I know what this article wants to say, but I don’t think it’s a good message. Nowhere is absolutely safe from climate change, but we know with confidence that some places are worse. If we can’t acknowledge that, then we’ll keep throwing money and human lives at rebuilding places that will just get destroyed again.
lol no, Florida is still Florida.
Desantis solved it and made climate change illegal in his state
Yeah no, i don’t live in a state that gets hit by hurricanes multiple times every year. What a crock of bullshit. We’re not “all Florida now.”
I’ll take my once in a couple decade random earthquake over that, thank you very much
This is the same NYT that has been giving print space to climate deniers for the last 30 years.
I find headlines like this pretty ridiculous. It’s basically like saying “Seatbelts don’t protect you because you can die in a car accident even with a seatbelt.” Some parts of the country are obviously much more susceptible to bad effects of climate change than others, and it’s contrary to evidence to deny this. Moreover, some parts of the world (for example, lots of Canada and lots of Russia) are likely to become more habitable overall than they are now. If we act like nowhere is safe, we will do a much worse job of relocating vulnerable people to areas where they would be relatively much more safe.
Headlines like this also do not emphasize the completely realistic mitigation techniques that lots of cities absolutely must be undertaking now to mitigate these risks. It is possible to build cities which are much more resilient to high rainfall events. The fact that 1.5 C is dead and 2.0 C is rapidly dying doesn’t mean we need to throw in the towel. Many parts of the world are much more survivable than Florida under a 2 or 3 C scenario, and acting like that’s not the case is like saying seatbelts don’t matter.
Variations on this story, and this one specifically, have been posted at least a dozen times in this sub in the past week.
And it’s not true.
We have been in places with variable and moderately predictable risks for a while now, and that hasn’t changed. The gulf south is one of the most dangerous parts of the US from a climate risk perspective, and the slightly inland south is at reduced but related danger for identical reasons, this has been known forever. Nobody serious has been betting on Asheville being a top tier climate holdout, no matter what the talking heads who were pushing climate denialism 5 years ago say today.
We should not consider everywhere to be the same risk. People foolishly building castles on the sand today in cheap parts of the south SHOULD NOT BE GETTING BAILED OUT BY THE REST OF OUR TAXES TO DO IT AGAIN. Live there if you want, but nobody deserves subsidized insurance at the rest of our expense for something which is completely a personal choice.
7 comments
I know what this article wants to say, but I don’t think it’s a good message. Nowhere is absolutely safe from climate change, but we know with confidence that some places are worse. If we can’t acknowledge that, then we’ll keep throwing money and human lives at rebuilding places that will just get destroyed again.
lol no, Florida is still Florida.
Desantis solved it and made climate change illegal in his state
Yeah no, i don’t live in a state that gets hit by hurricanes multiple times every year. What a crock of bullshit. We’re not “all Florida now.”
I’ll take my once in a couple decade random earthquake over that, thank you very much
This is the same NYT that has been giving print space to climate deniers for the last 30 years.
I find headlines like this pretty ridiculous. It’s basically like saying “Seatbelts don’t protect you because you can die in a car accident even with a seatbelt.” Some parts of the country are obviously much more susceptible to bad effects of climate change than others, and it’s contrary to evidence to deny this. Moreover, some parts of the world (for example, lots of Canada and lots of Russia) are likely to become more habitable overall than they are now. If we act like nowhere is safe, we will do a much worse job of relocating vulnerable people to areas where they would be relatively much more safe.
Headlines like this also do not emphasize the completely realistic mitigation techniques that lots of cities absolutely must be undertaking now to mitigate these risks. It is possible to build cities which are much more resilient to high rainfall events. The fact that 1.5 C is dead and 2.0 C is rapidly dying doesn’t mean we need to throw in the towel. Many parts of the world are much more survivable than Florida under a 2 or 3 C scenario, and acting like that’s not the case is like saying seatbelts don’t matter.
Variations on this story, and this one specifically, have been posted at least a dozen times in this sub in the past week.
And it’s not true.
We have been in places with variable and moderately predictable risks for a while now, and that hasn’t changed. The gulf south is one of the most dangerous parts of the US from a climate risk perspective, and the slightly inland south is at reduced but related danger for identical reasons, this has been known forever. Nobody serious has been betting on Asheville being a top tier climate holdout, no matter what the talking heads who were pushing climate denialism 5 years ago say today.
We should not consider everywhere to be the same risk. People foolishly building castles on the sand today in cheap parts of the south SHOULD NOT BE GETTING BAILED OUT BY THE REST OF OUR TAXES TO DO IT AGAIN. Live there if you want, but nobody deserves subsidized insurance at the rest of our expense for something which is completely a personal choice.