We Broke the Planet. Now What?

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Seemingly every other month, we hear about the latest example of a 1,000-year flood, a 100-year hurricane, the once-in-a-lifetime forest fire. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

The road is on fire.

Fire in Oregon, just one of 70 wildfires raging across 12 states.

Portland, 116 degrees. That is a new all-time record. I mean, we've never seen anything like this in the Pacific Northwest.

Historic and catastrophic flooding in Western Europe, with at least 199 people killed and hundreds more still missing after violent storms.

Experts have attributed the extreme weather to climate change.

The impact of climate change.

No one is immune from climate change. Whenever a climate-related disaster strikes, policymakers and environmentalists Issue a call to arms. Here's activist Greta Thunberg.

Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not.

And here is former Vice President Al Gore. This is our generation's life or death battle. Think back through the histories of the cities. Represented here in the nations they are found in, times in the past where heroism made the difference in a crucial battle that defined history. The whole world is facing just those circumstances right now. By now, we have grown accustomed to thinking of climate change as the enemy we must urgently defeat. Year after year, policymakers tell us it is our last and final chance to overcome the crisis.

In my view, we've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis.

We can't wait any longer. The implication here is that while it is late, it is not too late to head off catastrophe. But in many parts of the world, this is no longer true.

Sea level rise is a reality that's not going to be avoided by eliminating CO2 or methane emissions.

This week on Hidden Brain, how to fight the inevitable. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast A podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with With Progressive, save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. When we talk about climate change, we often talk about it as a battle. If we win this battle, we get to avoid catastrophe. If we lose the battle, we're finished. Now, some battles are like that, but others are not. Today we start with an account of 2 actual battles which illustrate 2 strategies for how we might respond to the huge challenge posed by climate change. Both battles represented crucial moments during the Second World War but they could not be more different in terms of strategy, tactics, and philosophy. On June 6th, 1944, more than 150,000 Allied troops approached the coast of Normandy, a region in the north of France.

The invasion fleet is moving towards France.

Some 13,000 paratroopers flying in 1,000 planes landed behind enemy lines. The aerial and amphibious assault was the result of months of planning and involved one of the most complex operations in military history. The risks were enormous. And reinforcements arrive, thousands of men. The Normandy invasion came with massive costs. 10,000 soldiers were killed in the battle. But the reason for the sacrifice was clear. This was the way to defeat the Third Reich, to destroy Adolf Hitler. D-Day, as the Normandy landing came to be called, became the turning point in the war. And it's a powerful metaphor for one kind of battle. In the face of an existential threat, the Allies mustered the will and the courage to overcome the powerful German war machine. Today, D-Day is still celebrated as one of the greatest military achievements in history. But consider another battle fought 4 years earlier. The date was May 26th, 1940, and the location was farther north on the French coast, at a small seaport called Dunkirk. German forces had overrun France and cut off Allied escape routes. Some 390,000 French and British troops were pinned against the sea. Their supplies were dwindling. They were facing aerial bombardments from Nazi warplanes. And German troops were just outside Dunkirk. The situation was desperate. They're worn out and footsore.

They're hungry.

For weeks they have been shelled and bombed from 3 sides. They had to stagger back to the sea to survive.

They were betrayed.

