American Cities and Climate Change: When is Enough, Enough?
 

As a geographer, with a focus in urban and regional planning, I wonder why people choose to remain in large, disaster-prone metro areas. I'm talking about extreme natural disasters that occur nearly every year. These extreme weather events, that are exacerbated by impervious surfaces in urban areas are obviously going to continue to occur!

What gives?

Certainly demographics play into certain populations' abilities to move out of hazardous areas, but (aside from denial of the existance of climate change) why do certain demographic groups choose to remain in such susceptible areas?

I, of course, live in a state that is highly proned to natural disasters. However, I love Alabama, I love Birmingham, and I love the Tennessee Valley. None of us can truly escape all natural disasters, but when you see the catastrophic flooding like we're seeing with Imelda, I wonder what coastal residents think when the rebuild time after time.

Is Houston just an exceptional city?

Is Miami Beach just too beautiful?

Is Charleston too precious to sacrifice?

Is New Orleans too important of a port to allow the Mississippi to run its natural course?

Was there a time when these disaster prone areas didn't have disasters?

Or are disasters a new thing in the social media, 24/7 cable news era?

Maybe the frequency and intensity of storms has become more news worthy?

Storms seem to come in spurts, the mid 2000's the 1950's, the 1930's, the 1850's You can look up years and groups of years with lots of storms. This year is not particularly extreme. When people with the money to actually develop land stop developing it and move en mass from the coast I will be concerned.

Something tells me, and this is just a hunch, I think Miami and other costal cities will be just fine long after all of us are dead.

Houston is just floody and prone to erratic weather. We've had four major flooding incidents since 2015.

Today's Houston was once 300 miles inland.

This Climate Change has got to stop right now, or else!

Or they have just become more political. That wasn't a 'thing' 20 years ago, now every story or drought or whatever is a chance to spread the Gospel of Climate Change.

Mind you, I am not someone who thinks people are dumb for thinking we have a major issue on our hands or anything...but really...the media never misses an opportunity to attribute everything on Earth to climate change.

What do you mean "demographics play into certain populations' abilities to move out of hazardous areas"?

But we know the answer to your question:

Money
Family
Jobs
Inertia
Connections
Beauty of area
etc. etc. etc.

Norfolk floods a lot. But like 98% of the time it isn't flooded. So as with anything in life, you deal with the short stints of bullshit to enjoy the other side of the coin. For most people, for most times, life is fine in these areas. My dad's entire family lives in Miami. They seem fine. No one usually cares about crap that rarely happens(even if that "rarely happens" event is happening more).

Man I hear you. I was passing through on my way to Baton Rouge and it was like an ocean burst out of the sky. People strandd on the side of freeways. Other freeways like 69 were jammed with people fleeing other roads. I ended up having to go up 69 to 190 and took that into Baton Rouge. A normally 6 hour trip took twice that. I'm beat and this hotel room is like heaven right now. Global warming is most definitely real no matter how much naysayers including the president want to deny it.

It's a combination of more extreme rainfall events, and extreme development with associated removal of natural ground cover. The two don't go together with a favorable outcome.

Please explain how lots of rain around Houston is because of climate change.

I promise you no climatologist would claim it is.

I think you're overstating. Perhaps that's what some people like to read into it because what they hear doesn't fit their political agenda. Their time would be better spent getting educated on the topic from a scientific standpoint.

"The media" I listen to and read gets it right most of the time regarding climate change. I've seen mistakes, but by and large what the media reports is factual. Except for Fox and a lot of talk radio. As an atmospheric scientist by education and career, I pay attention to the way the issue is presented.

Warmer oceans do have a cause and effect relationship with higher intensity rainfall events. Such events have complex causes, but warmer water can be a big contributing factor, depending on the relative strengths of the contributing factors.

One thing that continually amazes me is the number of people who think "global warming" must mean every place on earth, at any given time, is warmer than it was. So they think if they're having a cold spell, there can't possibly be any "global warming". They have no understanding of the concept of global averages, or the concept that warmer temperatures in some places (like the Arctic) are much more important than warmer temperatures in other places. Also, the feedback mechanism just compounds the problem. The warmer it is in the Arctic, for example, the more ice melts. The more ice melts, the less reflectivity there is from the surface, which speeds things up.

None of this matters to a president who loves to say that a snowstorm on the east coast "proves" there is no global warming (per some of his Tweets).

