So, in a paragraph soon to follow the pieces I just challenged, regarding how they seem to be unaware of the “baked in” effects of 1 or 2 decades ago, he writes this:

“Carbon hangs in the air for decades, with some of the most terrifying feedbacks unspooling over even longer time horizons—which gives warming the eerie shimmer of an unending menace. But climate change is not an ancient crime we are tasked with solving now; we are destroying our planet every day, often with one hand as we conspire to restore it with the other. Which means, as Paul Hawken has perhaps illustrated most coolheadedly, we can also stop destroying it, in the same style—collectively, haphazardly, in all the most quotidian ways in addition to the spectacular-seeming ones. The project of unplugging the entire industrial world from fossil fuels is intimidating, and must be done in fairly short order—by 2040, many scientists say. But in the meantime many avenues are open—wide open, if we are not too lazy and too blinkered and too selfish to embark upon them.”

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 32). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

It’s almost as if this was added in later, but didn’t make any adjustments to the prior paragraphs to account for it. Oh well, perhaps I’m being too demanding. There are so many complicated, multi-dimensional, interlocking effects , many of them still being discovered, and undoubtedly still yet to be discovered.