Alaska must, as well, but I don't know where they are, and whether existing population centers are threatened by them.
There was a pretty damn big earthquake in Anchorage in living memory
The article also says that Alaska is going to be the next Florida, another reason to question their desirability criteria.
Don't count out the elevated inland cities in the country's midsection, like Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee and Detroit
I have long thought Duluth might turn out pretty nice in 50 years or so. Port town, no worries about fresh water, &c.
My impression for California is that locations are going to stay good in a sorta First In, Last Out way. The most tempting places that got the first attention will still have water and be tempting. The places that settled later will be yuckier (drier, hotter) sooner. I don't expect anything that depends on water development after the 1960's or 1970's to last another century.
Lot of wasted capital. I suppose that's OK if it is capital paid for under our old rich conditions, but it sure is a shame if it is paid for by bond money, and the costs pushed into the poorer future.
The article also says that Alaska is going to be the next Florida, another reason to question their desirability criteria.
Crazy republicans, rednecks, dangerous wildlife. Checks out.
A friend of mine who specializes in climate adaptation planning has said that climate impacts are so chaotic and garbage-can-y that these kinds of predictions of which places will be the most resilient are not anything to rely on.
I will be very sad if NYC is substantially damaged in my lifetime.
You all could probably have guessed that one.
I've heard that, too, but I think having a great lake down the road is better than not having a great lake down the road.
Well, unless the extreme continental areas dry up and become like Central Asia. Lake Superior is big but its watershed isn't, no?
I watched a talk about the Museum in the 21st century. The heads of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MFA (as well as the Getty) were on the panel. Somebody asked about climate change and the rising sea levels and how they might fare. The Met, at least, is on high ground. The MFA is on filled land. The MFA is trying to incorporate the rising waters into its building plans, at least.
I think having a great lake down the road is better than not having a great lake down the road.
PROVIDED ITS NOT FULL OF TOXIC ALGAE.
7: I have bad news about three years ago.
Anyhow, we moved to a hill, so we should be fine.
14: Substantially, probably wrong. Irreparably?
Oh FFS, I hate these uses of political geographical boundaries to talk about this kind of thing. Maybe Anchorage is going to be sweet when it's all palm trees and flamingos, but Alaska is ginormous and includes diverse environments, some of which are already bellwethers of climate change with their melting permafrost and newly-arrived spruce beetles. And I wish that people would stop making Portland seem so attractive. It's about to start raining for the next 9 months, fuckers, so stay away.
Don't everyone be coming to the Wasatch Front to get your own mountain house. We don't actually have any water.
When the great Cascadian subduction quake brings beachfront property to Portland, this place is going to achieve peak insufferability.
17: So the permafrost melting will lead to more bog conditions, right? And they'll be partially drowned in lower areas, especially in the lower Yukon. If anything that makes it even more Florida-like. Well, pre-archipelago Florida, anyway.
Might as well get started planting citrus.
There's a reason they call it Anchorange.
Because the mountain range is full of ancho peppers?
Alaska is big enough to be both the new Florida and the new Mew Mexico.
Maybe I'll live in Chicago but buy up a city block in Detroit, for my grandchildren.
Enormous kittens roaming the taiga, just awful.
Heh. My guy and I have been going 10 rounds about moving from Inwood/NYC to Cleveland. Maybe we'll be like those jackasses who bought a loft in Soho in the 70s.
This map seems pretty cool and informative, but I can't quite figure out how it works. It gets all wonky when you start clicking on stuff. For example, when you look at the population living at or below sea level, the U.S. is "very high" and South Korea is only "high." Yet the size of S.K. on the sea level map is very large relative to its actual size, while the U.S. is small.
I haven't read the article, of course, but Jesus is totally right about Alaska (as is GY in 1). Especially when it comes to physical geography and climate, "Alaska" just isn't a meaningful unit. The Arctic is already warming at a much faster rate than the globe as a whole, and the sea ice is reaching record summer minima frequently. Several coastal communities are already making concrete plans to relocate because their existing villages are literally eroding away. Even in places like Anchorage, a rise of a couple degrees in average temperature may just mean that winter is dominated by sleet and icy roads rather than snow. This past winter it rained in January.
And in addition to the earthquakes, there's also (in various parts of the state) tsunamis, hurricane-strength storms, forest fires, and volcanoes. There are a lot of good reasons to move to Alaska, but "consistently pleasant climate" and "lack of natural disasters" are not among them, regardless of which particular area of the state you're talking about.
United States
Population living less than 5m above sea level, 2010
1,296,960,923 people
37 !!??!
Maybe this shows why math people can't explain their research?
It's gotten much less crowded since 2010.
That figure includes the mole people, of course.
So, is this true?
I've seen four major reports (details over the fold) from very different sources, all making the same point: decarbonizing the world economy will involve economic costs that are (a) small; and (b) far outweighed by the benefits
I wasn't aware that there was a plausible path that achives, "decarbonizing the world economy" let alone one that was clear enough that it was possible to estimate costs precisely. On the other hand, I find it easy to believe this:
[S]taffers at the International Monetary Fund, long the guardian of fiscal rectitude has concluded that for most countries, the local side benefits of reducing pollution would be sufficient to offset the costs for carbon prices up to $50/tonne.
I think he just means "stabilizing rates to those of 2000 (or 1990) in the West" which is pretty different. But he's right that achieving those goals doesn't seem to produce economic armaggedon, which is great.
Don't everyone be coming to the Wasatch Front to get your own mountain house. We don't actually have any water.
Oh sure, now that you have yours...
The modeling to date doesn't look all that dire for us here in the north. Maybe looking at more variability and some shifting along the lines of winters getting warmer and wetter and summers getting a bit drier.
it's pretty depressing for me that my beloved home (where my pops lives) is the highest point of land in the county, being as it's up on a bluff about forty motherfucking feet above the river level at high tide. maybe thirty-five at neap tide or whatever. plus, as you can tell when you go to garden, everything is built on sand (though there are clovis point arrowheads, which were made 10,000 years ago, I think? so peeps have been living there and not being scoured away by The Big One for a decent while.) this is part of my brother's 'group of shared family compounds' plan, where we have one in the mountains of west virginny, and one on a cliff in indonesia, and stuff like that. I'll admit the one on the cliff in indonesia is riiiiiight on the beach, which seems troublesome, but on the other and, it's made of volcanic rock and there's a gigantic active volcano ejecting new stuff there too? does that even help or does it mean we'll die in a krakatoan katastrophe? is washington, D.C. toast? prolly.
Having a nearby active volcano might be rather handy. It's continually creating new land, so even if the sea level does rise you can keep above water by just hopping on to the new stuff once it's cooled off enough.
49: unless of course the dire predictions that melting will lead to changes in the bouyancy of the crust and on to massive increasing in vulcanism come true.
50: that's even better. Continually supplied new land for all! And we'll need it...
Just to promote the home country once more, Scotland is one of the few areas in the world where sea level is expected to fall for the foreseeable future, because the ground is still rebounding from having the glaciers removed at the end of the last ice age, plus the polar ice cap is currently pulling sea towards it via gravitational pull and when the icecap melts that'll stop happening. Greenland too, but more so. They're looking at a 100m drop in sea levels round their shores once the ice is gone.
Ironically, this could mean that no sooner is the North-West Passage opened up than it becomes impassable again because it's dried up.