Quotes from Jeff Goodell

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.

The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs ' like the health effects of air and water pollution.

Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.

Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.

Americans don't pay much attention to environmental issues, because they aren't sexy. I mean, cleaning up coal plants and reining in outlaw frackers is hugely important work, but it doesn't get anybody's pulse racing.

When I asked the mayor if flood insurance rates had gone up after Sandy, he said, "Not really." This is how disaster relief works in America. There are lots of incentives to rebuild but few incentives to rebuild differently, much less to rethink the long-term future of cities and towns along the coast.

we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We're not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water.

Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands—or will we imprison them?

The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building.

Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today's Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

the climate is warming, the world's great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.

If we burn all the known reserves of coal, oil, and gas on the planet, seas will likely rise by more than two hundred feet in the coming centuries, submerging virtually every major coastal city in the world.

Geuze compared sea-level rise to other transformative catastrophes, such as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a partly man-made natural disaster that profoundly changed the geography of America and also expanded the role government plays in ensuring the long-term welfare of even the most vulnerable people. "We're going to need a new New Deal," Geuze argued. "It is going to require a rethinking of the social contract between governments and citizens.

We are already engineering the Earth's operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year. We're just doing it badly. Why not get good at it?

At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different.

Most of the water that will drown Miami and New York and Venice and other coastal cities will come from two places: Antarctica and Greenland. Often you hear about the disappearance of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro or the glaciers in Patagonia, but in the context of drowning cities, land-based glaciers won't contribute much. What really matters is what happens on the two big blocks of ice at either end of the Earth.

Lower Manhattan is the most valuable chunk of real estate on the planet, as well as the economic engine for the entire region—if it can't be protected, then New York City is in deep trouble.

LOYAL TO THE SOIL—WE NEED WATER NOT OIL and IF WE DESTROY CREATION, CREATION WILL DESTROY US.

nobody wants to spend money to build a more resilient city because nobody owns the risk.

In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned.

When people have to pay more and own more of the risk themselves, their decisions about where and how they live will change.

The simple truth is, human beings have become a geological force on the planet, with the power to reshape the boundaries of the world in ways we didn't intend and don't entirely understand.

In Virginia, much of the head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change can be traced to the political power of the fossil fuel industry, especially Big Coal. Dominion Energy, the state's biggest electric power company, is also one of the biggest coal burners in America.

It begins with this: the climate is warming, the world's great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.