9 ms·

This article is kind of infuriating. Just bring the facts up and talk about them, instead of describing people. I think this is one of the more critical parts (

This article is kind of infuriating. Just bring the facts up and talk about them, instead of describing people. I think this is one of the more critical parts (along with the stuff about water supply getting contaminated): > Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates that six feet of sea-level rise would put a quarter of Miami’s homes underwater. However, nowhere in the article does it say a six feet rise will happen at the end of the century. So is that actually going to happen? How many models project this and how many don't? What is the "stupendous reversal" required in real terms? What are the options to combat this? Would a giant sea wall work? If you come at this from the angle of "climate change is a myth" the entire article reads as fluff. This makes it basically impossible to convince people that this is a real issue that needs to be dealt with. The sensationalist title distances people from the issue even further (it is sensational because the article doesn't present any evidence that Miami will be underwater soon).

laverick 8y ago
Isn't Zillow ignoring the immense value created from all those new beachfront properties?
- bovermyer 8y ago
  Lex Luthor would like a word with you.
- FranOntanaya 8y ago
  That works better when the land isn't 100 miles wide with ocean on both sides. Miami City has a better ring than Miami Keys.
- calgoo 8y ago
  This is actually a joke i have told my wife who has family in Florida: The only way i would buy property in Florida is if im allowed to build an artificial hill/mountain on it, so that in 100 years my family will own a private island. I wonder if there is a long term business model here... Invest in land and prepare it to survive being surrounded by water, build infrastructure etc and then sell it to the same type of people who buy bunkers for end of the world situations.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    You're behind the game. Seriously, there was a major supreme court ruling in 2013 that allowed floating homes to be legally classified as homes instead of marine vessels which affords a whole slew of critical protections and distinctions. In everything from protection against seizure to the coast guard not being able to walk into your home to inspect for life jackets. Kind of makes you wonder why we haven't already been doing this on areas just off the current coast. Guess that old saying really is accurate -- necessity is the mother invention. Dutch Docklands is one of the companies building these new facilities. Their mock ups [1] look amazing. [1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States
ataturk 8y ago
Waiting patiently until we murder 4 Billion people.
beat 8y ago
The article isn't saying Miami will be underwater soon. It's saying that Miami's water supply is at risk, partly due to rising sea levels, partly due to human activity damaging the aquifer (limestone mining, toxic waste). Moreover, six feet of sea level rise isn't going to happen instantaneously. It will take decades. Property will slowly be lost, but people will just move inland (or move away). And a key question is, whose property goes underwater? If it's wealthy people on the beachfront, they can afford the loss. If it's poor people, that's something else. We saw that in New Orleans, where the worst Katrina flooding happened in the poorest neighborhoods. This also excludes the idea of simply building seawalls to protect low-lying areas. I mean, that's half of Holland, so it works. Making major social decisions on a distaste for the concept of global warming is foolish, though. Governments should operate pessimistically when it comes to threats to the land and people they govern. It should be assuming it will happen, on the worst-case side, not denying the threat because we don't like to think about it. Think that way, you might as well disband the fire department too. It's expensive and your house probably won't burn down.
- alex_anglin 8y ago
  Sea walls won’t work for Miami. The ground is too porous, so the water would just seep under.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    Yeah, a better example would have been stilt houses, which are already scattered around the Florida coast due to the flooding from hurricanes
  - beat 8y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking of that, but didn't want to extend the post.
- igravious 8y ago
  > The article isn't saying Miami will be underwater soon. I beg to differ, it's the first sentence of the title of the article: “Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. […]” Then there's, “Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates that six feet of sea-level rise would put a quarter of Miami’s homes underwater, rendering $200 billion of real estate worthless.” I don't know what you're arguing against the GP for. The question is, how are we to figure out how _concerned_ we should be? Clearly one day the good citizens of Miami are not going to be waking up to water lapping at their bedsheets. What timescale are we talking about? Who are Zillow? What options does the city of Miami have? Comparatively speaking is Miami an outlier or a typical case? I think journalists and news outlets do a major disservice to an important topic when they make alarmist headlines and skirt around the practical matters at the heart of articles such as this. The crux of the story, that Miami's freshwater is in peril before Miami's real estate is a valuable story to tell us. But please spare us the melodramatic, “What nobody knows is when that will happen, or what happens next.” You mean to say that the people in charge of managing these water systems are standing by dumbfounded and helpless? Maybe we should replace them by people who are able to problem solve in the face of adversity.
skh 8y ago
At this point in time people who deny climate change is occurring are impervious to logic and reason. They are like people who deny evolution or the people who believe the Earth is around 10,000 years old. Nothing is going to convince them they are wrong. It's too burdensome to ask that all articles about the detrimental effects of climate change present a proof of said claims. At some point in time it's pointless to engage in an endless reproving of claims that most sane people already believe in.
- calcifer 8y ago
