Hacker News Reader

> The real solution is to accept that anyone who bought in the last half century should have factored in the scientific evidence of climate change and not expect taxpayers to subsidize their failure to plan appropriately.

It's mostly not even climate change. The reality is that without a great deal of very expensive intervention from humans, sand coastlines are constantly shifting and changing. Building long term structures in these places has ALWAYS been folly.

The worst part is it's not even irrational because the rest of the country will fund the billions of dollars for state and federal projects to shore up these properties indefinitely.

> It's mostly not even climate change

Let me amend that: it’s not just climate change but climate change is like a catalyst for the existing problem. Higher sea level, greater storm intensity and frequency, and other ecological impacts (e.g. native vegetation might not control erosion as well due to changing conditions or invasive pests) all mean we get the harder versions of the problem and have deal with more crises at a time.

Its more like this was inevitable regardless of climate change on the time period the average housing stock lasts, so building there and expecting this to stay as is was inevitably stupid regardless of climate change.

The reality is that climate change is resulting in 100 year events becoming 10 year events. Yes, the barrier probably would have been washed away _eventually_ irrespective of our changing climate, but sea levels are rising (104mm since 1993) and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is increasing. Everything that is now happening occurs in the context of our destabilizing climate. Given this, I'm not sure how supportable it is to declare that climate change is not, at the very least, a contributory factor in events like these.

Or you know, maybe people are too stupid to estimate probabilities like that. Our history is too short to really know what is normal and what is out of line. In geological terms, we are still very much coming out of an ice age and far from peak temperatures that we know have happened before.

> In geological terms, we are still very much coming out of an ice age

In geological terms, AGW aside, the earth was still very much within the Late Cenozoic Ice Age and has been for 34 million years.

In glaciation terms the earth was swinging out of an inter glaciation period and due to return to glaciation and decreasing global tempretures and increasing ice coverage.

Thanks to human activity increasing the insulation attributes of the atmosphere mean tempretures are increasing and global mean tempretures will increase past what we (as a human species) have experienced in our brief time on the planet.

> far from peak temperatures that we know have happened before.

It's true - we're a long way from living on the surface of a near molten ball of rock with no breathable atmosphere, as the earth once was.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Cenozoic_Ice_Age

Ok you got me. I meant in the last few hundred million years it has been way hotter than today. Life existed and thrived back then as well. We are coming out of an ice age and temperatures must necessarily increase as a result, regardless of any presumed impact humans have on that process. This may be interfering with estimations of the impact of CO2 on our atmosphere. I'm not claiming to be an expert on this but I am skeptical of people who claim to be experts on this, as alarmism inherently boosts their careers.

> Life existed and thrived back then as well.

Hate to break it to you, but humans are not stromatolites.

Humans have been about for two million years and have evolved to live in recent climatic conditions and to thrive in the extremely relatively stable Holocene.

> We are coming out of an ice age

On what evidence?

By the record we are in an ice age (do see and read my prior link) and not only were we expected to stay in that ice age but were expected to return to increased glaciation (ie decreasing tempretures).

The only reason we are coming out of an ice age is due to human activity increasing the bulk insulation properties of the atmosphere.

> I'm not claiming to be an expert on this

I've spent four decades in geophysical exploration developing instruments and software for mapping earths energy and mineral resources for extraction.

I'm also not claiming to be an expert but I have some exposure to continent and global scale modelling of gravity, radiometrics, magnetic fields, tidal movements, drift, etc.

This page has some good general information that you ought to be aware of before talking to people about this topic: https://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/module-3/temperature-trend-chan... In short, the planet's temperature shifts wildly in geological time, even in a human time scale. Our written language and species may eventually survive long enough to convey all of this information past the next ice age, whenever that is to happen.

>The only reason we are coming out of an ice age is due to human activity increasing the bulk insulation properties of the atmosphere.

The climate is naturally cyclical, as explained in my reference above and many other academic sources. Again I'm not suggesting there is no human impact but that this may be difficult to isolate, no matter how confident various researchers claim to be in their models. We humans have lived through an ice age only 20k years ago and that ice age has been ending ever since, and not because of us. As an armchair geologist you should know about that as well as the Little Ice Age much more recent than that. This looks interesting: https://www.history.com/news/ice-age-human-survival

Higher sea levels are a good counter example to your point. Nobody thinks of normal housing lasting the thousands of years that process takes when you are think in terms of ice ages and warming periods, but a relatively modest rise makes a big difference when you’re thinking about things like how much a given house is exposed to storm surge.

Similarly, forest fires are always a risk but the fires are bigger, more frequent, and hotter when climate change had been drying out previously wet regions. That means society needs to plan for huge increases in response capacity in much larger regions than previously was the case, so again while it’s technically possible for there to be a fire anywhere those are very different situations from the prospective of everyone on defense.

Think of it like the way armies had to change going from flintlocks to automatic weapons, only we’re doing it much faster and are going to have to make hard sacrifices.

>The real solution is to accept that anyone who bought in the last half century should have factored in the scientific evidence of climate change and not expect taxpayers to subsidize their failure to plan appropriately.

Glad someone said this. If you got money to buy properties at Martha Vineyard, then how much do you really believe in climate change? People who build there should just accept the risk that their properties will be destroyed with little notice.

>The problem is that seawalls are very expensive

That's only one problem... The bigger problem is something you hit at, which is mass ignorance of complex topics that end up getting turned in to political sound bites. At least 30 years ago, and probably longer you could pick up books on bathymetry and arenology that described the physics of the situation and really gave dire warnings. Without adding things like rising sea level, the moment you start building near the beach bad things start happening quickly. Tall building interrupt wind currents, these wind currents change the shape and angle of the beach. Changing the shape of the beach changes the how waves scour the sand off the beach and leads to rapid erosion. This leads to people building sea walls, which just moves the feedback loop out a bit. What typically happens without constant replenishment is the ocean will continue to get deeper directly up to the seawall (losing your prime tourist attraction) until the seawall falls over.

A seawall is how you turn a million dollar problem in to a billion dollar one.

At the end of the day human ambitions and the ocean are not really compatible. We like to think we can tame anything and exploit its resources safely and cheaply. To use a bad analogy, it's like seeing a beautiful unicorn and capturing it because you love the way it looks. But after you capture it, its bright white coat grows dull and grey. It's horn falls off. It gets tons of medical issues requiring more and more expensive treatment. Suddenly everyone is claiming it's a ripoff and you never had a unicorn in the first place.

These homeowners cleaned the beaches free of any plants that would have helped prevent this in order to make their homes look nicer.

These people just want sympathy and for someone to pay for their mistakes.

There's definitely a significant amount of "leopards ate my face" going on here, but I think a fair few people simply don't know better. They see a beautiful beachfront property and when the weather is good, it's all hunky dory.

But then a hurricane moves in and levels everything to the ground, and the real estate agents neglect to mention that this will happen on a regular basis.

Another weird one I’ve heard are people saying it can’t be that bad if insurers cover it, followed by dismay when the premiums double multiple years running.

I think the solution will end up involving some changes to federal disaster aid: FEMA will give you relocation assistance if you sell your house to BLM to become part of the coastal buffer reserve.

A sea wall performs much differently than a properly sloped structure. There are different engineering approaches to this problem and they function well when in place.

That said, it's a waste of time, money and resources.