Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates that six feet of sea-level rise would put a quarter of Miami’s homes underwater.
However, nowhere in the article does it say a six feet rise will happen at the end of the century. So is that actually going to happen? How many models project this and how many don't? What is the "stupendous reversal" required in real terms? What are the options to combat this? Would a giant sea wall work?
If you come at this from the angle of "climate change is a myth" the entire article reads as fluff. This makes it basically impossible to convince people that this is a real issue that needs to be dealt with. The sensationalist title distances people from the issue even further (it is sensational because the article doesn't present any evidence that Miami will be underwater soon).
According to NOAA [2], the "relative sea level trend" in Miami Beach is 2.39 mm/year.
At those rates, in 100 years, the sea will have risen about one foot, not six.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212150739.h...
That accelerating projection "has the potential to double the total sea level rise by 2100 as compared to projections that assume a constant rate -- to more than 60 cm instead of about 30".
Two feet instead of one. I still don't see where six feet is coming from.
I read $SOMEWHERE recently that the the worst case scenario predicted six feet. But that's, IIRC, if we do absolutely nothing, the methane in the Arctic is all released, and Greenland melts. The more likely scenario is somewhere from 1-3 feet.
So unless memory fails me, the article didn't just pull it out of its arse, but a source would've been nice rather than just throw a number out there with no backing whatsoever.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
BTW, they already know that a lot of the melting in Greenland is from the bottom up (geothermal) rather than from the top down. But of course you don't hear too much about that, do you?
https://www.newsweek.com/puzzling-heat-deep-inside-earth-mel...
https://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-shee...
But it is losing mass when iceberg calving is accounted for.
"Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr."
Edit: And i thought this article on the scale of a gigaton of water was interesting as well:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
Or 0.5mm sea level increase (from your link).
Misreading the link - as many newspapers have done, and it's wrong absent further data - results in 6'
EDIT: As noted by Accipitriform I made the same mistake I pinned on many newspapers.
http://www.southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/wp-content/upl...
What I mean is, if you watch a movie, you suspend disbelief and willingly assume the context they give you to be real for the sake of the movie without questioning it. You do that because you want to be entertained. And if you took everything literally and demanded that the context be aligned with reality, it wouldn't be any fun. As such, few people walk out of something like a Mission Impossible movie believing that any of it was actually possible.
I had a discussion in online chat with co-workers in the last week or so regarding the wild fires currently burning in the US west. One lamented how sad the effects of climate change like these are. Out of curiosity, I looked at historical stats for wildland fires. Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion. The person was surprised and admitted that he didn't have any actual reason to believe that the occurrence or size of fires was more or less - he just assumed they were more and that the cause was climate change.
So to be clear, I'm not saying that climate change doesn't exist. Nor am I saying that wildland fires are not somehow affected by climate change. Only that people tend to take narratives that are created and repeated by journalists as facts, without questioning them, much as they would a movie.
This data suggests that our houses are built with better standards, fewer people are smoking, and our appliances are safer so there are fewer fires but it's pretty clear that our problems have grown much worse overall.
[1] https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_documents/SuppCosts.p...
We now spend over 5 times as much on fire suppression at the federal level than we did 30 years ago after adjusting for inflation. This growth outpaces cost of living, healthcare, and inflation significantly.
But to try to do do better: what's your source on fires?
Your coworker had the impression that wildfires are becoming larger and more damaging, and that climate change is a principal cause of this, due to widespread coverage to that effect (examples: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]). (Which I suppose was your point.)
And many of those journalists are repeating each other, but eventually you find that a lot of those statements originate from the National Interagency Fire Center [7]. There, the raw numbers pretty clearly show an upward overall trend from, oh, about 1953 or so. Before 1953, the numbers look a lot different, and if someone were to just casually plug all those values into a graph, they could make the point that wildfires aren't getting worse after all. That person would be completely ignoring the massive increase in wildfire suppression efforts over that same period, of course, but they wouldn't want that to get in the way of their surprising finding.
Further investigation into the subject would start to reveal all kinds of neat subtleties that would be missed from a quick glance at numbers, both from non-climate-related factors like increased habitation in the wildland-urban interface areas [8], as well as climate-related factors like the massive number of dead trees in western forests as a result of increased bark beetle activity [9] [10].
And then someone might begin to be in a position to have a more interesting discussion on the subject. :-)
[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2018-08-01/wi...
[2]: http://www.climatecentral.org/western-wildfire-trends
[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/wildfires...
[4]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634369281/wildfires-could-be-...
[5]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2...
[6]: https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi...
[7]: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
[8]: https://www.wildfirex.com/2013/07/25/population-climbs-in-wi...
[9]: https://www.fs.fed.us/research/invasive-species/insects/bark...
[10]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sierra-dead-tr...
First, I only used data from 1983 and later (not the 1960s as I said, and certainly not prior to the 1950s as you assert that some people do) because their footnote said that the sources for data prior to 1983 are not known or can't be confirmed.
