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book about urban planning and climate science didn’t exactly seem like the kind of book I wanted to tote around on my honeymoon. Yet I had given my word that I’d review it whilst sipping margaritas at a beach resort north of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, or in the bouncy tour vans en route to pyramids, sinkholes and snorkeling on the second biggest barrier reef in the world. So, as we waited for our plane, I pulled Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come out of my bag and got cracking.
What I discovered was some of the best science writing I have ever come across, colorfully executed for the purpose of taking the concept of sea level rise out of the abstract and showing just how dire the situation is.
The book’s 300 pages deal solely with sea level rise, which is expected to hit Florida, the lowest-lying state in the U.S., especially hard. It doesn’t deal directly with climate change’s numerous other hazards: ocean acidification, wildfires, invasive species, storms, etc.
In taking a closeup of climate change’s perhaps deadliest and most globally troubling symptom, Goodell has more room to show us how terrified we should all be. And he dives right in.
Now, usually, prologues kind of annoy me. I mean, just get to the book already.
But here, Goodell paints a picture of Miami in the not-too-distant future, one in which elected officials have spent the 21st century paying little mind to the science community’s alarm bells over the impact carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions are having on our climate. Miami, as a low-lying coastal population center, is hurricane-ravaged and largely underwater (given how excess CO2 in the atmosphere is believed to influence the frequency and intensity of storms as well as ocean water levels). After decades of failure to prepare for what is projected to come — Goodell, for example, imagines that the feds cut off funding for beach renourishment, one tool that helps keep rising waters at bay — South Florida is virtually abandoned, save for drug runners and other unsavory types. Miami is reduced to “a popular dive spot where people could swim among sharks and barnacled SUVs and explore the wreckage of a great American city.”
It’s a gloomy fate, one Goodell argues doesn’t have to be as bad as what’s projected.
Sea level rise is occurring, it’s just a question of how bad it can be and what we can do to prepare and to defend our cities against the volumes of water that will come. In other words, this is not a book for Sean Hannity devotees. Goodell makes this clear in the prologue: “If you’re still questioning the link between human activity and climate change, you’re reading the wrong book.”
From here, the author takes us on a global exploration of climate science, with anthropology, culture, history and urban design mixed in.
Front and center is humanity’s complex relationship with water, a substance that’s at once essential and deadly to us. We meet the Calusa, a tribe indigenous to southwest Florida that created an entire island out of discarded shells that fused together over thousands of years to form solid ground. They viewed water as something to which they must adapt, and housed themselves in structures they could easily move — the opposite of what we do, as our tendency to want to drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make way for real estate suggests.
We learn about ancient myths of a great flood that appear to correlate with the end of the last ice age. Seemingly every culture has one, though none has preserved them as close to verbatim as the Australian Aboriginals.
In great detail, Goodell describes the places his research took him: Venice, where high tide now brings flooding to Piazza San Marco; Makoko, the floating slums of Lagos, Nigeria, which the author warns will likely have disappeared “by the time you read this”; New York City, where they’re constructing a barrier to prevent flooding from storms of Hurricane Sandy-like magnitude at most, Goodell warns, “and nothing more”; Greenland, where he sees a melting glacier.
In Greenland, we meet “rock star” climate scientist Jason Box, who gained fame via his dire prediction that glacial ice in Greenland is melting much more rapidly than previously thought — likely due to dark-hued air pollution from the U.S. and China that coats its surface and, through absorbing heat, raises its temperature.
And, perhaps in part a reminder of the consequences of voting (or not voting), especially in 2016, we meet then-President Obama in Alaska, where he visited an indigenous tribe that lives along a rapidly approaching shoreline. The former president was distraught at American officials’ inaction on reducing carbon emissions.
Goodell clearly did much of his research and interviews for The Water Will Come prior to Nov. 8, 2016, which adds an element of wistfulness to its reading. He was in Paris for the climate talks, which resulted in an unprecedented agreement to reduce global climate emissions. The Trump administration, of course, announced it would be pulling out of the agreement in summer of 2017, much to the dismay of climate scientists and environmental advocates.