Although any particular storm has complex causes, warmer waters in the Gulf (very likely tied in a big way to climate change) can very well be a contributing factor, and potentially the main contributing factor for some storms.

all those cities are doomed in my lifetime and no one gives a fuk because the boomer owner class will be dead anyways

i frequently ship time-sensitive environmental samples and i can’t tell you how many times they don’t make it to the lab on time in houston either due to traffic, weather, or just the system breaking down. i have thousands of dollars worth of samples right now, i guess stuck at dallas, ruined due to flooding in houston. its become a serious problem.

houston was an honorable attempt insofar as an interesting collection of people.

Excellent point! And the idea that you can “carbon tax” people to change the climate “back” is even more ridiculous. As a species of this Earth we either learn to adapt to the climate changing or we go extinct. It’s been the history of this planet since its creation.

Chicago is subject to severe weather outbreaks year after year as well too.

It's called January

Well yeah, we’ll have to adapt... that’s not debated by anyone. At issue is how we adapt in the best ways possible to ensure our capacity for continued prosperity.

And primary among those ways to adapt is to limit our input of atmosphere-warming gases into our closed system. We have amazing technology - let’s use it.

Um ok, I don't even know where to start off... I'm just freaked out by these conversations.

Bon, first off, to all those who think scientists who've been warning us all about environmental issues and potential disasters - that's just about all of them scientists today - have actually sold their asses to green lobbies, just actually think for a second.
If you were a scientist with a Ph.D. trying to make a load of money out of propaganda and brainwashing, who would you sell your talents to? Shit like Green Peace or similar environmentalist NGOs? BWAHAHAHAHA, are you kidding? These poor guys have peanuts. You certainly wouldn't make up any fortune by standing by them.
Obviously, you'd go to an oil company or something like that well established, cause those can afford to pay you millions of dollars a year to serve their financial interests.

Second, you watch their data and graphs, then you start to realize something has probably been wrong for real, because all natural stuff around us has been changing much faster than ever in recent Earth's history (mind you, we're literally nothing compared to Earth itself, that's 4.5 billion years old).
Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts... All these extreme events are said very likely to go more and more frequent, at a freaking rate, worse ever seen before in human memories.

Third and finally, you've got 2 options.
Going back to mere rough nature like a caveman. That's what the cynical communists want me to do to weaken me, so they can take control of the world more easily. But of course I'm no retard, so I say fuck the communists.
Or advocate innovation, clean tech (and by "tech", I don't mean your pitiful iphone that's just a fashion item; tech should mean serious things), new entrepreneurship and better leadership, and just screw oil companies and all fossil fuels.

That is how I would summarize it. There's something sure. If you have kids and don't want them to struggle from atrocities, you'd better think twice, right now, because there's actually no shelter in the world.
No one would be spared if things had to gradually go really wrong. Not even 'Murika baby.
That must be clear enough.

:uhh:

So we should just chance it and hope for the best? We can and should discourage people from living lifestyles that we know could result in the destruction of our planet. The most effective means of doing that is a carbon tax IMO.

Flood insurance rates need to be adjusted to properly reflect risk. The National Flood Insurance Program needs to be revamped...subsidizing stripping drywall from the same ranch house annually in Harris County ain't cutting it.

So you’re suggesting that people pay actual market rates for flood insurance?

So communist of you.

Climate change is really only half the story. The other half of the story is that we built a lot of cities in places that were probably always living on borrowed time, even without climate change. Reliable weather records only go back about 140 years, but these are the records that are used to set the standard for all of our building codes, land surveys, etc. The New World has only been known to Europeans, Africans, and Asians for about 500 years. Some of these cities have been built in places that experience mass devastation events on average of every 400, 500, 1000 years. Since our records only cover about a century, we're completely vulnerable to anything that happens on a less frequent pattern.

Then there's climate change, which is speeding up the frequency of intense, destructive weather events (e.g. "500 year events"). Category 5 hurricanes hitting the Caribbean or mainland North America used to be a less frequent event, and probably was legitimately a 100 year event when European explorers first reached North America. Now it's an every other year event.

Per Wikipedia:

Except that we're the cause of current climate change. Please review the science. It's all out there.

However, if there is not enough political will do anything about it (at least in this country right now), we will be forced to adapt one way or the other. Other civilized countries are actually doing something about it, but without our help, their efforts may not be enough. And China's emissions (and some other countries) could overwhelm things.

It's impressive that young Americans are so heavily involved in this. Theoretically, at least, this crop of young Americans may be the country's way out of the current political gridlock on this issue. This and other issues, actually. We won't know until the 2020 and subsequent elections. Voter turnout is the key, obviously.

A large number of homes flooded in the Houston metro are multistory mansions or mcmansions. Lots of single story, too, the kind you find all over the Midwest and south. If you drive through Meyerland, you see where people with the resources have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars raising their entire homes 4 to 6 feet. The others just sit there vacant. Meyerland was a beautiful, very affluent neighborhood before the big floods started after 2010. A neighborhood ruined by flooding.