Second, I graphed the data since 1983 and there was somewhat of a trend upwards (not no trend like I said). But it didn't look significant to me. Especially not in climate terms. And especially given that realiable data only covers 35 years. And especially given that the numbers swing wildly with how we manage fires. That is, a trend in either direction could easily be created by increasing or decreasing budgets to keep them from starting and/or fighting them, like the swings you reference prior to the 1950s.
But in any case, as I said, I not saying that wildland fires are not somehow affected by climate change. Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them.
Sure, but the challenge is that critically questioning a common narrative takes significantly more effort than a quick review of a single dataset, especially when that narrative is coming from a fairly large body of professional researchers in multiple fields.
This is a big problem right now in the politics surrounding several different fields. A lot of interested laymen now have the tools to do some quick analysis on datasets, and then they draw conclusions from that that are contrary to the accepted science in that field. It's especially common in climate science because it's always been such a politically charged topic.
People accepting common narratives is essentially "epistemic learned helplessness" (http://web.archive.org/web/20130111103623/http://squid314.li..., one of my favorite essays), and that's a good thing. It's an immune response to bad ideas like being opposed to vaccination.
There is certainly room for asking questions about accepted ideas. Any time something doesn't make sense in some subject, absolutely go searching for an answer. You may even get to be one of the fortunate and talented few who find a significant question or even a flaw in some field. But, there's a fine line between asking questions, and drawing conclusions from a brief review and then indicting other people for not "critically" examining the subject.
Secondly I’m not sure I’m “indicting” anyone. Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts. This isn’t an indication of a lack of critical thinking. It’s an indication of a lack of thinking of any kind whatsoever.
> Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion.
That is called a "conclusion", no matter how many weasel-words you salt it with or how many times you say, "no, really, I wasn't drawing a conclusion". You've since walked it back to, "oh, I meant there wasn't a significant trend", and I shrugged and accepted that and replied solely to your criticism of other people.
Which was:
> Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them.
And now, you're choosing to expand from "people aren't critically questioning things" to, "oh, actually, I meant that they aren't thinking at all". Before you do that, you might want to think a little bit more about epistemic learned helplessness.
> Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts.
Nice, you're doubling down. Well, your "two minute gathering of facts", first, was erroneous, and second, your "observation" was either obvious, or wrong, pick your flavor. Obviously, people accept any manner of statements without personally verifying them. Nobody has the resources to become an expert on every bit of news coming from legions of researchers or journalists, and further, if they spend just two minutes attempting to verify a single factoid in something, they may well get it wrong, as you did.
Instead, people rely on other people to develop the specialized knowledge required to gather and synthesize the facts of a subject, and then other people still to report on that. It's imperfect, and sometimes (often) somebody somewhere in that chain gets something wrong, but it's still a better approach than armchairing everything you read, which has a far greater chance of leading you to the wrong ... well, "question", I guess, instead of "conclusion".
By the way, re-framing conclusions as questions is such a well-known tactic that it has a name: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
I didn't have a conclusion then, and I don't have one now. If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all. And 35 years of reliable data seems a little light to me. One would think we'd need several centuries to get real confidence.
But what I really question, are variables that would affect the numbers and size of fires such as how many were created by people, and the amount of effort put towards fighting them. The data we're looking at is not an observation of just nature. But it seems to be treated as if it is.
I would love to address each of your statements point by point, but it's been an interminably long week and I don't have the time. But this one I can knock out pretty fast.
I pulled the 1983 - 2017 series data from NIFC and created four different data sets from it, and charted each one. Each chart shows the values in red, the simple linear regression from 1983 to 2017 as a single red line, and a 5-year-running average in blue.
First, the raw data: https://ibb.co/iNQi8U ... there's a negligible change to the running average from 1983 to 1997, but from 1997 to 2009 there is a visually obvious increasing trend. The linear regression shows a 400% increase in acreage burned per year from 1983 to 2017.
Now, there are three different ways someone might "take out" 6 of the last 10 years. I think it's completely absurd to make any kind of argument by just deleting 60% of the data you don't like until the result looks the way you want it to look, but I'll play along. For each of the following charts, I just edited the same 6-highest years from 2007 to 2017.
One way to do this is to simply delete the years from the dataset. You pretend they didn't happen, and see what the overall data looks like then. And here it is: https://ibb.co/gRuzhp ... so here we see that there's still a clear upward trend, even with those years removed. The trend has been reduced to a mere 300% increase from 1983 to 2017, but there it is. You can see the obvious change in the data in the sharp decrease in the 5-year running average line.
A slightly more correct way to handle this is to decide that there's something wrong with the data for those years, and replace those years with approximate average values for the time period. This is occasionally done in climate science by people much smarter than me in cases where it's discovered that, say, a weather station sensor malfunctioned for a period of time. This chart looks like this: https://ibb.co/fvr1v9 ... it's fairly identical to the previous one.