  Honestly, the fact that your comment is downvoted speaks volumes about the audience here. The people who deny climate change are no different than antivaxxers.
  - skh 8y ago
    That is a more apt comparison. I was trying to think of one that didn't have the appearance of being anti-religious. Yes, they are like anti-vaxxers.
- temp64201292 8y ago
  It is actually more than pointless to argue with these people, as many of them actively engage in conspiracy theories: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... I personally know someone with the belief that climate change is a political conspiracy. Any evidence to support climate change just points to a bigger "cover-up" and validates their beliefs. Almost always this is not an isolated belief but a pattern of thinking, and the person holds similar conspiracy theory beliefs about other issues. This is not a political left/right issue (the person I happen to know happens to be a left-wing conspiracy theorist). This is an issue of mild paranoid psychosis that is not being recognized and treated seriously because the symptoms are not very disturbing to others, and the people suffering from it happen to be relatively high-functioning. Eventually as these people age the symptoms get worse and they end up driving those close to them away.
  - 8y ago
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I couldn't agree more. It seems to be an increasing trend in the media lately that articles are driven by narrative and emotional appeals than actual facts. This creates the bizarre scenario where you can read a 3,691 word story on how Miami will soon be underwater and yet be unable to explain Why the article is proposing this might be the case. So for instance the first thing I did after seeing this headline was to go cross-reference the data with the NOAA. They put Miami's expected sea level rise at 0 to 1 feet over the next century [1]. So what is the reason for the discrepancy? Which figure is more likely? Why? 3,691 words and the reader will be in no way whatsoever capable of even proposing a suggestion to this question. [1] - https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html
- jellicle 8y ago
  > They put Miami's expected sea level rise at 0 to 1 feet over the next century That's a false description of what NOAA says. The sea level trend is an instantaneous rate, not a projection of any sort.
  - zaroth 8y ago
    “The relative sea level trend is 2.39 mm/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.43 mm/year based on monthly mean sea level data from 1931 to 1981 which is equivalent to a change of 0.78 feet in 100 years.”
    - jellicle 8y ago
      That's right. It's an instantaneous rate. The instantaneous rate is constantly increasing. It's not a forecast. What's hard to understand about this?
    - southern_cross 8y ago
      The last time I did the math (it's been a while now), assuming that I did this correctly it showed that the current rate of sea level rise is something like half the average rate of the last ten to fifteen thousand years. So the current rate would basically have to double just to get us back to the long-term average. And it might very well do that someday, and do so perfectly naturally, too. (Nobody has ever said that the natural rise in sea level has stopped since the beginning of the last interglacial period.) But that wouldn't be good news for places like Miami.
leereeves 8y ago
According to NASA [1], global sea levels have been rising at a fairly steady 3.2 millimeters per year since 1993. According to NOAA [2], the "relative sea level trend" in Miami Beach is 2.39 mm/year. At those rates, in 100 years, the sea will have risen about one foot, not six. 1: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/ 2: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/ https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/
- pstuart 8y ago
  Only if that rate remains steady, and it very well may not.
  - leereeves 8y ago
    True. And some scientists believe that rate is accelerating, for example Steve Nerem et al: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212150739.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212150739.h... That accelerating projection "has the potential to double the total sea level rise by 2100 as compared to projections that assume a constant rate -- to more than 60 cm instead of about 30". Two feet instead of one. I still don't see where six feet is coming from.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - mikestew 8y ago
      I still don't see where six feet is coming from. I read $SOMEWHERE recently that the the worst case scenario predicted six feet. But that's, IIRC, if we do absolutely nothing, the methane in the Arctic is all released, and Greenland melts. The more likely scenario is somewhere from 1-3 feet. So unless memory fails me, the article didn't just pull it out of its arse, but a source would've been nice rather than just throw a number out there with no backing whatsoever.
      - howard941 8y ago
slg 8y ago
I am not sure it is reasonable for every article about the effects of climate change to start with the evidence that climate change is real. If you come to this article from the angle of "climate change is a myth", a single article from Bloomberg was never going to be the turning point in your belief anyway.
- lakechfoma 8y ago
  Probably not but I think GPs point is that if the rhetoric of the article was different and better data included then stuff like this would be harder to tear up and dismiss. This happens on both sides on all issues.
  - llandho 8y ago
    People who still believe climate change is a myth aren’t reasoned or reasoning people. His position is ideological not logical. More info in a Bloomberg piece won’t help, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.
    - lakechfoma 8y ago
      Again I think you're right that it won't help sway peoples thoughts on the subject _alone_ but in aggregate if all the rhetoric from one side became harder to target by the opposing pundits then maybe that would help at least slow down conversion or heel digging. I don't know if I agree with the GP that this article would be considered fluff, or that it could be an easy target for pundits, but I definitely see that pattern pop up a lot. ACLU/EFF frequently disappoint me with completely valid points steeped in FUD and bad methodologies that make them easy to rebut. The opposition finds the errors, turns around, gets their base hype on some key emotional rebuttals or mocking while ignoring the real valid points, and all we end up with is stronger division between sides.
