When talking about climate change, the question we need to ask is no longer “Are we screwed?” because that answer is unequivocally yes.

The question we need to ask today is, “Now what?”

It’s possible to build a livable world for the future if we take action to restore fragile environments, transform our food and energy systems, and build in protections for people and places.

But it won’t be easy.

A nine-foot storm surge barreled down on the city. It swamped subways and neighborhoods. A power substation flooded, causing an explosion that looked like something out of a science-fiction film. Half of Manhattan turned pitch black.

Downed power lines lit close-together homes on fire, forcing some residents to swim through alleys and into houses to help save neighbors. Forty-three people died. One person was electrocuted in front of neighbors as she ventured out into the storm to take a photo.

It wasn’t a scene from a movie or a scientist’s stark prediction. This was Superstorm Sandy, which hit New York City and New Jersey nearly six years ago. It changed how experts across the US think of disaster preparedness.

“Sandy was a wake-up call,” said Jainey Bavishi, director of the mayor's office of recovery and resiliency in New York City. “One of the things Sandy showed is that we’re experiencing these challenges now and so we have to act now.”

Acting now means no longer thinking of storms such as Sandy as rare phenomena that should be handled after the fact.

When the industrial era began, we set in motion climate change, a force that will lead to more catastrophic weather events, like Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, and, most recently, Hurricanes Irma and Maria. And superstorms are just the tip of this fast-melting, catastrophic iceberg.

"You have sea level rising dramatically, to the point that most of the world's cities are drowning and the ocean turning into a hot, sour, breathless soup as it acidifies and warms." Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author

Left unchecked, even a few degrees of warming could make our world largely uninhabitable, devastating civilization as we know it and even triggering an extinction event, the likes of which Earth has experienced only a handful of times in 4.5 billion years.

The question we need to ask is no longer “Are we screwed?” because the answer is unequivocally yes. Burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the implications are stark.

At present emission rates, more than 75% of the world will be exposed to heat waves so severe that they can kill regularly.

“You have sea level rising dramatically, to the point that most of the world's cities are drowning and the ocean turning into a hot, sour, breathless soup as it acidifies and warms,” environmentalist and author Bill McKibben said in an interview.

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That heat is melting land ice and causing oceans to expand, with cities like Miami likely to be surrounded by seas 7 feet higher than they were in 1990 by the end of the century. And some scientists think that’s a low estimate.

In some places, walls and elevated land simply won’t be sufficient to protect people from rising seas or powerful storms, according to Thaddeus Pawlowski, an urban designer who helped New York City set up disaster recovery programs after Sandy hit.

“There are places where we really have to give land back to nature,” he said.

In the grimmest terms, we are on the cusp of the greatest disaster response effort in history.

The question we need to ask today is, “Now what?”