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352 pages, Hardcover
First published October 24, 2017
Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.
A backpacker’s campfire (in the Western United States) throws out a spark, a tree ignites, and soon the mountainside is burning and the soot is drifting up, some of it lifted into the jet stream and settling into Greenland, darkening the snow and accelerating the transformation of ice into water, which runs down into the North Atlantic and eventually into Miami, Shanghai, New York, Venice, Mumbai, Lagos, and deeper still.
For anyone living in Miami Beach or South Brooklyn or Boston’s Back Bay or any other low-lying coastal neighborhood the difference between three feet of sea level rise by 2100 and six feet is the difference between a wet but livable city and a submerged city.