  - nikdaheratik 8y ago
    I think most of the people making this criticism are misunderstanding both the intended audience for the article and the point the writer was trying to make. The article was focused on problems Miami will likely be facing in the next 40 years due to rising sea levels and their pattern of development over the past 50 years. It is not trying to make the case for/against global warming to a non-scientific audience. It is trying to make the case against bullish development in S. Florida to investors who subscribe to Bloomberg. The point is basically, "Even if these guys don't end up under the ocean in 50 years, they're still going to have to pay more in taxes and water rates just to keep the city afloat"
jellicle 8y ago
> If you come at this from the angle of "climate change is a myth" Is it really a fair critique to insist that articles must be written to make sense to people who believe the moon is made of green cheese? And that every couple hundred words written for the general public must be fully-cited?
- adrianN 8y ago
  If a significant chunk of the population, including the president, actually believe that the Moon is made of green cheese...
  - marvi 8y ago
    Those people should feel free to invest in low lying real estate. They’ll make a killing if they’re right.
forapurpose 8y ago
Very many HN discussions begin with a comment criticizing the article, almost always with some easy Internet-style cynicism, hyperbole, anger, etc. It diminishes the quality of HN for me; it contributes little or nothing to my understanding.
- throwawaylolx 8y ago
  Blame everyone who upvoted this clickbait low-quality article to... over 200 points. Jesus
jlebar 8y ago
> Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. Note that your home does not need to be permanently underwater to have it destroyed by a storm. Not even a hurricane-type thing; there are parts of Miami that require permanent water pumps today to stay dry. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article209328849.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...
- southern_cross 8y ago
  The flooding referenced is the kind of thing that happens when you build infrastructure that is below sea level to begin with. (!?!) And then put in a drainage pipe system that allows water to flow out quickly during low tides, but lacks the check valves needed to prevent that water from flowing back in just as quickly during high tides. (!?!)
mistrial9 8y ago
At the 4th Climate Assessment of the State of California (this week in Sacramento) the officially accepted number is now 9'ish feet mean sea level rise by 2100. ( still reading summary as linked below) correction: 95th percentile of summary prediction is shown as 20 inches by 2050 (page 9 link below) (more specific report on this topic http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/ftp/pdf/docs/rising-seas-in-california-an-update-on-sea-level-rise-science.pdf http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/ftp/pdf/docs/rising-seas-in-...)
- mjn 8y ago
  To be more specific, 9 feet (2.7m) is the report's worst-case upper bound, the 99.9th-percentile results of running a new simulation model, RCP 8.5, not a prediction of what's likely to happen. That model has a huge range: Its 50th-percentile (median) estimate is only 1 foot (0.3m) of rise, and its 95th-percentile estimate is 7.5 feet (2.3m). There's discussion of that on pp. 31-32 of the summary report here (PDF): http://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/state/docs/20180827-StatewideSummary.pdf http://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/state/docs/20180827-Stat... The chart on p. 32 is a bit tricky to read, because this particular model is estimating maximum sea levels, not mean sea levels. Maximum sea level here is measured relative to a fixed reference of year 2000 mean sea level, and the 20th-century typical max was 1.5m above mean year 2000 sea level. The 99.9th-percentile line at 4.2m is therefore showing a 2.7m rise in the max sea level above pre-2000 norms. The colored blue and red ranges below the 99.9 lines represent the 50th-95th percentile estimates of the two different models. (In this case, at La Jolla specifically.)
  - mistrial9 8y ago
    hm I would reword that response .. still reading the two reports now
irrational 8y ago
> Would a giant sea wall work? No. Miami (and pretty much all of South Florida) sits on top of a sand bar on top of porous limestone rock. The ocean will just come up through the limestone rock and through the sand no matter how tall your sea wall is.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  Is that also true if the wall is say 5 km wide? (as some plans for the Netherlands propose).
  - irrational 8y ago
    Of course. The sea doesn't care how wide or tall the wall is. It will just go under it no problem. If the wall were put deep into the ground until it hit bedrock (a quick google search indicates the wall would have to go down at least 20,000 feet), then the water could not get through. But I imagine at that point it would be cheaper to move the entire city. The Netherlands has a completely different geology, so plans for one place can't be compared with plans for the other.
mbostleman 8y ago
Yes. I think the issue is that mainstream "journalism" is actually entertainment in all respects other than the fact that it carries a fairly widespread credibility among its audience as not being entertainment but rather a factual, verifiable source of information - one that is beyond the audience's ability to understand. Sort of like the unquestioning acceptance that many give to doctors or lawyers because (it is assumed) neither medicine or law can be understood without them. What I mean is, if you watch a movie, you suspend disbelief and willingly assume the context they give you to be real for the sake of the movie without questioning it. You do that because you want to be entertained. And if you took everything literally and demanded that the context be aligned with reality, it wouldn't be any fun. As such, few people walk out of something like a Mission Impossible movie believing that any of it was actually possible. I had a discussion in online chat with co-workers in the last week or so regarding the wild fires currently burning in the US west. One lamented how sad the effects of climate change like these are. Out of curiosity, I looked at historical stats for wildland fires. Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion. The person was surprised and admitted that he didn't have any actual reason to believe that the occurrence or size of fires was more or less - he just assumed they were more and that the cause was climate change. So to be clear, I'm not saying that climate change doesn't exist. Nor am I saying that wildland fires are not somehow affected by climate change. Only that people tend to take narratives that are created and repeated by journalists as facts, without questioning them, much as they would a movie.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Entirely agree that many of our opinions are often not based on much in the way of facts. But to try to do do better: what's your source on fires?