At stake at Dunkirk was more than just the outcome of a single battle. If the Germans captured this enormous fighting force, it could make the war unwinnable for the Allies. What followed over the next couple of weeks was as remarkable a story as the Allied invasion of Normandy 4 years later. English naval vessels, backed by an extraordinary flotilla of fishermen's boats, sailed to the French coast to rescue the marooned troops. Here in these scenes off the beaches of Dunkirk, you have one of the dramatic pictures of the war. Men wading out to a vessel beached at low tide, its crew waiting to haul them aboard. As the Nazis closed in, the boats began ferrying the trapped soldiers across the English Channel to safety. Sailing with one of the relieving vessels, we passed ship after ship packed with men whom the long arm of the Royal Navy has brought off the beaches of Dunkirk. Every kind of small craft— destroyers, paddle steamers, yachts, motorboats, rowing boats— have sped here to the burning ruins of Dunkirk to bring off the gallant British and French troops. The Belgian fishing fleet evacuated more than 4,000 troops. A paddle steamer, one of those cruise boats with a rotating wheel on one end, made 7 round trips and saved 7,000 men. The smallest fishing boat to help with the operation was the Tamzin. It was less than 15 feet long. The story of that epic withdrawal will live in history both as a glorious example of discipline and as a monument to seapower. In the end, hundreds of thousands of men trapped at Dunkirk were saved. They would go on to form the backbone of the Allied war effort against Hitler. Dunkirk could hardly be called a victory, though. It was a strategic retreat, One that would eventually pave the path to the Normandy invasion. I want you to keep the stories of Dunkirk and Normandy in mind as you listen to the rest of this story. In strategy and philosophy, these battles are metaphors for 2 very different ways we might confront climate change. One version of the climate change story says if we marshal all of our effort and resources and fight with unity and determination, We can overcome a terrible foe and win. This story says we are at Normandy. Many activists like the rousing language of Normandy because stories of victory and defeat exhort people to action. But another version of the climate change story says we are not at Normandy. We are at Dunkirk. If we want to survive, We need to be realistic about what we are up against and consider what is feasible. Defeating the Nazis at Dunkirk was not feasible. The only option was to figure out how to retreat and save as many lives as possible. So in the struggle against climate change, which metaphor is more fitting? Is victory around the corner if we just try hard enough? Or should we accept a conditional defeat in the service of long-term survival? When I ask myself these questions, I know what I want to hear. I want to hear that victory is possible, that if we work hard enough, we can head off catastrophe.

My name is Christina Hill, and I'm a professor at University of California at Berkeley. And I teach in environmental planning and urban design.

Christina specializes in one of the most visible aspects of climate change and the topic we'll be mostly focusing on today, sea level rise. She says the oceans are predicted to go up at least 3 feet over the next 80 years.

But when we look at the possible extremes in different parts of the world, for example, the state of Rhode Island has adopted an expectation for 2100 of about 10 feet. The state of California has adopted a 10-foot-2-inch planning expectation as a worst-case scenario for 2100. So there's a lot of discussion about that, but the extreme scenario is about 10 feet, and then the mid-range is more like between 4 and 6.

At 4 feet, much of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area is underwater. At 6 feet, parts of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Newark are submerged. At 10 feet, big swaths of San Diego, Seattle, and Boston are toast. How likely is that extreme scenario? It can be hard to predict, but estimates range from 1 in 50 to 1 in 200. Let's say the correct answer is 1 in 100. That is much less remote than most of us imagine. Christina says she sometimes has trouble explaining to her students exactly what such a risk entails.

I feel like I am always working with this kind of bias we have looking at probability as sort of a folk or everyday version of probability theory where people take a 1% number or a 5% number and they make that zero in their minds. What that means— there's an example I usually use when I'm talking to the public or to my students. If you've ever met a woman in the United States who's 5 foot 10, that has 1% odds.

Wow.

So it's not that unusual. Most of us have met tall women.

Let's think for a moment like Christina's students and tell ourselves that a 1% risk is the same as zero, that the extreme scenario of 10 feet of sea level rise will not come to pass within the next few decades. How likely is a 4 to 6 foot rise in sea levels?

I think that that mid-range is more like 60% probability, between 50 and 60%, I believe.

I see.

So that's a little better than a flip of a coin, but it's really not that much better. Yeah.

What would 3 to 4 feet of sea level rise mean for nations around the world?

Well, it's huge. You don't have to get to 10 feet to have huge impacts. There are hundreds of millions of people who live in that zone, who live in places that are flat enough to be within the reach of that tide.

