The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

“By midcentury, pretty much every reef in the world will be eroding away,” Ken Caldeira told me. That’s astonishing. Coral reefs have been around for about 250 million years, evolving into some of the most complex, diverse, and beautiful living structures on Earth. And yet, if nothing changes, within forty or fifty years they will be crumbling ruins. “I think if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, some reefs would probably survive,” Caldeira said. “But if we go on a few more decades, I think the reefs are gone. Over geological time scales, they will come back, depending how long it takes the ocean chemistry to recover. But it’s likely to be at least ten thousand years before anyone sees a reef again.”