No, and people should not be living there now. From what I have heard, if FEMA designates areas to be flood risks (our case on the West coast as opposed to violent storms), and not eligible for reimbursement unless risks are mitigated, then homeowners cannot get property insurance, and without that they cannot get a mortgage. An example I heard is that FEMA has told homeowners in certain areas that when their home is remodeled, they must raise the foundation 14 inches, or else loose eligibility for FEMA benefits.
http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-billionaires-life-extension-projects-2015-4 I don’t know if I want to “defeat death”.
I wonder if the climatologists who predicted increasing numbers of deadly hurricanes, due to climate change disaster that was going to happen any minute, were disappointed by the mild hurricane seasons.
Just like the end of the world predictions, when disaster doesn’t strike as you predicted, people decide you were exaggerating and stop listening. Hyperbole may make some more concerned and pay attention, but others may decide to stop listening at all. The earth was supposed to be disastrously cold by now… oops, let’s change it into boiling hot… no, let’s just call it climate change so we can cover all bases.
I had the privilege of sitting next to a very smart climatologist for awhile. She told me that they loathed Al Gore for his exaggerated portrayals that were untrue and just polarized people.
@Bay, I don’t expect you to come up with solutions. Merely some empathy for human beings who do not share your genes. Which I don’t recall observing from you in any context.
Many areas of CA are significant earthquake risks, and many cannot get, or afford, earthquake insurance. And the fools that bought on the landfill that is deemed “liquefacation” in an earthquake… well they buy the homes/condos for millions and live there anyway. Darwinian theory?
I think I only want to defeat death if they figure out a way to fix how terrible we would start to look!
After millions of dollars in lobbying efforts (funded by developers, real estate giants and investment companies) the government folded on most flood regulations, including the threat of yanking subsidized insurance in the vast majority of cases. Millionaires wanted their water-front properties not to lose any value (or insurance) so they claimed that government subsidies in flood zones were necessary to protect poor people who can’t afford to move - or insure themselves privately.
I’m not sure why rising seas would only affect rich NYC property owners, but assuming all coastal residents would be affected this would not be something to shrug off because home equity (which is a real asset, not a “paper profit”) is the largest form of wealth for many middle income households comprised of middle aged or older residents.
This idea that moving to Spokane or North Dakota will involve a lower cost of living than than the coasts – well, that won’t be true as more and more people move there.
A real concern is the large number of poorer people living on coasts in the southern hemisphere – Bangladesh was mentioned but there are many more countries in which there are few resources available to take care of the coastal residents as they start to move.
@busdriver11 - it would take a cold person, indeed, to be disappointed by a paucity of deadly and destructive natural disasters. I’m actually pretty sure that most climate scientist would love to be proved wrong.
I have a very matter of fact writing style. I assure you I am probably as empathic in real life as the next guy. I am uncomfortable sharing my emotions with most people. It is who I am.
Bay, I agree with you climate change wouldn’t be such a big deal, if it happened inch by inch. However, that’s not normally how change occurs. For instance, we alwYs talk about glaciers receding or advancing. The receding isn’t a slow melting, it’s a calving process. Little pieces of the glacier every few minutes, then a sudden enormous roar as a gigantic piece calves into the ocean.
I’m no expert, but as I understand it, climate change works the same way. The temperature doesn’t go up a fraction of a degree each year, but rather we can expect a jagged but inexorable line up to a certain zenith. Some years slightly higher, some years maybe even lower, but some years much higher. But the average trend line is up.
So what might that mean? I don’t know but the scientists say we can expect more volatile weather including stronger storms.
So far as hurricane seasons go, I think it was busdriver who said the meteorologists are disappointed by the hurricane season. Please keep in mind we Americans judge hurricane seasons differently from weather people. If there are 10 named storms, but none hits us, we think it’s a quiet season. Andrew, one of the worst storms to hit, didn’t make landfall until August. That year wasn’t particularly bad, but one big one hit us and still hasn’t been forgotten.
Forget the alarmists. Let’s look at the real example of Sandy. The northeast was impacted in a major way. I lost power for 10 days. We had to ration where we could drive because of the long gas lines. Why were the lines 2-4 hours long? No one thought of this in advance, but one major reason the lines were so long is that there weren’t enough police to monitor the line jumpers and fistfights so they had to ask that only one gas station open up per day. Plus many of the stations need electricity to run the pumps.
