America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana is trying to relocate the Native American settlement of about 100 people on the Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow island that lost 98% of its land over the past six decades to climate change.
My best understanding is that this is, in fact, a new phenomenon related to global warming, the defrosting of permafrost, etc.
Some regions of the world have always been unsafe for human habitation due to persistently unfriendly weather
There is no place without some kind of disaster. I've looked. It's a case of pick your poison.
Hurricanes in the Southeast. Tornadoes in the Plains States. Earthquakes and the ever-so-lovely Fire Season on the West Coast.
Etc.
But much of Florida is not far above sea level and some of the issues they are seeing can legitimately be linked to climate change. That's not just hand-wringing in this case.
This is especially true for low-lying islands, which are seeing new problems around the world. It isn't the norm for islands to simply disappear to rising sea levels.
Yes. And also on very porous limestone and coral. So ocean and groundwater levels are linked. Seawalls won't help, and even building on stilts, the groundwater goes saline.
There was a recent article about finding a decades old car and skeleton in a pond in a Florida gated community. Zooming out on Google maps, you can see how they transformed huge areas of ~swamp. They used the classic islet and pond approach. But I bet that all those ponds are tied to sea level.
I'd choose this over my former South Louisiana digs any day. We had to evacuate for hurricanes multiple times when I was a kid there. For hurricane Andrew we were driving north in the pouring rain and wind so high nobody could close the car doors except my dad. I've never been even close to that scared of weather in Georgia.
I was born and raised in Georgia. I'm abundantly familiar with what goes on there, weather-wise.
Near daily thunderstorms in the summer.
Electrical storms that can kill electronics, appliances or even people.
If it snows at all, businesses shut down, schools shut down, car wrecks go up, etc.
If it gets too cold, they sometimes shut down schools and businesses.
When I was eight years old and we had something like a foot of snow, roofs were collapsing, they were sending a van around to pick up nurses so the hospitals would be staffed and my sister and father walked like five miles in the snow to get to a store to get supplies we needed because no municipality in the state has any equipment for doing snow clearance and all the roads were closed.
Snow is not some kind of natural disaster in places that routinely get snow. But it is a real and serious problem in Georgia simply because it happens so rarely that it doesn't make any real sense to acquire snow plows and the like. They would rust and rot in place and be unusable on the rare occasion that it does snow enough to see an accumulation on the ground. Most of the time, you wait a day or so, things warm up, it melts, schools and businesses re-open.
But, meanwhile, people die in car wrecks.
https://www.vox.com/2016/1/27/10840810/snow-car-crash-map
Atlanta sometimes has serious flooding.
https://www.11alive.com/article/weather/10-year-anniversary-...
Etc.
I mentioned the flooding. The one major place that is often flooded is the connector near midtown where at the bottom of the 2 hills. There are certainly some flash floods on some streets especially when drains get clogged.
But you're right, there are issues here. I had a laptop zapped through a phone line > modem > ethernet > laptop from a lightning strike. I'd still take them over a straight up coast city's issues.
Given the long human history of surviving subzero temperatures, why do you say that?
Examples please? I may want to move to one of these places.
20 year rebuilds turning into 1 year rebuilds is what I think first world "climate exodus" looks like.
Yes, they know the location is pretty bad. But the numbers had worked for that ocean side Vista. They won't anymore.
https://www.c2es.org/content/hurricanes-and-climate-change/
> For the 21st century, some models project no change or a small reduction in the frequency of hurricanes, while others show an increase in frequency. More recent work shows a trade-off between intensity and frequency – that as warmer oceans bolster hurricane intensity, fewer storms actually form. For the continental United States in the Atlantic Basin, models project a 45-87 percent increase in the frequency of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes despite a possible decrease in the total frequency of all storms.
Which isn't exactly a great thing, but yeah, it's always more complicated.
https://www.c2es.org/content/hurricanes-and-climate-change/
And the point about more storms hasn't been established yet - which doesn't mean that it won't be established in the future.
Given the likelihood of larger storms and the possibility of more frequent storms, living in a storm-prone area becomes a much less appealing idea.
The UK has a similar problem. Some properties have been flooded multiple times in the last couple of decades. They're now uninsurable, which is not far off from being uninhabitable.
Even if they stay dry for years at a time, it only takes a couple of very expensive renovations to reduce their value towards zero.
The world is on the way to becoming uninhabitable for modern human civilization, and we're the cause. It happens that the majority of humanity lives in coastal areas that will be put underwater by the amount of sea level rise that's going to happen by the end of this century at current rates of warming. The current retreats from the most vulnerable areas in Florida are just a tiny, tiny taste to come of the massive climate refugeeism that is on the horizon.
It's not hysteria, this is what is going to happen unless we make massive changes.
More than I thought, but hardly a non outrunnable flood.
> Higher sea levels mean that deadly and destructive storm surges push farther inland than they once did, which also means more frequent nuisance flooding. Disruptive and expensive, nuisance flooding is estimated to be from 300 percent to 900 percent more frequent within U.S. coastal communities than it was just 50 years ago.
The mean sea level rising isn't out-runnable, but the storm events can be.
