I was fortunate to receive an invite to a semi-private video conference call, of international commercial Port authorities, some professionals from shipping, and their close employees. I felt the discussion was frank for such a call between competitors, which is often quite guarded. Each nation and company must clear with their local chain of command, but, the economic value of the shipping is not lost on anyone.
The take-away for me, and reinforced by some urban planning I know of, is that centers of commerce, and major urban centers, will deal with this in a timely manner. The further you are from that description, you may well have troubles.
Also some academic specialty research has noted that the underground infrastructure of sewers, water pipes and electrical/communications, will be affected by small changes in mean water height. Salinization of fresh water sources will be affected. The roads and houses, in many cases, less than you might imagine at first.
Yea, I have a feeling well off communities will be ok as well. I live in one such community in the sf bay where residents already paid for and construction is well under way for a higher sea wall:
At least California is getting a lot less than the other coast - I was worried it would be the entire country fairly equally.....
There is an artist out there making maps of what major cities will look like after coastal flooding - the one of Los Angeles is particularly interesting. Lot of new islands pop up
I’ve given up on any hope of meaningful emissions reduction and have f switched my work to climate repair, specifically methane removal.
It seems that we will have to bite the bullet and seriously work on repair, despite heavy opposition. And because of hysteresis, even when we get the climate back preindustrial levels, clean up the oceans, etc humans will have to continue to actively curate the climate, likely forever.
And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Methane is broken down primarily by hydroxyl reactions, but over the ocean it's also broken down by chlorine reactions from salt spray. (both of these reactions are powered by uv from sunlight). The ocean process is catalyzed by certain compounds in the air. We are working on accelerating this process by putting more catalyst into air above the deep ocean. Right now we're engaged in scaling the process up from the lab and fundraising.
The company is bluedotchange.com though there isn't a huge amount on our web site yet -- we haven't prioritized having a marketing department yet.
It appears no but we’re doing environmental studies to confirm. It feels like a lot of emission but it’s actually pretty small compared to the scale of the ocean and what people are pumping out in
It will only be ~10 m above the deck. Most of the CH4 is in the troposphere (the part we breathe); very little at higher altitudes.
There’s a short paragraph on the chemistry in the current Wired article on methane and Rob Jackson of Stanford. The author spoke with de Richter, one of the scientists who came up with this approach.
We're just bombarded with fear every day, even more so since COVID. More often than not it's BS (example in the 70's they feared that we would freeze to death by year 2000).
At one point the brain (at least mine) just lets go and tries to focus on something less draining.
We (humans) are just slightly evolved monkeys. We can rationalize all we want, our decisions are taken based on emotions.
We have built a much more complex world than we can really handle.
Why is it that those who want to fear monger about the current inflation and how long it will last are so resistant to the fears about sea level rise?
Wait until its determined how high the loss in real estate (especially as a tax base) will be with the sea a foot higher by 2050. Think of areas, especially Miami, that are in for serious impact without any mitigation plans.
People who hate to fear monger sure tend to horde guns, it's almost like they're afraid of something, so they have all these guns for protection... if there wasn't anything to fear, there wouldn't be a need for guns other than maybe sport/hunting related.
If they're not afraid, then maybe we can also start spending less on military and police because the world is safe-enough that we don't need to waste so much $$ on police force, etc... which often are the ones creating or escalating problems in society.
People love to blame BLM for destruction of property but guess how many riots there'd be if cops weren't allowed to murder people and get away with it, a hell of a lot less or if schools taught about things like the bombing of Black Wallstreet...
It's definitely a double standard... don't fear monger unless it involved a bigger police state for our protection, more guns - also for our protection, or bigotry (who to be afraid of and why...)...
Another commenter claimed science is often off about climate but lately I've been hearing how they're only wrong in that they under-predicted because to actually tell the truth is to scare the shit out of people and start panics or piss off business interests that pay money to the universities where they work, etc...