This is affecting me personally as I get closer to moving back to the area, which is where I grew up (through high school). I spend a couple of hours each night on Zillow, and just about everywhere I want to live has had flooding problems. The ads on Zillow rarely mention whether a home has been flooded, but when you see a 4,000 ft2 custom home in a beautiful area with a posted price of $280,000, you know the story. Some of the photos, though, show gutted homes selling at rock bottom prices (essentially the land value, which isn't much either).

I'm not going to settle in a neighborhood that has been flooded. I don't want to have to buy expensive flood insurance. So this is a challenge. But this is where my family is, and I need to be closer now that I'm retired.

not that we shouldn't keep trying to do something about it as best we can, but is there really anything different in the weather in these more disaster prone areas or is the reporting better and there is much content needed nowadays?

If you have ever listened to George Carlin, you would know that there is nothing we can do to destroy this planet. Earth will live on after all these disasters. Life on it ( including us)? We’re probably screwed, like the dinosaurs before us.

^ That's just about it when you're an atheist.

That being said, the human species got to a level of consciousness ever reached before.
I mean, dinosaurs were most likely completely stupid. :haha:

So let us see how smart we actually are, for once. That would be really cool.

I agree and now huge sections of the Amazon (one of the biggest oxygen producing areas) is going up in smoke and Antarctica/Arctic are melting at a faster than anticipated rate, people still aren't getting it and I wonder what the future holds especially for our coastal cities.

Sincere question: why not buy a multistory McMansion for land value and turn the street level story into a flood buffer...? Instead of a 4,000 sqft house, you'd have a flood-proof 2,000 sqft house. For barely more than the price of an empty lot.

you need good pylons for the first story in a flood zone like we have along the mississippi, not a premade 2x4 type wall panel. it would be cheaper to build new probably?

I doubt that, considering you've got the rest of the house for free. (Roof, walls, interior, etc.)

You have 100+ year old billion dollar insurance conglomerates, whose only functions are to make institutional investors money and who have been damn good at doing so for a century and counting, refusing to insure coastal properties in places like Florida. These companies, who are the absolute best at predicting long-term risk trends, have decided that the likelihood of coastal flooding is now so high, it is no longer reasonable in a fiduciary sense to insure against. Because it would lose them money.

That is all you need to know to understand that this is not just a case of increased media cycle exposure rates. When the Progressives, Allstates, and Liberty Mutuals (and the Pentagon, for that matter) say "this is getting serious", it's serious.

Do et al. (2017) computed the trends in annual maximum daily streamflow data across the globe over the 1966–2005 period. They found decreasing trends for a large number of stations in western North America and Australia, and increasing trends in parts of Europe, eastern North America, parts of South America, and southern Africa.

In summary, streamflow trends since 1950 are not statistically significant in most of the world’s largest rivers (high confidence), while flood frequency and extreme streamflow have increased in some regions (high confidence).

IPCC SR15 3.3.5.1

Numerous studies leading up to and after AR5 have reported a decreasing trend in the global number of tropical cyclones and/or the globally accumulated cyclonic energy (Emanuel, 2005; Elsner et al., 2008; Knutson et al., 2010; Holland and Bruyère, 2014; Klotzbach and Landsea, 2015; Walsh et al., 2016). A theoretical physical basis for such a decrease to occur under global warming was recently provided by Kang and Elsner (2015). However, using a relatively short (20 year) and relatively homogeneous remotely sensed record, Klotzbach (2006) reported no significant trends in global cyclonic activity, consistent with more recent findings of Holland and Bruyère (2014). Such contradictions, in combination with the fact that the almost four decade-long period of remotely sensed observations remains relatively short to distinguish anthropogenically induced trends from decadal and multi-decadal variability, implies that there is only low confidence regarding changes in global tropical cyclone numbers under global warming over the last four decades.

IPCC SR15 3.3.6

https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/...im/EF3-EF5.png

The IPCC AR5 assessed that there was low confidence in the sign of drought trends since 1950 at the global scale, but that there was high confidence in observed trends in some regions of the world, including drought increases in the Mediterranean and West Africa and drought decreases in central North America and northwest Australia (Hartmann et al., 2013; Stocker et al., 2013).

IPCC SR15 3.3.4.1

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uplo...r3_Low_Res.pdf

Every coastal city is f*cked royally and we're about to have the worst migration crisis/human suffering event this planet has ever seen in the next 100 years. The amount of people who live in Jakarta alone is staggering, 90% of them have nowhere else to go.

If the US was smart we'd start phasing out into interior regions and offering incentives to move in more strategic and habitable places but LOL that kinda good planning is not gonna happen in the most incompetent developed nation. Like always the poor will be hurt most.