Since we couldn’t use the stove and the food in our frig went bad, we and half the town went to the only place in town that had enough food and a generator - the local diner. I asked for a tuna sandwich. “we’re out of tuna.” “There’s no tuna??” His answer - no, there’s plenty of tuna, just not here. We can’t truck it in because there’s no gas in the trucks. There’s no gas in the trucks because there’s no electricity. There’s no electricity because most of the poles are down. The poles can’t be replaced because there’s no gas in the trucks that would bringing he poles…
And now you’re saying that our major ports could be underwater. Where’s the gas going to come from? And if there’s no gas or electricity, no one is moving inland. And if there’s no gas, there’s no food. You see how all our systems are so much more vulnerable than we ever imagine?
I think it’s a mistake to assume a single “catastrophic occurrence,” but it’s equally a mistake to assume slow, gradual, minimally disruptive changes that we will anticipate and respond to “before a major disaster strikes.” The most likely scenario, it seems to me (and based on a fair amount of study of this subject and discussions with the real experts), is a series of smaller catastrophes. As sea level rises, storm surges will be higher, causing more damage to low-lying coastal areas from hurricanes and smaller storm events. Most climate models also predict hurricanes will become more intense on average, meaning some will be much more intense, and many models predict an increase in the frequency of hurricanes in some basins. So it’s reasonable to expect more Katrinas, more Sandys, and perhaps some hurricanes of even greater force, with some of those storms doing even more damage than Katrina or Sandy because sea level will be higher and the storms will dump more water and stronger winds will push more ocean water up on shore. Yes, FEMA responded to Katrina and Sandy, but the human toll was nonetheless awful, especially in New Orleans. Human lives were lost, people’s homes and communities were destroyed, many people and many businesses were wiped out financially. Federal aid didn’t fully compensate for that; it didn’t come close. Yes, the survivors adapted, many by moving inland, but climate scientists will tell you that the effects of Katrina were entirely predictable–heck, my kids studied that very subject in middle school several years before Katina happened and they knew it was just a question of time, it might be a year or it might be 100 years, but sooner or later New Orleans was likely to flood and the damage would be devastating to many, many people. But as a species we’re not particularly good at taking prophylactic measures; we wait until a Katrina actually happens, and then, if we survive, we try to adapt and make do as best we can. So we’re not likely to build a “new” New York City or a “new” Miami before catastrophe strikes; we’ll likely wait until it happens, pay the price in lives lost and homes and businesses destroyed, then call on the federal government to bail us out, which it will do only partially. Can we then rebuild elsewhere? Well, sure, but it will take huge new investments to replace everything that’s been lost. Zillow estimates the total value of residential real estate in New York City alone is $1.9 trillion. Perhaps sea level rise and storms will never get so bad as to make it all unusable, but if even a quarter of it becomes unusable, that’s half a trillion dollars down the toilet. Can it be replaced? Sure, but who’s going to pay for it? Not FEMA, I’m pretty certain. Ultimately it’s just a dead weight loss to the economy. And that doesn’t include the value of commercial and industrial property or public infrastructure like highways, roads, bridges, schools, parks, the NYC subway, and utility infrastructure that would also need to be replaced.
Shift your focus to small island states, or poor, low-lying countries like Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, each with 10 million or more people currently living on land that is projected to be below sea level and/or subject to chronic flooding by the end of this century if present trends continue. China has 50 million people on such lands. They don’t have FEMAs in most of those places. Are those people going to anticipate disaster and just pick up and move away before catastrophe strikes? Not likely; and if they did, where would they all go, and who would pay for them to start over?
