The Uninhabitable Earth
David Wallace-Wells
Penguin: 2019
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Carbon Ideologies. No Immediate Danger and No Good Alternative (Volumes One and Two)
William T Vollman
Viking: 2018
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Carbon Capture
Howard J Herzog
MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series: 2018
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Dear Maldivian in exile,

I don’t know where to send this letter as I have no idea where you are. A crowded high-rise on one of the man-made islands floating off New Zealand if you were one of the fortunate ones. Maybe a sodden refugee camp outside Thiruvananthapuram if you weren’t so lucky. I know where you won’t be: Shanghai, New York, Mumbai, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Yangon. Those great centres of trade, heedlessly built on the water’s edge by colonial powers, will have been submerged just a few decades after the Maldives.

Do you think much about your old home? Before the waves took your islands, they were a place of wonder. Settled so low in the seascape that the sky formed a vast blue dome, filled at dusk with towering pink clouds. So bright with white coral sand that even deep waters refracted into shades of turquoise seen nowhere else. Skittering silver-blue schools of fish swam over the reefs that formed these islands over thousands of years. Each year huge manta rays with wingspans of more than a metre would swarm into lagoons to feed on an abundance of tiny organisms, leaping from the water in what appeared to be a performance of joy. The coral died off just a few decades after I wrote this, too delicate for the rising temperatures and acidity of the water.

When I spent time on your islands in 2019, the signs were already there. In Addu City, water pooled on the streets, brackish white puddles that never dried up. The fresh water was gone, driven out by rising seas and tainted with pollution. Rainfall was in decline so the thin layer of sweet water on the atolls was no longer replenished. In the twentieth century it had been possible to dig a well almost anywhere and drink the water. In Male, once your capital, people relied on a desalination plant. When a fire caused it to stop working, bottled water had to be flown in from India. Fights broke out when people thought the bottles were running out.

• Tags: Global Warming, Issue 15, Maldives, Robert Templer