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Comment by andrew_ | Hacker News Reader

With figures like a half million migrating from the North and New England to places like Florida [1], it makes the article seem a bit sensational. Florida is in no way a haven from the effects climate change.

[1] https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2022/02/08/covid-pa...

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It seems apprent that climate disaster is inevitable. Might as well experience coastal life before flooding makes the central/inner state areas the "new coast" haha

While it may cause a lot of economic damage, I don't think the location of the coasts will change dramatically.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/ipcc_far_wg_...

Weird take.

Isn’t the right answer “build as much housing/infrastructure in ‘safe’ areas as possible and do as little investment as possible on the ‘unsafe’ areas?”

People moving to Florida are doing the exact opposite of that.

I mean coastal areas have always been dangerous, and people seem to be bad at imagining Florida disappearing.

I do wonder tho, like … the Netherlands exist. Is it not possible to do that in Florida (in theory?)

People always say “well Florida is under sea level you doofuses” but loads of cities build stuff below sea level or just raise the ground outright.

My understanding is that the water will come up through the ground once Florida is below sea level. The geology will make it very difficult to prevent water from encroaching.

> The Floridian peninsula is a porous plateau of karst limestone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Florida

It's not possible, even in theory. Flordia soil is sand, which is permeable. The Netherlands soil is clay, which is water tight.

They already have problems where sea water infiltrates some neighborhoods. It basically creates salt water springs.

What I have heard is that the Netherlands uses levees on clay, but in Florida the ground is porous so the water would just go under them.

It means rent the beach house.

Or maybe new ice age is coming.

Estimates of when the next glacial period would naturally start range from about 2ky to 12ky, so too far away to worry about now.

The glacial transitions are somewhat predictable as they are triggered by favorable isolation conditions due to the eccentricity, obliquity and precession of the Earth. That's why we can have high confidence it won't happen in the next few hundred years.

https://judithcurry.com/2016/10/24/nature-unbound-i-the-glac...

http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=7344

> Or maybe new ice age is coming.

The science does not support that. Your particular corner of the planet is not indicative of the world's changing climate:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/does-global...

There is definitely scientific evidence that continued CO2 emissions will eventually stop the atlantic currents and plunge Europe into an ice age.

The thing you linked seems completely irrelevant to this discussion.

I wrote MAYBE, science definitely says there is some propability of ice age. Qestion is what is propability of that maybe.

But science is now religion I guess.

I moved to warmer country to save on energy bills. Our politicians say hot shower is a luxury now!

Science isn't a religion because it can change with new information

Scientism is a more precise term here:

https://sciencereligiondialogue.org/resources/what-is-scient...

>It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can’t catch in his nets does not exist (15). Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.

What is an example of something that we know outside of science?

Emotional state and self knowledge, logic, aesthetics, qualia, common sense - most of what you know is outside of science.

Mathematics

Mathematics is not a field of natural science, but it is a science too. I've seen it classified as "structural science" before. It operates on the same tenets of the scientific method (which, in one sentence, can be described as "methodically testing falsifiable hypotheses"). The only difference to natural science is that the testing does not involve interrogating the physical world through experiments.

There is also "political science" and "social science".

There are also those who advance the premise that mathematics is empirical, but for the context of the discussion I'm not sure that either is relevant.

Mathematical "testing" can be described as deduction.

We can present math axioms, but can we present scientific axioms?

Science as a religion or science as an all encompassing worldview is unscientific. This is better described as scientism.

If you examine the premises of climate doom, you'll find unscientific presuppositions. There are also necessarily moral implications to the goals of regulating consumption and population size. It becomes even less scientific for cynics who question if the climate scientist's "experiments" and models are incentivized to necessitate certain conclusions.

These are items which are best disputed in their respective arenas. "Believe the science" doesn't tell us anything about morality or the ideological progenitors of the climate movement. It narrows the issue while mischaracterizing science as a system of belief which can inform us on moral matters or the historical record of climate doom ideologues.

Forget your scare quotes around science. Just go on facts. Do you not accept the idea that we have terrible wild fires in the western us, that we had sudden and unexpected very hot weather in the west? Do you argue that there isn't a big change in the climate from human activities? Do you want to argue that the measurements of carbon dioxide growing in the atmosphere is fake, or maybe doesn't really affect the climate?

Or do you disagree that the level of the sea is rising as frozen water at the poles is putting more water into the sea? These are things that are reality. It doesn't matter if you think I have impure motives about something, am I stating things that are reality? You have prevented no information that these things are not reality, you are just arguing about mysterious dark motivations of people who are pointing out things that are really happening.

Scare quotes? Reality? Facts? Are we having the same discussion here?

There are limitations to science.

Yeah this article is nonsense. No one is moving because of Climate change, they are moving because Real Estate is mental right now.

