree falls leading to massive jungle fires in Indonesia, and the 100,000 fires continuing in the Amazon as Brazil’s president promises to open the rainforest to even more human development. Scientists predict that this policy will release about 13.12 gigatons of carbon into the air, more than twice the amount emitted by our country in the last two years.
He closes the piece with a grimly hopeful note, as he concludes that the likely range of warming this century, 3-3.5 C, will “unleash suffering beyond anything that humans have ever experienced”, but not the worst it could be. We can create new solutions in that time, technology that will extract CO2 from the air and cool the planet and perhaps even save it. Wallace-Wells concludes the piece with a bit of Ethos and moral questioning, as he responds to the dilemma of having children in this time. He introduces his one year old daughter, and admits to being ignorant and ignoring the issues she’ll have to deal with in her lifetime. He writes that the fight isn’t over, and that the key to saving our world rests in however his daughter and the rest of our future generation choose to act.
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