The map looks terrifyingly unfamiliar. Not because of the outlines of the continents; those are comforting in their hooks, tails, splotches, and whorls. It’s the storms. Across the globe’s tropics right now, seven superstorms are swirling over oceans. Hurricane Florence is butting into the Carolinas on North America’s southeastern coast. Tropical storms Helene, Isaac, and Joyce are hovering over the Atlantic like jets stacked on approach to Charlotte. Tropical cyclone Barijat is breaking up as it makes landfall at the Gulf of Tonkin while the Philippines and the rest of southeast Asia girds itself for Super Typhoon Mangkhut.

So, fine, sure, it’s hurricane season. Stormy weather, yes, but climatology said this was going to happen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that science doesn’t know if a warming planet will have more hurricanes, but its assembled researchers do agree that what hurricanes happen will be worse. More intense wind, more rain, parked for longer over coastal cities unprepared for 100-year-storms that now come once every five years instead.

Animation by NOAA

Still, though, a map of a planet with semi-permanent storms around its belt, with a violently churning equator … that starts to look otherworldly. It’s more like the planet-spanning white storms of Saturn, or the swirling atmosphere of Neptune. It’s the sign of a planet in the throes of change, and those changes don’t look good for the future.

Humans are used to the idea of some parts of their homeworld being all but uninhabitable. The arctic regions, even as they lose more and more of their icy expanses to a warmer atmosphere, are essentially no-go regions without intense scientific support. Yes, there are scattered settlements above the Arctic Circle, and some of the bases in Antarctica are technically permanent, in that there are humans there year round, even in the permanent darkness of austral winter. But no human lives in Antarctica, and even temporary visits require protective gear and technical support. Parts of the world’s deserts are all but uninhabited, and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry have argued that some climate change models put the hottest daytime temperatures in the Middle East and North Africa above survivable levels for humans.

To be clear, scientists tend to dismiss the idea that climate change and other human interventions could render the entire planet uninhabitable. "This is, of course, nonsense," emails Christopher McKay, a NASA planetary scientist who studies terraforming and life in extreme environments. "What is certain is that the coming changes will be very, very inconvenient to human society and be of enormous cost to human infrastructure. Fires, floods, sea level, heat waves, etc…. Although a cynic might say that the Earth overall will benefit in direct proportion that all things human are decremented."