Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 272 posts

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#211

Post by marvi »

adrianN wrote: post #146
jellicle wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you come at this from the angle of "climate change is a myth" Is it really a fair critique to insist that articles must be written to make sense to people who believe the moon is made of green cheese? And that every couple hundred words written for the general public must be fully-cited?

If a significant chunk of the population, including the president, actually believe that the Moon is made of green cheese...

Those people should feel free to invest in low lying real estate. They’ll make a killing if they’re right.

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#212

Post by downrightmike »

forapurpose wrote: post #158
downrightmike wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who took out most of the mortgages, were good sound borrowers with good credit scores and were often buying a second or more house to flip. Not just the banks, the borrowers are made of humans that make bad choices and liked to gamble. https://qz.com/1064061/house-flippers-triggered-the-us-housi...

What does that tell us about banks loans as a signal of investment security? > Not just the banks, the borrowers I don't think the banks need defending, and I don't think we can compare the financial decisions made by professionals who are legal and moral custodians of the financial system with ordinary people. It would be like comparing the medical decisions of hospitals and ordinary people - 'it's not just the hosp…

'it's not just the hospitals that offered this treatment as a cure, it's the patients who participated in it.' We'll see what happens with the FDA bypass for experimental treatments that went through this summer. - Do you not work in IT? 'it's the users who downloaded it.' The correct answer is both, because if a user wants to do something, they'll find a way, even though the admins do all they can to stop it. A lot of the business practices are nuanced and have a risk associated with them. The risk of the bail out not happening was the global economy failing, everyone playing the game was highly leveraged and everyone else paid for it.

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#213

Post by DoreenMichele »

I've had a class in hydrology. The article did a good job covering the actual threats to the water supply. It ended on a note of "But the impact of people's choices is the bigger threat to Miami's survival." I think that's true. However, I feel it did a poor job of really spelling that out.

Despite pockets of extreme wealth—one study estimated that the Miami metro area has the nation’s eighth-highest number of millionaires—the county overall is poor. Its median household income of $44,224 is almost one-quarter lower than that of the country as a whole.

It's not uncommon for ocean front property to be very desirable and very expensive. I'm guessing that a lot of those millionaires live near the beach or on the beach and their homes may be some of the ones most at risk of ending up under water as sea levels rise.

Rich people are typically the most able to up and move elsewhere. If the rich people in waterfront property homes start leaving, you are left with a bunch of relatively poor people and hard-to-solve, expensive problems.

This means you don't need sea levels to rise six feet to significantly alter the city of Miami in ways that can spell Miami's doom in some sense. Like Galveston, which was an important and rich city at one time and then was devastated by a single hurricane, Miami could become a shadow of its former self with no hope of recovery.

You only need it to rise however much would serve as some kind of tipping point where rich folks would stop feeling it was a desirable place to be. Maybe that's when their yard is inundated. Or maybe it will be determined by some other metric entirely.

The reality is there may be no one who is capable of predicting where that tipping point is. Once it's reached, there may be no reversing the problem. Miami may be left with a poor population, a raft load of expensive problems and no means to readily solve any of them as their poor population slides deeper into debt to keep surviving.

Edit/footnote: It's a lousy title. Even the article itself is not actually predicting that the entire city will ever be completely under water like the title suggests.

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#214

Post by wizardforhire »

nkoren wrote: post #188
mikestew wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't see where six feet is coming from. I read $SOMEWHERE recently that the the worst case scenario predicted six feet. But that's, IIRC, if we do absolutely nothing, the methane in the Arctic is all released, and Greenland melts. The more likely scenario is somewhere from 1-3 feet. So unless memory fails me, the article didn't just pull it out of its arse, but a source would've been nice rather than just th…

If Greenland melts, you get 6 meters (20 feet).[1] 1: https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html

Greenland is melting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#215

Post by akiselev »

mbostleman wrote: post #185
fabricexpert wrote: post #80

This article is kind of infuriating. Just bring the facts up and talk about them, instead of describing people. I think this is one of the more critical parts (along with the stuff about water supply getting contaminated): > Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates…

Yes. I think the issue is that mainstream "journalism" is actually entertainment in all respects other than the fact that it carries a fairly widespread credibility among its audience as not being entertainment but rather a factual, verifiable source of information - one that is beyond the audience's ability to understand. Sort of like the unquestioning acceptance that many give to doctors or lawyers because (it is a…

The National Interagency Fire Center stats for fire suppression costs paint a completely different picture [1]. While the total number of fires has decreased by about 10-20% since 1985, the size of the fires in acres and the amount of money spent has skyrocketed. The annual average from 1985 to 1989 is ~2.9 million acres while from 2013-2017 the average was over twice that at ~6.7 million acres. Furthermore, inflation adjusted expenditures have increased over five fold, meaning that we're spending significantly more resources on fighting fires and yet, the number of acres on fire continues growing.