Others have thoughtfully discussed problems associated with disruption of agricultural production and mismatches between freshwater supplies and current patterns of human settlement, as well as changing disease vectors. Those, too ,are stochastic events–we can’t predict exactly when or how they’ll play out, but again it’s not likely to be slow, gradual, even, and easily anticipated change, but rather a series of sudden crop failures, some potentially on huge scales, due to droughts in some areas and flooding in others; extended droughts causing severe water shortages in some urban communities; and sudden epidemics of diseases we haven’t seen in this country in decades, if ever. The only thing I’d add is that many coastal communities are already facing severe problems with saltwater intrusion into (formerly) freshwater aquifers that they depend on for public water supplies, a problem that is likely only to intensify with sea-level rise. Can that problem be fixed? Sure, like most problems, it can be fixed for the right price, but that price can be extremely high. We’re already spending billions to pump more fresh water into coastal South Florida to try to push back against saltwater intrusion, but that battle will only become costlier with sea level rise. I fear that one day we’re going to look back with perfect 20-20 hindsight and realize that the least costly climate change adaptation we could have done would have been a healthy dose of mitigation; but that insight will come too late.
We probably develop weblike feet to live in water like Waterworld. The problem I think is that we have too many people. Maybe we shouldn’t grow too much and have too many people. They consume resources and that might affect climate change like rain forest deforestation because of house building. More flood, more people dying.
Did you move after living through Sandy, hayden?
I doubt this country is going to stand by and rip up trillions and trillions of dollars because of ignorance. It could happen though. Civilizations come and go.
I guess we may not have to worry about the global warming. A mini ice wage may be coming pretty soon.
My brother moved after Andrew.
He was in the military at the time so his costs were covered, took a loss on his house though,
http://www.commerce.gov/news/blog/2015/04/noaa-mapping-tool-visualizes-anticipated-flood-effects-aiding-preparation-coastal
“Just like the end of the world predictions, when disaster doesn’t strike as you predicted, people decide you were exaggerating and stop listening. Hyperbole may make some more concerned and pay attention, but others may decide to stop listening at all. The earth was supposed to be disastrously cold by now… oops, let’s change it into boiling hot… no, let’s just call it climate change so we can cover all bases.”
This is a typical example of what passes for discussions of climate change, generally on the denier side. While I think hyperbole doesn’t help things (see my comment on “An Inconvenient truth”,)the real problem is the people who lose interest. The scientists who are talking about climate change, are talking scenarios in the decades head, not this year, not next year. Science isn’t into the crystal ball or bible code BS, they simply say that as time goes on, the likelyhood of major climatic disasters increases, not that X will happen by Y date. Those who stop listening do so because they don’t want to listen, they don’t want to hear the truth, so would rather put their head in the sand. There are people near where I live who live in flood zones for a river basis, and the last couple of years they haven’t seen any flooding, and people there have said things like they have no fear for the future, that it will be the same old same old. Yet many of these places would have significant flooding once every 10 years or so, but in the span of 18 months faced 4 major floods, something that should raise alarms. the NYC area had 3 “once in a hundred year” weather events in 18 months, culminating with Sandy, yet today people are saying things like “climate change, hah, just look at out winters”.
As far as disappointed that a major hurricane season hasn’t happened, if anything, it will make them more concerned. Hurricane season is determined in large part by ocean current patterns, the El Nino/La Nina patterns and so forth. Those flows often do have something of a pattern to them, and in the past it has allowed predictions based on them, that have been reasonably good. However, as the other waters warm up (which they are, including deeper layers) that predictability of those patterns gets shot, as it gets warmer it will be a lot harder to predict how those currents will affect hurricane season, if at all, and what seemed like a mild weather season might turn really, really ugly. Want an example? Normally with big storms, there are prevailing currents and weather patterns that deflect the big storms away from the NYC area, they usually go out to sea. More importantly, Sandy did not happen in the summer, it happened after hurricane season had ended, yet it packed a wallop. Why? Because the water was warm, far warmer then normal, and that caused weird wind patterns, and also meant Sandy did not lose the force it normally would.Sandy was unpredicted, it came out of nowhere. As each year passes and we don’t see major hurricane storms, it increases the odds of a major storm happening the next year, it could be that the temperatures we see now are helping keep the storms at bay, blocking them, in a year or two, if the temperature goes up, it could spawn major storms. The key thing that many of the deniers bank on is people don’t listen, they see what is in front of their face. Farmer Bill hears about the cold and snow in Boston, and chuckles "some global warming’, while collecting drought insurance checks cause his crop has been wiped out for 3 years by a bad drought.