Now, the other way we can do it, the most dishonest way we can do it, is to replace the values for each of those years with "0". As in, for that entire year, we subtract all wildfire activity, and pretend that the year went by with nary a spark. What does it look like then? https://ibb.co/hEWehp Ah! Now we finally get the flat trend we wanted. You can see the really obvious negative forcing on the 5-year running average when those years are left in the dataset but with "0" values.
There are answers to your other questions. The neat thing about news articles on this subject is that most of them can be traced back to some study, expert statement, or research paper. So if you're really interested in getting your questions answered, it shouldn't take more than a few hours' effort.
For example, one of my earlier links, https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi..., included a nice graph of federal funds spent on fire suppression. At the bottom of that graph is a link to the NIFC data it was sourced from. So, there's a reasonable answer for "the amount of effort put towards fighting them".
And then you could look at that graph, and then look back at the increase-in-acreage graphs, and imagine what they would look like if federal spending on wildfire suppression were mostly flat, maybe just tracking with inflation.
Moreover, six feet of sea level rise isn't going to happen instantaneously. It will take decades. Property will slowly be lost, but people will just move inland (or move away). And a key question is, whose property goes underwater? If it's wealthy people on the beachfront, they can afford the loss. If it's poor people, that's something else. We saw that in New Orleans, where the worst Katrina flooding happened in the poorest neighborhoods.
This also excludes the idea of simply building seawalls to protect low-lying areas. I mean, that's half of Holland, so it works. Making major social decisions on a distaste for the concept of global warming is foolish, though. Governments should operate pessimistically when it comes to threats to the land and people they govern. It should be assuming it will happen, on the worst-case side, not denying the threat because we don't like to think about it. Think that way, you might as well disband the fire department too. It's expensive and your house probably won't burn down.
I beg to differ, it's the first sentence of the title of the article: “Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. […]”
Then there's, “Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates that six feet of sea-level rise would put a quarter of Miami’s homes underwater, rendering $200 billion of real estate worthless.”
I don't know what you're arguing against the GP for. The question is, how are we to figure out how _concerned_ we should be? Clearly one day the good citizens of Miami are not going to be waking up to water lapping at their bedsheets. What timescale are we talking about? Who are Zillow? What options does the city of Miami have? Comparatively speaking is Miami an outlier or a typical case? I think journalists and news outlets do a major disservice to an important topic when they make alarmist headlines and skirt around the practical matters at the heart of articles such as this. The crux of the story, that Miami's freshwater is in peril before Miami's real estate is a valuable story to tell us.
But please spare us the melodramatic, “What nobody knows is when that will happen, or what happens next.”
You mean to say that the people in charge of managing these water systems are standing by dumbfounded and helpless? Maybe we should replace them by people who are able to problem solve in the face of adversity.
Considering that almost all projections have undershot global warming and sea level rise, and recent empirical observations have supported accelerating increases, we should be looking at worse that RCP8.5 scenarios which is already a full meter by 2080-2100.
Sea level rises by 2100 that are only 1"/.3m all rely on huge decreases in CO2 emission and global policy responses, which is unlikely based on existing evidence.
edit: https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70189089 (saline intrusion in Biscayne aquifer, access via referrer https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/06/global-warmin... and free access)
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... (nomenclature for future climate scenarios)
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report (assessments and risks under future climate scenarios)
edit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0146-0 (evidence that projections are below current observed rates and overly conservative, even in some worst cases)
One of our political parties has been paid to ensure that doesn't happen.
As for whether they're helpless or not... that depends largely on whether the rising sea level infiltrates the aquifer to the point where it becomes brackish rather than fresh water. And even then, the problem can be dealt with, by turning to desalination (probably of straight seawater).
For "Who is Zillow?", they're the #1 real estate website. Property values are their business, and they have lots of data (and a corporate perspective, rather than a scientific one, for better or worse). What options does Miami have? Spend more money on protecting the aquifer from mining and contamination, and maybe invest in desalination. Is Miami an outlier? Kinda. Most coastal cities are also on river mouths, and thus have better fresh water resources. But overstretching the fresh water supply is often a problem, even if that fresh water isn't itself endangered - see Los Angeles, for example.
The article itself did not focus on making predictions on global warming. The title, while a bit sensationalised, is not wholly inaccurate and was probably picked by the editor not the writer. The other two claims that I could find were about the potential damage of a six-foot sea level rise, which was probably accurate even if it didn't list out the likelihood of such a rise, and the article by the Union of Concerned Scientists which made a claim about the likelihood of increased flooding that seemed reasonable to me.
It is not trying to make the case for/against global warming to a non-scientific audience. It is trying to make the case against bullish development in S. Florida to investors who subscribe to Bloomberg. The point is basically, "Even if these guys don't end up under the ocean in 50 years, they're still going to have to pay more in taxes and water rates just to keep the city afloat"
I wonder if there is a long term business model here... Invest in land and prepare it to survive being surrounded by water, build infrastructure etc and then sell it to the same type of people who buy bunkers for end of the world situations.
