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Climate change enters the chat...
by nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
Climate change enters the chat...
- adrianN 2y agoEven pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings (other than war, which to my knowledge never was insurable) in most areas of the world.
- agsnu 2y agoA significant portion of human structures are located close to the coast (seaborne trade having been a huge enabler of economic development for a few hundred years) and are exposed to flooding from rising sea levels, or built in valleys that are increasingly at risk from flooding due to far-above-long-term-historic-norms precipitation runoff (higher atmospheric temps lead to more energy in weather systems; see eg massive floods in Europe in the past few years).
- adrianN 2y agoCompared to the other challenges climate change poses those are fairly simple engineering problems. The Netherlands manage fine with large parts of the country below sea level.
- graemep 2y agoand sea level rises are slow enough that countries with more high ground than The Netherlands can just not rebuild/maintain old houses in vulnerable positions and build higher (often just a bit further in) instead. Some buildings buy the coast (especially in port cities) and have steep rises anyway. There is a huge threat of cultural loss - e.g. Venice.
- llamaimperative 2y agoA few critical ingredients being: no denialism about their vulnerability, strong social and economic commitment to reducing vulnerability, lack of reflexively blaming floods on illegal immigrants or trans people
- mrguyorama 2y agoAlso they don't blame the climate or weather on democrats there.
- llamaimperative 2y agoI forgot that one! The Dems controlling the weather. Big one!
- jyounker 2y agoThe Netherlands has been planning for the impacts of sea-level rise for decades now. At least twenty years ago the government broached the idea (with TV commercials) that they were going to have to abandon some are areas to the sea.
- avianlyric 2y agoYou’re ignoring things like the geological conditions in the Netherlands, they have very peaty soil which is fairly impermeable to water. Which makes the task of keep the sea back pretty easy, you just build a big wall. But if you look in places like Florida, the ground conditions there are substantially more porous. If you try to keep the sea back there with a simple wall, it’ll just flow under the wall through the soil. You would have to dig all the way to bedrock and install some kind of impermeable barrier to prevent most of Florida from flooding due to sea level rise. Something that’s unbelievably cost prohibitive to do. The Netherlands only exists below sea level because their ground conditions meant it was possible to pump out the country using technology available in the 1740s. If the ground conditions weren’t basically perfect for this kind of geo-engineering, the Netherlands simply wouldn’t exist as it does today. You’re using an example that exists purely as a result of survivorship bias, as an argument that it’s practical to apply the same techniques or achieve the same outcomes anywhere else. Completely ignoring the fact that your example only exists because a unique set of geologic conditions made it possible, and those conditions are far from universal, and not in anyway correlated with places we humans would like to protect.
- wiredfool 2y agoKarst Topography enters the room....
- ekianjo 2y ago[flagged]
- soco 2y agoSaid the American living in a log cabin in Montana. But if you're from, say, Tuvalu, or Venice, the 15cm rise of the last decades is definitely noticeable, and the trend has no reason to stop or decrease.
- ljf 2y agoAgreed - Where I live now, 8 thousand years ago I could have walked all the way from the UK to Holland. Even just 1000 years ago the coastline here went four miles out to sea compared to today. In the last 20 year we've seen the erosion of the coastline here accelerating - regular news stories about people losing their houses to the sea: https://www.norfolk.gov.uk/article/56352/Challenges-of-coastal-erosion-and-flooding-set-for-discussion-by-councillors https://www.norfolk.gov.uk/article/56352/Challenges-of-coast... It doesn't matter if you think it is human caused or not, the sea level is undeniably rising: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-14/#:~:text=Long%2Dterm%20measurements%20of%20tide,(0.14%20inches%20per%20year) https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha....
- georgeplusplus 2y agoit used to be reported that Venice is sinking into the water but now the climate nut jobs have flipped it to it’s actually because it’s rising. I guess it’s all relative
- soco 2y agoIt's difficult to not be sarcastic but let me try my best: Venice sinking is what happens when water is rising.
- avianlyric 2y agoEh, Venice is also sinking regardless of sea level rise. That’s what happens when you build a city on top of what is practically a swamp. No surprise that big heavy buildings put on top of loose, waterlogged soil are gonna slowly sink into that soil.
- CalRobert 2y agoSeems like having the ocean at your door would be bad for the structure? Or burning down in a hot dry period…
- adrianN 2y agoWhy would a city like London or Paris burn down in a hot dry period?
- snacksmcgee 2y agoYou're refuting a lot of established facts about the risks of climate change, in a way that seems indicative of a certain ideology. Can you explain more what your position is?