As far as the “The earth was supposed to be disastrously cold by now”, please give that a rest, Fox News commentators and the Tea Party types and the rest have been chortling about that one, but that was something that was based in hype in one stupid article in Time Magazine, and it was a conjecture that died on the vine within a year. No one took it seriously, when analyzed the conclusions of those who promoted it were questioned, and basically it never was settled science, it was a hypothesis that never got anywhere, but the deniers jump on this to ‘prove’ that global climate change is a joke, the way that fundamentalists still try to use hoaxes of new dinosaur species of ‘piltdown’ man to prove that human evolution never happened.
As far as calling it global climate change, that is what it should have been called, for the very reason of people like Busdriver citing it. It is the old codger down the block from me who sneers at scientists and science (he belongs, to the shame of my town, to an evangelical/fundamentalist church that actually shares space in a town with major technical and pharmaceutical companies, whose work depends on the very science that keeps the old fart alive) and can’t wait in the middle of a cold winter to say “global warming, eh?” when Alaska when we were 5 below was 65 degrees…one of the things that global climate change has predicted and is coming true is swings in weather, the last couple of years it has been long, cold winters, the prior several had almost not been winter, we had little snow and the temperatures were well above normal…we have India with record heat, Australia has a miserably cold winter, England had a major heat wave, other places are colder than normal, and these events are increasing. The global temperature is going up, but that doesn’t mean everywhere goes up, it means some places will be warmer, others colder, but the net is going up, and more importantly, the range of climate fluctuation increases, too, so the northeast might see a couple of winters with record colds, then several summers with record coolness, then a winter with record warmth, and so forth.
“I had the privilege of sitting next to a very smart climatologist for awhile. She told me that they loathed Al Gore for his exaggerated portrayals that were untrue and just polarized people.”
It wasn’t that Al Gore’s predictions were untrue, it was the impression that what he was saying was what all scientists were predicting, he turned it into a kind of end of day prediction a la what bible types try to do, rather than discussing it and showing for example the map of Florida, and saying “in a worse case scenario, this is what Florida might look like”, but then go on to say that more modest (and likely) predictions were for an increase in the number of killing storms, in the number of droughts,and so forth. Gore and his cohorts probably thought they would ‘scare people straight’, what they did was scare them which led to them being prey of the Koch brothers and all trying to dismiss Global Climate change as the work of self promoters and alarmists and anti business types, when you are scared and you have all these soothing ads telling you it is all hype, that ‘scientists’ are saying warming isn’t happening, and if you add to that ads that say if you try and fight warming millions of people will spend the winter shivering in the cold, or losing their jobs, they are going to run to the ‘safe shelter’, rather than figuring out we need to do something.
Short-term: changes in animal migratory patterns and populations (food chain re-shuffling), weather patterns change
Long-term: Sea levels rise, crop yields decrease, human migration
@@bclintonk:
Brilliantly written response, and well thought out. People assume climate is linear, when what you get is something that becomes less predictable, more furious at time, and whose consequences cannot be fully fathomed until after they happen. It is much like earthquakes, with everything people think they know about them, a major one happens and you see how much or how little was understood, ‘earthquake’ building codes turn out to be a joke, and so forth. look what happened with Andrew, when they found out the building codes that supposedly would mitigate damage to houses and such turned out to be a joke.
There is an irony to an old statement, the one that says hindsight is 20-20. Usually that happens when after a disaster we look back and say “oh, wow, of course”…but the thing is, what is left out, is that the myopia that led to the disaster was not universally shared. In the case of Andrew, experts in both the private sector and business sector had been pushing for stricter building codes to deal with hurricanes, there were people pushing for better emergency planning for big storms, pushes for laws for something simple, like requiring gas stations to have generators in case the power went out,to allow them to pump gas, and all had been pushed off or defeated as being ‘too costly’ or ‘not good for business’ and the like…after Andrew, a lot of those laws were dusted off and passed. There were concerns about preparedness for storms in the NYC area,low lying houses, houses build on the sea front, hardening of infrastructure like power and subways and such…and it turned out it was correct.
On the other hand, we have the response of places like North Carolina, that makes it illegal for state agencies to talk about the impact of rising sea levels or to create official plans to deal with the effects of them…tells you about the nature of those denying this, it is like the little kid hiding under the covers so the monster can’t see him and he will be safe. Cute in a 5 year old, kind of pathetic among so called adults.