We were going to buy a house overlooking a creek but were told that an offer had just been accepted. A few days later, we got a call that for some strange reason the sale had fallen through. My wife and I started researching and ran across https://floodfactor.com. It said that there was a 97% chance of a foot or more of water in the house in the next 15 years, incurring more than $100,000 of damage.
I wasn't familiar with floodfactor.com but they were linked from realtor.com I'm a little cynical about that - hey, yes, your house flooded but you should have checked that link and it's not your realtor's fault - but it's a sign that their information should be taken seriously.
Now they do wildfire and "heat" risks as well as flooding. They might introduce something like water supply risk and other things.
On the flip side, the person that we bought our house from had the map showing the flood plains as part of the overview of the house and that the house that was outside of the flood plain. She was adamant about it because the house is up on a slight hill, so both neighbors are in the flood plain and had to fight insurance before that the house was not actually in the flood plain.
So, it's good to check the climate change maps as well as any mandatory disclosures.
In a similar vein, check out geological surveys for karsts and sinkholes if you live in an area where bedrock is comprised of soluble rocks (which is much of populated earth). I know this seems outrageous, but increased rainfall doesn't just flood creeks and rivers, it can overload sewage systems. And if an overloaded sewage system means water has to find it's own way.
This doesn't just effect your house. Think about the impact of a road to your house sinks. IME, these can take months to get fixed.
Rest in peace Mr. F.
I live near the top of a large, steeply sloped hill and water does not flow past/towards the house. It claims there is a 97% chance of a foot or more of water reaching my house in the next 30 years. It at least doesn't claim there would be damages, but there's really no way for what it claims to actually occur.
The FEMA maps also have reliability problems but I'm not sure this is more reliable.
They had heavy sudden rainfall, exceeding the capacity of drainage pipes. He just got superficial damage, his next door neighbour had 1ft of water everywhere on ground floor. No basement at least.
This project from propublica is also good, but similarly underestimates wildfire risk in our area:
Not only do I care about these kinds of risks, I also care about neighborhood quality and architectural design. None of this is measured let alone searched for. Walk score is a start but again same problem as Risk Factor.
This likely came up after the offer was accepted.
We hadn't said anything about flood insurance. So it seemed like either the disclosure scared the other buyer or they found riskfactor.com or something like that.
Beautiful house, beautiful view. Also a quarter mile below a earthen dam 250 feet high and a few feet above a creek that was raging in 1996, several years before this house was built.
Which "idea" is outside the mainstream here? That climate change will dramatically alter property values and liveability in some locations, or that housing search sites should surface this information proactively as a search criteria?
Companies are already starting to massively increase insurance rates (Florida and floods) or drop coverage altogether (California and fires). This is an article about a very real thing happening now in Arizona, though this situation is only exacerbated vs. caused by climate change. Extreme heat events in major cities without true access to a natural water source (e.g., Atlanta) or decaying water sources (e.g., Las Vegas) are happening.
We can debate the magnitude of change, but the direction of change is a done deal.
Once enough people are negatively impacted by climate change, we will start seeing tools and laws pop up to help people/business manage the impact. But, right now, politicians and businesses are still able to get away with their lies and denials of the cause and impact. It might be another 10, 20, or 30 years until enough people are hurt by climate change that perceptions on the right change.
Realtors and property listing sites want to close sales. Most homeowners want a multi year home.
Beyond the edges of repeat customers it seems hard to see why a real estate company would have any motivation to provide this information unless they cover an area that will significantly benefit from climate change.
I recently bought in Wyoming. Low flood, heat and wind risk are actively talked about in the local saloon. The market appears to be segregating into the climate naive and climate savvy, with the latter hoping to profit off a wealth transfer.
And of course I shouldn't have to say it that the Rockies will certainly not be water front, and no climate scientist is claiming that. Miami high rises may well fall down though.
I mean, this water issue has almost nothing to do with climate change. Groundwater depletion is a huge concern on the great plains and other areas too. This is what happens when you have so many people and need to support their preferences (eg watering commodity crops instead of growing crops that thrive in dry areas, overpopulation in arid regions, etc).