Its not exactly every year. I'm try to think of the last time Miami Beach experienced hurricane force winds. Maybe Wilma in 2007 I think? Probably not though. Maybe Andrew in 1992 but i don't think the strong hurricane force winds extended that far north. Maybe Betsy in 1965? That hit near Key Largo but had a big wind field and caused a little damage in Miami Beach. Probably have to go back to 1926. I have lived in Miami since about 1985 and I think i have been through hurricane force winds probably twice. Andrew, cat 5 and Wilma, cat 1. (Katrina was borderline). It only takes one (i learned that with Andrew) but those tend to be about a 1 in 50 year event. In an transient place like Miami and especially Miami Beach most people never experience that event.

Do we have a model for how much worse hurricanes will get?

I feel like that is important before making any policy.

Edit: I also think that flood insurance should be mandated in certain areas and privatized. I am probably forgetting something, though.

The climate has had wild swings of global temperatures that have occurred over a short period of time -- numerous times.

It was just a blink of an eye ago that we had an F'n land bridge connecting North America to Asia and Britain wasn't an island. We're not talking 100 million years ago, 10 million years ago, 1 million years ago, 100,000 years ago. This was as recently as 18,000 years ago.

Buy hey, a carbon tax will reverse 18,000 years of warming. [Where does that carbon tax money go?]. Here's an idea, if carbon taxes are the solution, why does somebody receive that money and what are they going to do with that money? They'll probably spend it, gets recirculated in the system for people to use to buy stuff that creates more carbon in the atmosphere.

Why don't we tax people and then throw that money dig a giant hole and bury it? Shrink the money supply, instead of taking it from someone to then give it back to someone, so that they can then give it back to somebody else. That'll cool the Earth. Less money, less warming.

LOL.

http://www.earthlymission.com/wp-con...-ice-age-2.jpg
https://earthlymission.com/europe-at...f-the-ice-age/
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/chesba...gesealevel.png
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/chesbay/chesgeo.html

The National Flood Insurance Program is, IMO, the culprit. Banks would never make loans for properties that could not be insured, which would put a stop to almost all home construction in vulnerable areas. But the federal government stepped in to insure where the private market won't, which is probably led to people building/buying home in places where houses should not be built.

Wow.

Clearly you know far more about the climate than the world's foremost experts who have devoted their entire academic and professional careers to the study of the climate. You should go give them a talking to and straighten them out.

Where I live in Kingwood TX, homes that flooded lost a considerable amount of value and will carry the stigma of flooding for years and won't sell as well as houses that didn't flood. Harvey and Imelda made it pretty clear which houses are flood prone. Fortunately, ours isn't.

It sounds like you have no idea how a carbon tax works. Instead of bringing up irrelevant geological history like land bridges to Asia and senselessly LOL-ing, maybe spend 15 minutes of your time educating yourself on the details of a carbon tax.

In quick summary for you, most producers are able avoid paying the tax via utilizing more energy efficient technologies. The tax main purpose is to dissuade the unnecessary use of fossil fuels. Tax money that is collected goes to fund small biz tax breaks and incentives/rebates to homeowners, and investment into energy technology research. So, even producers who pay the tax most likely receive the benefits back anyway. Only the largest emitters end up paying (and ALL studies on the issue show that they can more than easily afford it). There’s a reason conservatives favor it over other methods, like cap and trade, because it’s more effective, the tax is a tax in name only, and it actually functions as a market mechanism, rather than a hard and fast regulation.

Governments should at most bail out people once. Then you're on your own.

Makes no sense otherwise.

probably because its not cost prohibitive yet. if insurance companies quadrupled their rates around the gulf, des moines property would go thru the roof!

are there disclosure laws for homes that have flooded or are buyers left to their own dilligence? do people try and cover that kind of history up? you certainly see listings down there that say did not FLOOD in capital letters....

Florida residents whose property were damaged by Irma a few years back are now just opting to demolished them whole, especially in the Keys. The Exodus is slowly happening.

maybe the work around in the future will just be just renting. homeownership of stick built construction anywhere in florida seems crazy to me.

Yes as of this month. Sellers have to disclose if home is in 100 year flood plain and if the home ever flooded but without, pretty hard to hide. A little knowledge of the neighborhood and any repairs coinciding with major events. Previously, owners had to disclose if there was a flood risk. When you go to get a quote for flood insurance, you'll know pretty quick the flood risk. I backed out of buying a house a few years ago when i discovered it sat in 100 yearplain. And insurance was $3,000/ year just for flood. It's normally around $500 and optional if you don't live in risk area.