The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World Kindle Edition

If you read one book on our climate cancer, this is a great one. Jeff is a gifted writer, researcher, and interviewer, and all his talents combine into a highly readable, deeply thoughtful book. I was the most moved when he described pulling over to write down the name of the man in Louisiana sending out a cry for help on NPR, in order to contact him and make his story and predicament known. His interview with Obama is also worth the price of admission. (“There’s gonna be adaptations that have to be made and there are gonna be displacements.” Ah, the clarity!)Things that stood out: the number of times scientists said, about recent events, things like “we couldn’t have predicted this” - it makes me wonder what is else is coming, much sooner than most people (even scientists) realize.There were few to no mentions of sewage solutions in any city but Miami, probably because they’re the first city already dealing with it. Just sea walls. Where is the poop going to go? Is Manhattan going to engineer impervious poop shafts like the Channel Tunnel? MIT Tech Journal published an article in December 2021 stating that outside of hydrological circles, nobody is thinking about coastal water tables rising in conjunction with the tides (a fact that scientists didn’t study until ten years ago). The Maldives just spent billions on a sea wall and didn’t factor that into their project. Yikes.I was struck by how many multi-millions get spent all over the world on remediation solutions that last for just a few years before nature takes over again. If we could spend that money getting people solar panels, and buying out whole towns at more than their market value (just to create a better incentive)… sigh. The funds are there, but the psychological submission to nature’s strength is absolutely not. Some of us might just deserve what’s coming. Imperialist hubris dies hard.Finally - “When you think about big technological fixes for sea-level rise, spraying particles in the atmosphere to reflect away sunlight is the only planetary-scale fix we know of that could plausibly stop or slow sea-level rise.”I read that and thought, it’s not ultimately about sea level rise. We can live without coastal civilization. It’s about protecting the human body - we need to keep the atmosphere stable enough to still be able to grow food to eat, and we need the air to not cook our internal organs to death. That’s what this comes down to. Maybe not within my lifetime, or my kids’ lifetime as privileged Americans, but that’s the end result of carbon emissions ad nauseum.

The author does a great job of previewing upcoming events driven by climate change - including potential reactions to those changes in the areas of technology, law and politics. Very enlightening. Since the book is 5 years old, I looked online for updates to some topics presented. THAT was alarming - it turns out that some large preventive infrastructure projects the author discussed are behind schedule and running way over budget. All as the pace of climate change seems to accelerate.

I just finished reading this for the second time. The first time was 2 years ago and in many ways, I feel like parts of this book are already coming true. Catastrophic floods and fires worldwide. Deadly heatwaves and drought. It’s difficult to watch the news and not think of this book. If you have read books like The Sixth Extinction and The Ends of the World, you’ll like this one.

exactly that. Goodell is a veteran of Rolling Stone magazine and author of a suite of books revolving around climate change. He reveals in The Water Will Come what climate change is going to mean for the East Coast of the United States, and what people are (or, more to the point, are not) doing about it. Spoiler alert: it’s not good.The complexities of wind, water and land being what they are, the East Coast will experience substantially more sea level rise than many other parts of the U.S., and no place will feel the effects more dramatically than Miami Beach, where water may come up three to six feet over the coming decades. It is here that Goodell begins his book and to which he repeatedly returns. The effects of his reporting, at least on me, are a combination of exasperation, despair, a certain unproductive desire to revel in an I-told-you-so schadenfreude when it all goes to hell, and a final throwing-up-of-hands.As one scientist explains the inevitability of Miami beach being lost to rising seas, worsening storms and the ocean literally bubbling up through the porous karst limestone beneath the condos, a distraught estate agent exclaims, “This can’t be a fear-fest! Why is everyone picking on Miami? Why have we become the poster child on this? … You can’t scare people. You can’t tell them Miami is not going to exist. It’s not right. It’s not fair.”This moment captures the essence of Goodell’s book and is what stayed with me after I finished it. Climate change is incredibly hard to deal with psychologically (never mind practically) because it poses an existential threat. And if your financial livelihood is linked to pretending it is not happening, then it is doubly threatening. I am reminded of Upton Sinclair’s insight that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”Goodell has done a masterful job in capturing the gestalt of our times. We were a great country once. Now we ride down the backside of the empire's bell curve, impotent, grasping, fearful. There was a time we bestrode the world. Now we will watch our cities wash into the sea and wring our hands over it.

Libro profético

Easy compelling read. You don't need to be a scientist to understand what is happening to ice sheets in Greenland and bigger and more damaging storms around the world. This is about the world we live in now. Economic and social implications of rising water and development in low lying land around the world is discussed. This book was recommended to me and I will be recommending it to others. You won't be buying any coastal property after you read this book.

Miami seems doomed as is Norfolk/Hampton Roads . I'm surprised the flooding in NYC after Sandy wasn't covered. I think denial lays a large part of why people want to rebuild. "It's just a freaky thing.". New Orleans is the worst. They need to move the whole city to higher ground. True stupidity. Learned a lot. I highlighted half the book!

This is compelling reading! We bury our heads in the sand at our peril! Nations go on fighting and threatening one another when, surely, our greatest enemy is climate change - and our biggest challenge what we do about it. This book really demonstrates the enormity of the challenges that lie ahead for mankind in the forthcoming century. We need to act now, not just in relation to countries and cities being flooded out of existence, but on how we tackle potential lack of food, resultant immigration, and a host of other key issues. When you begin to evaluate these matters your head swims and you wonder how your children and children’s children will ever be able to come to terms with the changes, and survive. Excellent!

The introduction is a fictional account of a storm surge effectively wiping out Miami in 2037. It’s well researched and totally believable. The rest of the book describes the author’s efforts to bring this potential home to other coastal communities, their representatives and politicians. It’s slow, but there is some evidence that this massive tanker is just beginning to turn. Meanwhile, concerned communities are putting their homes on stilts, and borrowing other ideas from the third world. Check just what your flood insurance covers. There may be more gaps in it than you think.

Written by a journalist and accessible because of that, weighted towards the American coast but sufficient stories from Venice and The Netherlands, this book exposes the sea level rise in our Industrial Age. We can expect at a minimum 1-3 feet, more likely 8 feet or more, by 2100.3 years in the writing and, for me, well worth the effort.

Sea level rising? Parts of continents sinking? For me, more of a geo-political perspective, focusing on primarily the USA, but other countries large and small suffering from more frequent ‘king’ tidal effects. It’s not going to go away, how and when humankind begins to seriously address the issues causing these problems, not to mention the political will, remains to be seen. Short term thinking seems to be apparent at present. This a a thought provoking book well worth reading.

Really enjoyed it - which is odd given the subject matter it is covering. Left convinced enough that if I ever inherit money or gain money, will be investing in under water housing or mountain properties - the beach no longer appeals after this.