1. Go to a beach at high tide. Look at where the water is and add two feet. For sandy beaches that probably gets you through the dunes.
2. Look at the beaches at low tide. How much further out is it? Measure the distance between low and high tide points and see how far inland you get to see where the ocean gets to.
3. Go to marshlands - add 2ft to low tide and see if they’re still marshlands or if they converted to shallow ocean. Similarly check high tide, what surrounding land would be submerged if you added 2 feet of water.
4. Consider places near the coast that are lower than the high point of the beach. Now “spring tides” could get over that point and essentially turn that land into a swamp.
Finally of course, consider what happens if/when the ocean reaches farm land. The reason “salting the earth” is a phrase is because high salt content (as you might get from even short term flooding) kills most plants unless they’ve specifically evolved for high salt concentrations. Most grains for instance have not.
This of course ignores special cases like the Netherlands, Venice, etc that are already having to engineer solutions to a few inches of sea level increases.
A 2ft rise is catastrophic if it happens in a day but not if it happens over 80 years. The IPCC report shows about a 1ft rise from 1900-2000 which no one seemed to notice (other than the engineers whose job it is to deal with). I would expect a 2ft rise this century to be about twice as bad, so not that bad. The Netherlands is proof that this type of thing can be handled with time and engineering.
1. There will be new dunes, again above where the water reaches.
2. The beach will be the same size.
3. There will be marshlands. They will be in new locations. We might even get more.
4. Yep, lose some swamp and gain other swamp.
It all moves.
We can get more than a 2ft rise just from drawing out groundwater, causing the land to sink. We can get way more with an earthquake, going either direction. The land goes up (and the water relatively goes down) if the weight of a glacier is removed.
Edit: And the .6m (if that is correct) is just the baseline. Even if that is the level 364 days a year, one storm surge on one day with all that additional volume can put the entire city out of business.
There is a German saying for your kind of approach: "Nach mir die Sintflut", means "After me the deluge".
https://fi.intms.nl/fi_43a1c02c/files/downloads/201808-jerem...
I recommend Eric Rignot's presentations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ivlofypzE
IPCC is conservative.
Totally reasonable, and rare to see people not jumping up and down with literal "The sky is falling! Implement this tax plan now!".
You want to create a whole shit ton of blue-collar US jobs? What better way than resettling entire cities?
In the US the median personal income is around $35k. So you spend let's say $2000 moving and then you have $198k, or more than what most people will earn over the next 5 years for what?
Also, critically, if due to catastrophe you abandon your $100k home and buy another $100k home in another place, your move cost $200k.
So it's not the cost of the relocation here that's at issue; that's comparatively cheap. What's very expensive is the loss of all of that property and infrastructure that is left behind and will need to be rebuilt elsewhere.
The implication of that is that consumers, not the oil and coal companies, were the primary beneficiaries of externalizing the costs of pollution over the past decades, in the form of having access to cheap fuel.
Put another way: Exxon last year had revenues of $240 billion, and profits of about $20 billion. If allowing pollution to be externalized means that gasoline costs half of what it should, that means Exxon's customers saved $240 billion by pollution the environment. That's more than Exxon's profits in an entire decade.
The truth will eventually come out by way of reality, but people will suffer for their greed.
And before you try to rationalize this with "per capita" arguments....you don't lose your home or get cancer "per capita"...the absolute numbers matter and California has higher absolute numbers than any other state.
https://www.ucsusa.org/publications/ask/2012/NC-sea-level.ht...
Meanwhile, Atlanta metro, predicted to take 320,000 people, has brand new townhomes 30 minutes from the airport for $100k (in Newnan).
Edited for clarity.
Centuries. By the way, Newnan is named after a slaveholder.
The area is also scarred by decades, close to a century, of car-centered development. It looks like the city that ought be renamed with $100k units is extremely car-dependent.
In Atlanta at least there is no such thing. If someone is choosing not to live in Atlanta due to perceived racism they would be making a mistake.
The NorthEast could have earthquake issues in the next 50 years. Parts of New England are much better than other parts. Great Lakes area seems good as do areas like Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, Chicago (technically Great Lake area), Denver, and Austin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone
Geologists have also been predicting large earthquake issues in the New Madrid fault in the next ~20- 50 years.
Meanwhile, I'm preparing for the M9.0 earthquake that is overdue near the Portland metro area. Portland will burn like a roll of toilet paper when that quake strikes.
Any article which has the word "could" in there gets put into the speculation not factual bin.
So when the article starts with:
"By the end of this century, sea level rises alone could displace 13m people."
we are in the wild speculation category and I know it's not really worth reading. It might be true but so might many other contradictory claims. Non the less, articles like these are not written for information but to cater to a market of people who believe the world is going under tomorrow and love to dwell in it.
Yes, there is a large market for it, unfortunately these are the people who yell about "believing in science". Noble goals, but I'm concerned they're useful idiots in a political game where the real players don't give a crap about the environment.
I don't think the timescales here are realistic. The pace has picked up on global warming and the feedback loops are in place. Projections for '2065' are a bit silly. There is also this small problem in that the 'American empire' is on the decline. Currently the US (and UK) live off the rest of the world via tax havens, the petro-dollar and militarism. These instruments are not going to last forever and it is not possible to plot a linear graph of 'sea level rises' and 'insurance prices'. Everyone in affected areas will be caught out by 'negative equity' with nobody wanting to buy their property.
On the other hand, I hope that where ever these American climate refugees go, that the cities they go to will have enough infrastructure especially for water, and if they don't, they can fix it.