Let me repeat that: hundreds of millions of people. And that's actually a conservative estimate. About 600 million people worldwide live on the coast, but 2.4 billion people About a third of the planet's population live within 60 miles of a coast. If a rising sea washes out roads and bridges, if it cuts off access to hospitals, airports, and schools, the fact that water hasn't yet reached your doorstep will not be much comfort.

And that doesn't include the cities that are on tidal rivers, like Hamburg in Germany or Washington, D.C., or Other cities where the tide comes up a river.

Throughout history, humans have built cities next to bodies of water to fish, to trade, to transport goods and services and people. But rising rivers could imperil tens of millions of people in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Calcutta, and Shanghai.

If you can't access your property by roads, And your sewer lines may not work, so you can't flush the toilet. People are going to feel the impacts of that. That's a very immediate impact. But we're talking about factories and flat areas near the coast being flooded, supply chains being disrupted. In a way, economically and in terms of transportation, everyone's going to feel the impact of this coastal change.

I'd like to say that at least as far as flooding goes, that's about as bad as it gets. Unfortunately, the story gets worse. Sea level rise doesn't just mean flooding as the oceans swallow up the land. It also leads to a less visible but deadly threat: rising groundwater from below.

You'll actually see The profile or elevation of the groundwater table change and the amount of water in rivers change because the groundwater will flow out more towards the river, flow out towards the ocean, and in some places actually come up higher in the soil. In most places, actually.

And you're saying we're already seeing evidence of this in the United States?

That's right. So at high tides in Norfolk, Virginia, Miami Beach, the Florida Keys, here in the San Francisco Bay, New York City. People are seeing water come up through storm drains that were designed to take water away, but are now letting water literally bubble up like in a fountain.

I mean, it sounds like science fiction almost. I mean, of sort of the monster coming up through the sewers feels like it's a Hollywood trope here.

It kind of should be called, it came from below.

Flooding, to state the obvious, is only one of the consequences of climate change. In recent months, we've seen other effects: hurricanes, forest fires, extreme swings in weather. In many ways, it's not surprising that many people have come to think of climate change in a way similar to how the Allies thought of Adolf Hitler. as an existential threat that must be conquered. And it's not surprising that this leads many leaders to evoke the language of war to imply that if we only fight hard enough, we can win this battle. Life or death battle. Climate change must be fought.

This is our nuclear moment.

In the language of climate science, This approach is known as mitigation. Do everything you can to head off climate change. But the most disturbing part of my conversation with Christina was not her account of what could happen if we failed to act. It was her account of what would happen even if we acted.

Sea level rise, for example, is now projected to happen even if we stopped every molecule of CO2 from leaving human activities and livestock today. So sea level rise is now the horse that left the barn. It's going to happen anyway.

Why is that, Christina? Why would mitigation not head off the problem? I mean, there's the old proverb, the first thing to do when you're in a hole is to stop digging. And the analogy with climate change would be the first thing to do is to not make the problem any worse than it is right now. So why is it that stopping the emissions of greenhouse gases, why would it not head off these, even the moderate scenarios of sea level rise?

Well, the oceans have absorbed most of the CO2 that we've emitted so far over the last 200, 300 years. So we're seeing change just based on our 300 years of making this mistake. And we're also seeing tipping points in melting that can't be arrested. just by stopping our CO2 emissions because there already is so much CO2.

So this really speaks to sort of the inertia of the system, does it not?

That's right. I mean, we're trying to catch up. We've learned about what our mistake was over the last 300 years, but it's already had consequences. We have to recognize that these systems have already changed.

I mean, it seems a little scary in some ways when you think that there's still sort of debates, ongoing debates about whether climate change is real. And you're basically saying, at this point, many of the effects of climate change are almost inevitable.

Yeah, baked in on our new planet that we already live on.