This data suggests that our houses are built with better standards, fewer people are smoking, and our appliances are safer so there are fewer fires but it's pretty clear that our problems have grown much worse overall.

[1] https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_documents/SuppCosts.p...

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#216

Post by southern_cross »

Fun fact, kids. If you pump down an aquifer (any aquifer, anywhere) faster than it is being replenished from above via rainwater, then any other water sitting around it will eventually start to intrude. And if that outside water is salty or otherwise non-potable, then problem! Meaning that saltwater intrusion in coastal areas is a pretty much constant potential risk anyway, regardless of any sea level rise.

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#217

Post by sulam »

llandho wrote: post #205
fabricexpert wrote: post #80

This article is kind of infuriating. Just bring the facts up and talk about them, instead of describing people. I think this is one of the more critical parts (along with the stuff about water supply getting contaminated): > Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates…

[flagged]

Your response here is at least an order of magnitude more caustic than what you're replying to. At the risk of generating more bile, you should consider that you not only are not going to be getting the change you describe with your style of argument, you're making this community (such as it is) look bad and finally (and perhaps most importantly) you're reflecting poorly on climate-change believers, a community of interest that I consider myself a member of.

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#218

Post by Retric »

mrfredward wrote: post #145
Retric wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federal Flood Insurance has had zero net subsidy from 1968 to 2004. While covering up to 5.5 million homes in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr... Currently it's 25 billion in debt, but that's cheap in terms of federal programs of that magnitude (~15 $ per home per year). Further, the net economic gain from allowing people to build in slightly at risk areas has easily been worth 25…

So the program broke even for 36 years, then started running up debt in the early 2000s...because of more severe weather. As sea levels rise and weather gets more severe, this program will become much more expensive.

It's really hard to tell how much of the last 15 years is unusual vs the new normal.

Presumably things can be adjusted for with slightly increased premiums as it's still very close to break even for now.

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#219

Post by lazerpants »

nabla9 wrote: post #59
creaghpatr wrote: post #15

Interestingly, the Miami housing market outlook for 2019 is excellent, in spite of this news. https://gordcollins.com/real-estate/miami-real-estate-foreca... It would appear that people who actually have skin in the game believe otherwise.

Different timescales. Sealevel rise projections range from 0.2 meters to 2.0 meters by 2100. Typical mean projection is less than 1.0 meters by 2100. Things get gradually worse, but it takes time before it affects the property values with full force. Property investors and developers operate on timescales between 5-30 years, there is plenty of stuff to sell before demand starts to decrease.

Exactly. I recently looked at a landlease apartment for sale in NYC. Even if the landholder doesn't renew the lease in 27 years (not typical), based on my very simple model, the ROI on the apartment is enough that you are making nearly 100%. So even if the apartment has no return after 27 years, you're still fine. Obviously, you're better off if there is some residual value in the property after but you don't necessarily need a 50-100 year time frame to realize a decent return on real estate.

Re: Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First

#220

Post by frockington »

jnurmine wrote: post #202
frockington wrote: post #21

At a rate of 0-3 mm/year or 1 foot/century its going to be hard to convince anyone to care about the sea level. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html

From what I remember reading, the problem points are really the Arctic and the Antarctic. If they melt, hello Waterworld. For example, the ice cover in Greenland is melting at a record rate. If it goes completely, this alone would raise the sea level with something like 7 m (23 ft). If everything goes, it will be something like a 65 m (213 ft) sea level rise. Now, given the sluggishness of action-taking in this matte…

I live a couple hundred feet above sea level in the middle of the United States in a place where winter sucks. It is a struggle to actively care about climate change despite knowing that I should.
Post reply on HN