Based on the track record of historical climate predictions, it is rational to be surprised if one turns out to be accurate. Predictions are not facts, and they have been screaming them for decades. They have consistently been inaccurate, and tainted by political influences. There is good science on climate change, but there is also a lot of bad science on it, specifically in terms of future projections.
There's an undescribable absurdism of this era. People have data, history, sociology, models, medias. You make conferences, reports, warnings, yet the sad prophecy still lands just as remembered.
It's like Hofstadter's law applied to catastrophe.
I'm always reminded of Kubrick's comments on the risk of nuclear weapons:
"People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying." [0]
That last bit invokes some of the research behind Terror Management Theory: first and foremost, we are wired to avoid risks to our survival. But that drive is mediated by subjective qualia: avoiding mortal fear. The best way to do that is to prevent circumstances of immediate danger: don't poke the bear, don't play near the edge of a cliff. But when it comes to dangers of limited individual agency (systemic risk, black swans), it makes complete sense that evolution would select for "try not to think about it".
Maybe the scope limit of our deep brains is only a "thing" in large groups. Being short sighted is nothing if you're alone, you trip, you choke, you get whacked by a rock. In a semi organized society, the sudden too-late-bound reflex triggers an avalanche of failure.
I would generally agree, which is why I think the discourse around "misinformation" (IMO, both a legitimate concern, and a moral panic) is missing the forest for the trees.
Our failures to respond reasonably and proportionally to threats, be they ecological, medical, economic, military, even political, are all downstream of a crisis of trust, not only in institutions, but in each other. And as with broken trust in personal relationships, rebuilding that trust is non-trivial.
One observation I've made time and again throughout my life: a large chunk people live their life using a very simple, greedy algorithm (not as in greed, but greedy in the sense algo theory): deal with problems when they appear, and don't think about them until they do.
This is why people build houses in the path of lava erupting from a volcano: it's never an issue until it becomes one.
The smaller portion of folks who do plan ahead (because they are capable of it) and anticipate problems before they occur is the portion that gets ahead.
I don't think this is something that is specific to this era.
Sure, it's happened since the dawn of humanity. What is different is that we have tools and structures that are leagues ahead of any previous era. Stats, math, communication, everything is up to 11, and yet it doesn't affect much of the social response.
It's not like people don't know, it's more like there's not much we can do about it (other than voting).
It's up to governments to come up with and enforce laws that prevent corporations from releasing millions of metric tons of greenhouse gasses. Without strict laws in place, there's too little incentive from being moral or being long-term oriented, also your competition who don't will run you out of business with the extra profits.
There's also very few consumers willing to investigate/research the pollution generated from all companies related to making/delivering the products they buy. So being "greener" isn't really much of an advantage.
Nah, Covid showed that even with epidemic projections people would still under react at first, causing the exponential rise, then over reacting too late.
Our data don't take mob psychology enough in account, the curve is not really a quantitative map it's a psychology fractal. It means 'even with this curve in front of you, you will still follow the pattern causing it to happen'
And people like Leonardo DiCaprio fly their private jet to a conference, to tell Johnny average not to drive his car to work but instead use a bike. The same issues are apearing in many other future catastrophies, where a few big actors cause most of the damage, and the governments want to "do something", and then ban straws and make fuel a bit more expensive for average people, while not touching the main polluters.
I thought Leo was mostly calling out huge companies and industry for polluting? They are after all the majority of polluters by far compared to any individuals - rich or poor.
Then again just by living in most western societies on an individual level, even if we do try our best, we are essentially guaranteed to have a massively higher footprint than someone living in most third world countries.
Of course people forget he brough hummers to civilians,... And being a rich guy, caring for the environment, he could be driving a tesla (or something smaller, to use even less energy), but nope... he drives a monostrosity of a SUV (GMC Yukon - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10440521/Arnol... )
When the water and resource wars start (the final battles/world wars), I hope people realize who created this. I hope we don't just fight each other over water, and actually cannibalize the wealthy oligarchs, for all they've done to accerbate and accelerate things.