Kind of makes you wonder why we haven't already been doing this on areas just off the current coast. Guess that old saying really is accurate -- necessity is the mother invention. Dutch Docklands is one of the companies building these new facilities. Their mock ups [1] look amazing.
[1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States
No. Miami (and pretty much all of South Florida) sits on top of a sand bar on top of porous limestone rock. The ocean will just come up through the limestone rock and through the sand no matter how tall your sea wall is.
The Netherlands has a completely different geology, so plans for one place can't be compared with plans for the other.
Is it really a fair critique to insist that articles must be written to make sense to people who believe the moon is made of green cheese? And that every couple hundred words written for the general public must be fully-cited?
And the point of the article isn't strictly limited to global sea rise, but rather the multiple issues facing Miami's water supply due to its history of development, the fact that most of its freshwater comes from underground sources, and its geography. I didn't find the article to be either misleading or "fluff" though it isn't something that would be helpful to a geologist or someone who is already familiar with alot of this already.
Your point about the title is also misleading since, in nearly all news outfits, the editor picks the title not the author. To me, the main story the article is trying to tell isn't "the city is drowning", but rather that if you're considering investing in Muni-bonds for Miami (as a typical Bloomberg subscriber might), then you need to do more research compared to other cities as there are alot of issues under the surface. The same probably goes for real estate and other development (also typical subscribers to Bloomberg).
Note that your home does not need to be permanently underwater to have it destroyed by a storm. Not even a hurricane-type thing; there are parts of Miami that require permanent water pumps today to stay dry. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...
So for instance the first thing I did after seeing this headline was to go cross-reference the data with the NOAA. They put Miami's expected sea level rise at 0 to 1 feet over the next century [1]. So what is the reason for the discrepancy? Which figure is more likely? Why? 3,691 words and the reader will be in no way whatsoever capable of even proposing a suggestion to this question.
[1] - https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html
That's a false description of what NOAA says. The sea level trend is an instantaneous rate, not a projection of any sort.
It's too burdensome to ask that all articles about the detrimental effects of climate change present a proof of said claims. At some point in time it's pointless to engage in an endless reproving of claims that most sane people already believe in.
I personally know someone with the belief that climate change is a political conspiracy. Any evidence to support climate change just points to a bigger "cover-up" and validates their beliefs. Almost always this is not an isolated belief but a pattern of thinking, and the person holds similar conspiracy theory beliefs about other issues. This is not a political left/right issue (the person I happen to know happens to be a left-wing conspiracy theorist). This is an issue of mild paranoid psychosis that is not being recognized and treated seriously because the symptoms are not very disturbing to others, and the people suffering from it happen to be relatively high-functioning. Eventually as these people age the symptoms get worse and they end up driving those close to them away.
The chart on p. 32 is a bit tricky to read, because this particular model is estimating maximum sea levels, not mean sea levels. Maximum sea level here is measured relative to a fixed reference of year 2000 mean sea level, and the 20th-century typical max was 1.5m above mean year 2000 sea level. The 99.9th-percentile line at 4.2m is therefore showing a 2.7m rise in the max sea level above pre-2000 norms. The colored blue and red ranges below the 99.9 lines represent the 50th-95th percentile estimates of the two different models. (In this case, at La Jolla specifically.)
I remember when Katrina flooded New Orleans, lots of people were asking why rebuild the city when it almost certainly will flood like that again. And the answer was a simple, do you know how much it would cost to relocate everyone?
What does it do to the economy when almost everyones largest asset(their house) is worth effectively zero and people still have 20 years on their mortgage.
In my old city (Calgary, Canada) we had a pretty bad flood in 2013. The government made, what I thought was a smart, deal with the home owners.
They would get some government assistence with the condition that this was the first and only time that the governmnet would help.
Some owners rebuilt, others just bulldozed their homes. Now everyone knows where they stand, the government helped shoulder the initial burden and the people who moved helped lower the number of people living in a flood plain.
If the 2007 financial crisis taught me anything, it's that we can't rely on the banks to make sound financial decisions, particularly regarding mortgages. Even more so now that the government bailed them out at taxpayer expense. They know that will happen again when needed. They have a safety net so they can gamble as much as they want—they can win but not lose. They will continue to believe this until/unless the government breaks them into pieces that aren't "too big to fail".
Perhaps they already should have stopped offering those mortgages.
The modern era of Wall Street bailouts started in the '80s after the Mexican Peso crisis.
Bank bailouts have been happening since Colonial times, through emergency suspensions of specie payment, par laws, legal tender laws, etc.
> we can't rely on the banks to make sound financial decisions
Banks that have an implicit (or explicit) guarantee of bailout are making rational decisions about risk, since they can offload it on the taxpayer.
Agreed. From their perspective it's a sound and rational play - a better term would be to say we can't rely on banks to make moral or ethical decisions from a society perspective
> Not just the banks, the borrowers
I don't think the banks need defending, and I don't think we can compare the financial decisions made by professionals who are legal and moral custodians of the financial system with ordinary people. It would be like comparing the medical decisions of hospitals and ordinary people - 'it's not just the hospitals that offered this treatment as a cure, it's the patients who participated in it.' or 'It's not just the developers who made this highly insecure, malware-ridden software, it's the users who downloaded it.'
