The Uninhabitable Earth
Reposted from NYMag.com
Keeping History Above Water aims to advance knowledge and adaptation strategies for coastal communities facing the impacts of climate related sea level rise and flooding. But what if that isn’t enough?
If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.
“The Uninhabitable Earth” lays out hard facts and a grim future in the latest issue of New York Magazine.