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  People also sometimes cherry-pick or carve up data so that they can find a "surprising" result, to use one of ~pg's favorite adjectives. Your coworker had the impression that wildfires are becoming larger and more damaging, and that climate change is a principal cause of this, due to widespread coverage to that effect (examples: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]). (Which I suppose was your point.) And many of those journalists are repeating each other, but eventually you find that a lot of those statements originate from the National Interagency Fire Center [7]. There, the raw numbers pretty clearly show an upward overall trend from, oh, about 1953 or so. Before 1953, the numbers look a lot different, and if someone were to just casually plug all those values into a graph, they could make the point that wildfires aren't getting worse after all. That person would be completely ignoring the massive increase in wildfire suppression efforts over that same period, of course, but they wouldn't want that to get in the way of their surprising finding. Further investigation into the subject would start to reveal all kinds of neat subtleties that would be missed from a quick glance at numbers, both from non-climate-related factors like increased habitation in the wildland-urban interface areas [8], as well as climate-related factors like the massive number of dead trees in western forests as a result of increased bark beetle activity [9] [10]. And then someone might begin to be in a position to have a more interesting discussion on the subject. :-) [1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2018-08-01/wildfires-are-getting-worse-and-more-costly-every-year https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2018-08-01/wi... [2]: http://www.climatecentral.org/western-wildfire-trends http://www.climatecentral.org/western-wildfire-trends [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/wildfires-have-gotten-bigger-recent-years-trend-is-likely-continue/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/wildfires... [4]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634369281/wildfires-could-be-the-new-norm https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634369281/wildfires-could-be-... [5]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2018-mendocino-carr-ferguson-climate https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2... [6]: https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bigger-more-frequent-and-longer-since-the-1980s-42993 https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi... [7]: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html [8]: https://www.wildfirex.com/2013/07/25/population-climbs-in-wildland-urban-interface/ https://www.wildfirex.com/2013/07/25/population-climbs-in-wi... [9]: https://www.fs.fed.us/research/invasive-species/insects/bark-beetle.php https://www.fs.fed.us/research/invasive-species/insects/bark... [10]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sierra-dead-trees-20170128-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sierra-dead-tr...
llandho 8y ago
If I come at your post from the angle that “you are an ideological idiot who has asymmetric requirements of evidence, who doesn’t understand risk, and who should be ignored entirely on this subject” you do nothing to convince me otherwise. Instead, your post reads like a cartoon of a “very smart” right-winger whose brain is entirely closed, and provides no evidence that you’re interested in or capable of engaging with the subject matter. Please don’t comment further unless you effectively prove that you’re not the intellectually lazy, purposefully ignorant, vile piece of shit you seem to be.
- sulam 8y ago
  Your response here is at least an order of magnitude more caustic than what you're replying to. At the risk of generating more bile, you should consider that you not only are not going to be getting the change you describe with your style of argument, you're making this community (such as it is) look bad and finally (and perhaps most importantly) you're reflecting poorly on climate-change believers, a community of interest that I consider myself a member of.
southern_cross 8y ago
Whenever I read articles like this these days, I just sort of automatically mentally strikethrough any mentions of climate change so that I can, you know, concentrate more on the real problems.
joe5150 8y ago
I think what you want is an encyclopedia article. Some (a lot) of us enjoy reading about people, places, and the narratives of their lives and struggles.
nikdaheratik 8y ago
Well one of the issues is that no one knows what the sea level rise will be in Miami in 100 years but we do know that the average rise won't necessarily be evenly distributed. Also that geology and geography are against the city in those respects (as they are against Venice, or New Orleans). And the point of the article isn't strictly limited to global sea rise, but rather the multiple issues facing Miami's water supply due to its history of development, the fact that most of its freshwater comes from underground sources, and its geography. I didn't find the article to be either misleading or "fluff" though it isn't something that would be helpful to a geologist or someone who is already familiar with alot of this already. Your point about the title is also misleading since, in nearly all news outfits, the editor picks the title not the author. To me, the main story the article is trying to tell isn't "the city is drowning", but rather that if you're considering investing in Muni-bonds for Miami (as a typical Bloomberg subscriber might), then you need to do more research compared to other cities as there are alot of issues under the surface. The same probably goes for real estate and other development (also typical subscribers to Bloomberg).

