That’s the way it’s always been … just the evidence is all underwater right now.
Yes it will.
No it wasn’t, and no it isn’t.
You are incorrect. A 2-foot sea level rise would put a sizable chunk of Miami under water, and because the rise would not encroach evenly due to uneven elevations, some large inland areas would be affected before the coasts. Ultimately, however, if sea levels rise 4 feet, the greater Miami area, from Fort Lauderdale down through the Keys will become mostly uninhabitable.
ETA: Or said more succinctly by Colibri above.
You could maybe do a big civil engineering thing with dykes and walls like Hollland, but apparently the salt water is seeping up the water table because it’s all built on porous limestone. So it’s buggered really. Maybe it’ll become a strange kind of semi submerged ghost town with the remnants of the population boating between condos like wet Mad Max with added cocaine. There’s a novel in that idea somewhere.
Well, Ft. Lauderdale is conveniently nicknamed “The Venice of America” so the course is already mapped, at least.
4 feet is worst case projection. The range is 1 to 4 feet. What would a 2.5 foot rise do to Miami?
Also, average elevation in Miami is 6 feet. I’m not sure how all this works, but doesn’t it take a 6 foot rise to inundate Miami? I know coastal areas are doomed even under best case scenarios, but the city itself should be mostly unaffected.
Florida can also just do the Netherlands thing and build dikes.
Does anyone really want a prequel to Waterworld…well, searching around apparently some writers and produces think so.
Ever hear of high tide? Or hurricanes?
Behind levees instead of beaches? That’s pretty damn affected.
Florida has nearly five times the length of coastline as the Netherlands, and that overlooks the inland waters that would be backed up by sea level rise. The Netherlands has also been building its system for centuries.
Of course, building all those dikes would employ all those people that are supposedly going to be put out of work by measures to counteract climate change.
I think some people have misunderstood what watchwolf49 was saying here. He/she seems to mean that today’s buildings will all have been torn down a hundred years from now, because most buildings don’t last that long anyway.
Personally, I think there are two ways sea-level rise could be dealt with: either the Dutch approach with dikes and polders and all, or cities built on platforms above the water. It all comes down to which is cheaper. I do not think we will see major cities shift inland.
Originally Posted by watchwolf49 :
>>Are they building these buildings well enough to last until sea level rise floods them … seriously … 3 foot rise in a hundred years won’t be a problem with the buildings built today.<<
I think youse guys are misunderstanding this post. He’s saying the buildings are being built so shoddily that they won’t last long enough to be flooded out…
Buildings are generally depreciated over at most 50 years, but often less. While it’s just an accounting shortcut for assigning the cost of the building to the periods that in will be used in, one generally tries to do it in such a way that actually reflects the underlying value being created by its continuous existence (except for depreciation for tax purposes, which tends to be accelerated in order to encourage investment). If developers think they can get 40 years out of a building before it becomes unusable, then they’d still be in pretty good shape in terms of getting the money back out of it that they put in. That it will be useless after and that investment in other places may have a better total return over the long-term is not their concern because they’re always looking at time-value-of-money returns, and the value of the building in 40 years is mostly irrelevant compared to what people are willing to pay to occupy it now.
Why not? Gradually, over time?
You have to figure that even without potential sea rise issues, if you’re building anything that close to the ocean in hurricane country there’s already a pretty good chance of it becoming a write-off due to storm damage at some point over the course of several decades. Climate change probably doesn’t change the whole “risk versus expected lifetime profit” calculus for a developer building in coastal Florida all that much, at least not yet.
Well, I just think that once cities are established, they don’t move. There’s too much economic incentive for people to go where the urban core is already located, even if it no longer makes much sense for it to be located there.
Salt water intrusion into aquifers and storm surges are more an immediate threat to Miami than being completely submerged by standing water. Still, I don’t see how Miami survives this century as a major city. Poor Miami. And poor us, literally. Florida’s claims against the National Flood Insurance Program for FY 2014 were already $115,000,000, and yet they continue to build waterfront property.
We had a guest speaker at church a few weeks ago, who gave a presentation on climate change. He showed a video from Miami Beach, from the last year or two, in which the streets were all a foot or so underwater – not from rain or a storm surge, but just from a particularly high tide.
Edit: found some of the video he showed on YouTube:
It’s easy to pile the negging on Miami, but this problem extends more or less non-stop from Brownsville Texas along the Gulf coast, down Florida to Key West then north along the Atlantic to Portsmouth Maine on the east coast. And from San Diego to Seattle.
If sea levels go up 4 feet, substantially every city & town within a mile of the shore will be severely damaged. Which in the east includes places like Boston, New York City, Washington DC, Charleston, Norfolk, etc. All of them will be wrecked and all more or less at the same time. The Gulf coast is less inhabited but there’s still Tampa, Houston, our old waterlogged pal New Orleans, and a bunch of more minor cities.
The rest of the world won’t fare any better. Gonna be fun.
I believe Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida have solved the problem by prohibiting any reference to “sea level rise” in official communications. It’s called the “King Canute” approach to dealing with the sea. Meanwhile the mean sea level may be 5 feet higher by 2050, and the problem is not just the static water rise but the greatly amplified power of storm surges.