This kind of talk runs against so much of what we hear when it comes to fighting climate change. We are usually told we are at Normandy, that there is a way to defeat Hitler. Christina is saying, no, we are at Dunkirk. We may not like the reality we confront, but we have to be realistic about it. We have to prepare for that reality. What's known as adaptation. Now, it's worth noting that this type of thinking can be dispiriting. If we accept that some aspects of climate change are here to stay, will that make some people throw up their hands and give up? Will governments backpedal on even the meager promises they have made to rein in carbon emissions? And will climate change denialists and the fossil fuel industry say, You know what? It's too late to do anything, so why bother? Those concerns are real and worrisome. But in many parts of the world, the focus is already moving from mitigation to adaptation. That's because in these places, climate change isn't just a theoretical risk in the future. It's an existential threat in the here and now.

If things go Business as usual, we will not live, we will die. Our country will not exist.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When we think about the effects of climate change, it can be hard to anticipate all the risks we may face in the coming decades. But as the author William Gibson once said, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. I'm standing in the future right now. Shallow water laps at my feet. I'm in the Maldives, a group of nearly 1,200 coral islands in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka. The scene is breathtaking. Palm trees sway on white sand beaches. The water is turquoise. Couples tan themselves on lounge chairs. The Maldives are a magnet for celebrities. Some resorts have underwater bedrooms where you can watch multicolored fish through glass walls It all looks idyllic, but it's actually a scene from a horror movie. Hassan Manikku has watched that movie unfold over many years.

We've seen erosion. Basically, that's the biggest thing. Big area, chunks of beach just washing away into the sea.

The Maldives, like every nation on Earth, is grappling with the effects of climate change. But the challenges here are different. The islands are in the middle of the ocean. They are vulnerable to harsh weather patterns that have intensified with climate change. After one recent El Niño season, the water temperature rose 4 whole degrees Fahrenheit. More than 70% of the coral in the Maldives got bleached, turning it into an ugly off-white color.

And in terms of coral, From when I was younger to what it is now, it's nothing compared to what it was even 10 years ago. I mean, it was so colorful. So it's sad to see it now because it's pretty much when you go snorkeling now, you see dead coral and dead coral washed up, bleached dead coral. It's significantly different from when I was younger, maybe 10, 15 years ago.

Dying coral and eroded beaches are sad, but you might say they mainly affect tourists. That's not true in the Maldives, though. The ocean is threatening the very existence of the entire country.

I think Maldives will be one of the first islands, whole island nations, to go underwater if sea level does rise significantly.

According to some estimates, The Maldives could soon be submerged by rising sea levels. 80% of the Maldivian islands lie less than 1 meter, or 3 feet, above sea level. As we heard earlier, sea levels are expected to rise by at least that amount by the end of the century. So what's a nation like the Maldives to do? In 2008, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, started to explore a radical solution: buying land in India, Sri Lanka, or Australia and transplanting his entire nation elsewhere. That bears repeating. He began to look into what it would take to move his country somewhere else. We do not want to leave the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed told The Guardian. But we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades. In 2009, he spoke at the UN.

Please, ladies and gentlemen, we did not do any of these things. But if things go business as usual, we will not live.

We will die.

Our country will not The speech was part of a major diplomatic push to get the world to take climate change seriously. In a way, it was a Normandy-style call to arms. But at the same time, he recognized the stark reality of his country's situation. It called for a Dunkirk-style retreat. Of course, moving a country is not a simple thing. The Maldivian people have a long history on these islands. And a nation is not just land. It's history. It's language, cuisine, customs. How can you just pick up and leave?

I mean, psychologically, this would be devastating for them. So these are things that need to be looked at as well when moving people. I mean, you can't just move people Wherever you feel like moving them.

In the Maldives, as in many other parts of the world, it isn't feasible to literally follow the Dunkirk model and evacuate people. But perhaps we should look at the Dunkirk metaphor more broadly. At its essence, what it teaches us is the importance of adapting to the realities we face. The fact that the Allies couldn't defeat the Nazis at Dunkirk was a bitter pill for military leaders to swallow. But if they didn't come to terms with that fact and strategically retreat, they could have lost the entire war. People in the Maldives know they cannot stop the ocean from rising. They have to adapt to that reality. And over the last several years, that is exactly what they have started to do.

