‘Water’: Worry, worry everywhere
Miami’s Art Deco buildings have retained their beauty. Fancy cars owned by multimillionaires who made it big in real estate are parked beside palatial homes and exclusive shopping districts. The Magic City, so dubbed for its stratospheric growth, is still a popular tourist attraction.
And the visiting outof-towners are bringing scuba gear to go diving in the streets.
That’s how Jeff Goodell envisions Miami’s demise in The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (Little, Brown, 352 pp., out of four), a journalistic take on what will happen to the world’s coastal regions as climate change elevates sea levels.
After a prologue titled “Atlantis” that creates a new literary genre of speculative non-fiction, Goodell dives into a wonky but vivid mix of science, history and sociology. A comically sad lesson on how hucksters transformed the Sunshine State into the Boomville we know today bleeds into the author’s trip to Greenland for ice testing, then to the woes of Alaskan coastal com- munities, back to South Florida (one chapter is titled “Miami Is Drowning”) and out again to the wider world.
Goodell dips his toe into the lessons to be learned from Venice, Italy, and the Netherlands — and into the spreading concern in post-Hurricane Sandy New York City and Norfolk, Va., home to a huge chunk of the United States’ naval power. Readers even get a glimpse of Nigeria’s rising-water coping strategies, which include a floating school (which later collapsed) and an entire community built on stilts.
Billions of dollars will be spent — to either slow down the seas’ approach or to relocate people and assets in their way. The coming economic apocalypse is worse than anything Noah warned about, according to the author.
“As our planet changes, so will we,” Goodell warns.
A contributing editor at Rolling Stone and a fellow at the Washington, D.C., think tank New America, Goodell talks about climate change and what it means to every person on the planet in a way that will engage even the non- Nova crowd.
Yet at times the book is repetitive. Amid swirls of statistics come the same points over and over: Fossil fuels get much of the blame. Millions of people will be displaced. Policymakers move at a glacial pace. Real estate developers refuse to heed warnings. (“My biggest fear is mayhem — the Mad Max response,” one of them is quoted as saying.)
People who believe in climate change will find themselves nodding and tsktsking as they zip through this easy-toread volume.
Global warming skeptics might want to invest in some diving gear.