The Uninhabitable Earth

The sea is destined to “become a killer.” Four to eight feet of sea-level rise is expected by the end of the century. But humanity has convinced itself that a rise in sea level will be the worst ravage of climate disaster. Because of this, resources are so laser-focused on combating sea level rise that extreme weather events, diseases, and other effects get overlooked.

Whole cultures will be swallowed by the sea: the Maldives and the Marshall Islands, most of Bangladesh, Miami Beach, and the White House will all be condemned to an Atlantis-like fate, displacing hundreds of millions of climate refugees. By 2045, as many as 311,000 homes in the United States are at risk of chronic inundation; by 2100, the number expands to 2.4 million properties and domiciles. And the flooding won’t stop then: seas will continue rising for thousands and thousands of years. 

Coasts aren’t all that will be affected—inland flooding, which has affected 2.3 billion people around the globe just since 1995, will continue to devastate the planet as rainfall increases. At just 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, flood damages increase worldwide by between 160 and 240 percent. Even with a huge reduction in emissions, these predictions are all but guaranteed to come to pass.

Already, communities around the globe are struggling to adapt to the prospect of new coastlines. The melt rate of the Antarctic ice sheet tripled between 2008 and 2018—each year, the sheet loses over 200 billion tons of ice, meaning sea levels could rise several meters within just 50 years. All climate science is ruled by uncertainty, but sea-level rise is literally unprecedented: never before has the breaking-up of ice on such a scale been seen.

The melting of the Arctic threatens to trigger many more cascades of climate chaos. As ice melts, up to 1.8 trillion tons of carbon will be released from the ice in the form of methane gas, which is even more powerful than carbon dioxide. This flips the ice sheets and the permafrost in Canada, Russia, and other northern regions from carbon sinks—which absorb atmospheric carbon—to carbon sources. By 2100, the Arctic may have released 100 billion tons of carbon—half of all the carbon produced by humanity since the dawn of industrialization. Losing the “albedo effect,” in which white swaths of ice reflect sunlight back into space rather than absorbing it, also threatens to suck more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Some climatologists and ocean chemists predict 50 to 80 meters of sea rise at three degrees of warming—Montreal, London, New York City, Saint Petersburg, and Mumbai would be erased from the map at that level. Though this is the “ceiling” of sea-level rise, the Earth will get there eventually—it’s just a matter of when.