This post first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Very well-written and thought-provoking piece. On my phone it adjoined another story about public officials gutting the Clean Air Act. We have boats built to get individual racers short distances at high speed, but what we need is a large ship that can shelter a lot of people across stormy seas. And as yet no plausible mechanism to change.
“Thought-provoking”
Bringing up subsidence as a factor.
Sea level rise on the Gulf and East Coast is about 4mm per year. Subsidence on those coasts is as much as 5mm per year.
“My memory is muddy. What’s this river that I’m in. New Orleans is sinking man and I don’t wanna swim.”
The Tragically Hip
“New Orleans is Sinking” (1989)
Sometimes diasporas kill a culture, sometime they spread bits of it around everywhere.
Drivers are driving 10-20-30 MPH over the speed limits burning fossil fuel like its a fun sport. No one has debated one of the industries putting vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere…Meat Eating…Cows. 58 Companies are responsible for Climate Change. We are trapped in the society they created for maximum profits.
We are cutting down forests to send the wood to China. The Amazon Rain Forest is putting CO2 into the atmosphere instead of sucking it up. We are destroying our precious soil. The Arctic is melting away with tremendous consequences. Everything in nature is connected in a web we don’t yet understand. The Republican Party denies Climate Chaos is happening.
Abrupt Climate Change is possible and could come down on us at any time. Will we listen to the cries of our youth before we destroy their future? The necessary changes are enormous but the time is short.
I own an electric car and have 18 400watt solar panels on my roof. I haven’t eaten meat in 42 years and am a healthy and active 82 year old man.
Some unspeakable tragedy is going to wake up the sleeping masses. Sorry for my dose of reality
Humans are trapped in a Hell of their own design. There will be no escape due to the fact that we’re drilling more oil than ever and emissions are rising exponentially over time. Every single trendline is going in exactly the WRONG direction! Even if you wanted to be optimistic and pretend we have a chance, you can’t because reality has painted us into a corner.
Carbon Capture and Storage WILL fail because it’s a scam cooked up by the Fossil Fuel Industry to give the impression we’re taking action. EVs will have no effect and neither will wind farms and solar panels. Even recycling plastic is totally useless. If you don’t believe that, just look around at all the plastic under your feet and all the plastic products, toys, plastic bags, food and storage containers. Plastic is in almost everything you buy or drive.
The Fossil Fuel Industry is firmly embedded in our society and is in everything you purchase. It takes oil to make all those products, so even if you own an EV, solar panels etc, it ALL contains Fossil Fuel products.
Humans will be extinct within the century. 4-8 degrees Celsius rise in GAT is not survivable for mammals or much of anything else. Barring some unforeseen miracle, humans are finished.
Miami will eventually be under water. Not only due to rising sea levels but also because the city is built on limestone which is as porous as Swiss cheese. Sea water and sewerage routinely appear on the streets of the city due to “Sunny Day” flooding where “King Tides” cause water to rise up through the limestone and gush onto the streets through storm drains. No rain or hurricanes required. But denial is hard to overcome when millions of dollars of real estate are at stake.
I knew this was happening but thank you for reminding me.
I don’t see you posting very often but I hope you stick around.
The author of this isn’t prepared to move from Central Coastal California even though its obviously unsustainable. People keep moving to places like Florida and Texas, even if some people are leaving. I think it takes a Katrina like event to make moving become a decision people will make. People may include a concern about climate in their moves, but I’ll bet it isn’t often at the top. When I left Atlanta, one contributor was the inability to manage water in a place with ample rainfall–it was indicative of a growing problem but also the ineptitude of the political culture in Greater Atlanta and in Georgia, but it still wasn’t top of the list (even with the political ineptitude attached).
Oir house here in Tucson is at aboutvl 1700 ft above sea level. It would be something to see sea water show up here.
“But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray.”
I just want to reassure the wealthy that me 'n my buddies in the tribe will provide a hut for them in their destitution.
It ain’t much, but it’s all they left us.
Is there any doubt that carbon use will be absolutely maxed out in trying to fend off the flooding, then in trying to fight a slow retreat, and of course in-total for moving every single man, woman, child, and all their possessions away from the coastlines? How about businesses/industries and all their movable assets?
A lyrical piece that really brings out the human impacts of “climate migration”. The observation that a community can both see long-time residents driven off due to climate change and be a welcome haven to other climate migrants was something I hadn’t really thought about before.
About 18 months after Katrina I spent a week on a habitat for humanity build in Slidell. It seemed like a nice town. I don’t recall the houses we built being particularly elevated. I wonder how they’re holding up.
The city of Townsville, Australia called this idea “forced retreat”: rebuilding over and over until the community is emotionally and financially exhausted and can no longer rebuild.
They argued that “forced retreat” is the “no build” scenario climate change adaptation strategies should be weighed against. IIRC they found that no adaptation strategies had a positive benefit-cost ratio, but the “forced retreat” option was the costliest choice.
By chance do you use Flipboard? I had that same pairing!
When my children were small, we visited the San Diego Zoo often. There was one of those large wooden thermometers like you see tracking how much money has been raised to support 4th of July fireworks or a local school project or whatever, but this one was tracking worldwide CO2 increase. This was in the 70s and 80s. Human-caused climate change was a known phenomenon then and 40 years later people are still denying such a thing exists, or pretending it’s a new thing.
Just this week we took the grandchildren to DC and visited the Museum of Natural History. There is a huge display on past mass extinctions. The one caused by the meteor strike that resulted in the end of the dinosaurs is the most famous, but guess what? There were 4 others. Guess what else?
The report argues that nearly half of the planet’s animal species are now in decline, but unlike past mass extinctions, this one has been entirely caused by humans (https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2023/07/19/modern-sixth-mass-extinction-event-will-be-worse-than-first-predicted/?sh=4dcae1454ab6)
Globally, many species are declining as the result of a variety of destructive human activities, particularly habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation, the widespread use of pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals, overexploitation and hunting, and the effects of invasive species, aggravated by runaway climate change.
We are our own worst enemy.
The article you’re linking to is clickbait, by someone who doesn’t live there. I lived in Miami for most of my life, a second-generation native, and I’m buying a house there for a move very soon. So a few facts here.
Miami will be underwater eventually, but it’s going to take a very long time. The claim that the city is built on limestone is accurate, and it is porous, which will cause saltwater intrusion problems in the lowest lying areas. But it’s also rock hard and higher elevation in the oolite ridge along the southeastern Florida coast. The King Tide flooding is only happening in the lowest lying areas like Miami Beach, and yeah, that place is going to suffer the worst and the earliest flooding. Bad idea to buy real estate at sea level, duh.
But most of Miami is at higher elevation. The last house I owned in Miami was 1,000 feet from Biscayne Bay, but 43 feet elevation above sea level on the limestone rock ridge that most of Miami is sitting on.
The house we’re buying now is further inland, and 27 feet above sea level. It’s going to be a long time before the ocean rises that much. It will rise, but hyperbole about how fast it will happen is not helpful.
If you want a real estate investment that’s secure against climate change for 100 years, then yeah, there are parts of Miami you shouldn’t consider. Go to Montana, maybe. Meanwhile there are reasons why it’s still a hot real estate market, and it’s not just climate denial. But you’d have to live there for a while to understand it, like anywhere else.
Reality always prevails.
It does. It’s the timeline I’m responding to. Accurate information is helpful, hyperbole is not.