Yeah.

All right, so just describe where we are right now, Hassan. Just describe what we're seeing around us and where we are.

We're on an island which is in the midst of being reclaimed right now.

Hassan and I are standing on a small oval spit of land. All around are huge, hulking ships with heavy machinery aboard. We visited the island on a holiday, so the machines were silent. But Hassan explained what they were here to do.

So we've got excavators, dredgers. We've got a lot of rock We're dredging boulders which will eventually create shore protection for the island. This particular island used to be a sandbank, which we have sort of enhanced through dredging.

The machine that I'm seeing over there, that's a dredger?

That's a dredger. That's a dredger with sort of— the dredger is on top, on the front of the vehicle, and you put that down and And it churns the sand and dredges sand plus water through those pipes onto the island.

And so what's the idea of sort of dredging up the sand and pulling in the water? What's the goal here? What are you trying to do?

We're trying to create an island eventually, which will be—

We're trying to create an island. Hassan is literally extracting land from the sea.

Again, this is not a natural island. We're reclaiming in an area where Naturally, it may have taken hundreds of years for an island to form, but we're trying to do it within 4 or 5 months. So it's either we live on floating structures in the ocean or we dredge and we create land above the sea level. That's what's happening right now.

And so I'm guessing we're sort of walking around now to about the middle of the island, and I'm guessing we're probably about maybe 3 feet above seawater, sea level?

We're at 2 meters.

Oh, it's actually 2 meters.

Yeah, 2 meters above sea level.

Okay. But the whole thing right now is sand?

Whole thing right now is sand, yeah. The whole thing is built on sand. The sand is strong enough to have buildings on it.

This island doesn't look like paradise right now, but it will eventually house a tourist resort with about 80 guest rooms and an environmental science center to study the effects of climate change. Hassan is a developer and also one of the leaders of an environmental NGO. Now again, the idea of building islands for tourists isn't very high-minded. But what's happening on this island is only an extension of what is being considered for the entire country. A new version of the capital city of Malé is rising on land reclaimed from the sea. It's being called The City of Hope.

And now phase 1 is almost done already with apartments, schools. There's a state-of-the-art hospital there now. And basically a new city. And phase 2 is also going to be— is also coming up with like sports stadiums and all that kind of stuff. So just bringing in the infrastructure in now. So eventually there'll be a network of about 4 or 5 islands connected to each other, which will consist of the capital city or the capital area of Maldives.

So in other words, it's not just the resorts that are basically have been creating the islands. And the government of Malé is also sort of saying, for us to basically survive, the options are to either move everybody off or we actually have to move to higher ground. There is no higher ground to move to, so you actually have to create higher ground.

Exactly, exactly. That's what's happening right now. We're creating higher ground I mean, if you speak scientifically, we are getting about 100— say, 50 years more or 100 years more by going up a meter. That's essentially the idea that they're going with. Yeah.

You see the same thing in other parts of the world on the front lines of climate change. People in these places are not focused on defeating climate change. On preventing it. They know that battle has already been lost. Instead of mitigation, they are talking adaptation. In New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed the city in 2005, federal and local governments invested billions of dollars. The money wasn't aimed at transitioning New Orleans to renewable energy sources. It went into building some 350 miles of levees, pumps, and gates encircling the city, based on the assumption it would be only a matter of time before the city was struck by another devastating hurricane. When Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana 16 years later, in August 2021, there were still major problems, including weeks without power. But there were vastly fewer deaths, and significantly less destruction compared to Katrina. The money spent on adaptation likely saved New Orleans. In the Maldives, Hassan Manikul predicted that what his country was doing today, the rest of the world would be doing tomorrow.

And it wouldn't be just the Maldives going underwater. It'll be half of Manhattan. It'll be shorelines of all the other countries as well. So it's a global problem.