laverick 8y ago

Isn't Zillow ignoring the immense value created from all those new beachfront properties?

bovermyer 8y ago
Lex Luthor would like a word with you.
FranOntanaya 8y ago
That works better when the land isn't 100 miles wide with ocean on both sides. Miami City has a better ring than Miami Keys.
calgoo 8y ago
This is actually a joke i have told my wife who has family in Florida: The only way i would buy property in Florida is if im allowed to build an artificial hill/mountain on it, so that in 100 years my family will own a private island. I wonder if there is a long term business model here... Invest in land and prepare it to survive being surrounded by water, build infrastructure etc and then sell it to the same type of people who buy bunkers for end of the world situations.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  You're behind the game. Seriously, there was a major supreme court ruling in 2013 that allowed floating homes to be legally classified as homes instead of marine vessels which affords a whole slew of critical protections and distinctions. In everything from protection against seizure to the coast guard not being able to walk into your home to inspect for life jackets. Kind of makes you wonder why we haven't already been doing this on areas just off the current coast. Guess that old saying really is accurate -- necessity is the mother invention. Dutch Docklands is one of the companies building these new facilities. Their mock ups [1] look amazing. [1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States

ataturk 8y ago

Waiting patiently until we murder 4 Billion people.

beat 8y ago

The article isn't saying Miami will be underwater soon. It's saying that Miami's water supply is at risk, partly due to rising sea levels, partly due to human activity damaging the aquifer (limestone mining, toxic waste). Moreover, six feet of sea level rise isn't going to happen instantaneously. It will take decades. Property will slowly be lost, but people will just move inland (or move away). And a key question is, whose property goes underwater? If it's wealthy people on the beachfront, they can afford the loss. If it's poor people, that's something else. We saw that in New Orleans, where the worst Katrina flooding happened in the poorest neighborhoods. This also excludes the idea of simply building seawalls to protect low-lying areas. I mean, that's half of Holland, so it works. Making major social decisions on a distaste for the concept of global warming is foolish, though. Governments should operate pessimistically when it comes to threats to the land and people they govern. It should be assuming it will happen, on the worst-case side, not denying the threat because we don't like to think about it. Think that way, you might as well disband the fire department too. It's expensive and your house probably won't burn down.

alex_anglin 8y ago
Sea walls won’t work for Miami. The ground is too porous, so the water would just seep under.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Yeah, a better example would have been stilt houses, which are already scattered around the Florida coast due to the flooding from hurricanes
- beat 8y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking of that, but didn't want to extend the post.
igravious 8y ago
> The article isn't saying Miami will be underwater soon. I beg to differ, it's the first sentence of the title of the article: “Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. […]” Then there's, “Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates that six feet of sea-level rise would put a quarter of Miami’s homes underwater, rendering $200 billion of real estate worthless.” I don't know what you're arguing against the GP for. The question is, how are we to figure out how _concerned_ we should be? Clearly one day the good citizens of Miami are not going to be waking up to water lapping at their bedsheets. What timescale are we talking about? Who are Zillow? What options does the city of Miami have? Comparatively speaking is Miami an outlier or a typical case? I think journalists and news outlets do a major disservice to an important topic when they make alarmist headlines and skirt around the practical matters at the heart of articles such as this. The crux of the story, that Miami's freshwater is in peril before Miami's real estate is a valuable story to tell us. But please spare us the melodramatic, “What nobody knows is when that will happen, or what happens next.” You mean to say that the people in charge of managing these water systems are standing by dumbfounded and helpless? Maybe we should replace them by people who are able to problem solve in the face of adversity.

skh 8y ago

At this point in time people who deny climate change is occurring are impervious to logic and reason. They are like people who deny evolution or the people who believe the Earth is around 10,000 years old. Nothing is going to convince them they are wrong. It's too burdensome to ask that all articles about the detrimental effects of climate change present a proof of said claims. At some point in time it's pointless to engage in an endless reproving of claims that most sane people already believe in.