No, we shouldn't try to support 8 billion people with the standard of living of Botswana. It would be much better for everyone involved to have 100 million people with an American/Western standard of living. Quality over quantity.
I was curious how big a population could be supported at the per capita emissions of various countries and still be net zero. What I mean by "net zero" is the the atmospheric CO2 level would stay at current levels.
Here's a table of populations (in millions) that would be net zero at the per capita emissions of various countries.
50 Qatar
115 Australia
130 United States
170 South Korea
211 Germany
240 Norway
270 China
360 United Kingdom
390 France
560 Mexico
670 Botswana
1020 Fiji
1050 India
1980 Honduras
3030 Laos
4260 Bangladesh
4900 Cambodia
6100 Kenya
6900 Nepal
7700 Zambia
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/01/19/scientists-calcula...
High standards of living are a product of billions of people, many in much lower standards of living. The regression to progress of having much fewer people is another huge problem.
And it's a very weirdly urgent take when demographic collapse is going to handle a lot of this for us anyway.
The problem is that there are very large consequences to anything but the smallest of population changes for those who remain.
Also: Global warming (or at least the co2 increase) WILL stop before 2100 for the simple reason we'll run out of oil. I mean peak oil, we can fight about when it will happen, but before 2100 economically viable oil will be gone in practically every scenario. So why bother?
Not going to elaborate on the why or how because I've spent enough time on the Internet to know where these arguments lead.
Yes, I plan to be one of the survivors.
I do suspect AI can provide a future Alexander with a tool to solve such a Gordian knot. ML controlling chaotic systems such as double or triple pendulums demonstrates how intrinsically unstable systems can be managed. Imagine the power and ability of 8 billion coordinated people.
'Climate change' is not the issue, unrealistic population infrastructure capacity is. In California the ecology is that we have regular cycles of heavy rain every 5-7 years. The reservoir systems were originally built to store water for the dry years.
Forestry management took into account tree disease and the fact forest floors have self cleansed with fire for millennia.
Today we appear to have forgotten all this and are instead astonished and horrified if it rains/ doesn't rain and when there are fires during fire season.
Arizona is in a far more serious situation with inadequate infrastructure capacity to sustain massive population increases, but currently the mania for housing anyone who wants to live in the west outstrips common sense.
Obviously good ecological stewardship of our planet is a no brainer but it seems as though a lot of people just can't join up the historical dots on this and feel human migration to the more pleasant geographical and climate areas are a human right independent of 'tragedy of the commons' logic.
Not sure if that's the right wording. I live in CA too and the wave of remediations to your "fire event acceptance" and coastal water supplies has been pretty dramatic.
I regularly see more activity to clear land around natural burn territory while out hiking, in addition to laser-scanning vegetation patrol helicopters that map down to individual leaves nearing PG&E lines. Citizens here also have better access to early warnings and fire monitoring tech.
Coastal cities are implementing desalination plants with $80M+ of state DWR grants for this awarded so far. This includes brackish groundwater treatment.
Torrance, Santa Barbara [1], and Catalina island now have new desalination infra up and running and contributing millions of gallons a day to local water supplies. Water resources are managed as part of a diversified portfolio-style contingency strategy.
There's also a new interagency group / process to make the planning and setup more efficient than it would be otherwise.
Even up here in rural NorCal we have received millions in state grant money for coastal works like this.
1. https://santabarbaraca.gov/government/departments/public-wor...
Not enough water in the reservoirs (caused by badly pricing the cost of water)? Its that dastardly climate change.
Too many wildfires (caused by poor forest management and PG&E)? Definitely climate change.
Insurance companies leaving the state (caused by price caps on insurance)? You guessed it: climate change.
California's population peaked sometime between 2018 and 2020 (depending on the data source), and has been consistently falling since then.
Transients aren't residents. The numbers similarly do not account for tourists.
Is the point you're trying to make that California's population is not in fact shrinking despite all official sources saying otherwise? That would be a pretty extraordinary claim. I'm sure you have a source to back it up though, would you share it?
