How do I respond to people saying houses near the beach will be underwater soon?
At work we have access to only about 8 websites. One is a real estate site. Lots of my co-workers love spending hours looking through houses and real estate. I am not really interested. But they have this same discussion every week about how none of them want to buy a house near the beaches in Melbourne because they will be ‘underwater soon’. They are serious about this I am not joking. They try to estimate that a house 100 metres from a beach should be de-valued by $100,000.
Please tell me how I should respond to these people. Give me a cite or a quote than can quickly fight their ignorance
Here is a site showing tide gauge data from various Australian locations. Melbourne is not listed as such (unless one of the other named locations is actually a Melbourne location) but Geelong is not far away, and shows an rise of 0.97mm per year, I think. (The pics are rather small). You’ll notice that many of the gauges actually appear to show sea levels falling.
So, less than a millimetre per year is not going to put those houses under water any time soon. That site quotes an expected range of between 9 and 88cm rise by 2100, which is such a wide range as to be useless, frankly.
BUT - if enough people listen to them you’ll be able to buy well and clean up wth great, ocean view real estate at bargain prices (for as long as the global warming hysteria lasts).
As a Melbournian looking at the monent I’ve got to say Beaconsfield Parade doesn’t appear to be getting cheaper!!
If the hysteria about Global Warming continues, at some point beach property should take a hit. If you buy into the hysteria, short beachfront property. If you don’t accept the data, buy beachfront property…but why would you care what the ignorant think?
In any case, if you are looking to buy beachfront property, feed the hysteria. Don’t find ways to dismiss it.
It depends on the beach. I notice you’re in Australia. But I can tell you about my local situation–the Texas Gulf Coast.
Our coast is low-lying, with a few offshore islands that are essentially really big sandbars. We get lots of tropical weather & and the occasional big hurricane. A big storm tends to destroy anything near the water. But even the smaller storms wash away the beach.
Subsidence caused by pumping out underground water can also put properties near the water under that water. But it’s a slower process. And inland areas near bayous (local name for small rivers) becomes increasingly flood prone. However, the water goes down quickly–unlike the tragedy in New Orleans.
I live just north of Downtown Houston–which is 30 miles inland. And I’m in the Heights area–founded by those escaping from the yellow fever & malaria that plagued early Houston. So I’m OK.
But I’ve seen what happens to coastal properties after a big storm: Piles of matchsticks. I would never build on the beach unless it was a modest vacation place on stilts. Fun for a while–until the sea takes it.
You could respond by telling them that the time scale of the changes in sea level is not what most people would think of as “soon.”
Projections like the ones in Al Gore’s movie are different from what your friends are talking about because they require a change in the rate of sea level rise (which could occur if enough of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets melt, but are not certain events in the future) and they require time scales on the order of decades - 2050, 2100 are years bandied about, but no one really thinks “soon” - or even in the next 20 years.
2050 doesn’t count as “soon”? I dunno about you, but I plan on still being alive then, and if the house I were living in were swallowed up by the ocean, I’d be pretty upset. It seems to me that “not soon” means at least that it’s going to be the next generation’s problem, not mine.
How much sea level rise by 2050? The last figure I saw was a few inches by the end of this century. Now, don;t get me wrong- a few inches could lead to some nasty disasters with dykes and whatnot. But “houses being underwater” will require several/many feet, which is not “soon” on any *human *scale. *Geologic scale, *where 1000 years is as a blink of an eye- that’s different.
The house doesn’t need to be completely underwater for it to be ruined. The sea only really needs to reach the floor of the house for it to be uninhabitable.
You don’t need to invoke rising average sea level to know that almost all coastal flooding is both predictable and preventable. Instead of stronger levees, the world needs deeper setbacks from the shoreline. The so-called 100-year high water mark is crossed by 5 percent of houses every 20 years. Those are bad odds.
If I recall correctly, an ice shelf could slip into the sea over a matter of days. Before it falls in, and after, the rate of increase will be fairly slow, but for those few days, it could be quite significant. The question is just when we can expect such a catastrophic event to occur, which is not yet completely modeled.
They gave 20th century sea level rise as between 1 and 2 mm/year. Really, not a very alarming number.
The IPCC went on to estimate that the sea level would rise another 0.09 to 0.88 m (0.3 ft to 2.9 ft) by the year 2100 from both thermal expansion and melting ice. However, since that estimate was published, better information on the rate of loss of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets leads to decreased likelihood that the lower end estimates are correct (the 2001 IPCC report included the possibility that these ice sheets would actually grow, changing sea level by -0.02 m from Greenland and -0.17 m from Antarctica. I don’t think anyone believes that will happen anymore.)
A sea level rise of 2 ft by 2100 shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. More is possible, but less seems unlikely. By comparison, sea level rose about 0.1 ft to 0.26 ft in the 20th century.
Completely true, and not taken into account in the rates stated above.
People should expect a minimum sea level rise of 2 ft by 2100, and considerably more should large amounts of ice sheets or ice shelves melt and collapse - which is a pretty unpredictable phenomenon both in magnitude of sea level rise and in timing of occurrence.
The 2 ft of eustatic sea level rise we can expect as a minimum could then translate into 192 ft of retreat horizontally along sandy beach shores (and, I should note, 0 ft of horizontal retreat at coastal cliffs.)
It’s just hard to see how 2 ft could work when you don’t know the slope of your shoreline, but depending on the shape of their shores, some might need to worry about this while others might not.