And also:
> Sea level rise at specific locations may be more or less than the global average due to local factors such as land subsidence from natural processes and withdrawal of groundwater and fossil fuels, changes in regional ocean currents, and whether the land is still rebounding from the compressive weight of Ice Age glaciers.
Again, all from your own link.
No I intentionally read all of it. But you knew that :)
> The mean sea level rising isn't out-runnable, but the storm events can be.
Some low lying areas should probably be abandoned. My point is just that it happens very slowly, and can be planned for.
I also suspect some of that increase is because of bigger populations living near the coast.
> Sea level rise at specific locations may be more or less than the global average
This is true regardless of climate change. Some land rises, other sink.
I don't know how to say this politically but this is something that took me back when the call-to-arms came about for the Bahamas recently given the latest hurricane.
Isn't it kind of a broken system? Every hurricane season, the Bahamas stands to get absolutely hammered. It's devastating, but... almost on a schedule?
Hurricanes are nothing new, we have endured them all of our lives, they are not getting worse or more frequent.
My family has been in Florida and the Bahamas for 14 generations along the way it just became second nature to instruct the next generation on what to look for in a house that will survive the storm. My original family homestead is still standing and was built in the 1700's, it has seen many storms some worse that Irma and Dorean.
NOAA data indicates otherwise:
* https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/images/Atlantic_Storm_Count.j...
* https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/
* https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/images/AtlanticStormTotalsTab...
It is well know that storm seasons peak and trough, on a roughly 10 year cycle. I remember the old timers telling me that long before meteorology could predict the weekly weather with any form of accuracy. We peaked in 2005 and hit bottom in 13 we are close to a peak again. I got hit by 4 hurricanes in 2005, it was a freak anomaly and I assume I will never see that again in my lifetime.
Take named storms out of the equation, we literally drive around in those things. The north gets worse storms when they get their noreasters. They are of little to no concern other than they have the possibility to develop.
Why do you believe this? The earth's climate is indisputably changing. This means that different patterns will be established than what was normal in the past. There are good reasons to believe that increasing ocean temperatures and higher ocean levels are likely to increase hurricane frequency, intensity, and destructiveness. Although the data we have so far isn't yet conclusive that this is happening currently, it's definitely suggestive and certainly consistent with said reasoning. Why do you think you know better?
I'm not familiar with this particular "scandal" (whatever it may or may not be), but you are aware that fossil fuel corporations have been heavily funding climate denial for decades, no? Whether or not some people on one side or the other have engaged in dubious behavior is not the ultimate arbiter of truth.
It's clear from your other posts that you have a vested personal interest in believing that you are safe from hurricanes and global warming. That's fine. I don't expect you'll change your position, for better or for worse. But surely you can at least acknowledge that changing ocean temperature may have some effect on hurricanes? If you deny that, how do explain how hurricanes work? Are they not intrinsically dependent on temperature differentials between water and air?
Here is a good paper, which states the facts without trying to attribute every disaster to AGW. You will note that they quickly distance themselves from any predictions being used by their study. Which is the right thing to do because we know, that the data does not lead to any other conclusion:
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
Some quick excerpts, but you should read the article, it is the most logical stance one can take on climate change and it's relationship to hurricanes:
>>Storm size responses to anthropogenic warming are uncertain.
>>There is less confidence in future projections of the global number of Category 4 and 5 storms, since most modeling studies project a decrease (or little change) in the global frequency of all tropical cyclones combined.
>>but these observed changes have not yet been confidently linked to anthropogenic climate change. Human activities may have already caused other changes in tropical cyclone activity that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural variability, or due to observational limitations.
>>We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero
>> the reported numbers of hurricanes were sufficiently high during the 1860s-1880s that again there is no significant positive trend in numbers beginning from that era
>>In short, the historical Atlantic hurricane frequency record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.
>>In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm activity support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic.
Point being, we don't know, and it will be a long time before we do know. So claiming the sky is falling only leads to people rejecting the real science, because it gets blurred with agenda and advocacy. Which brings it full circle, as to why I replied to this article. Which was to let HN know that people are not leaving the keys in some mass climate exodus as the article implies. They are leaving because of some very real economic issues local to the keys. The article is false on it's face and a reporter could have spent a day in the keys, to find that out, but they did not want to. They already had a title for the article, now they just need to make the facts fit. As a person that has dedicated my life to the sciences, I find advocacy hidden behind science to be detestable. This climate change fear mongering is what is turning peoples ears off to real environmental issues. It's causing more damage than good as when the predictions don't manifest, you have lost them for good. The CRU got the EPA gutted and now we are seeing many hard won environmental battles, based on good science reversed due to the fact that their very support is being eroded with lies. The very people you are talking about that have a vested interest in denial, where quick to capitalize on the fact that more people where no longer listening, by going back and fighting old lost battles with new troops.
The plural of anecdote isn't data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic_hurricanes_in...
