Book review: Hell and High Water

Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water may be the most depressing book on global warming I’ve ever read.

He writes of a “Planetary Purgatory” [UPDATE – by the 22nd Century], where sea level rises 20 feet, many coastal cities are subject to such frequent hurricanes they are abandoned, and most of the Greenland ice mass melts. What are today considered heat waves become normal summers, with more and more forest and agricultural land lost to fire and drought.

Here’s the really bad news: this is not what Romm is trying to avoid, but what he hopes to settle for.

Romm fears worse “purgatory” scenarios than this, but even more, he fears “hell and high water,” where we end up with sea level rises of 40 to 80 feet. This, along with mega-hurricanes, would require us to triage coastal cities, abandoning most of them. Inland agricultural areas would end up in a permanent state of drought; fire would be ubiquitous.

Grist