calcifer 8y ago
Honestly, the fact that your comment is downvoted speaks volumes about the audience here. The people who deny climate change are no different than antivaxxers.
- skh 8y ago
  That is a more apt comparison. I was trying to think of one that didn't have the appearance of being anti-religious. Yes, they are like anti-vaxxers.
temp64201292 8y ago
It is actually more than pointless to argue with these people, as many of them actively engage in conspiracy theories: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... I personally know someone with the belief that climate change is a political conspiracy. Any evidence to support climate change just points to a bigger "cover-up" and validates their beliefs. Almost always this is not an isolated belief but a pattern of thinking, and the person holds similar conspiracy theory beliefs about other issues. This is not a political left/right issue (the person I happen to know happens to be a left-wing conspiracy theorist). This is an issue of mild paranoid psychosis that is not being recognized and treated seriously because the symptoms are not very disturbing to others, and the people suffering from it happen to be relatively high-functioning. Eventually as these people age the symptoms get worse and they end up driving those close to them away.
- 8y ago

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I couldn't agree more. It seems to be an increasing trend in the media lately that articles are driven by narrative and emotional appeals than actual facts. This creates the bizarre scenario where you can read a 3,691 word story on how Miami will soon be underwater and yet be unable to explain Why the article is proposing this might be the case. So for instance the first thing I did after seeing this headline was to go cross-reference the data with the NOAA. They put Miami's expected sea level rise at 0 to 1 feet over the next century [1]. So what is the reason for the discrepancy? Which figure is more likely? Why? 3,691 words and the reader will be in no way whatsoever capable of even proposing a suggestion to this question. [1] - https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html

jellicle 8y ago
> They put Miami's expected sea level rise at 0 to 1 feet over the next century That's a false description of what NOAA says. The sea level trend is an instantaneous rate, not a projection of any sort.
- zaroth 8y ago
  “The relative sea level trend is 2.39 mm/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.43 mm/year based on monthly mean sea level data from 1931 to 1981 which is equivalent to a change of 0.78 feet in 100 years.”
  - jellicle 8y ago
    That's right. It's an instantaneous rate. The instantaneous rate is constantly increasing. It's not a forecast. What's hard to understand about this?
  - southern_cross 8y ago
    The last time I did the math (it's been a while now), assuming that I did this correctly it showed that the current rate of sea level rise is something like half the average rate of the last ten to fifteen thousand years. So the current rate would basically have to double just to get us back to the long-term average. And it might very well do that someday, and do so perfectly naturally, too. (Nobody has ever said that the natural rise in sea level has stopped since the beginning of the last interglacial period.) But that wouldn't be good news for places like Miami.

leereeves 8y ago

According to NASA [1], global sea levels have been rising at a fairly steady 3.2 millimeters per year since 1993. According to NOAA [2], the "relative sea level trend" in Miami Beach is 2.39 mm/year. At those rates, in 100 years, the sea will have risen about one foot, not six. 1: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/ 2: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/ https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/

pstuart 8y ago
Only if that rate remains steady, and it very well may not.
- leereeves 8y ago
  True. And some scientists believe that rate is accelerating, for example Steve Nerem et al: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212150739.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212150739.h... That accelerating projection "has the potential to double the total sea level rise by 2100 as compared to projections that assume a constant rate -- to more than 60 cm instead of about 30". Two feet instead of one. I still don't see where six feet is coming from.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikestew 8y ago
    I still don't see where six feet is coming from. I read $SOMEWHERE recently that the the worst case scenario predicted six feet. But that's, IIRC, if we do absolutely nothing, the methane in the Arctic is all released, and Greenland melts. The more likely scenario is somewhere from 1-3 feet. So unless memory fails me, the article didn't just pull it out of its arse, but a source would've been nice rather than just throw a number out there with no backing whatsoever.
    - howard941 8y ago

slg 8y ago

I am not sure it is reasonable for every article about the effects of climate change to start with the evidence that climate change is real. If you come to this article from the angle of "climate change is a myth", a single article from Bloomberg was never going to be the turning point in your belief anyway.

lakechfoma 8y ago
Probably not but I think GPs point is that if the rhetoric of the article was different and better data included then stuff like this would be harder to tear up and dismiss. This happens on both sides on all issues.
- llandho 8y ago
  People who still believe climate change is a myth aren’t reasoned or reasoning people. His position is ideological not logical. More info in a Bloomberg piece won’t help, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.
  - lakechfoma 8y ago
    Again I think you're right that it won't help sway peoples thoughts on the subject _alone_ but in aggregate if all the rhetoric from one side became harder to target by the opposing pundits then maybe that would help at least slow down conversion or heel digging. I don't know if I agree with the GP that this article would be considered fluff, or that it could be an easy target for pundits, but I definitely see that pattern pop up a lot. ACLU/EFF frequently disappoint me with completely valid points steeped in FUD and bad methodologies that make them easy to rebut. The opposition finds the errors, turns around, gets their base hype on some key emotional rebuttals or mocking while ignoring the real valid points, and all we end up with is stronger division between sides.
- nikdaheratik 8y ago
  I think most of the people making this criticism are misunderstanding both the intended audience for the article and the point the writer was trying to make. The article was focused on problems Miami will likely be facing in the next 40 years due to rising sea levels and their pattern of development over the past 50 years. It is not trying to make the case for/against global warming to a non-scientific audience. It is trying to make the case against bullish development in S. Florida to investors who subscribe to Bloomberg. The point is basically, "Even if these guys don't end up under the ocean in 50 years, they're still going to have to pay more in taxes and water rates just to keep the city afloat"

jellicle 8y ago

> If you come at this from the angle of "climate change is a myth" Is it really a fair critique to insist that articles must be written to make sense to people who believe the moon is made of green cheese? And that every couple hundred words written for the general public must be fully-cited?