We'll see how well that holds up next time those people need assistance. Somehow I don't see any elected politician telling his voters "sorry, we already helped you".
>According to a new survey from Discover, millennials are outperforming older generations when it comes to saving for their future. In a national study of 2,205 people, Discover finds that 81 percent of millennials are currently saving in some capacity, compared to 74 percent of Generation Xers and 77 percent of baby boomers.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180110005313/en/Dis...
I couldn't find the percentage of Baby Boomers that are retired, but they certainly (as a generation) are not prepared for retirement. The Baby Boomers are (again, as a generation) incredibly reckless in all facets.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/where-did-baby-boomers-go-...
People move away when a location is no longer economically viable, period. They won't move away until then, despite the risks. If they did, no one would live in volcano or earthquake zones. Think San Francisco Bay is going to be depopulated just because it's a dangerous place to live?
My point is, until a location is no longer safe, they will generally stay put and resist any pressure to leave, even if all evidence points to it becoming unsafe in the not so distant future. Elected officials live in the moment, and will not make decisions that impact constituents today in preparation for a future disaster.
"Many businesses were permitted to stay in the flood plain, but houses and motels were either raised or moved due to the likelihood that a flood would occur while a person may be sleeping. The majority of the flood plain was made into large parks, which have increased in number and have been improved and updated on a continuing basis."
Again, that was a reaction to something that already happened. Are there any examples of elected officials forcing folks to leave an area well before something bad happens?
Private flood insurance has pulled out of the market after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and it’s not just South Beach it’s a majority of Miami-Dade County.
On the beach it has gotten to a point where some commercial properties can’t get insured...that will be an inevitable disaster.
Florida is a recourse state, isn't it? That might make whether or not banks offer mortgages a trailing indicator rather than a leading indicator of how risky it is there.
In a non-recourse state (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington), if the borrower stops paying their mortgage the bank can foreclose and sell the property, and that ends the borrower's obligation. If the proceeds from the foreclosure were less then what was owed too bad for the bank. That's all the get.
In a recourse state, it starts out the same. The bank forecloses and sells the property. But in a recourse state, that only ends the borrower's obligation if the proceeds are enough to pay the remaining debt. If they fall short, the borrower still owes the difference. The bank can go after assets other than the property, or can go for wage garnishment, or both.
It is, and the lender almost invariably chooses to first sue on the note so as to avoid taking title to the property for as long as possible.
I was working briefly with Halliburton during the Rita-Katrina time period. I think it might behoove you to take a more holistic look at this issue.
I'll try to be visual in my explanation by simply asking you to Google maps of the energy pipelines in the US. Here are a couple:
https://www.oilandgas360.com/america-needs-pipelines-for-at-...
https://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas/wells-to-consumer/tr...
I think you get the picture.
And that's just energy. It's not only energy that make places like New Orleans, Galveston, and Houston critical. Let's just say that if New Orleans disappeared tomorrow, not only would the US be in for a decidedly bad time, but the nutritional intake of children in Sub-Saharan Africa would be materially affected.
Some of the ports along these coastal plains are enormously important. Of course not all of them are important. I'm not here to argue that Myrtle Beach or Miami are as critical as New Orleans, New York, or the NIT. I'd just strongly urge us to look at the ports and be judicious.
If Miami disappeared tomorrow, we would be fine. So yeah, who cares?
If Houston disappeared tomorrow, that's a whole different thing. If that happened, I'm just saying that we'd better have a good plan in place for that contingency.
Those different realities should, and currently do, inform our strategic policies on these different ports. You can't simply say, "Move this enormously important, warm water port." That's not how you "engineer an empire" so to speak.
All that said, we can mitigate impact. Outside of a few Engineering history specialists, not many people realize that Chicago was built on a swamp that was prone to flooding as well. Not saying that the Chicago solution is appropriate for the situations in Miami or Houston, just saying that there are definitely ways to think long term about minimizing impact.
Sorry for the dumb question but I don’t get the link between New Orleans and African children? I’m in the UK, so may be missing some common US knowledge?
[1]https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Port%20Pr...
Its always common to hear people say 'If banks lend a loan against X, X must be ok to buy'. In reality although banks do a bit of verification here and there. Its mostly they are looking for a way to recover their money from you.
In many cases you will see the banks will happily lend money, and then if things go south, they will go after your collaterals or destroy your credit rating etc. Very rarely can you tell them, 'You approved of it, so bear the loss'.
Florida is not a "no recourse" state though.
https://www.axios.com/sea-level-rise-costing-billions-in-hom...
>More than 861,000 of them do not have flood insurance. And for homes in those counties that aren't designated flood zones, the numbers are even worse.
>Those four counties have a population about 5 million people, and include the Florida Keys, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Naples.
