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elvirs

beach front property owners should worry

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Those who find global warming convincing should buy up all the soon to be beach front property while it is still cheap.

I don't know why this has been down voted. Would you buy a property with a 50 year lease?

Probably because it’s a ridiculously trivial problem in the context of the full seriousness of climate change.

Possibly, but I thought he/she was putting serious point in a light hearted manner. Expected sea level rises are .5 to 2m by then end of the century. Anyone with property less than 2m above the current sea level should be concerned.

There is a common misunderstanding in sea level rise. When the number says .5 to 2m it is a planetary global average, but sea level rise distribution is not uniform across the planet.

Some places, such as the US east coast[1][2], are expected to have to deal with sea level rises 3-4 times the global average or 2m to 8m of sea level rise. So property up to 8m or more from the current sea level may be concerned.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1597

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

and anybody owning stock in companies that insure those properties....

As Americans, we're all on the hook for it.

https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/a-broke-and-brok...

"The government-run National Flood Insurance Program is, for now, virtually the only source of flood insurance for more than five million households in the United States. This hurricane season, as tens of thousands of Americans seek compensation for storm-inflicted water damage, they face a problem: The flood insurance program is broke and broken.

The program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been in the red since Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005. It still has more than a thousand disputed claims left over from Sandy. And in October, it exhausted its $30 billion borrowing capacity and had to get a bailout just to keep paying current claims."

And this is why American coasts are grossly over-developed-- the government undercuts private insurers who would charge a much higher market price.

NPR Planet Money did an episode on this: "The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is $30 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury. If it were a private company, it would be bankrupt. And instead of preventing risky behavior, the NFIP may be encouraging it. Among the NFIP's many problems are houses that flood again and again and again. Throughout the program's history, one percent of homes have been responsible for more than 25 percent of the claims. The NFIP can't drop these homes."

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/epis...

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