Perversely, for a generation now, we’ve been comforted by numbers like these—when we think the worst that climate change can bring is an ocean a few feet higher, anyone who lives even a short distance from the coast feels like they can breathe easy. In that way, even alarmist popular writing about global warming has been a victim of its own success, so focused on sea-level rise that it has blinded readers to all the climate scourges beyond the oceans that threaten to terrorize the coming generations—direct heat, extreme weather, pandemic disease, and more. But as “familiar” as sea-level rise may seem, it surely deserves its place at the center of the picture of what damage climate change will bring. That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we’d already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war—because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.
In The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell runs through just a few of the monuments—indeed, in some cases, whole cultures—that will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited; Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States’ largest naval base, in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nations of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh, including all of the mangrove forests that have been the kingdom of Bengal tigers for millennia; all of Miami Beach and much of the South Florida paradise engineered out of marsh and swamp and sandbar by rabid real-estate speculators less than a century ago; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, today nearly a thousand years old; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well as Trump’s “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, Richard Nixon’s in Key Biscayne, and the original, Harry Truman’s, in Key West. This is a very partial list. We’ve spent the millennia since Plato enamored with the story of a single drowned culture, Atlantis, which if it ever existed was probably a small archipelago of Mediterranean islands with a population numbering in the thousands—possibly tens of thousands. By 2100, if we do not halt emissions, as much as 5 percent of the world’s population will be flooded every single year. Jakarta is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, today home to ten million; thanks to flooding and literal sinking, it could be entirely underwater as soon as 2050. Already, China is evacuating hundreds of thousands every summer to keep them out of the range of flooding in the Pearl River Delta.
What would be submerged by these floods are not just the homes of those who flee—hundreds of millions of new climate refugees unleashed onto a world incapable, at this point, of accommodating the needs of just a few million—but communities, schools, shopping districts, farmlands, office buildings and high-rises, regional cultures so sprawling that just a few centuries ago we might have remembered them as empires unto themselves, now suddenly underwater museums showcasing the way of life in the one or two centuries when humans, rather than keeping their safe distance, rushed to build up at the coastline. It will take thousands of years, perhaps millions, for quartz and feldspar to degrade into sand that might replenish the beaches we lose.
Much of the infrastructure of the internet, one study showed, could be drowned by sea-level rise in less than two decades; and most of the smartphones we use to navigate it are today manufactured in Shenzhen, which, sitting right in the Pearl River Delta, is likely to be flooded soon, as well. In 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 311,000 homes in the United States would be at risk of chronic inundation by 2045—a timespan, as they pointed out, no longer than a mortgage. By 2100, the number would be more than 2.4 million properties, or $1 trillion worth of American real estate—underwater. Climate change may not only make the miles along the American coast uninsurable, it could render obsolete the very idea of disaster insurance; by the end of the century, one recent study showed, certain places could be struck by six different climate-driven disasters simultaneously. If no significant action is taken to curb emissions, one estimate of global damages is as high as $100 trillion per year by 2100. That is more than global GDP today. Most estimates are a bit lower: $14 trillion a year, still almost a fifth of present-day GDP.
But the flooding wouldn’t stop at the end of the century, since sea-level rise would continue for millennia, ultimately producing, in even that optimistic two-degree scenario, oceans six meters higher. What would that look like? The planet would lose about 444,000 square miles of land, where about 375 million people live today—a quarter of them in China. In fact, the twenty cities most affected by such sea-level rise are all Asian megalopolises—among them Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Which does cast a climate shroud over the prospect, now so much taken for granted among the Nostradamuses of geopolitics, of an Asian century. Whatever the course of climate change, China will surely continue its ascent, but it will do so while fighting back the ocean, as well—perhaps one reason it is already so focused on establishing control over the South China Sea.
Nearly two-thirds of the world’s major cities are on the coast—not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice paddies—and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. Already, flooding has quadrupled since 1980, according to the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, and doubled since just 2004. Even under an “intermediate low” sea-level-rise scenario, by 2100 high-tide flooding could hit the East Coast of the United States “every other day.”
We haven’t even gotten to inland flooding—when rivers run over, swollen by deluges of rain or storm surges channeled downstream from the sea. Between 1995 and 2015, this affected 2.3 billion and killed 157,000 around the world. Under even the most radically aggressive global emissions reduction regime, the further warming of the planet from just the carbon we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere would increase global rainfall to such a degree that the number affected by river flooding in South America would double, according to one paper, from 6 million to 12 million; in Africa, it would grow from 24 to 35 million, and in Asia from 70 to 156 million. All told, at just 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, flood damage would increase by between 160 and 240 percent; at 2 degrees, the death toll from flooding would be 50 percent higher than today. In the United States, one recent model suggested that FEMA’s recent projections of flood risk were off by a factor of three, and that more than 40 million Americans were at risk of catastrophic inundation.
These effects will come to pass even with a radical reduction of emissions, keep in mind. Without flood adaptation measures, large swaths of northern Europe and the whole eastern half of the United States will be affected by at least ten times as many floods. In large parts of India, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia, where flooding is today catastrophically common, the multiplier could be just as high—and the baseline is already so elevated that it annually produces humanitarian crises on a scale we like to think we would not forget for generations.
Instead, we forget them immediately. In 2017, floods in South Asia killed 1,200 people, leaving two thirds of Bangladesh underwater; António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, estimated that 41 million people had been affected. As with so much climate change data, those numbers can numb, but 41 million is as much as eight times the entire global population at the time of the Black Sea deluge 7,600 years ago—reputedly so dramatic and catastrophic a flood that it may have given rise to our Noah’s Ark story. At the same time as the floods hit in 2017, almost 700,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar arrived in Bangladesh, most of them in a single settlement site that became, in months, more populous than Lyon, France’s third biggest city, and was erected in the path of landslides just as the next monsoon season arrived.