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

"It won't really impact me," says the rich yuppie making, or expecting to make, six figures. He looks out from his sixth floor apartment where the snow piles up. The snow is spit down in gusts by a bomb cyclone, which itself is energized by the jet stream, which itself is weakened by the warmest Arctic ever recorded in human history.

Of course, he says this in 2018, a few days after the most costly year in human history when it comes to natural disasters. Entire cities were swamped and entire territories of the US have been destroyed. The climate is killing people, "but not me."

The Water Will Come is about a very specific part of climate change: rising seas. This is probably the least questionable part of climate change: the land ice in Greenland and the Antarctic is melting faster than it is growing. As long as the climate continues to gain more energy, they will melt.

The book doesn't question it. I don't even recall it trying to go into the physics too deeply -if you're reading, well, you know. Instead, Goodell is trying to answer the question, "What are we going to do about it?" The question has a lot of answers:

*in Miami they'll raise the city
*in New York they'll build a seawall around lower Manhattan.
*in Venice they'll build a "Mercedes on the seafloor"
*In Lagos they'll build an island for the super-rich
*And so on...

The one consistent response to this is, "So will it survive climate change? Will it survive 3 feet? Will it survive 6ft? 8ft?"

The answer is almost always, "No, we're just buying time." They can survive one feet. Maybe two feet. But when solar power fails to take over the world? When wind power stalls out? When fracking expands to every corner of the world and oil is economically king? Venice's lagoon will be destroyed and Miami will be an underwater scrapyard. The third rail in the New York subway will be encrusted by salt.

How can I blame the yuppie, then? If American society refuses to even believe in climate change, and cripples itself so as to fail simple tests of resiliency, how can I blame somebody whose answer to resiliency is, "I will be too rich or too dead to care"? At least they have an answer.