Climate fiction envisions the future of hurricanes and sea level rise » Yale Climate Connections

by Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections
June 19, 2026

The future of climate change and hurricanes is beset with huge unknowns – both scientifically and culturally – because the situation is so unique and unprecedented in human history. Given these unknowns, the climate fiction (cli-fi) genre is useful for envisioning a difficult-to-imagine future.

Below, I review three cli-fi books that present plausible scenarios. All of them predict that hurricanes combined with sea level rise will inevitably bring about economic hardship of the kind I have been warning about for years: a collapse of the coastal property market, resulting in people abandoning hurricane-prone coastal areas. I highly recommend reading all three books and give them a rating of four out of five stars each.

North (2025), by Jesse Keenan

One of the most impressive and comprehensive non-fiction books on climate change ever written is “North” (2025), by climate adaptation expert Jesse Keenan of Tulane University. “North” would make an excellent textbook for a college-level course on climate change adaptation, and I recommend it for readers unafraid of the highly technical language Keenan uses.

But Keenan devotes the last 5% of “North” to cli-fi, which envisions a relatively hopeful scenario for post-climate America in 2079. He defines this as a time when “societies and economies have internalized the uncertainty, the risks, and the opportunities of climate change … with climate action under a renewed sense of optimism of a shared future built on a balance of American civic nationalism and local autonomy.”

Read: A preview of the new year — in 12 new books

But getting to this post-climate America causes much upheaval in places like Florida. After the Great Climate Mortgage Crash of 2032, the Sunshine State’s fortunes underwent a steady decline. By 2057, Keenan writes:

There were very few sandy beaches left to handle what was left of the nearly 200 million tourists that Florida used to accommodate every year. With sea level rise and a shortage of sand, only a handful of recreational beaches remained in Florida. Elevated concrete pads with microplastic sand were popular for a while, but these beachside structures eventually just became barren concrete landscapes. People increasingly fell out of love with going to the beach because it was just too hot to go outside between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. for half the year. Sport fishing had also largely disappeared … many fish were simply being boiled alive in the near-shore waters. The theme parks had not fared much better, particularly with increasing media attention on heat-related deaths of tourists. After successive waves of denge and zika VII, tourists simply did not want to put their children at risk.

Then, to make matters worse, Keenan envisions the landfall in Tampa Bay of Category 6 Hurricane Grant, whose 59-foot storm surge and 220 mph (355 km/hr) winds killed over 14,000 people. A mass migration of 5 million people out of Florida resulted, and the state suffered insolvency and the collapse of the state insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Company.

The Light Pirate (2023), by Lily Brooks-Dalton

“The Light Pirate,” by Lily Brooks-Dalton, provides a story of Florida — presumably in the late 21st century — ravaged by sea level rise, fierce hurricanes, and extreme heat. Over a period of decades, the story follows a family that lives in the fictional town of Rudder, located along the Florida east coast. The beautifully written but melancholy book details the steady abandonment and breakdown of Florida civilization from climate change, starting with catastrophic Hurricane Wanda. Brooks-Dalton writes:

Rudder crumbles before his eyes: roads eaten away by floods, trees felled by the winds, houses knocked off their foundations. Each year more people leave. Each year the town budget for repairs and maintenance shrinks. What would it take to save it? The easy answer is money. The other answer is more complicated. Feats of engineering to protect them from the sea, higher roads, more durable utilities, global climate control, international policy decisions that should’ve been made decades ago. Time travel and politics, but in the end it’s always been money. The world is divided now: The places that still function, and the places that don’t. Florida doesn’t. Their local governments are dissolving, their infrastructure crumbling. Louisiana is fading, too. The Outer Banks of North Carolina are gone entirely. The Bahamas. More will follow.

The Deluge (2023), by Stephen Markley

“The Deluge,” Stephen Markley’s sprawling 900-page 2023 cli-fi epic, chronicles the climate crisis over the next three decades. He envisions an America in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. He writes: “Fanaticism, ethnic factionalism, and political extremism will engulf the planet, and the pillage of the natural world will indeed accelerate as the elite make one last futile attempt to gather as much capital as possible in an effort to wall themselves off from the inevitable.”

Read: Climate fiction that will haunt you! 

“The Deluge” follows climate scientist Tony Pietrus, whose fate becomes intertwined with a diverse cast of characters — a drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor-turned-religious zealot, and a charismatic young activist named Kate Morris, who becomes a formidable political force. As the story progresses through the years 2026-2035, the characters live through or hear about several extreme weather-related events, including Hurricane Alberto, which devastates Virginia Beach in 2026; months-long heat waves and wildfires that affect multiple continents; the first ice-free summer in the Arctic in 2030; a partial collapse of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, followed by its rapid retreat by 10 km per year, resulting in a rapid increase in sea level rise rates; a trillion-dollar “ARkStorm” flood in California; and Cyclone Giri in Bangladesh, whose 210 mph (340 km/hr) winds drive a storm surge that leaves over 2 million people dead or missing. These climate change-amplified disasters end up causing a U.S. economic crash in 2036, which Markley describes in this way:

Housing prices had plummeted 7.8 percent year over year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, the largest drop since the 2008 crisis, and this was after a 3.6 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2035 alone. Most of the metro areas where this was occurring were on the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast, particularly in and around Miami, where homes sat unsold, foreclosures had spiked, lending had tightened, and a full-scale abandonment of all homeowners policies by the hard-hit insurance industry was creeping outward like a cancer. Sound familiar? wrote Krugman. While poor minority neighborhoods turned to flooded ruins, the wealthiest Miamians neighborhoods are experiencing untenable nuisance flooding. The National Flood Insurance Program has fallen nearly half a trillion dollars in debt despite Congress’s efforts to raise rates for at-risk properties. Rating agencies continue to downgrade the bonds of coastal cities and tax bases are collapsing, which then hamstrings much-needed repairs to the infrastructure needed to keep these cities dry. Much of this has been predictable, but that does not make it any less frightening.

Three years later, the main character suffers through the most intense hurricane ever recorded, 2039’s Hurricane Kate. Kate levels nearly every structure from Norfolk to Myrtle Beach as far as 20 miles inland. Markley writes:

The coast was kindling and rubble. Amid the flood, fire-scorched divots smoldered for days, boats and houses and churches and cars washed miles from the shore and deposited in trees, in drifts of sand, hurled into other structures. Homes like my parents’ were swept off their foundations. Trailer parks had been reduced to disjecta piled on the sides of the highway. The floodwaters, which did not recede for a month, wreaked havoc on electrical wiring and corroded sewer lines. In one iconic image from the Norfolk navy base, a destroyer had been torn from its anchors and run aground. It lay on its side in the middle of the city, its stern wiping out a strip mall. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor hadn’t been able to sink or destroy as many ships. Despite evacuations, at least eight thousand people were dead or missing. It would be the first trillion-dollar storm, sending a twelve-foot surge sweeping across the beaches and dropping seventy-nine inches of rain in some regions during the five days it took to dissipate. Power was out for months; food, water, fuel, and electricity hard to come by. 

Bob Henson contributed to this post.

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