Brady Dennis in the August 24, 2016 edition of the Washington Post reports a study done by Zillow, a real estate company, that estimates that rising sea levels could leave nearly 2 million U.S. homes inundated by 2100, a fate that would displace millions of people and result in property losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars. With six feet of sea level rise, nearly 2 percent of all U.S. housing stock could vanish, accounting for roughly $882 billion worth of homes. “It may turn out that actual water poses almost as much of a problem for the housing market in the future as negative equity has in the past,” said Krishna Rao, Zillow’s director of economic product and research.
The states worst affected would be:
Maryland and Virginia, 100,000 homes
The Carolinas, 140,000 homes submerged.
Florida, facing the gravest threat, one in eight of all properties inder water.
Cities under the worst threat would be Miami (possibly a third of its housing stock), Boston (one in five homes), Honolulu (a quarter of its housing).
The guide who took my wife and I around Namibia is a national figure, a former captain of the national soccer team, who last year came second in the world in a rating of tourist guides. He is smart, well-read and knowledgeable. Yet, in a conversation about the effect of climate change on water-deprived Namibia (drought since 2011) he forcefully stated that man-made climate change was a fiction. He said it in a way that showed he had thought about it. He is a great chap, and I dropped the subject as having nothing to do with our tour.
When someone like that categorically denies the work of nearly all climate scientists it shows what a problem we are faced with. We pour gunk into our fragile, thin strip of liveable atmosphere for two hundred years – and where do the man-made climate change deniers think it goes? Conveniently, to the moon? Meanwhile, local authorities are having to build protective dykes, and other flood prevention projects, to protect houses that, arguably, should never have been built so near to the sea. Whether, in hurricane-prone areas these are effective we we will in due course find out.
Overall, this year has been almost two degrees warmer than what people experienced in the 20th Century.
Last year broke the record for the hottest year ever globally. But Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says that “2016 has really has blown that out of the water.”
Schmidt has calculated the chance that the rest of this year will continue on its record pace, based on the first six months. “It indicates that we have roughly a 99 percent chance of a new record in 2016,” he says.
A couple of degrees warmer overall may not sound like much, but Schmidt points out that it’s persistent warming over decades that alters the atmosphere, the oceans and most everything else. An average eliminates the temperature extremes and variations and renders a number that indicates a persistent trend. And while a temporary increase in temperature won’t affect sea level, a long-term one will.
“Sea level rise is a cumulative effect of persistent warming for decade and decades and decades,” Schmidt explains, “that is warming up the interior of the ocean.”
Eventually, a warmer ocean expands, just as heated water does in a kettle. A warmer ocean also causes more evaporation to rise from the surface, which leads to more rainfall in some places.
One of the cruel ironies of climate change is that it will be the developing world that will be most affected, despite it being mostly the fault of developed countries (who have higher per capita emissions.) They’re the ones that will suffer most in terms of vulnerability to natural disasters and reduced crop yields. Also, most poor countries tend to be hotter by default (nearer the equator.) If average temperatures rise, that makes living more unbearable in those places. which are arguably already too hot for comfort. Although your Namibian guide was a sceptic, most African politicians recognise the reality of climate change.
You’re right about many US homes being vulnerable to flooding and eventual submersion. Again, it’ll be the poor that will be most affect. Hurricane Katrina hit the poor and majority black neighbourhoods the hardest- I can’t think of a reason why future such events won’t have a similar effect.