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People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything. Florida has plenty of water, the whole state is designed around shade and air conditioning, and it's reall

by scythe 5y ago

People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything. Florida has plenty of water, the whole state is designed around shade and air conditioning, and it's really rainy in the summer anyway. It's also not actually hotter than the other lowlands south of the Potomac/Ohio. (I grew up in Florida.) It's the places that suddenly need A/C to keep people alive that will have problems with buildings that aren't designed for it and tenants who can't afford it. And yeah, there are hurricanes but at least the buildings are designed for it. The Northeast has sustained worse hurricane damage than Florida over the last decade, due partially to unprepared infrastructure and a migrating storm zone. (Three cheers for the Bahamas!)

jjav 5y ago
> People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything. I wouldn't mind moving to FL, weather is great and I like the location for boating. But FL is very low and rising sea level is going to cause lots of problems, so I can't bring myself to invest any kind of money in real estate in FL if it's going to be flooding in a few decades.
- scythe 5y ago
  Sea level rise over this century will be somewhere between 1 and 4 meters. That's bad for some places like Cape Coral. But most of Florida isn't that low. Sea level rise is a very slow, long-term problem. The major reachable consequences of global warming are heat waves and regional declines in precipitation. Also hard-to-predict ecosystem sensitivity questions (e.g. fires in California). I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about the ocean, but it's a generational problem, not a personal problem, in the vast majority of cases.
  - jdkee 5y ago
    The mean height of the state of Florida is 2m above sea level. See https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-future-is-now-for-sea-level-rise-in-south-florida/ https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-future-is-now-for-se...
    - jjav 5y ago
      And as the article above points out, Florida ground is porous, so even before sea levels rise enough to flood the street level, it is flooding from below which impacts both underground infrastructure and fresh water supplies.
    - scythe 5y ago
      No, it isn't. It's 100 feet, or 30 meters. See: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-with-the-lowest-average-elevations.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-with-the-lowes... https://vacationidea.com/florida/highest-elevation-in-florida.html https://vacationidea.com/florida/highest-elevation-in-florid... https://johnenglander.net/florida-is-not-going-underwater-anytime-soon/ https://johnenglander.net/florida-is-not-going-underwater-an... The house I grew up in nearly flooded during Hurricane Frances and the surveyor lists the elevation as eight feet. If Florida's mean elevation was six feet, huge swathes of the state would be underwater every hurricane. Wikipedia lists the average elevation of Miami as 6 feet, which might be where that guy got confused.

by scythe 5y ago

jjav 5y ago

> People moving to Florida doesn't contradict anything. I wouldn't mind moving to FL, weather is great and I like the location for boating. But FL is very low and rising sea level is going to cause lots of problems, so I can't bring myself to invest any kind of money in real estate in FL if it's going to be flooding in a few decades.

scythe 5y ago
Sea level rise over this century will be somewhere between 1 and 4 meters. That's bad for some places like Cape Coral. But most of Florida isn't that low. Sea level rise is a very slow, long-term problem. The major reachable consequences of global warming are heat waves and regional declines in precipitation. Also hard-to-predict ecosystem sensitivity questions (e.g. fires in California). I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about the ocean, but it's a generational problem, not a personal problem, in the vast majority of cases.
- jdkee 5y ago
  The mean height of the state of Florida is 2m above sea level. See https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-future-is-now-for-sea-level-rise-in-south-florida/ https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-future-is-now-for-se...
  - jjav 5y ago
    And as the article above points out, Florida ground is porous, so even before sea levels rise enough to flood the street level, it is flooding from below which impacts both underground infrastructure and fresh water supplies.
  - scythe 5y ago
    No, it isn't. It's 100 feet, or 30 meters. See: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-with-the-lowest-average-elevations.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-with-the-lowes... https://vacationidea.com/florida/highest-elevation-in-florida.html https://vacationidea.com/florida/highest-elevation-in-florid... https://johnenglander.net/florida-is-not-going-underwater-anytime-soon/ https://johnenglander.net/florida-is-not-going-underwater-an... The house I grew up in nearly flooded during Hurricane Frances and the surveyor lists the elevation as eight feet. If Florida's mean elevation was six feet, huge swathes of the state would be underwater every hurricane. Wikipedia lists the average elevation of Miami as 6 feet, which might be where that guy got confused.