>And there's still cause for concern about homes and businesses covered by flood insurance.
>The National Flood Insurance Program, which is part of FEMA, is chronically underfunded.
>A series of major storms that caused floods in the last 12 years, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, has left the program roughly $25 billion in debt and with limited borrowing resources.
>Its financial woes are expected to be compounded by the flooding that devastated Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast after Hurricane Harvey.
>Irma will only add to the problem. [1]
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/08/news/economy/flood-insuranc...
That’s by design. They don’t want you to build there.
which is to say, you won't be able to get flood insurance.
Currently it's 25 billion in debt, but that's cheap in terms of federal programs of that magnitude (~15 $ per home per year). Further, the net economic gain from allowing people to build in slightly at risk areas has easily been worth 25 billion over that time period. Consider, without some form of insurance you could not build downstream of major dam's as the low risk of them failing puts huge areas at risk.
As sea levels rise and weather gets more severe, this program will become much more expensive.
Presumably things can be adjusted for with slightly increased premiums as it's still very close to break even for now.
I’ve actually discovered (from the Yale “Financial Markets” MOOC) that US government uses mandatory insurance to get people to move out of areas which are likely to be flooded, etc. USG makes the insurance mandatory, and insurance companies, quite predictably, price just about everyone out. People either pay through the nose or move out.
Edit: reading further into the thread, looks like they already are refusing to insure. Move TF out.
https://gordcollins.com/real-estate/miami-real-estate-foreca...
It would appear that people who actually have skin in the game believe otherwise.
Maybe this is optimism bias writ large? Another possibility is that even if there is robust demand despite certain destruction, these houses are really worth many millions for the short term (for cachet, status, etc.). Here we model them as really expensive vacations.
High P/E in the case of AMZN is not measure of long term. It's measure fo fast expected growth, low interest rates, shadow margins, and general short therm overconfidence.
It took 10 years for AMZN stock to recover from the peak of 1999 crash. There was nothing wrong with the company, markets just didn't want to wait.
Maybe folks think they'll be able to get out before the collapse, or some new tech will save them from being underwater?
Sealevel rise projections range from 0.2 meters to 2.0 meters by 2100. Typical mean projection is less than 1.0 meters by 2100. Things get gradually worse, but it takes time before it affects the property values with full force.
Property investors and developers operate on timescales between 5-30 years, there is plenty of stuff to sell before demand starts to decrease.
From their perspective, any kind of government bailout would be great, but certainly can't be counted on. This is especially true of engineering projects, where physical reality puts hard limits on what is and is not possible before even considering costs. Printing money a la quantitative easing is trivial compared to building a giant seawall or what have you.
Government subsizided flood insurance is a really weird subsidy that just shouldn't exist.
No actual company is stupid enough to put money that a floodplain won't flood. Instead the federal government uses tax money to basically back insurance so that when, surprise, your floodplain floods, the insurance companies aren't actually losing money.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surrendering-to-r...
That's not a bad idea.
Also, as someone who lived in south Florida, flood insurance is a joke and unavailable near the coast anyway. Nobody expects it to pay out enough in a major catastrophe, including hurricanes and flooding.
Neither of those risks are comparable to earthquakes and hurricanes/flooding, which can be relied upon to thoroughly destroy huge swaths of cities, regularly.
In contrast, a slightly stronger quake in DC (5.8) caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to structures, including to the Washington Monument, because the local building codes did not contemplate earthquakes.
We already do; municipalities in blizzard-prone areas factor snow removal costs into their annual expenditures, which show up in residents' taxes.
Flood insurance is fundamentally the same, the payouts are just not well spread, requiring a large geographically diverse insurance company.
And we're not talking about a 10,000 euro loss here, when a home gets flooded, the loss is likely six figures or more since houses aren't cheap. Most people can't afford insurance for a likely loss of $100,000.
There are many large geographically diverse insurance companies, and there is a reason all of them stay away from flood insurance. There's no buyer for the amount of premium they would have to charge.
With tens of thousands of claims, home owners will get pennies on the dollar if they get anything at all.
plenty of places that don't see earthquakes, tornados, floods, hurricanes, or much of anything else.
blizzards might sound apocalyptic to a floridian, but generally just damage above-ground electrical, and maybe knock a few trees into a few roofs.
So realistically they'll get a bail out so they can at least recover somewhat. It will still be a loss for them, it'll be a loss to everyone who pays taxes, but it's still better then the alternatives.
People as ends, not means. It's not ok to leave people starving in the streets as an example to others. Fight for laws to restrict building in flood plains, but don't abandon the forlorn.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-del-mar-sea-leve...
Herb Montgomery and his wife, Janet, have lived in Del Mar's low-lying Beach Colony just east of Camino Del Mar for 20 years.
He knows the ocean is creeping closer to his property and he says the city has an obligation to protect his home, valued at $3.2 million, from the rising waters
Things are going to get ugly down the road.
I think what you might have wanted to recommend was for insurance companies to have higher premiums / rates whatever. Not everything needs to be solved at the government level.
