Remember, that is the Arctic feedback loop that does not much concern many climate scientists in the near term. The one that concerns them more, at present, is what is called the “albedo effect”: ice is white and so reflects sunlight back into space rather than absorbing it; the less ice, the more sunlight is absorbed as global warming; and the total disappearance of that ice, Peter Wadhams has estimated, could mean a massive warming equivalent to the entire last twenty-five years of global carbon emissions. The last twenty-five years of emissions, keep in mind, is about half of the total that humanity has ever produced—a scale of carbon production that has pushed the planet from near-complete climate stability to the brink of chaos.
All of this is speculative. But our uncertainty over each of these dynamics—ice sheet collapse, Arctic methane, the albedo effect—clouds our understanding only of the pace of change, not its scale. In fact, we do know what the endgame for oceans looks like, just not how long it will take us to get there.
How much sea-level rise is that? The ocean chemist David Archer is the researcher who has focused perhaps most acutely on what he calls the “long thaw” impacts of global warming. It may take centuries, he says, even millennia, but he estimates that ultimately, even at just three degrees of warming, sea-level rise will be at least fifty meters—that is, fully one hundred times higher than Paris predicted for 2100. The U.S. Geological Survey puts the ultimate figure at eighty meters, or more than 260 feet.
The world would perhaps not be made literally unrecognizable by that flooding, but the distinction is ultimately semantic. Montreal would be almost entirely underwater, as would London. The United States is an unexceptional example: at just 170 feet, more than 97 percent of Florida would disappear, leaving only a few hills in the Panhandle; and just under 97 percent of Delaware would be submerged. Oceans would cover 80 percent of Louisiana, 70 percent of New Jersey, and half of South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Maryland. San Francisco and Sacramento would be underwater, as would New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, Houston, Seattle, and Virginia Beach, among dozens of other cities. In many places, the coast would retreat by as much as one hundred miles. Arkansas and Vermont, landlocked today, would become coastal.
The rest of the world may fare even worse. Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian Amazon, would not just be on the oceanfront, but underneath its waters, as would Buenos Aires and the biggest city in landlocked Paraguay, Asunción, now more than five hundred miles inland. In Europe, in addition to London, Dublin would be underwater, as would Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Stockholm, Riga and Helsinki and Saint Petersburg. Istanbul would flood, and the Black Sea and the Mediterranean would join. In Asia, you could forget the coastline cities of Doha and Dubai and Karachi and Kolkata and Mumbai (to name just a few) and would be able to trace the trail of underwater metropolises from what is now close to desert, in Baghdad, all the way to Beijing, itself a hundred miles inland.
That 260-foot rise is, ultimately, the ceiling—but it is a pretty good bet we will get there eventually. Greenhouse gases simply work on too long a timescale to avoid it, though what kind of human civilization will be around to see that flooded planet is very much to be determined. Of course, the scariest variable is how quickly that flood will come. Perhaps it will be a thousand years, but perhaps much sooner. More than 600 million people live within thirty feet of sea level today.
Wildfire
The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is meant to be, in Southern California, the start of rainy season. Not in 2017. The Thomas Fire, the worst of those that roiled the region that fall, grew 50,000 acres in one day, eventually burning 440 square miles and forcing the evacuations of more than 100,000 Californians. A week after it was sparked, it remained, in the ominous semi-clinical language of wildfires, merely “15% contained.” For a poetic approximation, it was not a bad estimate of how much of a handle we have on the forces of climate change that unleashed the Thomas Fire and the many other environmental calamities for which it was an apocalyptic harbinger. That is to say, hardly any.
“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote in “Los Angeles Notebook,” collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968. But the cultural impression is apparently not all that deep, since the fires that broke out in the fall of 2017 produced, in headlines and on television and via text messages, an astonished refrain of the adjectives “unthinkable,” “unprecedented,” and “unimaginable.” Didion was writing about the fires that had swept through Malibu in 1956, Bel Air in 1961, Santa Barbara in 1964, and Watts in 1965; she updated her list in 1989 with “Fire Season,” in which she described the fires of 1968, 1970, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1982: “Since 1919, when the county began keeping records of its fires, some areas have burned eight times.”
The list of dates cautions, on the one hand, against wildfire alarmism—against a sort of cartoonishly Californian environmental panic, in which all observers are all-consumed by the present instance of disaster. But all fires are not equal. Five of the twenty worst fires in California history hit the state in the fall of 2017, a year in which over nine thousand separate ones broke out, burning through more than 1,240,000 acres—nearly two thousand square miles made soot.
That October, in Northern California, 172 fires broke out in just two days—devastation so cruel and sweeping that two different accounts were published in two different local newspapers of two different aging couples taking desperate cover in pools as the fires swallowed their homes. One couple survived, emerging after six excruciating hours to find their house transformed into an ash monument; in the other account, it was only the husband who emerged, his wife of fifty-five years having died in his arms. As Americans traded horror stories in the aftermath of those fires, they could be forgiven for mixing up the stories, or being confused; that climate terror could be so general as to provide variations on such a theme had seemed, as recently as that September, impossible to believe.
The following year offered another variation. In the summer of 2018, the fires were fewer in number, totaling only six thousand. But just one, made up of a whole network of fires together called the Mendocino Complex, burned almost half a million acres alone. In total, more than two thousand square miles in the state turned to flame, and smoke blanketed almost half the country. Things were worse to the north, in British Columbia, where more than three million acres burned, producing smoke that would—if it followed the pattern of previous Canadian plumes—travel across the Atlantic to Europe. Then, in November, came the Woolsey Fire, which forced the evacuation of 170,000, and the Camp Fire, which was somehow worse, burning through more than 200 square miles and incinerating an entire town so quickly that the evacuees, 50,000 of them, found themselves sprinting past exploding cars, their sneakers melting to the asphalt as they ran. It was the deadliest fire in California history, a record that had been set almost a century before, by the Griffith Park Fire of 1933.
If these wildfires were not unprecedented, in California at least, what did we mean when we called them that? Like September 11, which followed several decades of morbid American fantasies about the World Trade Center, this new class of terror looked to a horrified public like a climate prophecy, made in fear, now made real.
That prophecy was threefold. First, the simple intuition of climate horrors—an especially biblical premonition when the plague is out-of-control fire, like a dust storm of flame. Second, the expanding reach of wildfires in particular, which now can feel, in much of the West, only a gust of bad wind away. But perhaps the most harrowing of the ways in which the fires seemed to confirm our cinematic nightmares was the third: that climate chaos could breach our most imperious fortresses—that is, our cities.