Those where the two generations that saw the most sever storms. I am sorry but it's going to take a lot more data that the fact that the Keys got hit by a Cat 4 and the Bahamas got hit by a CAT 5 right near the peak of a cycle to convince me that this is somehow irregular when I have seen it every 8-9-10 years of my life on interval. Especially when I absolutely know there is science behind the 9 year cycle and have lived thru it. The article does a disservice because I live in the Keys and I absolutely know for a fact that the exodus is due to affordable housing. I talk to locals every day that are leaving, not a single one has mentioned the storm as a reason other than the fact that affordable housing has gotten even more expensive. The article is false on it's face no if and's or buts about it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08471-z.epdf?auth...
> Both observed datasets show significant increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates in the Atlantic basin that are highly unusual compared to model-based estimates of internal climate variations. Our results suggest a detectable increase of Atlantic intensification rates with a positive contribution from anthropogenic forcing and reveal a need for more reliable data before detecting a robust trend at the global scale
I'm not sure if you're expecting "Day After Tomorrow" sized storms or what, but the actual data points to changes in hurricane behaviour due to the warming climate.
>>Here, we utilize two observational datasets to calculate 24-hour wind speed changes over the period 1982–2009
Paper was published in 2019 from what I can tell by references, 2007-2008 was the peak of the 9 year cycle. Why was the calmer cycle of 2010 thru 2015 excluded? They go one to reference publication from the 70's but exclude any data set from that time. It's a nice sliver of time to include, Mitch, Isabel, Ivan Hugo, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Andrew, Dean ending with Felix in 07. We then enter the quite period of no major storms until 2016 with Mathew, so almost a decade of contrary data that was not included.
Actually, from my reading, it's a lot more complicated than that - I can't quite recall the scientific reasons why, but it's something to do with temperature gradients in the atmosphere, or wind patterns (I vaguely recall, very happy to be corrected) . But basically, the frequency of hurricanes overall might decrease, but the frequency of severe hurricanes will probably increase.
> For the 21st century, some models project no change or a small reduction in the frequency of hurricanes, while others show an increase in frequency. More recent work shows a trade-off between intensity and frequency – that as warmer oceans bolster hurricane intensity, fewer storms actually form. For the continental United States in the Atlantic Basin, models project a 45-87 percent increase in the frequency of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes despite a possible decrease in the total frequency of all storms.
That is so epic dude. Can you tell me more about it? Where is it, what kind of place is it? How much is original?
My great grandfather was a hunting guide and met Elvis years before they shot the film one time when he took him and his friends hunting. Elvis and my great grandfather hit it off, and he would come and hunt every year. They became lifelong friends.
Anyways, my family where Corsican merchants, they where attacked in Tampa bay when the pirates laid siege to the city of Tampa. They lost their boat, and when you loose your boat in the new world unless you are rich, your pretty much a citizen of the new world.
Some of my family headed east to the fort in Saint Augustine and then settled down the east coast and eventually married into another old Florida family called the Summerlins also known as the Summerals and the Summerlands (hence the name of the island I live on). One of my distant (some kind of great great) uncles was the first child born after the purchase of Florida by the US, thus making him the first natural born US citizen from Florida. His name was Jacob Summerlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Summerlin
He went on to be a cattle Barron and donate most of what is now downtown Orlando to the city or Orlando. Summerlin boulevard in Orlando is named after him.
Anyways, my relatives on the east coast went as far as south as Ft. Pierce until Henry Flaglar came and started building the railroad. Some of them joined it and worked it to Key West (my immediate family was not part of that first group, my dad was a treasure diver for Mel Fisher and that is how I ended up down here). That is how some of us spread down here. But most of the family that ended up in Ft. Pierce, took up commercial fishing and branched towards the Bahamas and started setting up camps in Bimini, Spanish Wells, and Andros. Some liked it over there and began to make it their base of operation and the family spread to the Bahamas.
It's pretty cool, I have a lot of family in Florida and the Bahamas when the reality is almost everyone that lives in Florida is not from Florida and it really gives you perspective, the old Florida was nothing like the Florida Man articles you read about Florida today.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/421860690078118339/
Have not found any of the house yet, I will keep looking. I know there are some on Facebook posted by the family (they just had a family work weekend) but I don't do Facebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_cracker_architecture
Most of it is original, the wood stove is still in the house but used as a fireplace and was replaced by a gas stove. My uncle added AC back in the 80's. The only addition that I know of, was the addition of a real bathroom back in the 60's before that there was a outhouse located about 20 yards behind the back door. It's claim to fame is that both Elvis and Woodrow Wilson had both sat on it, it is dilapidated but still stands and yes I did sit on it as a child just to say I did.
Last year, Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic "500-year" floods in Texas. Just this past week, remnants of tropical depression Imelda dropped unbelievable amounts of rain along the Texas Gulf Coast - more than 40 inches in some areas.
As these types of extremes become more frequent, you need to ask yourself if this stuff is just what is on the schedule, or if things are getting worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hu...
Article on work force housing issue and how Irma made it worse: https://therealdeal.com/miami/2019/07/21/many-residents-of-t...
