_The Water Will Come_

p. 20: "2017 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States' top climate science agency, says global sea-level rise could range from about one foot to more than eight feet by 2100."

P.13: "gone will be the beach where you first kissed your boyfriend; the mangrove forests in Bangladesh where Bengal tigers thrive; the crocodile nests in Florida Bay; Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley; St. Mark's Basilica in Venice; Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina; America's biggest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; NASA's Kennedy Space Center; graves on the Isle of the Dead in Tasmania; the slums of Jakarta, Indonesia; entire nations like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands"

P. 19: At the end of the last Ice Age, "Due to the flat topography of coastal Florida, the rising seas would have been particularly dramatic to anyone living there. Halligan estimates that the seas moved inland at a rate of five hundred to six hundred feet a year."

P. 24-25: "As the ice melted, the Mediterranean rose higher and higher, and by about 5600 BCE, it had risen to a point where it was 500 feet above the Black Sea. Then the strip of land between them collapsed, and the seawater flowed over it. So much water poured in so fast it cut a flume—now the Bosporus Strait—280 feet wide and 450 feet deep. . . . After two years, the lake (Black Sea) water had risen 330 feet, until the lake was at the same level as the Mediterranean Sea. . . . It's not a thesis all scientists accept. Liviu Giosan of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and colleagues from the University of Bucharest drilled cores in the area, examining the sedimentary data near where the Danube River empties into the Black Sea. They found evidence that Black Lake/Sea water levels rose only about half as much as Ryan and his colleagues proposed and would have drowned only about 800 square miles of land (about half of Rhode Island), rather than the 25,000 square miles (more than the entire state of West Virginia) that Ryan and Pitman suggested."

P. 27: Early landfill: "From a distance, Mound Key looked like any other Florida island—low and green and peaceful. The only thing remarkable about it was that it was entirely artificial, an island built by the Calusa from their discarded seashells."

P. 29: Resilient living conditions, not resistance: 'Houses on Cape Cod were also moved and recycled. One observer found that the residents thought of their "houses less as family seats, founded for the ages, than as temporary shelters, like the borrowed shells of hermit crabs, to be shifted about and exchanged, in location and function, as the need arose."'

P. 32: "A few billion years ago, Florida was part of Africa. When the Atlantic Ocean opened up, Florida was left behind, stuck onto the North American continent."

P. 39: 'For these early vacationers, the pull of the beach was its very emptiness and "cleanliness"—no shipwrecks, no dead bodies washing up, no sign of dirty industrial life.'

P. 44: "in the twenty-first century, as sea levels started to rise, the phrase 'the Venice of America' would take on an entirely different meaning." Will Rogers on FL real estate: "Carl discovered that sand would hold up a real estate sign, and that was all he wanted it for."

P. 48: "More than any place in America, South Florida has been an expression of the technological dominance of twentieth-and twenty-first-century life: it is a world created by dredgers, cooled by air conditioning, powered by nuclear energy, dominated by cars, sanitized by insecticides, glamorized by TV and the Internet. It is a place that has been habitable only if you believe the premise that nature—the heat, the bugs, the alligators, and most of all, the water—can be tamed."

P. 50: "According to NASA, Greenland is losing three times as much ice each year as it did in the 1990s."

P. 55: "By 2040, the summer sea ice in the Arctic is likely to vanish entirely"

p. 56: "In the past twenty years, the Arctic has warmed by more than three degrees Fahrenheit, roughly twice as fast as the global average.

P. 60: "The oldest continuously recording tide gauge in the world is at the end of a pier near Chrissy Field in San Francisco; it has been recording water levels since June 30, 1854."

P. 62: "the thermal expansion of the oceans caused by the Earth's rising temperature has contributed about half of the observed sea-level rise in the last fifty years." "between 1950 and 2009, the seas north of Cape Hatteras rose three to four times faster than the global average."

P. 66: "warmer temperatures in the United States stress pine trees in the Rockies, leaving them vulnerable to pine bark beetles, which bore into the trunks of the heat-weakened trees, killing them and turning them into tinder. A backpacker's campfire throws out a spark, a tree ignites, and soon the mountainside is burning and the soot is drifting up, some of it lofted into the jet stream and settling in Greenland, darkening the snow"

P. 69: "NASA's James Hansen published a paper in 2015 stating that, due to the exponential increase in ice sheet melting in Antarctica, we could see as much as nine feet of sea-level rise by 2100." "145 million people live fewer than three feet above sea level, many of them in poor nations like Bangladesh or Indonesia."

P.86: Obama: '"I've got a chronic concern about pandemics, for example. And the odds are that sometime in our lifetime there's gonna be something like the Spanish flu that wipes out a lot of people... if we're not taking care."'

P. 96: "As recently as 2010, when the county finalized a new zoning plan called Miami 21, which was supposed to celebrate the values of New Urbanism and prepare Miami for the twenty-first century, sea-level rise wasn't even mentioned."

P. 109: Perhaps convincing banks and insurers is fastest path to climate-change action. '"So far, banks don't require any more than the minimum of insurance to get a mortgage," Pathman said. "But in the next decade or so, as the risks of flooding from sea-level rise get clearer, that is probably going to change. They will begin to require that some larger percentage of an asset be insured. Banks will say, 'What you have now doesn't cover the risk. We need insurance for thirty to fifty percent of the value of the property.' If you have a two-million-dollar home, you will need to carry eight hundred thousand dollars in insurance. What happens if insurers don't want to write that? Maybe they stop giving thirty-year mortgages. And if that happens, this city is in big trouble.'

P. 113: '"If you have all your wealth tied up in your house, and your house is underwater, then you have lost everything."'

