California and Florida now lead the country in climate change risks

California and Florida now lead the country in climate change risks
theconversation.com

In both places the reality of the situation was not what was promised:

California with periodic drought, and a general shortage of water in the places people wanted to live. Drought which brings fire, followed by wet years, which bring mud. My entire childhood was punctuated by dry, fire, rain, mud - rinse and repeat, like seasons. Are there more fires now? I dont really know to be honest - particularly with forest fires, its hard to separate that from 100 years of bad forest policy in regards to letting forests that need to burn periodically burn.

Florida with periodic hurricanes which would come thru and wipe down everything built. Are there more hurricanes every year now? I'm not clear on that either - I will say while the frequency seems within norms, the size of them does seem bigger because of how much warmer the gulf is.

Climate change may be making these problems more extreme, but the fact is these problems are not new. Neither state is experiencing weather that is all that much different than in the known historical record - both in the time they've been settled by europeans and from what we know from things like tree ring records.

Until we acknowledge there is no practical way to put the climate change genie back in the bottle, and that we need to switch from trying to decarbonize to making our built environments more resilient and focusing on sustainability, articles like this that tie every change in the climate to anthropogenic climate change, are little more than doomerism.

“Environmental” is 50%, but it’s a bit of an odd measure - per the report [1] it’s for rivers and maintaining habitats. I’d pref to exclude that from the available total. That would make agriculture 80% and urban uses 20%. When you consider many water inefficient agricultural uses, there’s quite a bit of water for consumers that is being sent elsewhere. CA has also consistently failed with other source developments, e.g. desalination, so I’d argue it’s less a fact of life here and more a question of the will to improve.

[1] https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...

I'm personally all for geoengineering solutions, but even that is just a bandaid. We do need to address the core problem here. We are having record high heat almost every day it seems like. Eventually it will get so hot the problems will become extreme, possibly beyond our ability to continue to mass produce food.