I have lived in Florida for 44 years and have seen storms far nastier than Irma long before climate change was a thing. It's the nature of the beast here, and homes can and are being built to withstand these storms. They do a lot of damage, but they are not these cyclones of death that the media makes them out to be. At CAT 4 or 5 storm is a serious storm don't get me wrong. I took a lot of damage from Irma due to a roof hatch failing, but it was all water damage, structurally my house is fine. But it also sits 9 foot above sea level as far as ground and then 14 foot pier foundation above that. Storm surge here can be up to 15 ft. If you are not above that your house is going to flood in a serious storm. If you are above that, and your house is built to code, it is going to survive the storm. If you are ground level, anywhere on the islands other than by the cemetery in Key west, which IIRC is 15 to 20 ft above sea level, you are going to flood.
Take a look at the 1935 Labor day storm that hit us, look at the devastation, compare it to Irma and you will see that these storms come and go, The 1935 storm was the worst storm to have ever have made landfall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane
It was horrific, my grandparents and great grandparents went thru it, all of them said they would never live to see another one like it, and they where correct.
I wish people would focus more on ocean pollution and preservation, I have seen the decline in ocean stock first hand in my life. Killing the ocean is what is going to kill us, and it has to do directly with what we are pumping into the water.
Edit: Forgot to note outside of commercial shellfish, fishing and fishing guide occupations there is no industry down here other than the service industry.
https://www.flkeysnews.com/news/local/article234300792.html?...
One could argue it was not so hard as fighting carbon emissions, because the general public had alternatives they could switch to without noticing much difference. It probably also helped that Margaret Tatcher actually was an educated chemist who could listen to the scientists
AGW is different in that even though the science agreed we still have politicians who are convinced it’s not a big deal.
I mean it's an absolutely known thing:
http://www.davidmcminn.com/p2/956hurricanes.htm
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0442%2819...
and it was well known by the old timers before anyone put any science behind it. And is pretty much tribal knowledge to anyone that is a long time Florida resident.
As a personal plug, I apply to THORN every time they post on the who's hiring thread, but never seem to make it to an interview. I would love to focus on child trafficking and exploitation solely.
Currently one of the projects I am working on is blockchain tech as this is becoming a huge market for pedophiles. They are encoding child porn images into, block chain smart contracts and are being paid via crpto for access to these smart contracts full of graphic child exploitation imagery. Anyways, another quick shameless plug for me if anyone from THORN reads this you should hire me! I know how these people operate and I know how to develop solutions to track and stop them.
Back to the subject, I work with 10 other developers, other than a few guys that work remote we represent the development community for 150 miles around us. It is very remote and there really is no tech industry here, but I am OK with that. The trade-off is that I get to go spearfishing with my children, we get to snorkel and scuba the second largest barrier reef (Which is dyeing if I have not mentioned that), boats are like bikes around here and I have been in a fight with a 14 ft Tiger shark over who was going to get to eat my hog fish. It really is a paradise (except for the occasional Hurricane that is, that and the fact that we have no waves to surf). Work where you live, not live where you work is a mantra I live by.
The homeowners weren't forced to purchase these properties, so it's not the government's responsibility to remediate the situation.
Yes, it'd probably be better if the government let people face the damages for the most part. Unfortunately it's consistently portrayed as a huge failing if, say, a president fails to respond to a hurricane quickly or decisively enough. Partly because of the usual partisan nonsense, but also because the local governments want the aid.
As long as the properties are bulldozed and never allowed to be developed again, it’s reasonable policy.
Should people know better? Perfect information is hard. I’ve bugged Redfin several times to include these models in their property search interface with no reply. You need legislation to better assist real estate buyers to fully understand what they’re getting into.
Ordinary people aren't the perfect agents we're propagandized them to be. People often are forced to gamble tomorrow to live through today. I've seen people make the gamble and lose badly and others manage to slip out from under it.
For someone to not do basic research into buying an entire house, because they weren't interested? That gets very little sympathy from me.
But if the real problem is that they were forced to gamble to live, then that gets sympathy from me.
And you improve these two situations in very different ways.
I remember reading about a disaster in Washington State (I think). A geology professor been doing field trips to an hill side. To show his students an example of an unstable hillside. One year he shows up and there are now houses on it. Few years after that the whole thing comes down.
Another one. During the housing bubble in California they build a subdivision on farmland that was reserved as a flood plain. During heavy rainfall years it's expected to flood. Now there are houses on it.
Are the people that bought those houses responsible or are they more victims? Both?
Funny enough, waterfront property in the keys is rather affordable when compared to other areas of Florida.
Similarly, tourism related businesses might not be plutocrat-level wealth but they tend to be well-represented politically because they’re visible and employ a fair number of people.
My sister had a break-in at her home one year. She told me something like "Well, the benefits for Katrina survivors ran out last week. That's probably not coincidental."
If you have people who, through no fault of their own, cannot make their lives work and the entire rest of the world takes the attitude "Well, too bad, so fucking sad, chump. Not Our Problem." then people have a tendency to say "Welp. The system doesn't work for me, so why should I care about little details like you expecting me to respect your property rights? It's not like you care about my inability to eat through no damn fault of my own."
When stuff like that happens on a broad scale, it leads to serious problems. Entire industries/cities/regions can be negatively impacted if enough people walk away from their problems and just go elsewhere.
That's us - you do realize?
However, corporations are not me in the sense that I neither make the decisions nor receive the pay that corporate executives do.
* The petroleum company refines that oil into gasoline.