P. 116: Venice: "I paused for a moment and was immediately struck by the quietness of the city—there were no people around; the shutters of the buildings were all closed. Even better, there were no cars—no traffic, no exhaust fumes, no roar of broken mufflers."

P. 125: Death of cruise industry welcome: "e economy into a singular engine that services tourists: every shop sells necklaces of fake Murano glass jewelry and Venetian carnival masks; every restaurant offers the same pasta with meatballs; every apartment is now an Airbnb. This has not only eroded the city's tax base and pushed out traditional jobs, it has turned the city into something nearly indistinguishable from a Disney version of itself."

P. 131: Venetian barrier, reminiscent along with Maeslant in Rotterdam of John McPhee's _Control of Nature_. "According to a UNESCO report, during the project planning phase, three sea-level rise scenarios for 2100 were considered. The estimate cited as "most probable" was 16 centimeters (about 6 inches); the one cited as most "prudent" was 22 centimeters (about 8 inches); the third scenario, labeled "pessimistic," was 31.4 centimeters (about a foot). Planners recommended using the prudent scenario for design purposes. In a world where respected scientists are now suggesting that sea-level rise by 2100 could be six feet or more, designing a barrier for eight inches of sea-level rise looks, in retrospect, either like startling naïveté or startling incompetence."

p. 138: "Another example is the barrier on the Thames just east of London. . . . The barrier became operational in 1982, one of the first examples of a big retractable gate to be built. . . . it was closed only four times in the 1980s; as of this writing, it has been closed seventy-five times since 2000."

P. 149: "seas are now rising about 50 percent faster in the New York area than the global average."

P. 152: "a wall around Lower Manhattan might actually deflect more water into places like Red Hook,"

P. 154: As true of immigration as fooding in NYC. "projects like this are nuanced and complex and expensive, making them difficult to sell as a quick fix. And they require people to acknowledge that the world is changing fast and that they will live differently in the future. It's so much easier to just build a wall and forget about it"

P.169: "the entire amount of CO2 emitted by the Marshallese in the last 50 years is less than the city of Portland, Oregon, emits in a single year. And of course, the basic injustice of climate change is that the people who are least responsible for the problem are the ones who will pay the most dearly for it." Notably, people not yet born.

P. 181: "(hilariously, negotiators for Saudi Arabia, which ranks as the world's fifteenth-largest economy, demanded that if islands like Kiribati or the Marshalls were to be compensated for damages, the Saudis should also be protected from loss of future oil income)."

P. 182: "The most credible estimate may be from the International Organization for Migration, which projects about 200 million climate refugees by 2050."

P. 185: "In 2014, Kiribati purchased eight square miles of private land in Fiji for $8 million. Fijian president Ratu Epeli Nailatikau has assured the people of Kiribati that some or all of them would be welcome to migrate thirteen hundred miles across open ocean waters to his country, if the need arose."

P. 192: "Naval Station Norfolk is at risk because of a number of factors, including the subsidence of the land the base is built on and the slowdown of the Gulf Stream current, which brushes up against the coast here (as on the rest of the mid-Atlantic coast, sea levels are rising in Norfolk roughly twice as fast as the global average)."

P. 200: "many people in the military end up talking about climate in much the way eighth graders talk about sex—with code words and winks and suggestive language."

P. 202: Narrowing of straits all over the world will increase miltary tensions. "In the not-so-distant future, the Bering Strait—the fifty-mile-wide gap between Russia and the United States off the coast of Alaska—could become a strategic choke point in global trade like the Strait of Malacca in Asia or the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf."

P. 224: "In Mexico, a man named Richart Sowa has made a floating island out of 250,000 used plastic bottles stuffed into recycled fruit sacks. He planted mangroves and palm trees on it, built a two-story house out of wood and fabric, and calls his plastic bottle island an eco-paradise. Then there's the Seasteading Institute, which imagines an entire city at sea, far from the hands of government. The institute was cofounded by Peter Thiel, the eccentric billionaire who sits on the board of Facebook and campaigned for Donald Trump during the 2016 election. For seasteaders, offshore settlements are a kind of libertarian dream, a new city-state where the old rules don't apply. The institute recently spun off a for-profit company called Blue Frontiers, which hopes to build a laboratory and living spaces on a series of fourteen floating platforms in a lagoon in Tahiti. The proposed project, which the company sees as a prototype for more ambitious settlements on the open sea, includes floating solar panels, a high-speed internet connection, and its own cryptocurrency, called SeaCoins."

P. 227: Life in Lagos' Makoko "water slum": "Within minutes, we were deep in an elevated city, a community on stilts. Some of the houses were shacks, with walls of burlap and driftwood, while others were slum mansions, brightly painted, with two stories and rooms added on. The canals were crowded with boat traffic—kids hot-rodding around with their friends, women paddling boats full of rice and vegetables. We passed a machine shop, where men gathered, shirtless, working on an engine; a mill, where corn was being ground into mash; a small blue hut with a sign that said hair salon. We motored past a school where kids sat at desks, thirty feet above the water, and churches that were built on elevated piles of sand. Kids yelled at us as we floated by; others stared at me ("They have never seen a white person before," Patrick explained). We saw people napping, washing clothes, repairing fishing nets. In short, living life on the water."

P. 250: Bay Area problems to come: "Leaky septic systems are not the only source of contamination urban residents need to be concerned about when their city starts to flood. In Miami, a 200-acre garbage dump known affectionately as Mount Trashmore sits right on the edge of Biscayne Bay."

P. 253: "just because I can tell you how to solve the problem, if it doesn't fit within the culture of this city and the future of this city, then it's not the right solution." -- Bruce Mowry, Chief Engineer of Miami Beach