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Comment by todd8 | Hacker News Reader

SLR (sea level rise) is a problem, but this article promotes a kind of alarmist version of SLR, in my admittedly inexpert opinion.

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...

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People, en masse, rarely react to a problem till it hits them in the face. Florida does get flooded already - Sunny Day Floods, what a beautiful name. Meanwhile real estate prices keep ignoring the issue:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA

Yes, you are correct.

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.

Sensitive to exposure -- 22% discount for properties that will be encroached with 1ft sea level rise, 6% with 6ft encroachment -- and to knowledge eg less discount in regions with less belief in climate change, except for investors who don't seem to be influenced by such local beliefs, substantially greater discounting after 2014 IPCC report (dataset from 2006-2017). Recommended read!

The paper you cite is dated 2013 and says SLR has been 3mm/year since the 1990s. It mentions the possibilities of more dramatic rises by 2100 but doesn't go into much detail.

If we're talking about a meter of SLR in the next 80 years, thats 12.5mm/year.

I'd like to understand this better. Do you have a scientific citation for 12.5mm yr until 2100?

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....

The paper you cited above calls 20, 39 and 59 inches of SLR by 2100 the low, intermediate and high scenarios. And 39 inches is close to a meter.

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.

I don’t think regular people can appreciate that level of increase though. It’s better to focus on exceptional examples that drive the harm home. If we want action on the issue that is.

This is the opposite of alarmist. A 3mm/year SLR is pretty much the best-case scenario. An alarmist but still possible scenario would be 3 meter SLR from the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

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