> 2073
Lines up with Fallout
You're correct, we're unprepared for the wrath of Mother Nature. But that's more or less always been the case, especially when it comes to the west of the USA. Climate Change is simply adding the explanation point to: So Stupid!
Because... that's not true.
Energy being cheap does not mitigate the problems created by climate change, and there are many scenarios in which low prices make climate impact worse, such as oil prices falling and consumption increasing.
It'd be nice to talk about this stuff in terms of prices because they're very convenient, but convenience does not necessarily make a good metric. The price shout-out is like an ancillary observation at best.
Cheap energy is a great way to solve a lot of the other problems. And lower carbon energy can chip away at the root cause.
I have some hope that we're starting to turn the corner as birth rates keep going down, and I am somewhat hopeful that things like renewables will keep pushing forward and contribute to helping us move in a better direction, but there's still a ton of stuff that won't be helped. You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels, at least not in any sort of regime that feels believable (I don't think giant fields of green houses is a plausible replacement for modern intensive agriculture), and it still relies on all sorts of manufacturing processes that are in no way sustainable. That hope runs up against proclamations from people like Musk and my local government that WE MUST GROW at all costs. We need to triple our population by 2100 despite the fact that our infrastructure is already groaning at less that half the goal. I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion, and I can't see it being feasible anywhere over 5 billion, maybe. But the powers that be in society see that they could reign over a teeming mass of the impoverished and I truly get the feeling the sentiment is our billionaire class would rather reign over a ramshackle society of poverty where the gulf between them and everyone else is titanic instead of a sustainable society when the objective standard of living is higher but the gap is narrower, and so I'm not sure if we'll actually make any moves to improve things or just slowly work our way to a grinding cyberpunk dystopia.
To summarize, it feels like people dunking on Malthus and Ehrlich are whistling past the graveyard, their stomach full of seed corn allowing them to put off thoughts of the future and all that matters in our society currently is the next quarter's results. Winter is coming and its not going to be pretty.
> the green revolution allowing us to feed people by basically converting petroleum products into agricultural yiel
The green revolution was largely about shuttle breeding in wheat, corn, and rice. Higher yields mean less land can be used for agriculture. Were we see most biodiversity loss and deforestation, people are subsistence farming, engaging in slash and burn agriculture, and using unimproved seeds/methods.
> You can't eat cheap electricity provided by solar panels,
You can split water and force the H2 under pressure to combine with atmospheric nitrogen and create 0 CO2 fertilizer. So you kind of can eat cheap electricity once its cheap enough.
> that WE MUST GROW at all costs
Economic growth isn't tethered to land use anymore and is increasingly detached from CO2 emissions. A few centuries what little economic growth that existed required grain and wood. Economic growth makes us richer, and that extra accumulated wealth allows us to do things like environmental protections. You see the world over, as countries become richer they devote more resources to environmental protection.
> I think its pretty clear that there is no sustainable QUALITY of life at 9 billion
That isn't clear at all. Paul Ehrlich predicted that 6-7 billion people would lead to mass starvation, yet food insecurity is at an all time low. The Club of Rome predicted we would be out of resources by 1992. You're making the argument that people made about the end of whale oil. The mistake is that thinking resources are fixed and finite arrangements of particular atoms in the ground, rather than the application of human ingenuity to raw inputs. Oil was originally useless black gunk.
I'm not denying that there are problems and that there will be consequences of the old carbon economy. I'm not saying that habitat loss isn't a problem. I'm am however pointing out that these are solvable problems and a lot of very capable people are hard at work. Low and no carbon energy is now a solved technical problem and has become merely an infrastructure challenge. That's pretty amazing. Agriculture isn't standing still, there are a ton of gains to be had in land use. Society has managed to solve a lot of hard problems, we have the ability here.
I don't think the dust bowl is a good indication. Compared to ocean warming and acidification, it was a relatively local problem.
The general populace is definitely unprepared. Those with means know what is coming and they're "getting mine while the getting is good" before it all goes to shit. Which, of course, means making things worse.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/ins...
