This is what the world will be like if we do not act on climate change.
The best-case scenario of climate change is that world gets just 2°C hotter, which scientists call the “threshold of catastrophe”.
Why is that the good news? Because if humans don’t change course now, the planet is on a trajectory to reach 4°C at the end of this century, which would bring $600 trillion in global climate damages, double the warfare, and a refugee crisis 100x worse than the Syrian exodus.
David Wallace-Wells explains what would happen at an 8°C and even 13°C increase. These predictions are horrifying, but should not scare us into complacency. “It should make us focus on them more intently,” he says.
David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City. His latest book is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
There are islands in the Chesapeake Bay that have already succumbed to sea level rise, one of them is Holland Island.
Even in a best case scenario, the consensus is that we’ll get at least two feet of sea level rise by the year 2100.
One big question is: What will happen when flooding gets worse and worse and people decide there’s no hope for them anymore to live in their respective towns.
Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for the New York Times Magazine. His first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, was a New York Times bestseller. His latest is The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future.
