Every climate scenario, including the ones where emissions fall fast, commits the world to roughly 20 centimeters of sea level rise by 2050. Most of the heat that drives it is already stored in the deep ocean, where it will stay for centuries. Cooling the atmosphere won’t pull it out. Carbon removal won’t either. So the honest question is what to do with water that’s already on its way.
One answer, and as far as I can tell the only program studying it as a system, is to put some of that water somewhere else: into the desert basins and shrinking inland seas that sit below sea level around the world. It sounds like science fiction until you hear the numbers, the sites, and the list of questions that have to be answered first. This conversation is a tour of all three, with the person building the research program to answer them.
Guest
Charlotte Love is Program Lead for the Coastal Futures Resilience Initiative (CFRI) inside ARC at Renaissance Philanthropy. She studied earth sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, completed a PhD in hydrology working with the Army Corps of Engineers on flood-frequency estimation, built transboundary water-security networks with the National Academies across North America, MENA, and Central Asia, and served as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Federal Railroad Administration. CFRI is currently a team of one; she’s hiring and raising.
Key topics
00:00 — Cold open: sea level rise is permanent on human timescales
01:55 — Charlotte’s path: Scripps, hydrology, the Army Corps, Central Asian water diplomacy, and why the executive branch needs answers rather than papers
06:35 — Why the rise is locked in: deep-ocean heat storage and thermal expansion
09:34 — What SAI and carbon removal don’t fix, and why every intervention is maintenance
11:14 — The CFRI idea: storing seawater in endorheic basins to replace the storage land ice once provided
13:11 — The numbers: eleven sites, 51 cm over a century, and the 20 cm target for 2050
16:14 — Phase one: proof of concept for the Qattara Depression and Dead Sea, scoping for the Caspian
20:04 — Groundwater, salinity, and the questions a water scientist asks first
24:24 — Why Egypt has wanted to fill the Qattara for decades: hydropower, desalination, dust
29:05 — The Dead Sea and Caspian as restoration projects, and the Caspian’s research void
35:26 — The Salton Sea as an early learning site
40:18 — Phase two, phase three, and the handoff question
45:14 — Is there enough talent? Gravity, topography, and why this scares people less than SAI
47:36 — Closing
Links and resources
Coastal Futures Resilience Initiative (CFRI), ARC at Renaissance Philanthropy
Previous episode: Marianne Hagen on the Seabed Curtain Project
The Overshoot Era is about what we do now that we’re past 1.5 degrees, and every episode is a conversation with someone building one piece of the response — seabed curtains, seawater storage, atmospheric cooling, the governance that has to hold all of it together. Subscribers get every episode, the full show notes, and the written essays where I connect the pieces. Free at overshootera.com.