Y2K did not result in a global banking meltdown. Instead, it quietly fixed and VCRs stopped being conveniently programmable.
When Iraq lit oil wells on fire on its way out of Kuwait, it was expected to burn for years and be a global climate catastrophe. Crack teams from around the world converged on the country, invented new techniques and thereby dramatically shortened the projected time for putting them out.
In the aftermath, the desert bloomed like no one could remember seeing. That detail was a footnote in more dramatic stories.
No one wakes up in 2023 and thanks whatever gods they believe in that those two apocalypses were averted. We just go online and handwring about the latest bad news and predict that it's unfixable and we're doomed.
You can acknowledge that there are problems to solve but that doesn't mean that we are doomed as some would have you believe. Even challenging the worst case models is OK as that's how these things work. There's just so many variables that blindly listening to the worst case people without considering other things is foolish.
There is literally nothing you can express to change the mind of a person unwilling to change their beliefs in direct presence of evidence, let alone challenge them when the evidence is indirect, more abstract, or existing in the broader environment beyond themselves.
Frankly speaking, if all the droughts and floods of the past few years in Europe, US, China, etc didn't cause people to wake up, nothing will and they will eventually ponder how we got where we have.
> drastic action that will upend numerous livelihoods and quality of life because we will be able to engineer things to limit effects of warming and probably limit it.
With all due respect, that is absolute bogus. Even the most optimistic scenarios of changing our behaviour tomorrow disagree. We could have done things since the 90s to improve the situation, and it wouldn't have reached the current state.
Whether we "succeed" is not a boolean value conditioned on the average global temp increase < 2.0C. What climate scientists express is that along the way to 2.0C, we will observe many irreversible tipping points, e.g. Ice-sheet of Greenland, change of oceanic currents, yada, issues with polar vortex e.g. increased splitting which causes heat-domes and people suffer and die from heat and so on.
Frankly, I don't expect that anything will change and I have made peace with it.
> "Their excellent climate modelling was at least comparable in performance to one of the most influential and well-regarded climate scientists of modern history," Prof Supran said, comparing ExxonMobil's work to Nasa's James Hansen who sounded the alarm on climate in 1988.
Unwillingness to build nuclear power, which could possibly solve the problem, is a driver of suspicion, which is a driver of denial.
Politicization of social sciences and campus activities, severely damages credibility, which drives denial.
Corruption of global institutions (such as the WHO, in light of COVID origins) and the understandable yet also uncomfortable 'Don't Look Here' approach to NIH, Lancet relationship with Wuhan Biolab Research (it's complicated) generates deep suspicion, and fosters denial.
Big Pharma + McKinsey designed scheme to addict millions with opioids without real consequences, and subsequent embracing of Big Pharma during COVID on totally unquestionable terms aka 'Trust The Science!', although rational from a policy perspective (it's a national emergency), is again, a huge driver of suspicion and therefore denial.
Political voices basically have no credibility in most situations and won't be able to convince anyone remotely skeptical.
I think things like 'Housing Insurance' frankly is one of the better means of social interdiction, it hits people right in the pocket book, and I would hope insurance companies just send out the letter with the graph saying 'well, this is where the weather is going, this is the expected damage, so this is your rate'. That's not political logic.
Even if the wolf comes, nobody will take them seriously.
Let me be clear: climate change is driving massive disasters around the globe and has been for years. We're in it. It will get worse, but we're in it.
> I feel like our country is extremely unprepared for what climate change is going to mean for everyone in a decade or two
I've heard this regularly since the 80s. Go rewatch An Inconvenient Truth and see how it lands.
They're right... if they're from 30 years ago. Popular conception of climate change is wildly out of touch with reality, which is why you're right that it's going to get really bad really fast. Instead of adapting, we're largely ignoring or bandaging problems which continue to get worse.
Because we could absolutely do it, we wouldn't need to invent a single iota of new tech.
It wouldn't even be that hard - we need to pick up where we left off in 1985 when the 'eco warriors' stopped the buildout.
Why does the current Administration believe in 'science' only when it suits them?
Or maybe there's more than 'science' going on ...
