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Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

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41–50 of 91 posts

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#41

In the free market of ideas, no one actually believes this will happen. Just look at coastal real estate. Buyers and lenders would have to be colossal fools to pay such premiums to be waterfront. Even Obama just plunked down 12M on a waterfront mansion on the low lying island of MV.

Buyers and Lenders are in fact, colossal fools. People build in floodplains all the time.

Obama only ran the country for 8 years, but hfdh434535 knows better.

Real estate is about the closest thing to putting your money where your mouth is as far as climate change goes and the people have spoken - the coasts are still the most valuable and desirable places to live.

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#42
post #3

I find it hilarious that even in a worse scenario with the climate crisis, Chicago somehow did not get any migrants .

Hilarious and wrong headed. Chicago is the largest city stateside (Toronto on the Canadian side) next to a Great Lake with the infrastructure and hinterland to support a large population. Fresh water supply is going to be critical in a climate crisis.

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#43
post #16
post #12

> In the worst-case scenario, in which sea levels rise by six feet by 2100, ... Where does six feet come from? It seems very suspicious. It contradicts NOAA Sea Level Trends data of tide gauge measurements, going back to 1930 and sometimes earlier. According to the map, in almost all places in US the projected sea level trend is no more than 1-1.5 feet by 2100: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html…

You can’t just eyeball these graphs and assume the trend is linear: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/10/09/sea-level-accelerati... See also https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/10/14/sea-level-accelerati...

From NOAA web site, when you click on "Previous RSL Trends" button:

> Although the trend may vary with the end year, there is no statistically significant difference between the calculated trends if their 95% confidence intervals overlap. Therefore, the most recent calculated trend is not necessarily more accurate than the previous trends; it is merely a little more precise. If several recent years have anomalously high or low water levels, the values may actually move slightly away from the true long-term linear trend.

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#45

It seems really unintuitive to me that there is enough ice on the globe to raise the sea level by 6 feet (let alone 230). But then if I had to guess the land area of Antarctica, I would have estimated something the size of Oklahoma or Texas (when Antarctica is 40% larger than the USA)

Much of the Antarctic landmass is below sea level, if the Antarctic ice shield melted the continent would look like an archipelago. There is much water tied up in the Antarctic ice shield(well, it took 40 myr to accumulate, you get this much even in a cold desert), on average it's 2 km thick. The IPCC estimates that if it melts fully it would result in 50 m of sea level rise.

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#46
post #4
post #3

I find it hilarious that even in a worse scenario with the climate crisis, Chicago somehow did not get any migrants .

Their map doesn't make any sense to me. They show no expected migration to really any of the cities in the midwest but somehow they expect a mass migration of people from Miami to rural western Kentucky?

Are the shades of red based on migration relative to that same region's previous numbers, or some national average?

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#47
post #12

> In the worst-case scenario, in which sea levels rise by six feet by 2100, ... Where does six feet come from? It seems very suspicious. It contradicts NOAA Sea Level Trends data of tide gauge measurements, going back to 1930 and sometimes earlier. According to the map, in almost all places in US the projected sea level trend is no more than 1-1.5 feet by 2100: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html…

There's a major research initiative taking place right now into Thwaites Glacier, as unexpectedly fast melting is occurring. It's thought this is due to warm saltwater penetration underneath the glacier but other factors are being considered. The issue with Thwaites Glacier is it has a tapered edge that generally resists thawing, but that widens out to a huge contact surface area once erosion by salt water progresses…

> This glacier alone will cause a global sea level rise of three feet.

Where did you get that information? This source from Wikipedia says it would cause a rise of 4 inches:

At the beginning of 2020, researchers from the ITGC took measurements to develop scenarios for the future of the glacier and to predict the time frame for a possible collapse: The erosion of the glacier by warmed ocean water seems to be stronger than expected. The researchers noted with concern, that at the baseline of the glacier, the temperature of the water is already more than two degrees above freezing point. They confirm thawing of the Thwaites glacier contributes about four percent of global sea-level rise. The collapse of this glacier alone would raise the sea level by about 65 centimetres (25 inches).[25]

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#48

It seems really unintuitive to me that there is enough ice on the globe to raise the sea level by 6 feet (let alone 230). But then if I had to guess the land area of Antarctica, I would have estimated something the size of Oklahoma or Texas (when Antarctica is 40% larger than the USA)

Much of the Antarctic landmass is below sea level, if the Antarctic ice shield melted the continent would look like an archipelago. There is much water tied up in the Antarctic ice shield(well, it took 40 myr to accumulate, you get this much even in a cold desert), on average it's 2 km thick. The IPCC estimates that if it melts fully it would result in 50 m of sea level rise.

Any ice below sea-level will melt into water that will take up exactly the same amount of space. So any ice below sea-level that melts will not cause sea levels to rise.

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#49
post #12

> In the worst-case scenario, in which sea levels rise by six feet by 2100, ... Where does six feet come from? It seems very suspicious. It contradicts NOAA Sea Level Trends data of tide gauge measurements, going back to 1930 and sometimes earlier. According to the map, in almost all places in US the projected sea level trend is no more than 1-1.5 feet by 2100: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html…

Most of your comment is flat-out false. That page shows current instantaneous sea level change; it doesn't show future predictions (except in, say, the paper linked at the bottom about predicted sea level change). Sea level rise is increasing each year and is projected to continue increasing faster each year, the rate dependent on how much CO2 we keep putting into the environment.

2m in sea level rise is roughly the current "intermediate" scenario, which would happen if the world made immediate and large reductions in CO2 emissions. That is, we're on track to be worse than that now.

Since I've seen this exact error on HN before (don't recall if it was you who made it or not): do you understand that giving the 2018 sea level rate change as "1.34 feet per 100 years" is NOT a prediction that the sea level will change 1.34 feet over the next hundred years?

Re: Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises

#50
post #28

In the free market of ideas, no one actually believes this will happen. Just look at coastal real estate. Buyers and lenders would have to be colossal fools to pay such premiums to be waterfront. Even Obama just plunked down 12M on a waterfront mansion on the low lying island of MV.

Real estate prices are priced by mostly by current demand, not future oncoming disasters. Much waterfront property is _already_ vulnerable (and expensive to insure) today, regardless of whether you believe in consensus climate science, due to storms and flooding in current climatic conditions. That house by the ocean is going to destroyed at some point, the only question is when and how.

> Much waterfront property is _already_ vulnerable (and expensive to insure)

If we are talking about the US then there's government flood insurance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTKAqHwj0s

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