Michiel nodded. “Building a surge barrier can only buy us time. We must prevent sea level from rising, or lose the city.” Saskia raised her eyebrows and smiled as if to pass that remark off as a mere jest. It was very blunt talk by the standards of climate change cocktail party discourse. You couldn’t “prevent sea level from rising” in just one place. That was the whole point of sea level. You had to change the climate of the whole world. That kind of thinking—adjust the climate of the entire planet just to make things good for Venice—might have been very typical of Venice in, say, the twelfth
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