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Comment by arno_v | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly if you put it to 20 meters the effect globally seem insignificant. Although 80% of my own country would be flooded, so that's not great.

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I guess you mean the shape of the countries doesn't change much? iirc the majority of Earth's population lives on coastlines, most major cities will be inundated

They'll have a _long_ time to migrate though, no?

The rise in sea level is something of a misnomer, because the real damage comes in storm surges. Even a 1cm rise increases the amount of water that can pushed inland by *checks notes* a whole helluva lot. So while manhattan isn't going to be put underwater even after a whole foot of sea level rise (predicted by 2100), the storms it has to survive will be much worse.

People won't move just from a little water in the roads (just look at Miami), I think even in the year 2099 you'll have a hard time getting new yorkers to move to ohio, but once a storm comes through and destroys their housing they will have to find somewhere else to live.

Housing is super expensive for people now. All of that coastal infrastructure will need to be rebuilt.

But housing isn't expensive because it's hard to build. It's expensive because building it isn't allowed. If it all had to be rebuilt, that would be much cheaper than trying to build it under existing conditions.

Yeah, I was looking at this and thinking "At 20m, basically the entire Eastern and Southern Seaboard of the US is gone."

Not at all. Those living along the shore have flood insurance which will continue to pay for restoration of the coastline.

Insurance isn't an endless bucket of money, and it's also going to adapt. Eventually you just won't be able to get insurance for properties in areas like that. Just look at the floods in New Orleans or the current flooding along the east coast of Australia, I doubt there's enough money to make all those affected whole again.

I think insurance may be the main driver for when people actually decide to move. People are pretty resilient, but if you can't get a home loan because you can't get insurance, people won't keep living there.

I live in NJ. As I understand it, the state gov - via taxpayers, obviously - subsidizes property insurance at the shore (as NJ calls the beach).

That generosity isn't endless.

These communities are wealthy and influential. Places like Buffalo will go bankrupt keeping places like NYC above water.

The big problem, as a sister comment pointed out, is that, for various reasons, a lot of people live close to the coast line. And a lot of people having to move was historically never really a good for peace, plus we loose a lot of agriculturally valuable land in the process.

Transportation by water is like 50 times cheaper than by land and it has been like that for at least the last 2000 years. So most people live either along the coast or along rivers.

At 20 meters, the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles, and parts of Orange county are significantly impacted.

Well if California goes, we might as well all pack up, civilisation is over.

Okay. So what do you think will happen when a significant chunk of the United States economic power is under water?

I suspect it will look like Amsterdam, or Venice, or any number of cities that figured out how to cope with existing at or below sea level.

From https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating...

> In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5). By 2300, seas could stand as much as 5 meters higher under the worst-case scenario.

I guess thy will migrate the datacenters before 2300.

Mostly knowledge workers. Remote work already reducing potential impact.

Well, billions of poor people without iPhones will be displaced or flooded. But actually on reflection, that's irrelevant compared to, dunno, having to build sea walls in Los Angeles and ruining the beach.

When I imagine the value of beach houses in Orange County dropping due to sea level rise, it fills me with such sadness.

On a global scale, sure, but as you pointed out for some spots it wouldn't be good. Both Miami and New York (to a lesser extent) would be having a bad time.

And as Lex Luthor pointed out in Superman1, there may be profit to be had. So honestly, two sides to that coin, amirite?

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