Basically build some dikes, desalination plants, pumping stations, etc. and start planning which areas to protect and which areas to abandon. Problem solved.
All of this requires money of course. Luckily, Miami is still a pretty rich city in a relatively rich state; it can handle this.
If the worst happens, it will be because of ignorance and mismanagement and not because of a lack of solutions or means. It may take a few minor incidents before people figure this out but the smart thing would be to not wait for that.
See https://youtu.be/5GEGWP95HFw?t=2m0s for an example of how those stilts are placed. Note that until 2:30 it's basically just using a big weight. From about 2:40 the machine starts to get serious.
Beyond dikes we've had mills keeping ground water levels steady since at least the 10th century.
Despite pockets of extreme wealth—one study estimated that the Miami metro area has the nation’s eighth-highest number of millionaires—the county overall is poor. Its median household income of $44,224 is almost one-quarter lower than that of the country as a whole.
It's not uncommon for ocean front property to be very desirable and very expensive. I'm guessing that a lot of those millionaires live near the beach or on the beach and their homes may be some of the ones most at risk of ending up under water as sea levels rise.
Rich people are typically the most able to up and move elsewhere. If the rich people in waterfront property homes start leaving, you are left with a bunch of relatively poor people and hard-to-solve, expensive problems.
This means you don't need sea levels to rise six feet to significantly alter the city of Miami in ways that can spell Miami's doom in some sense. Like Galveston, which was an important and rich city at one time and then was devastated by a single hurricane, Miami could become a shadow of its former self with no hope of recovery.
You only need it to rise however much would serve as some kind of tipping point where rich folks would stop feeling it was a desirable place to be. Maybe that's when their yard is inundated. Or maybe it will be determined by some other metric entirely.
The reality is there may be no one who is capable of predicting where that tipping point is. Once it's reached, there may be no reversing the problem. Miami may be left with a poor population, a raft load of expensive problems and no means to readily solve any of them as their poor population slides deeper into debt to keep surviving.
Edit/footnote: It's a lousy title. Even the article itself is not actually predicting that the entire city will ever be completely under water like the title suggests.
"Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbX7ASDLwAk
"Behind these walls You can be so self-absorbed Behind those eyes, no disguise Disguise, no you can't disguise
Behind this fortress of an address Stuck in the passion void With a little style full and for a while But you can't turn back time
Dear Miami, you're the first to go Disappearing under melting snow Each and everyone turn your critical eye On the burning sun and try not to cry
..."
This again. I won't stop complaining about this tedious journalistic style until it finally dies.
I don't want to hear a personal story of a random person that's related to the issue in some way. I certainly don't want to read anything about how he spends his day - I value my own day too much for that. I just want to read about the issue itself.
That's why people don't read longreads anymore.
You would think it would be a bad-ass book talking about dinosaurs, but no... it's mainly tedious descriptions about the look on the face of a particular paleontologist when the author met them at the train station, and how wild a particular paleontologist party was the day before they found an important new bone.... I couldn't imagine a more boring book, had to give up half way through.
For example, the ice cover in Greenland is melting at a record rate. If it goes completely, this alone would raise the sea level with something like 7 m (23 ft).
If everything goes, it will be something like a 65 m (213 ft) sea level rise.
Now, given the sluggishness of action-taking in this matter, some of the ice cover will almost certainly melt before anything gets done.
The end result will probably be much more than a few feet, but less than the maximum, so let's guess 30 m (100 ft).
Now, I suppose some self-correcting actions are automatically taken when enough people get displaced and pour to dry areas: traffic ceases in the coastal cities, air traffic to these areas will cease as well, factories will stop, and so on.
But still... given +30 m, have you already checked where the current coastline would be where you live?
So far you need the global integrate of all changes.
I would guess that the parts of Alaska that are seeing the sea level fall are due to the land rising from tectonic activity.
Things like changes in water temp and currents can also play a role.
At high tide on the small inlet next to Norfolk’s most prestigious art museum, the water lapped at the very top of the concrete sea wall that has held it back for 100 years. It seeped up through storm drains, puddled on the promenade and spread, half a foot deep, across the street, where a sign read, “Road Closed.”
The sun was shining, but all around the inlet people were bracing for more serious flooding. The Chrysler Museum of Art had just completed a $24 million renovation that emptied the basement, now accessible only by ladder, and lifted the heating and air-conditioning systems to the top floor. A local accounting firm stood behind a homemade barricade of stanchions and detachable flaps rigged to keep the water out. And the congregation of the Unitarian Church of Norfolk was looking to evacuate.
“We don’t like being the poster child for climate change,” said the Rev. Jennifer Slade, who added that the building, with its carved-wood sanctuary and soaring flood-insurance rates, would soon be on the market for the first time in four decades. “I don’t know many churches that have to put the tide chart on their Web site” so people know whether they can get to church.
https://www.npr.org/2016/05/10/476071206/as-waters-rise-miam...
