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).

Start worrying when the banks stop offering mortgages to people trying to buy property in south beach.

I remember when Katrina flooded New Orleans, lots of people were asking why rebuild the city when it almost certainly will flood like that again. And the answer was a simple, do you know how much it would cost to relocate everyone?

What does it do to the economy when almost everyones largest asset(their house) is worth effectively zero and people still have 20 years on their mortgage.

In my old city (Calgary, Canada) we had a pretty bad flood in 2013. The government made, what I thought was a smart, deal with the home owners.

They would get some government assistence with the condition that this was the first and only time that the governmnet would help.

Some owners rebuilt, others just bulldozed their homes. Now everyone knows where they stand, the government helped shoulder the initial burden and the people who moved helped lower the number of people living in a flood plain.

Interestingly, the Miami housing market outlook for 2019 is excellent, in spite of this news.

https://gordcollins.com/real-estate/miami-real-estate-foreca...

It would appear that people who actually have skin in the game believe otherwise.

Part of the problem here is exacerbated by all the flood insurance that effectively subsidizes building in flood plains. In addition to long term measures to mitigate climate change, we should have a tax on areas that are threatened by flooding and water levels rising so that we can reduce the immediate issues by incentivizing people to move away from them.

There are technical solutions to all of this. I come from a country that has been fighting back the sea for centuries (Netherlands) and that has been exporting it's knowledge to do so for a long time as well. The basic consensus is that we'll need bigger dikes and a few other things over the next decades. Plenty of time to build that. Not a problem. At least not in places that can afford to invest in solutions.

Basically build some dikes, desalination plants, pumping stations, etc. and start planning which areas to protect and which areas to abandon. Problem solved.

All of this requires money of course. Luckily, Miami is still a pretty rich city in a relatively rich state; it can handle this.

If the worst happens, it will be because of ignorance and mismanagement and not because of a lack of solutions or means. It may take a few minor incidents before people figure this out but the smart thing would be to not wait for that.

I've had a class in hydrology. The article did a good job covering the actual threats to the water supply. It ended on a note of "But the impact of people's choices is the bigger threat to Miami's survival." I think that's true. However, I feel it did a poor job of really spelling that out.

Despite pockets of extreme wealth—one study estimated that the Miami metro area has the nation’s eighth-highest number of millionaires—the county overall is poor. Its median household income of $44,224 is almost one-quarter lower than that of the country as a whole.

It's not uncommon for ocean front property to be very desirable and very expensive. I'm guessing that a lot of those millionaires live near the beach or on the beach and their homes may be some of the ones most at risk of ending up under water as sea levels rise.

Rich people are typically the most able to up and move elsewhere. If the rich people in waterfront property homes start leaving, you are left with a bunch of relatively poor people and hard-to-solve, expensive problems.

This means you don't need sea levels to rise six feet to significantly alter the city of Miami in ways that can spell Miami's doom in some sense. Like Galveston, which was an important and rich city at one time and then was devastated by a single hurricane, Miami could become a shadow of its former self with no hope of recovery.

You only need it to rise however much would serve as some kind of tipping point where rich folks would stop feeling it was a desirable place to be. Maybe that's when their yard is inundated. Or maybe it will be determined by some other metric entirely.

The reality is there may be no one who is capable of predicting where that tipping point is. Once it's reached, there may be no reversing the problem. Miami may be left with a poor population, a raft load of expensive problems and no means to readily solve any of them as their poor population slides deeper into debt to keep surviving.

Edit/footnote: It's a lousy title. Even the article itself is not actually predicting that the entire city will ever be completely under water like the title suggests.

For context the global rate of sea level rise currently seems to be 4cm a decade so you could come back in 10 or 20 years and probably not notice much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

This is one of the best articles I've seen on climate change. We are now looking to a 3 degree rise in surface temps by the middle of this century - well within our lifetimes. Miami is headed underwater. I wouldn't be buying real estate in any low-lying area if I can avoid it.

"Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...

The idea that it's 2018 and we don't have solar powered desalination plants for some of our largest, sunny, water-limited southern cities boggles my mind. Los Angeles has a nuclear plant just to the north, but no desalination, and more sun than anyone wants. It's insane.

Always reminds me of Roisin Murphy "Dear Miami" (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbX7ASDLwAk

"Behind these walls You can be so self-absorbed Behind those eyes, no disguise Disguise, no you can't disguise

Behind this fortress of an address Stuck in the passion void With a little style full and for a while But you can't turn back time

Dear Miami, you're the first to go Disappearing under melting snow Each and everyone turn your critical eye On the burning sun and try not to cry

..."

> One morning in June, Douglas Yoder climbed into a white government SUV...

This again. I won't stop complaining about this tedious journalistic style until it finally dies.

I don't want to hear a personal story of a random person that's related to the issue in some way. I certainly don't want to read anything about how he spends his day - I value my own day too much for that. I just want to read about the issue itself.

That's why people don't read longreads anymore.

Fun fact, kids. If you pump down an aquifer (any aquifer, anywhere) faster than it is being replenished from above via rainwater, then any other water sitting around it will eventually start to intrude. And if that outside water is salty or otherwise non-potable, then problem! Meaning that saltwater intrusion in coastal areas is a pretty much constant potential risk anyway, regardless of any sea level rise.

At a rate of 0-3 mm/year or 1 foot/century its going to be hard to convince anyone to care about the sea level. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html

Have we seen any sea level rise in the US yet? I think people would buy into it more once we have pictures of roads and buildings being hit by water at high tide.

I'm getting the feeling lately that the freedom in speech and action that is the foundation of the United States doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

Florida has a rather right leaning/libertarian persuasion, which as the article pointed out, allowed the Miami Drum Services Inc. superfund site and Lake Belt limestone mine to cause contamination of drinking water as recently as 1997.

I'm from Idaho and am well aware of the environmental impacts from superfund sites and mining. The corporations go in and make their millions, then taxpayers are on the hook for the cleanup. Now we can't even fish many rivers and lakes here because mine tailings have contaminated the water with mercury (from gold mining) and other nastiness.

Due to a long history of this short term thinking where profits are privatized and externalities are socialized, Miami is going to have to come to terms with losing its drinking water and either pipe it in from far away or move to desalinization. It's going to be expensive and unfortunate, but I wonder if it will be enough for people to shift their politics. Judging by the political stalemate in my state, I'm guessing not.

"Good news, everyone!"

I’ve never understood how the parts of the country most affected by sea level rise have been so vociferously against it being real.

When the BP spill happened and they had all the local mayors and politicians crying about the damage to their coast, I couldn’t understand why no one had the cajones to ask them why they cared so much about their coast being damaged now, when they were completely fine with it being gone and under water in a few decades.

"by the end of this century" is quite an odd definition of "soon". By then some of us won't even be alive.

Hysterical headline and article.

In grade school it was dying from the ozone hole, acid rain, and global freezing (new ice age).

Recycling, not being wasteful, and conserving water wasn't scary enough I guess.

Now, now, let's focus on the positives here:

- more pollution from shipping routes through the Arctic circle (and yucky-looking icebergs that tourists don't like)

- less beachfront property

- more desalinatable water

- hotter heat

- more revulsive detestable significant others (displaced global unrest)

- costs of responding to natural disasters occurring with greater frequency due to elevated ocean temperatures

- less parking spaces (!)

What are the other costs and benefits here?