We may all die, but at least if they die first there'll be some justice... and maybe we get a few extra years without one of them polluting as much as 50 million people in a single year...
i'm really saddened that I have boys under 4, and they have to really live through some of the worst of this. It's going to be a much harsher world, and it already isn't very amicable to anyone who isn't already wealthy.
Nothing? We’re well on the way to making gas-powered vehicles obsolete and nuclear power widespread.
I think some level of saying “the sky is falling” is okay but you’re only going to be able to inspire voters with progress - negativity doesn’t win elections.
Source? Nuclear power is highly unpopular and hanging on by a thread in the United States. Our reactors are in disrepair and do not make a profit without subsidies.
Nuclear power is shrinking with no new plants being built and old ones being decommisioned. So spreading is definitely not the word I would have used either.
Micro nuclear reactors are being built not far from me. I expect nuclear to grow substantially in the US at least in the midwest. My state is already green with many windmills, solar farms, hydro plants. The only thing they have not explored very far yet is geothermal and there is plenty of opportunities for that here too.
I'm skeptical that micro nuclear reactors will ever be economically viable (without subsidies) for grid scale power production. There are huge economies of scale in fission power once you account for labor costs, site security, and thermodynamic efficiency. Bigger is better.
Micro reactors are more suited to isolated areas disconnected from the grid.
Nuclear power is unpopular but sometimes leaders need to lead by doing the unpopular thing, every now and again we get good ones.
For all their flaws (and there are many, don't trust a Tory) our government in the UK has done a good-ish job with environmental policy. Not great, but not like the early Trump admin going full retard over fossil fuels, science etc.
> Nuclear power is unpopular but sometimes leaders need to lead by doing the unpopular thing
The biggest flaw of democracy is that politicians need votes, for them and their party, and getting them is their main objective. They do unpopular things, but make immense efforts to spin it as desirable.
Climate change will be properly addressed until the general population suffers from it, and threatens to vote for someone who actually does something. At that point, an emergency state could be declared and the votes won't be as valuable.
Was Trump's policy towards nuclear bad? I seem to recall that his admin green-lit in-country efforts that were effectively on ice for quite a while - TREAT, ARDP, the VTR, micro/small reactors, Vogtle approval.
And an opening statement from Forbes article in Dec 2020: "By most accounts, President-elect Joe Biden will continue President Trump’s nuclear energy legacy — to aggressively develop U.S. technology for export to the international market within five to seven years." https://www.forbes.com/sites/dipkabhambhani/2020/12/01/biden...
The negativity is needed because too many people think the sky is not falling. The can has been sufficiently kicked and the problem has become a fact of life. There hasn't been mass mobilizations for climate policy in 30 years. The oil barons won.
Yet people still rail against an EV company because "tweets" and continue to suck on big auto that held us back on purpose because their factories were built for ICE engines, and ya'know, cheated on emission tests.
But no, getting angry and emotional is not the answer. We're reducing our emissions, mostly thanks to natural gas (fracking) displacing coal, but part due to alternatives like wind and solar. Some states like Texas run on wind for the full day at times, only tapping into non-renewables during peak loads.
We've made great progress and some people need to calm down or they look crazy (some are), diminishing their cause.
Some people seem to treat "green" as a religion. The sin you're born with is your carbon footprint. You can do everything and it's still not enough. You have to flagellate yourself, you need to convert everyone else to live your lifestyle, you need to give this and that up. You need to live without electricity, without transportation, without meat, etc. Some positions are counter productive to the cause or are simply useless (banning straws instead of sanctioning foreign countries/companies for dumping plastic waste that they buy from us)
Be a conservationist, not an environmentalist. Clean the Earth, make it better, but stop with the doomsday speeches and flagellation.
It's as if there aren't multiple issues at play. There can be securities fraud, China level spying on your driving, terrible quality issues (the Model S), and all sorts of other negative things that contrast the good that is Tesla.