No one listens to "eco warriors" now, what makes you so sure they were the ones that stopped the buildout?
The buildout curve grows rapidly in 1980's and 1980's and then drops to 0 in the early 1990's [1].
Were the USA to have 'kept the pace' on that buildout, 60-85% of current electricity generation in USA would be supplied by Nuclear, much as it is in France.
The denialism of the green crowd is existentially damaging to their credibility.
With respect to climate change, far from 'not being listened to' - they're the most influential NGO movement maybe in history (aside from religious movements) - and influence government policy all over the world, at the highest levels, towards a fundamental reshaping of the economic basis.
Mixed in with the 'climate movement' are all sorts of other ideologies, particularly those against consumption etc. which gives you hints as to why they won't chose a relatively clear 'almost solution' to their supposedly existential problems.
If there's a funny bit of history it's that Greenpeace has caused climate change. They saved the Whales, which is nice, but they killed Nuclear (and continue to hold it back) which is bad.
Look at the data from the EIA. Look at those numbers, rate of buildout, and the % contribution made to US energy generation mix. Extend the growth phase (which stopped in 1990) out 20 more years. What is the result?
The result is relatively easy reach to Paris targets.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-indus...
Clearly someone else, with actual power and influence, wanted to kill nuclear. The environmentalists made for a convenient scapegoat. You fell for it too.
If the claims of climate change people were true, that we are facing existential destruction in short order - then how is it possible they are denying a tried and true solution?
We could have reached 'Paris targets' long ago were we to have kept deploying Nuclear installations, in the terms that we understood decades ago. With fewer accidents. Etc.
The denial of a tried and true solution to this supposedly existential crisis destroys their credibility, and therefor their claims. That's not to say clams aren't valid, but that we can't trust the vanguard of the people behind the climate movement, obviously.
It's incredibly naive (but maybe understandable) for people to not understand that the issue of climate change is hugely politicized and ideological, and because of that, it's hard to make heads or tails of a lot of information.
People running around screaming that the sky is falling - and not talking about Nuclear as part (possibly the basis) of the solution - are spreading irrational fear and hysteria. There's no reason to talk about 'mass flooding' if we can solve the problem in a fairly straight forward manner.
But its overall meaning was not clear, and it context was not clear. English isn't machine code. "Loopholes work under tyrants" is a valid and meaningful English statement but it doesn't have any meaning to this conversation and if I said it as part of my argument you would not know how it contributed to my argument; it is effectively nonsense.
> People running around screaming that the sky is falling - and not talking about Nuclear as part (possibly the basis) of the solution - are spreading irrational fear and hysteria. There's no reason to talk about 'mass flooding' if we can solve the problem in a fairly straight forward manner.
That's a complete non-sequitur. But first, I apparently have to say that people can share one idea and not all their ideas. For example, we both probably believe that using the internet brings us value, since we're doing it. But we disagree on other things! So I wouldn't call us "the internet people." Similarly, there's no such thing as "climate change people." There are people who are concerned about climate change.
Now, the fact that many of them teamed up to kill nuclear is indeed a big problem. But, it is not reasonable to dismiss the dangers of climate change just because that happened. As you say: we're probably worse off due to nuclear disinvestment... making the dangers even greater. So we still need to seriously work hard to address climate change rapidly. Even if it's too late for nuclear, climate change is still a problem. I don't know what your actual position is - what change you'd want to see in the world. None?
Finally, I realize I'm probably wasting my time. When you talk about people "running around screaming that the sky is falling", that's a strawman, it's disingenuous, and it tells me you have no respect for a viewpoint opposing yours. Please take note that I'm not deploying hyperbole and metaphor to make your side sounds stupid, I'm just engaging your words and ideas.
It starts with insurance not covering large areas of the coast, water scarcity in dry regions, etc. Pretty soon you have expensive energy, mass migrations, widespread shortages, and politicians yelling jingoistic chants at rallies.
Everyone acts like 20 years from now gas will be more expensive and we’ll get some coastal flooding. These people are hopelessly optimistic. it’s going to get really bad once the dominos start falling.