People are absolutely moving because of weather. The PNW has had terrible summers for about the past 5 years. Before there were decades of great mild summer weather, often July, Aug, Sept. These past few years there were smoke concentrations at deadly levels. Not just from one forest fire. Multiple fires every year. This is separate from the danger of a fire burning your house down. My coastal area wasn't right next to a fire, it was hundreds of miles away. The weather patterns were pulling air from the interior to the coast. If you live in Washington, Oregon, or northern California you were endangering your life if went outside. My nextdoor neighbor told me he was moving to get away from that. This was 2 years ago. Since then it has gotten worse. We've thought of selling our mountain cabin. Instead of the summer, people say our 4th season is the smoke season, only half jokingly.

At the same time, people keep moving here because we have so many jobs. There aren't that many people moving away, but lots more talk about it. I think about another 5 years will really accelerate the trend. We all know there have been historical times when there was some smoky air. Even Mark Twain wrote about it when he visited Seattle more than 100 years ago. Now it's happening every year, with severe impact. All my friends bought air conditions for the first time including me, and we also have air cleaners and air quality gauges for our inside air.

I can't talk about USA but personally I move from a major Italian city toward French Alps also (witch means, not only) for climate. My original city is not much suffering so far, floods happen sometimes but not in the part of the city I was living, but hot summer simply became too long and hot for my taste while winter rainy weather with now almost no snow is less and less appealing.

I have had various reasons, not just climate, I also want to live outside the city I consider about to became sky open prisons with density problems become so big and broad that they outweigh the benefits of being near, I also want nature etc. But climate was a part of the decision.

Not so many but others I know have made or are evaluating different relocation also for climatic reasons. So well, for us in the south/central Europe for now there is no much internal migration due to climate change, but start to happen and to be discussed not in talk show and interested lobby-setups but on casual middle-class citizens topics.

We're looking to move and we're absolutely limiting our options to places we think won't burn down and will have water 30 years from now.

I'm curious, what areas of the US are slated to run out of water in 30 years?

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration

https://www.pewtrusts.org/trend/archive/spring-2019/a-map-of...

I wasn't able to open the pro publica link. The second like has a thumbnail of the map, but I couldn't find a high resolution, zoom able version.

My takeaway from interpreting the thumbnail map is that the aquifer in the central valley of California and another big area in Texas is in trouble, mostly ok in the US otherwise.

So if I steer clear of the central valley and So Cal from LA all the way east to Texas or so (LA, Vegas, Arizona and texas) am I avoiding most of the trouble spots?

I'm just trying to get through thr fear mongering and get to brass tacks. Where can I buy a property that will likely still have a good well in 30 years, where can I not?

I've had trouble finding good data on this. Locally, farmers have had their water cut to the bone, upstream reservoirs are empty, and people are paying big bucks to drill their wells deeper. It's a notable change over 8 years. We're set for now as regular consumers, but I don't feel comfortable betting on the 15-year timeframe where I live now.

So we're eyeing the more sure things, e.g. far PNW, and NE US.

I certainly wouldn't move to an area that depends on the Colorado river, but that's just me.

And who knows--maybe something will trigger with climate change and Vegas suddenly gets rain soaked and verdant.

People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything. Florida has plenty of water, the whole state is designed around shade and air conditioning, and it's really rainy in the summer anyway. It's also not actually hotter than the other lowlands south of the Potomac/Ohio. (I grew up in Florida.) It's the places that suddenly need A/C to keep people alive that will have problems with buildings that aren't designed for it and tenants who can't afford it.

And yeah, there are hurricanes but at least the buildings are designed for it. The Northeast has sustained worse hurricane damage than Florida over the last decade, due partially to unprepared infrastructure and a migrating storm zone. (Three cheers for the Bahamas!)

> People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything.

I wouldn't mind moving to FL, weather is great and I like the location for boating. But FL is very low and rising sea level is going to cause lots of problems, so I can't bring myself to invest any kind of money in real estate in FL if it's going to be flooding in a few decades.

Sea level rise over this century will be somewhere between 1 and 4 meters. That's bad for some places like Cape Coral. But most of Florida isn't that low. Sea level rise is a very slow, long-term problem. The major reachable consequences of global warming are heat waves and regional declines in precipitation. Also hard-to-predict ecosystem sensitivity questions (e.g. fires in California).

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about the ocean, but it's a generational problem, not a personal problem, in the vast majority of cases.

The mean height of the state of Florida is 2m above sea level.

See https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-future-is-now-for-se...

No, it isn't. It's 100 feet, or 30 meters. See:

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-with-the-lowes...

https://vacationidea.com/florida/highest-elevation-in-florid...

https://johnenglander.net/florida-is-not-going-underwater-an...

The house I grew up in nearly flooded during Hurricane Frances and the surveyor lists the elevation as eight feet. If Florida's mean elevation was six feet, huge swathes of the state would be underwater every hurricane. Wikipedia lists the average elevation of Miami as 6 feet, which might be where that guy got confused.

And as the article above points out, Florida ground is porous, so even before sea levels rise enough to flood the street level, it is flooding from below which impacts both underground infrastructure and fresh water supplies.

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