The terrible irony, of course, is that efforts in places like New Orleans and the Maldives to adapt to climate change might actually make climate change worse in the long run. Dredging requires enormous amounts of fossil fuels and pumps greenhouse gases into the air. And the process damages biodiversity. Hassan sees the paradox.

But what happens is when you are dredging, there's a lot of silt and sand which goes, which disperses obviously with the currents and things like that. And the sand settles on top of the reef, damaging the corals and basically stopping photosynthesis from happening. Dredging is not environmentally friendly at all, I would say. We're disrupting the lagoon. We're disrupting the ecosystem around here, and it takes a long time for the reefs to recover after such a huge development.

Hassan's NGO is working with scientists at MIT to try to use natural processes to more quickly build up new islands like this one. He hopes his nation's plight will attract scientists from around the world to come and study what works and what doesn't. The one thing that Hassan knows is that here in the Maldives, there are no pain-free solutions, no final victories. They are at Dunkirk. They need to be realistic to stay one step ahead of the sea. As I heard Hassan's story, there was a part of me that said, okay, you can outrun the ocean for a year or a decade. But can you outrun it forever? That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey With priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In places like the Maldives, people have recognized they are not at Normandy. Defeating climate change is no longer on the table. In regions where wildfires, hurricanes, and crippling droughts are increasingly regular occurrences, a similar shift is unfolding. In some places, People have been forced to pull up stakes and leave, Dunkirk-style. Others have been forced to come up with creative ways to adapt: establishing cooling centers in cities during heat waves, maintaining healthy and resilient forests to minimize wildfires, growing crops differently in periods of drought or flooding. Ironically, Normandy, That monumental symbol of fighting back is itself in Dunkirk mode these days. It's suffering from coastal erosion due to rising sea levels. And in response, the local government is adapting, building up natural barriers to the sea, relocating vulnerable houses and farms, and implementing what they call a strategic withdrawal in the face of an advancing sea. From Normandy to the Maldives, many places are just getting started on this journey. But there is one nation that has a long head start on the rest of the world. Here, the problems posed by rising seas are not just the future; they are the present and also the past. That nation is the Netherlands. More than a quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level. Christina Hill, the UC Berkeley scientist we heard from earlier, says that for many hundreds of years, the Dutch have been building long, tall walls to keep out the sea.

First they built dikes around individual villages. And then as regions became kind of realities through political power, they would connect those individual village or city dikes and make them into regional Dikes.

Keeping out the seawater is only the first step, though. Remember earlier how we talked about the monster that came from below? The Dutch came up with a solution for that, too.

The Netherlands has an incredibly extensive system of pumps that controls the water level, the groundwater level. And if you don't have that extensive system of pumps, then even if you build a dike, the groundwater comes up behind it.

This system of pumps and dikes helped to keep both the sea and the groundwater from perpetually flooding their land. The pumps would pipe the water out from the ground and redistribute it, while the tall dike walls prevented water from flooding in the first place. These were the solutions that the Dutch needed before climate change started to lead to sea level rise. Now they're working overtime on new techniques.

Yeah, they are planning to expand their sandy coast which has a dune line, and that dune line is the effective barrier between them and the sea. And there they're trying to what they call build with nature or imitate nature by moving huge quantities of sand and dumping it in a spit shape on the shoreline. And by using that natural approach, they can save a lot of money on what they'd normally do, which would be bulldozers and Blowing machines that blow sand up onto the dunes. And it also provides them with recreational benefits because it provides a point break for surfing and all kinds of activities in the water. And it provides habitat because they're no longer driving heavy equipment over the beach every year. So that's called the sand engine. And that's one of their big innovations, which uses natural processes.

I mean, at some level, you know, the idea that sort of you can hold the sea at bay, I mean, it's sort of impressive that they've essentially done it for several hundred years. But it also does seem like something of a fool's errand at some point.