Spending 30k on a car is a huge financial decision and some people just can't afford to take that decision lightly no matter how much they believe in climate change.
For context I own a fair bit of Tesla stock and am a big fan. But I am hesitant to buy one myself, as much as I'd love to.
The reason people go overboard worrying about their carbon footprint is because fossil fuel companies have a strategy of making global warming 'our' fault, and a consequence of individual action instead of recognizing it's too large of a problem for us to tackle individually. We need government regulation in the form of a carbon tax. Want to drive a dodge viper to work? Knock yourself out. Your carbon taxes will help fund a few KW clean nuclear power.
Ah yes, more taxes to pay for the taxes and over regulation on nuclear.
The fossil fuel companies that you think are out to get you are the only ones actually reducing emissions. Fracking gave access to so much natural gas it displaced coal, reducing emissions year over year.
Those energy companies also invest in wind farms, solar, everything. The gov gives out taxpayer money like hotcakes for "green" solutions, why not take advantage?
the drop in emissions we need to not pass 1.5C of warming is not within the time frame of construction/operation of full nuclear power (for the entire world, not just the US).
Electric cars exist to (temporarily?) save the auto industry. The decrease we get in purely tailpipe emissions does not offset the supporting infrastructure, their construction, and the sprawl that they demand.
Even Exxon is not putting 1.5C targets (where even then a lot of real people die) in their "sustainability" reports anymore. Everything needs to stop at 2030 at the latest, and I personally have no hope that that is possible.
Not even hitting the brakes. We're over the cliff and people are still arguing over whether we should ease on the accelerator a bit and if so, how much.
No one knew about climate change in 1957. It was a theoretical possibility that required decades of research, development, and infrastructure to prove. You're talking about literal terraforming - no one was sure that such a thing was actually possible. And even today we are still discovering novel mechanisms which obscure, regulate, or amplify temperature fluctuations. The case against 195X oil companies is overstated - though it makes for a convenient scapegoat.
In response to: >"No one knew about climate change in 1957."
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1]
It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2].
The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4].
More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade before the last founding father of the United States died.
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
[0] >the effect may be considerable in a few centuries
[1] >and whether there any important ways in which it [CO2] is being removed from the atmosphere
[2] Even more interesting, the doomsday predictions are more than a hundred years old as well:
>THERE was a letter in NATURE some time since, calling attention to the pollution of the atmosphere by the burning of coal; and it was calculated that in the year 1900, all animal life would cease, from the amount of carbonic dioxide
Hindsight is 20/20. Yes, now, after decades of study and billions of dollars in measurement and modeling infrastructure, this particular theory appears to be panning out. But to pretend that we knew with any certainty 100 or even 60 years ago that this was a likely outcome drastically oversimplifies the complex and chaotic global climate system. It is effectively revisionist history and even more importantly the warming necessary to confirm such theories did not really take off until the last few decades, ignoring that 60 years ago we did not have the spatial coverage to measure it with sufficient density and precision to verify a phenomenon on the scale of global climate change.
And on top of all that, we are measuring a chaotic, periodic, oscillating system, and it is impractical to draw any conclusions
about differences in future trends about without at an absolute minimum decades of quality sampling.
So, again, people who claim that the petroleum industry knew about climate change and irresponsibly and continued to put the future of the planet in peril in the name of profits are dramatically underestimating the scope and scale of the theory and the degree of infrastructure and analysis necessary to prove it with any certainty.
my own particular PDF copy of Big Oil research showing climate change from carbon burning, is dated in the 1970s. It is a clear research result at the time. They even predict a two percent rise in temps, around now.. there is no question at all. I read it from time to time.
"How are you so great at resolving questions about comets, when you know nothing about astronomy or orbital mechanics? Presumably because you have the right heuristics, the ones about which authorities to trust and which ones not to. But what are those right heuristics? The writers of Don’t Look Up spend 2 hours 18 minutes demonstrating that they have no idea and can’t even keep their answer consistent from one moment to the next."
