“We can adapt to this problem up to a point,” Oppenheimer told me. “But that point is determined by how strongly we mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions.”

If humanity manages to quickly lower its carbon pollution in the next few decades, then sea-level rise by 2100 may never exceed about one foot, the report says. This will be tough but manageable, Oppenheimer said. But if carbon pollution continues rising through the middle of the century, then sea-level rise by 2100 could exceed 2 feet 9 inches. Then “the job will be too big,” he said. “It will be an unmanageable problem.”

This release concludes a trilogy of special reports from the IPCC. The first came last October, when it warned that even “moderate” warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius would generate irreparable damage; and the second was published last month, with a summary of how climate change will reshape the planet’s land surface. After this new report, the IPCC will fall silent until 2021, when it will publish its sixth major assessment of climate science.

In other words, the IPCC—whose recent reports have overthrown the climate conversation both in the United States and around the world—will publish nothing new until after the 2020 presidential election.

The headline finding of this report is that sea-level rise could be worse than we thought. The report’s projection of worst-case sea-level rise by 2100 is about 10 percent higher than the IPCC predicted five years ago. The IPCC has been steadily ratcheting up its sea-level-rise projections since its 2001 report, and it is likely to increase the numbers further in the 2021 report, when the IPCC runs a new round of global climate models.

Read: Are we living through climate change’s worst-case scenario?

But sea-level rise is only one of the bewildering consequences of climate change listed in the report, whose view stretched “from the highest mountains to the bottom of the ocean,” according to Ko Barrett, a vice chair of the IPCC and a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What’s clear is that climate change is going to reshape every system made of water on Earth.

That means that as the ocean warms, seafood safety will decline: Mercury will accumulate in fish, and the toxic bacteria Vibrio will become more common. And climate change will sicken people. In the Arctic, where indigenous people rely on seafood diets, food- and waterborne illnesses are already increasing.

Climate change will also prompt extreme coastal-flooding events—think of Hurricane Harvey or Katrina—to surge in frequency. Floods that used to happen every century will now happen, in some places, every year. It will push the worst rainstorms, including tropical cyclones and hurricanes, to dump even more water. And it will increase the frequency of extreme El Niño and La Niña events like the “monster El Niño” that struck in 2016. This threatens to induce intense “whiplash between wet and dry periods,” Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, told me.