I am writing this review from the city of Malé, the capital of the Maldives. The highest point of land on this entire archipelago of 1,190 islands is maybe twenty feet above sea level, and that is the trash dump in the center of town; most of the nation is only a meter or two above the sea. Earlier this year its president announced that the Maldives would be setting aside a portion of its tourist income each year so that in the future, as sea level rose, it could buy a new homeland somewhere else.
It is, I think, a very safe bet that the number and variety of disasters will rise dramatically in the years to come, as the planet warms. Indeed, a large number of well-informed people are making those bets already. They work for insurance companies and they are increasingly dumping coastal policyholders as bad risks, or raising their premiums sky high. The number of both devastating droughts and floods increases steadily and ominously. And that’s with barely a degree Celsius of global warming; the computer models make it clear that we can expect at least two or three more degrees unless we get to work right away.
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