Yeah, they've done it for more than 1,000 in an increasingly concrete and steel way. They're just now kind of moving back to a big-scale version of using sand and earth in new ways. Over time, I mean, you know, what choice are they facing as a, as a nation-state? It would be to move to Germany, and, you know, that's not politically on the table. So they have to keep working at it and Their plan is to continue to innovate and to share what they learn with the rest of the world.

If you're thinking the rest of the world should start learning what the Dutch have to teach, there is a major catch. All this adaptation, it costs a lot of money. Few countries are spending anywhere close to what the Dutch are spending. And that goes for the United States too. Some parts of the US are starting to wake up. In September 2021, California approved a $15 billion package for climate change initiatives. That number was a record, but Christina said even that level of spending may not be enough for the challenges facing her home state. I asked her to paint me a picture of what the coming decades hold for the San Francisco Bay Area.

If sea level rises, let's say 3 feet, then a lot of the Bay Area shoreline would be inundated. And if it was just the horizontal movement of that saltwater, we would build dikes and prevent it from moving laterally. But unfortunately, it's also groundwater. So we have to be able to drain stormwater, and we have to be able to accommodate higher groundwater, and we have to accept that saltwater will try to move inland and figure out what we're going to do about that. So a lot of low places— the city of Alameda is an island. East Oakland, San Francisco, uh, the Mission Bay area. If sea level rises above 3 feet, those areas will be flooded and they may not be able to tolerate the high groundwater that they'll face before that.

Mm-hmm.

There are places in the Bay Area where there are radioactive dumping sites. And as the sea level rises and the groundwater, those contaminants will move around potentially in the soil. And that's more of an impact on communities of color because they live in lower places. It may already be happening in places around the Bay Area. So the Bay Area could be, if we don't find the right way to adapt, a big toxic soup within a mile of the shore zone. And it's going to be very difficult to live next to that and to watch it creeping up. all the roads and sewer pipes over time.

It's tempting when you hear about this unfolding catastrophe to imagine there must be a way to prevent it from happening. But then Christina presented me with a simple thought experiment. More than anything else she told me, it brought home to me the futility of trying to push back the sea. To imagine we can win a war against climate change.

Imagine trying to take 3 feet off the surface of the ocean and store it somewhere when the ocean is 75% plus of the planet's surface. That is not possible, never mind the energy to pump it into some low place. So we're going to have to live with a huge ocean that's very powerful and inexorably continuing to rise over time. I think we really should think about living with it in ways that are productive and safe instead of trying to keep it out.

So this is fascinating what you're saying, because in some ways you're saying sort of the metaphor in some ways of believing that we can overcome this foe, that might be sort of the wrong metaphor, that in some ways that battle might almost have been lost already.

That's right. And the ocean has been rising for the last 22,000 years. We just have been in a slow period. We invented this whole city thing during the last 8,000 years when sea level rise has been very slow. So it can go really quickly. And we are concerned that in our new phase, it may go faster than it ever has in the last 20,000 years. We could be at the steepest part of the curve. So, um, the idea of fighting that as if it's a war and you're keeping the enemy out— the Dutch used to think of it that way and try to guarantee safety to their citizens by keeping all of the seawater out, protecting them from all storm floods. But even the Dutch have said, well, you know what, maybe that's not realistic and we need to figure out how to live with water. And that's become the slogan of the Dutch effort to adapt is living with water, doing more floating housing, more artificial ponds that kind of make room for water and allow people to live around and even on the water.

Adaptation is going to be very difficult and very expensive. Many countries will not be able to afford what the Dutch have done. They are going to have to come up with their own solutions, their own adaptations. But starting sooner rather than later can reduce the harm and reduce the costs. Cristina says the challenge here is not just about economics or politics. It's also psychological. Adaptation involves accepting a certain measure of defeat.

American audiences respond very poorly to the word retreat. Americans don't retreat.