- adrianN 2y agoMy position is that climate change is an existential threat to civilization, but buildings are not at a risk that would make them uninsurable. We build cities both in very wet and very hot and dry climates without much trouble. Those are engineering problems we can solve without much trouble.
- llamaimperative 2y agoBut with lots more money, which is what insurance deals with Of course they’re insurable at some premium. The question is whether there is any premium someone is willing to pay that can also cover the risk.
- notabee 2y agoIt's also a social coordination problem. For example a neighborhood where all the homes have to be fire resistant is going to fare a lot better, and probably be cheaper for the individual home owners to build and insure, than the one fire-resistant home in a neighborhood of tinder boxes. I don't think the prognosis is good for the U.S. in that regard. We have very little social cohesion and a lot of parties interested in making the situation worse for their own benefit.
- swiftcoder 2y agoI don't know about that. The Iberian peninsula is not historically at much risk for natural disasters, and we now suffer alternating forest fires and floods pretty much every year...
- lores 2y agoI remember forest fires yearly in northern Spain in the 80s. Are they more violent now?
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoClimate change deals frequency, rather than novelty. Oh and as crypto bros like to say: we're early.
- swiftcoder 2y agoMostly they seem to have planted a lot more Eucalyptus, which makes the fires worse. The severe floods on the other hand seem to be catching everyone by surprise.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoExcept for Fire?
- helboi4 2y ago[flagged]
- rbanffy 2y ago> Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings Floods, storms, droughts, fire? They appear to be getting worse. More restrictive codes designed for better fireproofing buildings, for instance, can solve a number of problems in California in fire prone areas. Another thing that has a political solution is forest management. Lack of water can be solved by desalination, which becomes an energy problem rather than a water one. Very dry areas can benefit from solar panels because they reduce water loss from evaporation, thus reducing the pressure on water supplies. It is expensive, but that's another problem.
- notabee 2y agoThat's not really true. The introduction of so much extra energy into the atmosphere is going to make weather extremes worse all over the world, and harder to predict as historical models become less relevant. Large scale pattern changes like the AMOC shutting down are going to completely change many local weather patterns so that e.g. places that have little history of tornados will start having them, or places that used to be too wet for wildfires will suddenly experience them in extreme drought conditions. Despite scientists' best efforts, we're running a global experiment with no control group and predictions will only become more difficult the harder we push the system into a new state.
- jeffhuys 2y agoPole drift.
- defrost 2y agoMagnetic, rotational, geodetic .. ? What are you trying to say?
- falcor84 2y agoCan there even be geodetic drift of the poles? I sort of assumed that our lat/lon system is based on the poles being fixed points as a matter of definition.
- defrost 2y agoEach ellipsoid is rigidly defined (well, some historic ones are sloppy), so WGS84 won't drift .. (that's a bold statement, is it true down to the micron and if so what are the absolute* datums to reference against?). That said, there are literally hundreds of historic pre WGS84 ellipsoid|datum pairings, each with a somewhat different "survey map pole". Historically geodectic poles have shifted as a function of datums. The main point here, such as it is, was to poke at the infomation free aspect of "polar drift" as a comment .. which pole and what does that have to do with climate change? etc.
- avianlyric 2y agoWe still use many of those old ellipsis and datum’s today. When you’re doing human things, like surveying land, and defining property boundaries. It’s nice to work with a coordinate system which remains fixed relative to the area you’re surveying, and doesn’t drift due to annoying things like tectonic movement, or your entire country slowly tipping into the ocean.
- defrost 2y agoFWiW I'm old enough to have navigated via LORAN and travelled through over two thirds of the 190+ countries on the planet tying in multitudes of old datums to the "new" WGS84 standard as part of a career in geophysical surveying (Gravimetrics, tides, magnetics, radiometrics, EM, etc.) I'm not old enough to have seen Great Britain and relate isles pressed down by the weight of kilometres of ice though .. that'd be a great great great grand something that saw that.
- ekianjo 2y agoStill waiting for the water to flood New York...
- fragmede 2y agoHurricane Ida in 2019 brought torrential rains which flooded the city, especially the subway.
- ekianjo 2y agoTorrential rain has nothing to do with sea rising which is the topic discussed at hand. You can have torrential rains anywhere in the world not just on the coastline.
- jyounker 2y agoThat happened six years ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/severe-rainfall-hits-new-york-city-leaving-thousands-without-power-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/severe-rainfall-hits-new-yor...
- Macha 2y agoAnd last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxqswOkZMSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxqswOkZMSI
- randerson 2y agoHurricane Sandy flooded big parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. I have friends who couldn't go back to their apartments or offices for months afterwards.
- topspin 2y agoHow did climate change cause vast neighborhoods of single-family wooden mcmansions to be constructed with ~3 meters of separation?