Talk to The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Jeff Goodell spent years traveling to the places most threatened by rising seas — Miami, Rotterdam, Lagos, Dhaka, Venice, the Marshall Islands — and The Water Will Come is the result of that reporting. His thesis is blunt: the seas are rising faster than most official projections acknowledge, and the cities humanity has built along coastlines over centuries will be partially or entirely underwater within the lifetimes of children alive today. This is not a distant hypothetical. It is already happening.
The book is organized around places and people rather than data tables. Goodell sits with real estate developers in Miami who are still selling luxury condos on land that will flood within decades. He visits Rotterdam, which has spent billions building flood infrastructure and has accepted that living with water, rather than fighting it, is the only viable long-term strategy. He reports from the Marshall Islands, where the question is not whether the islands will be uninhabitable but when. Each location illuminates a different dimension of the problem: denial, adaptation, migration, loss.
What it gets right
- 1.
Sea levels are rising from two sources: melting ice sheets and glaciers, and thermal expansion of warming ocean water. Both are accelerating.
- 2.
The upper range of sea level projections — 6 to 9 feet by 2100 — is dismissed by most planners but is supported by real physical possibility and would be catastrophic.
- 3.
Miami is one of the most vulnerable major cities on Earth. It sits on porous limestone that makes seawalls ineffective and is surrounded by water on three sides.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jeff Goodell is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and one of the most widely read journalists covering climate change. He is the author of several books on energy and the environment, including Big Coal and How to Cool the Planet. Goodell has reported from every inhabited continent on the human dimensions of climate disruption. His long-form journalism and books translate complex earth science for general readers without sacrificing accuracy or urgency. He lives in Austin, Texas.