At some point in our lifetime we are going to have to effectively abandon cities like Miami, and our politicians will still be in denial about climate change.
Or if you don't want to commit to building a pier or platform, could you moor a houseboat there?
It's worth noting that flooding isn't an all or nothing thing. I live on the New England coast and my neighborhood occasionally floods during storms. This is a disaster for some houses, but only a temporary inconvenience for others which are build on a tall foundation and have a raised area for parking.
FWIW, I'm not sure if any main stream politicians are arguing today that there is no climate change. I could be wrong, but most of what I hear is a question of how much is human caused/accelerated, rather than whether it's happening at all.
There are some obvious exceptions like people pandering with "record low today, how about that global warming libs", but as far as I can tell this isn't the official position of any political office.
>> most of what I hear is a question of how much is human caused/accelerated, rather than whether it's happening at all.
I feel like that's last decade's news.
Many people I hear now are just fed up of the hypocrites and would as soon watch it all melt/burn/explode rather than let smug folk like Kerry be the "Climate Czar" while tooling around the globe on his Airstream.
Greta has a point when she starts raving about the climate change conferences where each of the attendees all flew in on their private jets. It's pretty shameful.
What were the going to do travel by sailboat for weeks? Some of the most important/powerful people in the world? They aren't used to zoom so flying it is.
but most of what I hear is a question of how much is human caused/accelerated
That's just another form of denialism. "Climate change is a hoax, I don't have to change my behavior." is little different from "Climate change is real, but I'm not convinced it human-caused, so I don't have to change my behavior."
I suspect the next stage will be to admit that it's real and was caused by humans, but argue that it's too late/expensive to do anything about it. (And therefore I don't have to change my behavior.)
"FWIW", the last president declared that climate change was a hoax invented by China to make the US weaker. I don't know about "official position of any political office" but "climate change is a hoax" (or similar) is a common position on one half of the US political divide.
I'm still a big fan of making all elected officials wear NASCAR inspired suits with the patches of all of their corporate sponsors so we know who's actually talking when the elected person's mouth moves.
Depending on the thread I think it's either people annoyed that they're seeing his name at all, and people who don't like seeing their guy getting criticized, but either way the result is the same. HN does generally swing much righter than the rest of the internet, too.
If the poster has said "he-who-will-not-be-named", I'd be there right with you and say it was silly. But they just did not do that, that is something you have made happen in your head.
"former president" is perfectly fine. As is "last president", or "trump", or whatever. I think the point wasn't about the specific person who had said those things so much about general level of political discourse in US around this subject...
It isn't that they're in denial. They know full well what is happening. It is just that they are selfish. They're going to get theirs while there is still something to get in the hopes that they'll be able to weather this disaster until they are no more.
It's entirely possible to wall off the sea and pump river water over it to keep cities dry. The Dutch have been doing it for centuries. All that is required is quite a bit of money and political will.
I don't see Miami ever being abandoned, even if they have to float it.
Anything south of Orlando is basically drained swamp. The bedrock is eroding due to over development (which causes the land to sink) and salt water has encroached on the fresh water aquifer. Miami spent half a billion $ a few years ago on a pump project that is already being overwhelmed.
I would be stunned if Miami survives as anything but a billionaires island 20 years from now.
It's not just will and money that are needed. You need competence, actual ability, as well. Otherwise you're just playing at being King Canute while someones get rich.
And everyone who doesn't live near a coastal city is going to pay for the relocation of everyone who continues to live there despite recurring flooding and a bleak future outlook.
"Failing to curb future emissions could cause an additional 1.5 - 5 feet (0.5 - 1.5 meters) of rise for a total of 3.5 - 7 feet (1.1 - 2.1 meters) by the end of this century" is also pretty disturbing.
They almost certainly are. Retroactive studies of climate predictions made by the IPCC found that they were consistently much too conservative.
And there have been multiple climate related events in the last few years that were worse than the worst case models. (The heat wave in the US's pascific northwest last summer.) Others that are occurring way ahead of schedule - for instance, models predict the equatorial region having days of deadly heat by 2080, it happened in 2020.