* An auto company builds a truck that runs on gasoline
* A shipping company buys said truck, as well gasoline to power it.
* A store contracts that company to ship their goods.
When a consumer buys something from that store, and has a gasoline burning truck move the goods from the warehouse to their residence who was responsible for emitting those greenhouse gases?
"The chief beneficiaries of the land boom at the coast have been the beach towns and property owners who perversely shoulder little of the risk of building in harm’s way yet enjoy most of the wealth, the report added."
"After the 1940's, the Harris County area did not suffer what would be considered a widespread, regional flood, that is, until June 2001." Since then, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2015, 2016, and right now.
Houston way overbuilt in flood plains. That area has had floods for a century, but the impact was lower when the big losses were herds of cattle. They need higher flood insurance premiums to discourage building.
The Florida Keys, Greater Miami, New Orleans, and Houston are just too low-lying for today's hurricanes. New Orleans has everything going wrong - the Mississippi River, hurricane country, and sinking land.
[1] https://www.hcfcd.org/flooding-floodplains/harris-countys-fl...
Both driven because the county government is funded by taxes on property rather than commerce.
To achieve growth in the bureaucracy, taxes have increased as fast as possible, and additional property developed at a growing rate in order to increase its taxable value.
In Florida it's lots of building only slightly above sea level so there's risk from the beginning, in Texas as more of the watershed/flood plain is paved neighborhoods that were not at risk before have become underwater estates.
>They need higher flood insurance premiums to discourage building.
We already have that. Just results in more people becoming uninsurable. Regulation would probably be better, but county governments are incentivizing toward developers who can afford to work around this type of discouragement anyway, which is one of the cases where it pays more than regulation. Now that the damage has been done, the most pro-development Harris County Judge of all is no longer in power, but there's still residual momentum, and it's a little too late. You should have seen it this week.
Looks like some "Real Estate" systems have been selling you false estate since the beginning. After all you can not disprove that the purpose of county government is corruption.
I can only imagine what would happen if you got unscrupulous developers mixed up with government like this on a larger scale.
These are incredibly productive institutions and under normal operation can build enough resources to weather any storm, plus this kind of thing is what's mainly insured when a storm does hit.
In response to a gradual rise in sea level, they would be expected to adapt at a glacier's pace but anything is possible. For example the island of Galveston was largely raised 8 feet after the disaster of 1900 as the preferred approach to future mitigation, and that foresight turns out to be about as good as you can get so far when it comes to coping with unforseen sea level rise.
You just need to have foresight good enough to forsee the unforseen.
Eventually working in industrial environments like Galveston or Texas City will not be that much different than working offshore in the Gulf. Heck, some operators justify working offshore now because it's not much worse than working in a mainland oil field or refinery anyway.
Besides traditional businesses of Texas, in South Florida probably agriculture and real estate would suffer first, but I imagine tourism would hold out as long as it could and smuggling would not want to go anywhere either, with their multi-century tradition.
I'm in NJ. A few years back we had hurricane / super-storm Sandy. Not only did the GOP gov at the time ( Chris Christie) find the money to rebuild. The state actually ran adverts with the tag line "Stronger than the storm." It made no sense to me.
The people living at the shore (as we call it in NJ) aren't in denial. They don't even see it.
at the beach
down the shore
Buried all the way at the bottom of the article is this little gem:
> Her insurance payout of about $100,000 would cover repairs to the 640-square-foot house. But the county requires that when more than 50% of a home is damaged, that it be completely rebuilt to meet modern storm-resiliency codes and — in her flood zone — on stilts. That would cost at least $200,000, money she doesn’t have.
So, effectively, she can rebuild her home in a way that would (presumptively) make her happy but government legislation forces her to spend double the money to rebuild it in way she probably isn't a fan of. Simple solution is to limit the ability of local building codes to force people to completely demolish/rebuild in situations like these. She had a non-elevated non-flood-proof home before, she should be able to keep her home the way she likes it at a cost she can afford, assuming the people financially invested (mortgage company, insurance company) agree, why shouldn't she be allowed?
This is a government for the rich.
I'm assuming you are conveniently forgetting that the 'Social security', 'Medicare' and 'Other spending' slices of mandatory spending go to rich and poor: these programs pay out their benefits to all people regardless of how wealthy they are.
In this particular case, though, any transfers are more 'chump change' than 'wealth' from the rich: Social Security tax is only levied on the first $132,900 of earned income (2019). With the exception of the surtax, Medicare taxes are only due on earned income. Rich people don't make the bulk of their money from a paycheck, so it really isn't like the rich are contributing a lot of their wealth or even income to the Medicare and Social Security systems.
On top of that, the rich still get all the benefits of the same Medicare and Social Security programs. So what if they pay in a bit more over a lifetime than their nanny or the schoolteacher of their children? These are insurance programs, and that is how insurance works: everyone pays in, and everyone benefits, but not necessarily to the same extent.
If the government is making it policy not to be able to live on land you purchased, then it should compensate you.
(The exception being if everyone who bought property had always known there was an e.g. 80% chance of the government taking it without payment and thus bought their property at e.g. 20% of what would otherwise be the market value... but that doesn't seem to be the case.)