adrianN 8y ago
If a significant chunk of the population, including the president, actually believe that the Moon is made of green cheese...
- marvi 8y ago
  Those people should feel free to invest in low lying real estate. They’ll make a killing if they’re right.

forapurpose 8y ago

Very many HN discussions begin with a comment criticizing the article, almost always with some easy Internet-style cynicism, hyperbole, anger, etc. It diminishes the quality of HN for me; it contributes little or nothing to my understanding.

throwawaylolx 8y ago
Blame everyone who upvoted this clickbait low-quality article to... over 200 points. Jesus

jlebar 8y ago

> Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. Note that your home does not need to be permanently underwater to have it destroyed by a storm. Not even a hurricane-type thing; there are parts of Miami that require permanent water pumps today to stay dry. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article209328849.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...

southern_cross 8y ago
The flooding referenced is the kind of thing that happens when you build infrastructure that is below sea level to begin with. (!?!) And then put in a drainage pipe system that allows water to flow out quickly during low tides, but lacks the check valves needed to prevent that water from flowing back in just as quickly during high tides. (!?!)

mistrial9 8y ago

At the 4th Climate Assessment of the State of California (this week in Sacramento) the officially accepted number is now 9'ish feet mean sea level rise by 2100. ( still reading summary as linked below) correction: 95th percentile of summary prediction is shown as 20 inches by 2050 (page 9 link below) (more specific report on this topic http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/ftp/pdf/docs/rising-seas-in-california-an-update-on-sea-level-rise-science.pdf http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/ftp/pdf/docs/rising-seas-in-...)

mjn 8y ago
To be more specific, 9 feet (2.7m) is the report's worst-case upper bound, the 99.9th-percentile results of running a new simulation model, RCP 8.5, not a prediction of what's likely to happen. That model has a huge range: Its 50th-percentile (median) estimate is only 1 foot (0.3m) of rise, and its 95th-percentile estimate is 7.5 feet (2.3m). There's discussion of that on pp. 31-32 of the summary report here (PDF): http://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/state/docs/20180827-StatewideSummary.pdf http://www.climateassessment.ca.gov/state/docs/20180827-Stat... The chart on p. 32 is a bit tricky to read, because this particular model is estimating maximum sea levels, not mean sea levels. Maximum sea level here is measured relative to a fixed reference of year 2000 mean sea level, and the 20th-century typical max was 1.5m above mean year 2000 sea level. The 99.9th-percentile line at 4.2m is therefore showing a 2.7m rise in the max sea level above pre-2000 norms. The colored blue and red ranges below the 99.9 lines represent the 50th-95th percentile estimates of the two different models. (In this case, at La Jolla specifically.)
- mistrial9 8y ago
  hm I would reword that response .. still reading the two reports now

irrational 8y ago

> Would a giant sea wall work? No. Miami (and pretty much all of South Florida) sits on top of a sand bar on top of porous limestone rock. The ocean will just come up through the limestone rock and through the sand no matter how tall your sea wall is.

Scarblac 8y ago
Is that also true if the wall is say 5 km wide? (as some plans for the Netherlands propose).
- irrational 8y ago
  Of course. The sea doesn't care how wide or tall the wall is. It will just go under it no problem. If the wall were put deep into the ground until it hit bedrock (a quick google search indicates the wall would have to go down at least 20,000 feet), then the water could not get through. But I imagine at that point it would be cheaper to move the entire city. The Netherlands has a completely different geology, so plans for one place can't be compared with plans for the other.

mbostleman 8y ago

Yes. I think the issue is that mainstream "journalism" is actually entertainment in all respects other than the fact that it carries a fairly widespread credibility among its audience as not being entertainment but rather a factual, verifiable source of information - one that is beyond the audience's ability to understand. Sort of like the unquestioning acceptance that many give to doctors or lawyers because (it is assumed) neither medicine or law can be understood without them. What I mean is, if you watch a movie, you suspend disbelief and willingly assume the context they give you to be real for the sake of the movie without questioning it. You do that because you want to be entertained. And if you took everything literally and demanded that the context be aligned with reality, it wouldn't be any fun. As such, few people walk out of something like a Mission Impossible movie believing that any of it was actually possible. I had a discussion in online chat with co-workers in the last week or so regarding the wild fires currently burning in the US west. One lamented how sad the effects of climate change like these are. Out of curiosity, I looked at historical stats for wildland fires. Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion. The person was surprised and admitted that he didn't have any actual reason to believe that the occurrence or size of fires was more or less - he just assumed they were more and that the cause was climate change. So to be clear, I'm not saying that climate change doesn't exist. Nor am I saying that wildland fires are not somehow affected by climate change. Only that people tend to take narratives that are created and repeated by journalists as facts, without questioning them, much as they would a movie.