So, any time you see a climate prediction put forth by a major institution, I would assume it's going to be too conservative. That has been our pattern so far.
Yeah, people think these types of things are blown up and manipulated as if the scientists actually make a buck out of it versus their usually very meagre salary and huge workload,
Someone I know who used to work for a non-specific policy related group of scientists investigating something pretty important (pollution, the kind that gives your kids fucked up lungs not something relatively abstract like global warming) and that he was explicitly told (in response to a warning their data looked bad for the government) "That's awful, we must do something about it, in the meantime please lower the figure"
From a different viewpoint, these scientists are just trying to shut down companies and have employees lose their jobs by making things too expensive because the happen to pollute "a little". So intead of polluter pays, consumer pays after the prices get raised to compensate the expense of the polluter fines/taxes, the equipment upgrade to reduce emissions, etc.
If the damn scientists would just shut up already, everything would be fine! /s
If you tax the carbon then the market will adjust by favouring more efficient products. If poor people can't afford them then that's a different societal issue which is not being caused by a relatively small tax.
Because the money train is still running ... until it stops. As with most systemic problems the vested interests in the status quo will prop something up as long as possible, ignoring the underlying failures until all at once a domino effect kicks off and years of collapse appear to hit all at once.
I'd imagine it'll be around insurance underwriting for the structures and the financial instruments attached to them.
Because they package up your loan with a bunch of others and sell it to another company within a year, no sweat off their back. What does flood insurance cost?
The increasing number and intensity of disasters is causing many types of insurance, particularly flood and fire, to become scarcely available. We are beyond basic cost accounting at this point.
Flood insurance is immaterial to the arguments here considered. You buy it year by year, not in 40 year contracts. They will stop selling to you once your house is about to go underwater. Who would insure a house at the bottom of the ocean?
If an insurance company is guaranteed to have an $800,000 claim filed on their policy within the next 12 months because your house is already flooded, they won't sell you the policy.
Because the people issuing those mortgages will be long retired by the time it comes home to roost and also they are probably banking on a federal govt bailout.
If you mortgage a property and the property is destroyed, you are still on the hook to repay the loan. If you have insurance that will cover it, then great. If not, you still owe the note. Sound like sound logic for the banker types.
Except that you don't buy insurance in 40 year contracts. Once the water gets too close, it will become uninsurable. It would be like selling insurance on a house that is burning.
Nah, some insurance company will continue to take people's money, but when it comes time to make a claim, they will come back with this was not an act of god event, but a malicious man made event. Claim denied!
Publicly traded banks have an obligation to their shareholders to make money. Nobody wants to be the first to abandon a profit center. A classic multipolar coordination trap that, theoretically, governments are here to fix.
By the time your home will be worthless you’ll at least have paid back the principal. Add in the uncertainty of so many too big to fail bailouts of bad mortgages probably happening and large scale engineering projects to save homes probably happening and you’ve still got a decent bet by the bank.
I don't buy this. There are plenty of things a bank will not lend you money for. I can't get a 2 million mortgage for instance. I can't get a mortgage to buy undeveloped land. I can't get a loan to start a business. I can't get a loan to buy a business. Why is this very specific circumstance one where all risk parameters fly out the window? Why aren't they recklessly greedy in the other situations I list?
I feel like you've asked a good question. I don't doubt the conclusions of the report, and I don't think the banks do either.
Why, then, would they make what the facts indicate are bad loans?
Greed is a partial answer, sure. This is hardly the only place where corporations trade risk in the distant future for revenue today.
But my instinct is that the greater part of it is inertia. They make the loans because they've always made the loans and it will take a good deal of energy to change that.
My guess is that it's an area where change will come as a short, very sharp shock. One year all the banks will make these loans and the next year none of them will.