The book is, in its entirety, unapologetically foreboding. One wonders whether his picture would have been as dire had the 2016 election turned out differently.
With all of the colorful descriptions of people and places and their histories also come some wonkier descriptions that, at times, can slow the casual reader down. Those whose eyes glaze over at the mere utterance of “National Flood Insurance Program” should take note, especially when he launches into a description of the engineering of Venice’s MOSE barrier.
But distilling dense, important concepts like these into more easily digestible descriptions for the masses is a science writer’s job, and Goodell is incredibly adept at this, in part due to his use of analogies. For instance, he compares the phenomenon that’s causing the land under New York City to sink to pressing on a couch cushion.
No matter where on the globe Goodell takes us in his effort to connect the dots on sea level rise, The Water Will Come’s heart is solidly rooted in Miami — or, even more so, Miami Beach.
It’s there that every fall the King Tides wash in and cause flooding in the streets even when it’s sunny in some areas. It may be wise for leaders in other coastal cities, like St. Pete and Tampa, to anticipate a similar fate in their own low-lying areas near the waterfront, where real estate development provides a lifeblood to the local economy.
Here’s where Florida politics come in.
In a chapter near the book’s end ominously titled “Miami is Drowning,” Miami Beach Mayor Phil Levine is in many ways front-and-center. Levine, who is now running for the Democratic nomination for governor in the 2018 election, has campaigned on climate change and sea level rise, and even — “after much denial and bureaucratic foot-shuffling” — got his city to start taking action.
The city is trying literally to raise its streets and other infrastructure while encouraging private businesses and other entities to follow suit with their own investments. So far, the bulk of the work has taken place in the tony Sunset Harbour neighborhood, where Levine and other city elites live.
During one recent year’s King Tides, Goodell spent a day walking around in sewage-laden tidewaters with Florida International University geologist Henry Briceno, a Venezuelan immigrant kicked out of his home country by then-dictator Hugo Chavez. Briceno irked city officials in Miami Beach when the Miami Herald reported on data he collected that suggested floodwaters were swimming in sewage; some samples contained hundreds of times the state limit for fecal content.
South Florida officials, after all, have seen contaminated water backing up into the streets, and officials have had to dump millions of gallons of sewage into Biscayne Bay.
That should sound familiar to Tampa Bay residents who have been around during storm season. Floodwater inundation has led to massive sewage dumps in St. Petersburg and other places as well as sewage backups in Tampa’s low-lying areas. Sewage was, of course, a key issue in the St. Pete mayor’s race and the city is now in the middle of a massive overhaul of the city’s wastewater system.
Yet with creeping water levels and without serious mitigation methods, Florida’s coastal areas could routinely be surrounded by potentially toxic stews. One might be inclined to joke that rising water levels just bring one’s property closer to the gleaming gulf (and some choice paddleboarding), but given what sea level rise could potentially wash up into our streets, as Goodell writes, “It ain’t gonna be pretty.”
While in Miami, Goodell examines the situation at Turkey Point, Florida Power & Light’s nuke plant, which sits near the water south of Miami. Officials with the utility giant didn’t seem all that concerned with sea level rise, and told Goodell the facility is equipped to handle encroaching seas. To what level, they would not say. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he writes, which approved two more reactors to be built out there, didn’t mention sea level rise once in its most recent environmental review of the facility, which the agency conducted in 2016.
In the book’s epilogue, Goodell writes that sea level rise might not be as bad as what’s projected if we can manage to curb fossil fuels in the next decade. It’s going to happen regardless, but with the right approach it could be two feet instead of eight. The catastrophic loss Goodell presented in his prologue’s version of Miami would not come to pass by the century’s end, perhaps. It’d be easier to adapt, to raise streets, move to slightly higher ground, etc.
But given how the political climate itself would have to change drastically before more sweeping policy changes come about, the author doesn’t seem to hold out much hope. If worse comes to worst, come 2100, maybe we’ll be able to tour South Beach’s long-gone art deco buildings via virtual reality, or visit the Las Vegas replica of Venice — assuming the American Southwest isn’t itself reeling from the impacts of a warming planet.
This article appears in Dec 7-14, 2017.
