"America Is on Fire, Says One Climate Writer. Should You Flee?"

"In “On the Move,” Abrahm Lustgarten predicts a massive demographic shift in response to an increasingly unlivable world."

"It’s happening already, of course. You can see it in the blazes in California, incinerating homes and forcing residents to escape the terror of wildfires. You can glimpse it in Arizona, where droughts have pushed farmers to give up on growing crops and sell their fields to developers.

On the coasts, tides are rising, flooding vulnerable seaboard cities as a pervasive warmth expands ocean volumes and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland melt into the water.

And finally, there are the heat waves: weeks of infernal temperatures that literally kill residents of Western states who venture too long outside. “The places around the world we think we can live in now,” Abrahm Lustgarten explains in “On the Move,” his fascinating new look at the population changes wrought by climate crisis, “will not be the same as the places where we will be able to live in the future.”

In a larger context, he warns, we may now be on the cusp of “the largest demographic shift the world has ever seen.”"

Jon Gertner reviews “On the Move,” by Abrahm Lustgarten for the New York Times March 22, 2024.

Source: NYTimes, 03/25/2024