I don’t know how anyone could buy a property on the coast these days, I know it’s some of the most expensive real estate but you could be looking at a total, 100% loss on that not too far into the future, definitely in our lifetimes. When it gets to the point where everyone starts to see that coastal areas are sinking, real estate values will plummet and you won’t be able to sell even well before sea level rise makes the home uninhabitable. Unless of course the trend magically stalls or reverses.
It's politically tough to do but you really need to ensure that federal subsidies for flood insurance in coastal areas are gradually reduced to zero. Some people will fight this tooth and nail while denying the effects of climate change. But it's a worthwhile fight.
Just so. With 30y home loans being the standard here in AU, that induces property buyers to consider a roughly 25y longer horizon than our local politicians trouble themselves with.
We've had some famous instances of coastal housing collapses here recently (eg. [0])
It's not clear how much is attributable to sea level rise - probably not much - but these types of stories demonstrate the thinking involved from the various involved parties.
The hubris of the purchaser (often there are associated stories of fights with local councils to get permission to build that close to the shore - also complicated in Australia by a standing 30-metre water front is public property), followed by even more hubris of the purchaser (demanding that same council to build a sea-wall). Lending institutions don't care either way, at least yet, because their capital / revenue is assured. Local councils don't have the budget, inclination, or obligation to allocate huge resources to such a tiny demographic. Our national administration is populated by pro-coal climate-deniers or sceptics, so we're not expecting good leadership outcomes at that level either.
First, even if you lose the house you can recoup some of its value through flood insurance. Since 1968 in the US you can get flood insurance via the National Flood Insurance Program in many at-risk areas. Given that the program has operated at an ever-increasing loss since 2004 one could reasonably claim that taxpayers are subsidizing risky coastal building at an ever-increasing rate.
Second, even if you believe that the property will be a total loss at some point in the future, it will still provide some value as you use it until that point.
Third, it is entirely possible that the net costs above have already been (at least somewhat) factored in to the price, and that as high as the prices seem to you, they would be substantially more expensive if climate change was not a factor.
So you're saying it's worth it if you don't think about the financial solvency of the US subsidized flood insurance while you look away from the problem until your front porch is underwater. Enjoy your vacation!
Correct. Think of low-lying coastal property as a disposable luxury good that we choose to subsidize, like large cars or air travel.
In a few wealthy regions like SF and NY I would guess that Dutch-style defenses will be economically feasible to protect home values.
In other places my guess is that property values will crash when the federal government eventually admits it cannot afford to keep NFIP solvent indefinitely. Though even in that case I wouldn't be surprised if wealthy coastal landowners still manage to finagle a taxpayer bailout out of it.
There will also be unfortunate death spiral effects. Elevating sewer lines, rebuilding roads and drilling new wells as the old ones are infiltrated by seawater will cost money, leading to increased taxes. High taxes will force out marginal residents. As the tax base shrinks, per capita taxation will go up, pushing out more people...
Your house could be a mile inland and fifty feet above sealevel, but you could still have to abandon your home as a direct result of sealevel rise.
The minute any coastal community stops grows, they're screwed. Manhanttan and DC will (probably) be fine, but if you're living in Nowheresville, South Carolina, then you had better sell your house now, while you still can.
There are plenty of places in South Carolina - even close to the coast - that will be fine with a foot of sea level rise. It's not like everything is effected evenly.
Some places will be devastated - others will be fine.
Also - it's not like you need to get out now. This is going to happen slowly over 30 years. A lot of people who own will be dead before it gets noticeably worse.
People have known this was a thing for a long time, and if it has affected property values at all - it's been minimal. It's not like there's going to be a flip of a switch and every coastal property in South Carolina - poof - becomes worthless.
You might have a Katrina event that tanks property values by ~50% in highly effected areas. But for the most part - prices will just decline slightly. Or, with the state of interest rates - maybe just not accelerate as fast as other places.
From what I've read the dramatic drop your discussing is priced in at about a 7% discount. You can easily see why a 100% loss is unlikely - a fifty year leasehold sells for about 50% of a freehold.