skybrian 8y ago
Entirely agree that many of our opinions are often not based on much in the way of facts. But to try to do do better: what's your source on fires?
thaumaturgy 8y ago
People also sometimes cherry-pick or carve up data so that they can find a "surprising" result, to use one of ~pg's favorite adjectives. Your coworker had the impression that wildfires are becoming larger and more damaging, and that climate change is a principal cause of this, due to widespread coverage to that effect (examples: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]). (Which I suppose was your point.) And many of those journalists are repeating each other, but eventually you find that a lot of those statements originate from the National Interagency Fire Center [7]. There, the raw numbers pretty clearly show an upward overall trend from, oh, about 1953 or so. Before 1953, the numbers look a lot different, and if someone were to just casually plug all those values into a graph, they could make the point that wildfires aren't getting worse after all. That person would be completely ignoring the massive increase in wildfire suppression efforts over that same period, of course, but they wouldn't want that to get in the way of their surprising finding. Further investigation into the subject would start to reveal all kinds of neat subtleties that would be missed from a quick glance at numbers, both from non-climate-related factors like increased habitation in the wildland-urban interface areas [8], as well as climate-related factors like the massive number of dead trees in western forests as a result of increased bark beetle activity [9] [10]. And then someone might begin to be in a position to have a more interesting discussion on the subject. :-) [1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2018-08-01/wildfires-are-getting-worse-and-more-costly-every-year https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2018-08-01/wi... [2]: http://www.climatecentral.org/western-wildfire-trends http://www.climatecentral.org/western-wildfire-trends [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/wildfires-have-gotten-bigger-recent-years-trend-is-likely-continue/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/wildfires... [4]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634369281/wildfires-could-be-the-new-norm https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634369281/wildfires-could-be-... [5]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2018-mendocino-carr-ferguson-climate https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2... [6]: https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bigger-more-frequent-and-longer-since-the-1980s-42993 https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi... [7]: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html [8]: https://www.wildfirex.com/2013/07/25/population-climbs-in-wildland-urban-interface/ https://www.wildfirex.com/2013/07/25/population-climbs-in-wi... [9]: https://www.fs.fed.us/research/invasive-species/insects/bark-beetle.php https://www.fs.fed.us/research/invasive-species/insects/bark... [10]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sierra-dead-trees-20170128-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sierra-dead-tr...

llandho 8y ago

If I come at your post from the angle that “you are an ideological idiot who has asymmetric requirements of evidence, who doesn’t understand risk, and who should be ignored entirely on this subject” you do nothing to convince me otherwise. Instead, your post reads like a cartoon of a “very smart” right-winger whose brain is entirely closed, and provides no evidence that you’re interested in or capable of engaging with the subject matter. Please don’t comment further unless you effectively prove that you’re not the intellectually lazy, purposefully ignorant, vile piece of shit you seem to be.

sulam 8y ago
Your response here is at least an order of magnitude more caustic than what you're replying to. At the risk of generating more bile, you should consider that you not only are not going to be getting the change you describe with your style of argument, you're making this community (such as it is) look bad and finally (and perhaps most importantly) you're reflecting poorly on climate-change believers, a community of interest that I consider myself a member of.

southern_cross 8y ago

Whenever I read articles like this these days, I just sort of automatically mentally strikethrough any mentions of climate change so that I can, you know, concentrate more on the real problems.

joe5150 8y ago

I think what you want is an encyclopedia article. Some (a lot) of us enjoy reading about people, places, and the narratives of their lives and struggles.

nikdaheratik 8y ago

Well one of the issues is that no one knows what the sea level rise will be in Miami in 100 years but we do know that the average rise won't necessarily be evenly distributed. Also that geology and geography are against the city in those respects (as they are against Venice, or New Orleans). And the point of the article isn't strictly limited to global sea rise, but rather the multiple issues facing Miami's water supply due to its history of development, the fact that most of its freshwater comes from underground sources, and its geography. I didn't find the article to be either misleading or "fluff" though it isn't something that would be helpful to a geologist or someone who is already familiar with alot of this already. Your point about the title is also misleading since, in nearly all news outfits, the editor picks the title not the author. To me, the main story the article is trying to tell isn't "the city is drowning", but rather that if you're considering investing in Muni-bonds for Miami (as a typical Bloomberg subscriber might), then you need to do more research compared to other cities as there are alot of issues under the surface. The same probably goes for real estate and other development (also typical subscribers to Bloomberg).