I couldn't find any concrete evidence to validate this, it seems more of a prediction? Mr Hauer is a sociologist so this seems a bold claim https://coss.fsu.edu/sociology/mhauer
'his research has focused on how migration induced by sea level rise could reshape the U.S. population distribution'
The practice of inserting quotes from random "experts" in news stories is one of the worst journalistic practices out there. It's fundamentally dishonest in very obvious ways, and forms the basis of many articles.
No hysteria at all there.
Add more landfill.
He also has a PhD in geography from the University of Georgia.
SLR has been going on for 20,000 years, and it may be accelerating in the last few decades due to global warming; however, if your property is threatened by a 3mm SLR per year you probably didn’t make a wise purchase in the first place. 2+mm SLR per year has been going on for at least 150 years. See [1].
[1] https://www.flseagrant.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SLR-Fa...
Of interest though is this study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073842 which indicates that prices are 7% than they would be otherwise.
If we're talking about a meter of SLR in the next 80 years, thats 12.5mm/year.
Here's the latest from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration[1]. It is a graph that shows with 95% confidence there has been a 2.42mm/year SLR for Key West from 1913 to 2018, the most recent information on their site for sea level trends.
When I look at the graph, it looks quite linear over that time period, that spans from before significant anthropomorphic CO2 to the current period of hockey-stick temperatures. I don't see the evidence for expecting 12.5mm/yr, but I'm not a climate scientist.
I'm ready to call BS on the Bloomberg article, but I'm open to hearing more information on this.
[1] https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....
But since the paper is from 2013 I should have used 87 years. So 1000mm/87yrs = 11.5mm/yr, a little more optimistic than 12.5mm/yr.
The new issue with these hurricanes is that they are bringing significantly more water with them because of global warming. The net result is you are seeing once in 1500 year floods happening every year.
It is very hard to recover from those. Especially if you find yourself doing it every year. At some point, you have to move.
The net loss is property and economic activity to name a couple.
Source?
This is the same kind of cherry picking that denialists have been using for decades. Locally rare events appear frequent if you gather trials from enough localities. The fact is that there has been no increase in storm intensity or frequency over the last 100 years which correlates with greenhouse emissions. There was an increase starting in the 1980s [1] but this is simply not enough data for climate prediction, which normally changes on scales of hundreds of years at the quickest - even if you assume that we are expecting catastrophic temperature increase over the span of a century.
Its worrisome that proponent hysteria is driven by the same kind of fallacious reasoning as that of denialist.
1. https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-...
Overall this isn't rocket science. You have warmer temperatures over the ocean, which yields more water in the air to get caught up in passing hurricanes. The net result is more rainfall when it hits land. It is what it is.
[1] https://w2.weather.gov/climate/getclimate.php?date=&wfo=lix&...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/climate/hurricane-tropica...
>There is no consensus on whether climate change has yet affected the statistics of tropical cyclones, owing to their large natural variability and the limited period of consistent observations.
Which is exactly what I was pointing out, and exactly what laymen have come to totally disregard in their rush to blame everything on climate change while believing that "this isn't rocket science." Just like denialists and snowy winters, only in reverse.
This is on the scale of rocket science - in fact in some ways it is more difficult than rocket science, because it is fundamentally an empirical and non-experimental science, and it takes decades, if not centuries, to collect enough evidence to refine/reject theory.
The article then shows a chart predicting population displacement caused by a 1.8-meter sea level rise.
Is that the accepted consensus, that the sea level is rising ~6 feet?
A quick summary is in https://www.apnews.com/d6a3852a6dd34a8c90a5a1acc0d0afaf, but that's just scratching the surface.
In The Netherlands if an area floods homes are not built there and measures are taken to control the water in those areas. In the US people get insurance and build in the same place using the same style.
New Jersey hired a man from The Netherlands to tell them how to break out of that process. This was due to the Sandy Hurricane that devastated the coast.
It boils down to if something keeps getting damaged stop doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
edit: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/storm-water-management-dutch-s...
On top of that, Florida has a state-run fund (Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund) for times when the private/commercial reinsurance market is insufficient.
This is anecdotal, but the one I worked at had no weather/climate modelling and was only just beginning to leverage even the most basic analytics across the company. From what I heard from people in pricing was that their pricing was also a mess for property. They basically just gave up on selling insurance to anyone within 100 meters of water. They did account for elevation to some degree so that they wouldn't insure people in a flood plain, but much of the process was kludgy and ad hoc. The company is a reasonably big player and is (laughably) considered to be very technically advanced in the broader market. Even the biggest players are just moving out of manual data entry so I am not overly hopeful about the broader industry in this country.
On the other hand, Canada has a very sheltered insurance market and it desperately needs more competition. It's very protected though so I don't expect that to happen any time soon. If there was more competition, I would expect the analytics to be better and yield a more accurate picture of the real climate change costs based on the existing science.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane
What's sad is that most reporters know that climate change is measured in decade long trends. Small yearly increases in sea level, gradual increases in global temps and slow changes in atmospheric composition. But that doesn't get clicks.
Associating climate change with outlying catastrophic events is as short sighted as the environmental abuse that causes climate change.
