I'm gonna say yes. After discussing this over with a friend, by 2097 Florida is going to be underwater and all the coastal cities, including New York, will be flooded and that will ultimately lead to climate migration. I'm hoping that I don't live to see it, and I'm glad I won't have any kids to deal with that future either.
Places that are below sea level can be kept dry by medieval technologies, much less modern ones. Even in the most apocalyptic climate-change scenarios, where there really are hundreds of millions of climate refugees, food supply chains are broken and forced to change radically, and the average global temperature has risen by multiple degrees Celsius, I'd imagine Florida actually continues to be a wealthy and growing retirement community.
Well, yes. Florida, and all the coastal cities, absolutely need the infrastructure. It's an indictment against the government that New Orleans was allowed to have its crappy levees, because the worst effects of Katrina could have been prevented quite easily.
But even if the doomsday scenario for Florida doesn't come to pass, that's not going to stop it from getting rammed by a new hurricane every three months. Climate change will continue to increase the intensity and speed of those hurricanes, and if technological development is unable to keep up (there's no guarantee either way), obviously it won't matter how large those barriers are.
After reading some of the posts in this thread I've come to reevaluate my dooming. But whether we're on the "winning" or "losing" side of climate change will depend on how many people are killed or forced to uproot themselves.
Well, yes, fair enough that infrastructure needs to be built and, even in the First World, that is a challenge for poorer places: a better levee system could've saved New Orleans from Katrina, or could save many low-lying areas that are sinking in South Asia.
I don't think there's good evidence that climate change is resulting in increased hurricane frequency or power; this was once conventional wisdom but it empirically is not a thing that has been happening and I think some of the science that suggested this is now being called into question. (It remains the case that hurricanes really ought to be
larger now, which would on the margin make them more dangerous since each individual storm would hit more places even if there aren't numerically any more storms, or the aren't stronger, but I don't think that's been observed empirically either, and that effect would be far smaller in any case than the one originally hypothesized. Also, storm frequency is something where, based on recent theories, the climate change battle really ought to have already been 'lost', so the fact that their frequency and severity
aren't increasing kind of suggests we may be wrong about other things, too -- though in some ways greater uncertainty on a topic like this might be scarier than knowing what is coming).
I think that storms will not hit Florida every three months. They probably will continue to hit multiple times a decade, though, and it'll simply remain the case without some terrible catastrophe that the Floridians will be wealthy enough to keep rebuilding into the foreseeable future, even if other parts of the world (...like South Asia) may not be.
Poll