If a house is going to be sold to a rich idiot who should know it won't last, then I'm mostly in favour of letter them be stupid.
If it was a home for average people then it would be bad, but I don't think risk-taking like that (for the rich) leading to a transfer of money from the stupid to the not-stupid is such a bad thing.
>About 2 feet (0.6 meters) of sea level rise along the U.S. coastline is increasingly likely between 2020 and 2100 because of emissions to date.
Carbon capture and sequestration is an absolute must investment. That's massive damage and human suffering on the way if we don't remove the emissions that have already happened.
>Carbon capture and sequestration is an absolute must investment. That's massive damage and human suffering on the way if we don't remove the emissions that have already happened.
As long as it is cheaper to prevent emissions, we should do that instead of capture and sequestration. If you stop emitting CO2, the atmospheric levels take care of themselves. That is to say, we went to zero emissions tomorrow, they would go down quickly- faster than they went up.
For this reason, we should only capture carbon if it is cheaper than prevention, or prevention is maxed out.
Once the melting point moves beyond a "gate" where the ground starts going downwards, then water will just go in there and the melt will accelerate tremendously. We don't know if it's a decade or a century, as it's not been witnessed in history.
Extreme weather will be far more noticeable than that amount of sea rise over 3 decades (if no less). We are not good noticing slow changes, but a hurricane hitting a big city, a heat dome or an atmospheric river drowning a populated region are things that will cause alarm, specially if that kind of things happens frequently.
Barely related, I'm about a quarter the way through Neal Stephenson's latest book [0], which beautifully / distressingly describes a relatively near future where this has already happened.
Also, while I appreciate this is a publication with an intended readership of US citizens:
"Sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise ..."
Presumably this means sea level along everyone's coastline is projected to rise this amount.
Anyone know if there is a database for converting GPS elevation to local peak- or mean-high-tide elevation? I live in a coastal city and would be interested to know which areas are SOL...
Looked not nearly as bad as I would have thought, until I saw the disclaimer that it doesn't take erosion into consideration. Considering that the lagoons will become bays and that the soil is sandy here, I suspect erosion around them could be considerable.
How would it raise Lake Michigan? Different precipitation patterns or changes in consumption due to climate change maybe, but how could a foot of sea level change lake Michigan's level?
silly question I know. I know they're indepenent, and higher than sea-level, but just wondered, more precipitation, snow melt, etc.
Should've googled it before I asked
> The Great Lakes are land-locked bodies of water that drain via the St. Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean. Lake Ontario, the lowest of the Great Lakes, sits 246 feet above sea level. It (and the other four Great Lakes at elevations of 571 feet for Lake Erie, 577 feet for Lakes Michigan/Huron and 600 feet for Lake Superior) will not be affected by rising oceans, whose rise will be only about one foot by the year 2100. Oceans have been rising at an average rate of 0.14 inches per year in recent years, but the rise is expected to increase slightly in coming years. The levels of the Great Lakes fluctuate a few feet in cycles that are independent of ocean levels.
Its not as silly as you might think. Levels in Lake Huron-Michigan recently reached an all time high (I believe last year). Some towns in Indiana were expecting to be completely wiped out. Of course, this is not due to melting glaciers but due to changing weather patterns.
For a region like ours though, its a similar problem. Water levels here also could move a lot faster than sea levels, however its not as steady or certain of a rise. Ultimately there is also already a geoengineering megaproject which has been built and is capable of flushing the lake into the Gulf of Mexico: the Chicago "river" (more of a canal at this point as its flow has been reversed).
The take-away for me, and reinforced by some urban planning I know of, is that centers of commerce, and major urban centers, will deal with this in a timely manner. The further you are from that description, you may well have troubles.
Also some academic specialty research has noted that the underground infrastructure of sewers, water pipes and electrical/communications, will be affected by small changes in mean water height. Salinization of fresh water sources will be affected. The roads and houses, in many cases, less than you might imagine at first.
US Citizen here, California coastal dweller