"In terms of detection and attribution, much less is known about hurricane/tropical cyclone activity changes, compared to global temperature. In the northwest Pacific basin, there is emerging evidence for a detectable poleward shift in the latitude of maximum intensity of tropical cyclones, with a tentative link to anthropogenic warming. In the Atlantic, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on hurricane activity. A recent study finds that the observed increase in an Atlantic hurricane rapid intensification metric (1982-2009) is highly unusual compared to one climate model’s simulation of internal multidecadal climate variability, and is consistent in sign with that model’s expected long-term response to anthropogenic forcing. Reduced aerosol forcing since the 1970s probably contributed to the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since then, but the amount of contribution, relative to natural variability, remains uncertain. There is some evidence for a slowing of tropical cyclone propagation speeds over the continental U.S. over the past century, but these observed changes have not yet been confidently linked to anthropogenic climate change. Human activities may have already caused other changes in tropical cyclone activity that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural variability, or due to observational limitations."
1. That claim certainly isn't science, because it's neither reproducible nor falsifiable.
2. If it's not science, what is it?
If we convert our entire energy and transportation sectors to renewable energy and climate change turns out to be a hoax, we still get cleaner cities, cleaner air and a cleaner environment. That is a perfectly acceptable consolation prize considering the potential risks.
1. That's not my definition of science--it's the definition of science.
2. If your argument is not based on science, what is it based on?
> If a planet destroying meteor is hurtling towards earth, is that reproducible or falsifiable?
That scenario would be a matter of Newtonian physics, which any astronomer could run the numbers for. Newtonian physics is indeed reproducible and falsifiable, as demonstrated by the many objects launched into the solar system, as well as the astronomical observations and predictions over the centuries.
It's disingenuous to compare climate change alarmist claims based on primitive, already-falsified computer models to simple, proven Newtonian physics.
> Should we do nothing until you personally are convinced that it has been scientifically proven that it will destroy the planet.
Should we do what you demand when you demand it because you personally are convinced that the planet is going to be destroyed? (N.B. Earth will certainly be destroyed, either when impacted by a large celestial body or when the sun expands. Earth would not be destroyed by a minor GATA increase.)
> If we convert our entire energy and transportation sectors to renewable energy and climate change turns out to be a hoax, we still get cleaner cities, cleaner air and a cleaner environment.
If it might be a hoax, shouldn't we consider why such a hoax would be perpetrated? Might there be ulterior motives? What would be the implications of those motives?
> That is a perfectly acceptable consolation prize considering the potential risks.
Your analysis presented here is completely one-sided. It does not mention any drawbacks or side-effects. It is not impartial, it is not fair, and it is not scientific. It is not a reasonable analysis to act upon, especially considering the risks, i.e. decimating the economies and lives of billions of people in poor and developing nations.
> 1. That's not my definition of science--it's the definition of science.
Definition of science: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science
> That scenario would be a matter of Newtonian physics, which any astronomer could run the numbers for.
Please provide citations and evidence for these extraordinary claims. And no, academic references don't count because they are obviously biased due to them trying to advanced their own careers. I will only accept citations from 2-bit think tanks funded by mega-corporations that have obvious financial interests at stake.
> Should we do what you demand when you demand it because you personally are convinced that the planet is going to be destroyed?
Yes.
> i.e. decimating the economies and lives of billions of people in poor and developing nations.
Please use science to back up that claim. Until then, clean energy is the way forward. Its already cheaper[1], healthier[2], and creates more jobs[3] than fossil fuel.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and... [2] https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu... [3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm
“It’s snowing - climate change is a hoax”
“It’s 100F, - climate change proof”
You can thank the CRU and all the other alarmist for implementing exactly what you propose and it's is absolutely the reason the populous does not buy it. Never assume people are idiots, it is a fatal mistake.
The question now is, when will "you" (i.e. not you personally) figure out that you're lying to yourself about your lying? Stephen Schneider advocated lying to the public in 1996:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
--Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5.
How much longer will "you" keep lying?
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/louisiana-town-moves-to-high...
13M feels low. Given the "of $1M each" then perhaps they means households. At an average of 4 heads per, 52M individuals feels closer.
That said, what goes into a $1M move? Does beachfront property average out that high?
Finally, is that $1M in current dollars, or adjusted for inflation estimates?
I have lived in Florida for all of my 47 years. It is clear that some land is unsuitable for development when taking a long term view. That does not stop the mortgages from being approved.
A house doesn't have to be investment!
But I do wonder why are banks writing mortgages on houses in these kind of areas? Shouldn’t they be more worried about losing their investment over 30 years?
If you default and your property value has dropped 20% due to rising seas - but you had a 20% downpayment - the bank will end up whole, only you will be wiped out.
In a well-constructed mortgage, the bank has essentially zero risk of loss.
Even banks aren't, they are going to package up the mortgages and sell them to someone else.
We know mortgage writers don't care about the long term viability of their loans, just look at the subprime mortgage crisis from last decade.
That sounds like a religious statement, not a scientific one.
why do they keep building these "paper" houses? average american house is too poorly constructed to handle these things. honestly its just a few sticks and plywood in between most of the time! what hurricane??? Government should force contractors to build using ICF technology, hurricane proof houses on high stilts in coastal areas and problem solved!!!
this is a crucial comment: "She dreams of resettling in Key West or Homestead, a safer spot on the Florida mainland.