Florida has a rather right leaning/libertarian persuasion, which as the article pointed out, allowed the Miami Drum Services Inc. superfund site and Lake Belt limestone mine to cause contamination of drinking water as recently as 1997.
I'm from Idaho and am well aware of the environmental impacts from superfund sites and mining. The corporations go in and make their millions, then taxpayers are on the hook for the cleanup. Now we can't even fish many rivers and lakes here because mine tailings have contaminated the water with mercury (from gold mining) and other nastiness.
Due to a long history of this short term thinking where profits are privatized and externalities are socialized, Miami is going to have to come to terms with losing its drinking water and either pipe it in from far away or move to desalinization. It's going to be expensive and unfortunate, but I wonder if it will be enough for people to shift their politics. Judging by the political stalemate in my state, I'm guessing not.
When the BP spill happened and they had all the local mayors and politicians crying about the damage to their coast, I couldn’t understand why no one had the cajones to ask them why they cared so much about their coast being damaged now, when they were completely fine with it being gone and under water in a few decades.
We consistently have this problem with preventative measures. Someone accurately predicts that something terrible will happen unless we do something about it, we spend a large amount of time and money preventing or mitigating it, then people ask why we spent all that time and money when the thing turned out not to be that bad.
It turned out not to be that bad because we spend all that time and money.
The problem is it's also easy to spend time and money on wasteful pork barrel projects to prevent threats that don't actually exist but line the pockets of government contractors, and then they make the same argument for not cutting them.
What we need is a better way to separate the legitimate problems (e.g. climate change) from the hype (e.g. terrorism). Because if you're going to pay a bunch of money for something that also serves as a jobs program, it might as well be addressing the real problem instead of the fake one.
It's because wealthy people tend to have physical assets and political power there. They don't want to pay more for insurance for their assets in the short term (property/catastrophe coverage) and in many cases they would be difficult or impossible to liquidate and transfer to somewhere not effected.
This has been the case in coastal areas, with property developers at least. They have it very badly, where they typically are small-ish family operations at the core and they operate with high leverage as land banks.
But if you did the above, it really doesn't matter whether climate change is real or not, all the risk will be on the homeowner going forward. That ought to be enough to change behavior in the long run.
https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=LA
I call it the truth distortion field when any large industry impacts what politicians say. Here’s some background:
Thus I'm skeptical. And "brain drains" refer to skilled employees leaving, not some intelligence or education level which you're implying.
Climate change divides Americans, but in an unlikely way: The more education that Democrats and Republicans have, the more their beliefs in climate change diverge.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/14/upshot/climat...
1. https://mississippitoday.org/2016/07/13/mississippi-brain-dr...
2. https://www.omaha.com/news/education/higher-education/nebras...
College-educated workers want and need to live in more urban areas that have employers in future-forward industries. From a cultural aspect, I think these people also want to live in municipalities (up to state government) that are run by people that share their values. Among the educated, these values are increasingly progressive.
Rational self-interest is an assumption that enlightenment liberals and market fundamentalists alike have overplayed. It has its applications, and it may even be a somewhat valid assumption for individuals carefully looking at the terms of an economic deal they have make-or-break decision making power over. For collective civil action, my guess is its influence is somewhere between minimal and a wash.
In grade school it was dying from the ozone hole, acid rain, and global freezing (new ice age).
Recycling, not being wasteful, and conserving water wasn't scary enough I guess.
- more pollution from shipping routes through the Arctic circle (and yucky-looking icebergs that tourists don't like)
- less beachfront property
- more desalinatable water
- hotter heat
- more revulsive detestable significant others (displaced global unrest)
- costs of responding to natural disasters occurring with greater frequency due to elevated ocean temperatures
- less parking spaces (!)
What are the other costs and benefits here?
I've written about our need to address climate change here in past comments. I think the administration's climate change denials (see: "climate change politifact') and regulatory rollbacks are beyond despicable: they're sabotaging the United States by allowing more toxic chemicals into the environment that we all share, and allowing more sites that must be protected with tax dollars that aren't there because these industries pay far less than benchmarks in terms of effective tax rate. We know that vehicle emissions, mercury, and coal ash are toxic: why would we allow people to violate the rights of others in that way?
A person could voluntarily consume said toxic byproducts and not have violated their own rights or the rights of others, you understand. There's no medical value and low potential for abuse, so we just sit idly by while they're violating the rights of other people by dumping toxic chemicals into the environment that are both poisonous and strongly linked to climate change.
What would help us care about this? A sarcastic list of additional reasons that we should care? No! Miami underwater during tourist season is enough! I've had enough!
So, my mistake here - my downvote-earning mistake - was dropping my generally helpful, hopeful tone for cynicism and sarcasm that wasn't motivating enough.
We need people to regulate pollution in order to prevent further costs of climate change. Water in the streets holds up commerce, travel, hampers national security, and destroys the road.
We must stop rewarding pollution if we want it - and definitely resultant climate change - to stop. What motivates other people to care?