To American ears, retreat smacks of cowardice and capitulation. And at a deeper level, retreat calls on us to accept that there might be towns and cities we cannot save. Yes, there may be population centers we can protect with levees and pumps. There may be fortifications we can build to guard against storms. But adaptation might mean there are some areas that cannot be saved? Which politician is willing to tell her constituents it's time to pull up stakes and run?

In the United States, we don't really allow even grief. So how do you imagine the losses of land and, you know, places that our parents lived and that we've always imagined living in, we wanted our children to live in? There's a lot of grief in that. Grief isn't really accepted in American culture.

Yet, if we fail to do that psychological work, if we fail to talk honestly about what can and cannot be done, if we fail to be realistic about our options, Christina warns that natural disasters will not be the only things keeping us up at night.

Unless we come up with ways to adapt in place in a way that gives us some stability, For, let's say, 30 to 50 years at a time, then we create tens of millions of climate refugees, maybe hundreds of millions. And that, I think, means international conflict. That means war. So I, I think it's better to imagine adapting in place and reducing our CO2 than it is to imagine either the deaths or the migrations of Tens of millions of people. That's unacceptable.

Rather than deny what is inevitable, seeing climate change realistically might allow us to harness ingenuity and innovation. Reframing the conversation from the language of pessimism and catastrophe to the language of optimism and creativity might be a way to transform the challenges we face And get more people to realize they are not just part of the problem, but part of the solution.

It's really about thriving, not vanquishing a foe. How can we thrive? With what agreements? With what physical systems? How do we look forward to a culture where people can be creative and happy and enjoy living with water? Water is beautiful. It's really about believing that there's going to be a way where we can have compassion for each other and we can be resourceful. We can be more resourceful together than alone, and we can be brave.

We've used the frames of Dunkirk and Normandy in this story To make a point. The world is not focused remotely enough on the challenge of adaptation. To the extent we focus on adaptation, we are usually reactive. We think about adaptation after the hurricane strikes, after the island is submerged, after forest fires have burned through half a state. Even then, we don't do remotely enough. People continue to flock to the coasts, to places that are going to be severely affected by climate change. Even those who believe that climate change is real tell themselves, it won't affect me. I'll sell my home near the sea before it's too late. Normandy talk helps such denial. It allows us to imagine that if we all made just a few more sacrifices, there is a way to prevent catastrophe. Now, to be clear, There is a compelling scientific and moral case to be made for mitigation. The less carbon we emit, the more we can delay the harmful consequences of climate change. Ice will melt more slowly. Seas will rise more gradually. Storms and fires will be less frequent and less destructive. Some significant harms from climate change are already inevitable, but the things we do today can have an enormous impact on the lives of people 100, 200, or 500 years from now. The truth is, we shouldn't have to choose between adaptation and mitigation. They are both important. We must save millions of people around the world who will be displaced or affected by climate change in the near future. And we must limit the planetary harm we pass down to future generations. As Christina told me, We need to walk and chew gum at the same time. But across the world, governments are not doing remotely enough on either front, let alone both. Meanwhile, the storms and fires and floods keep coming. To paraphrase that warning on the sideview mirrors of cars, the future is closer than you think. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Ryan Katz, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Sarah Miller. She wrote a wonderful article some years ago. It was titled Heaven or High Water. It's about our collective psychological denial of the realities of climate change. The article is funny and terribly scary at the same time, and I highly recommend you track it down and read it. Sarah's writing led me to Christina Hill. Thank you, Sarah. Special thanks this week to researchers Peter Blumen and Christina Halber, who helped us understand the science of climate change. If you liked this episode, please be sure to share it with a few friends. Maybe listen together and chat about what it means afterwards. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Football season is here and the fantasy footballers are back to help you dominate your league. And this season we're bringing you 5 episodes every week. That's more starts, more sits, more waiver wire wins, and more trades from draft day all the way to your fantasy championship. We've got the rankings, the matchups, the news, and the advice you need to win.

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