“I’d like to take the money and run,” Rittel said. “But I’ll have to buy something on stilts. I’m not buying anything on the ground down here ever ever again.”"
Sea level rise is accelerating. This angle may spark some smart thoughts here.
https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/galveston-hur...
1891 July 6th 80mph from the south 1900 Sept 8th 145mph the great galveston hurricane kills 8,000 people with a 15ft storm surge even though it was low tide while hitting it traveled 6 to 10 miles inland from the ESE .The pressure at landfall was 27.55inches with winds of 110mph.Half of Galveston destroyed with 2,600 buildings destroyed & 10,000 people left homeless would have been much worse if not moving so quickly. It is said that a one inch steel hull of an ocean going freighter was pierced through with a piece of lumber.According to the hurricane research division winds were of Category 4 strength at landfall. Newspaper headline | max wind map | Monument | surge animation | Interview with Julie Lake summer of the storm 1909 july 21st a 10 ft strom surge with 110mph winds from the ESE 41 killed in texas. 1915 AUG 17th a cat 3 120mph kills 275 ,12' tides flooded Galveston 5' to 6' in the Business District. Winds at Galveston were 97 mph gusts to 130mph putting this in the cat 3/4 range.Press 940 mb,.Seawall prevented a repeat of the 1900 disaster.Causes 50 million in damage max wind field 1932 Aug 14th 145mph winds from the SE direct hit 1934 july 27th, a storm surge of 5.9ft with a cat 1,80mph that passes just east while moving south 1942 Aug 21st 80mph from the ESE 1943 July 27th a storm surge of 4 ft ,nineteen killed,86mph winds. 1945 Aug 27th 140mph from the south just west of here 1947 August 24th 80mph from the S.E 1949 oct 4th 130mph from the south 1957 June 27th 110mph(hurdat) Hurricane Audrey well east from the south. Newspaper article 1959 July 25th hurricane Debra hit with 85mph winds bar 29.07 14.42 inches of rain. NHC Wallet 1983 hurricane Alicia on aug 18th causes 2 bill damage as a cat 2/3 with 71 to 98mph winds in Galveston moving at a forward speed of 8mph. 21 killed 1.2 billion dollars in damage,a 10 to 12 ft storm surge at normal high tide.90% of Dwellings on Jamaica bch destroyed.Many highrise glass buildings sustained heavy damage. Pressure in Galveston was measured at 989mb 29.20 inches at 2:00AM. From NOAA GPST2 - GALVESTON PLEASURE PIER (PORTS) - TX 29.29 max gust 020/076kts Damage photo | #2 | max wind field | Dr Ted Fujita wind map | Newspaper headline | Newspaper headline #2 1989 Oct 15th Jerry 3 dead over 8 million in damage ,85mph winds.The latest a hurricane ever hit the upper Texas coast NHC Wallet 2001 June 5th T.S Allison hits with 60mph winds dumping extremely heavy rain especially inland in the Houston area. Over a 120 hr period houston recorded 36.99 inches of rain.Only 3 tropical systems have produced more rain in this area. T.S Amelia 46.00",T.S Claudette 45.00",unamed 1921 40.00". 41 deaths related to flooding & 5 billion in damage. Allison was finally retired in July of 2002 as the only T-storm to be retired. NHC Report 2008 Hurricane Ike hits Galveston on Sept 13th with 110mph winds causing extensive damage in entire area by 15 ft storm surge.From NOAA GALVESTON G GPST2 11.19 ft storm surge MAJOR 29.29 GALVESTON STATE PLEASURE PIER.A high gust for the Houston area was 92mph at Hobby airport.Gust at pleasure pier 86mph.Deaths reported in Texas at 22 with several missing. Hurricane Warning Show | Before & after aerial shot | Bolivar Peninsula just north | Ike model history | SAR Helicopter refueling over Galveston | Newspaper headline | Newspaper headline 2 days later | Neil Frank describing landfall video | Ike aftermath story video | surge animation | USGS surge info | Radar animation | NHC Final report 2017 Aug 29th tropical storm Harvey just offshore while moving north by 32 miles with 50mph winds. Galveston Scholes Field (KGLS) 22.87 inches of rain gust's to 59mph. Galveston Pier 2.7ft water inundation. Inland counties report upwards of 60inches of rain in some locations most rainfall ever for tropical system in U.S. NHC Final report
outline.com and archive.org do not seem to work; Google's cache returns 404. Are there any other such sites that work?
I do turn off javascript for specific sites using Chrome. That does defeat some paywalls.
Taken in context, the numbers paint a very expensive picture economically (trillions and trillions of dollars), as well as a grave tale of unnecessary suffering for many tens of millions of people, if not more.
And money is an abstraction. You could eliminate trillions and trillions just by hacking the systems that keep track of who has how much.
What I'm trying to say is not that the consequences of climate change aren't grave, but that without mentioning specific numbers and their relationship to other numbers that describe reality, and researching and choosing those in good faith, you are saying nothing.
If you want actual numbers and the relevant context, perhaps you could read the IPCC report.