How will climate migration effect states' voting habits? (user search)
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Author Topic: How will climate migration effect states' voting habits?  (Read 2938 times)
Death of a Salesman
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« on: March 17, 2023, 10:41:58 AM »

Why do these hypothetical future climate refugees only tend to come from red states?  are they being punished for their sins?  Cities like New York, Boston and LA are all coastal too, you dips[inks]ts

If you listen to the climate alarmists, the effects of climate change are being felt now and it still has not slowed growth in the mostly already hot/wet/stormy Sun Belt.  The idea that Florida is going to simply "go away" sometime in the next 50-100 years reads as terminally-online, liberal wishcasting.  

New York? Sure. Because it is built on an island. Maybe a lot of the city will be moved up the Hudson, though. Boston probably has a better chance of surviving because there is more room to build on higher ground. The climate will probably actually improve in those areas. I can see places like White Plains and Methuen being heavily gentrified and built up around the end of my life (2060-2080).  LA? It will probably do alright so long as they can get water. The climate probably won't get that much worse for them.


I'm not totally sold on mass retirement in the North TBH.  Currently, the northernmost states that take in significant retiree migration are North Carolina and Tennessee.  Do we really expect MI and WI to have winters like present day NC and TN by 2100?  For Canadian border states to compete directly with Florida for retirees would probably require an utterly catastrophic scenario where it doesn't snow at sea level anywhere in the continental US in an average winter!

They don’t need to have anywhere close to snow-free winters, although I agree that Midwest winters aren’t necessarily getting milder in the short to medium term. Not dying of heatstroke in heatwaves during the rest of the year is more important.

True, but wouldn't the person who wants to retire on the beach in Florida's present day climate end up on the beach in NC where it hasn't snowed in 20 years in this scenario, not in Michigan or New England?  I think there's some real risk of Florida losing population in the long run, but those people presumably still want to live in the South.

IPCC projections for the climate in 2100 tend to be around a 5° F temperature increase and 3 feet of sea level rise. This is noticeable, but it will have a fairly modest effect.

Here's a list of Eastern seaboard cities ordered by temperature/latitude.
Daily Mean Temperature
Miami: 77.4°
Jacksonville: 69.3°
Charleston: 66.5°
Virginia Beach: 61.6°
D.C.: 59.3°
Philadelphia: 56.3°
New York: 55.8°
Boston: 51.9°
Portland: 47.5°
Halifax: 45.5°.

Climate change tends to increase temperatures more in cold areas than warm areas, so the temperature increase should be milder in warm areas than cool. A rough estimate of the climate circa 2100 would be:
Miami: 80.9°
Jacksonville: 73.4°
Charleston: 70.8°
Virginia Beach: 66.3°
D.C.: 64.2°
Philadelphia: 61.5°
New York: 61°
Boston: 57.4°
Portland: 53.4°
Halifax: 51.5°

Miami's climate shifts into the clearly tropical range and probably becomes too warm for most Americans. Northern Florida & Georgia continue to absorb many retirees, as do the Carolinas, and probably more go to the Virginia coast. The Jersey shore is increasingly muggy in summer, and people increasingly vacation in Maine, but the water is still cold off of Nova Scotia even in the height of summer.

With respect to sea level rise, it should not be a substantial threat to any city besides New Orleans. Building levees around low-lying areas will be worth it in cities where a single acre contains $10m of property.

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Death of a Salesman
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Posts: 238
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« Reply #1 on: March 18, 2023, 05:51:48 PM »

Why do these hypothetical future climate refugees only tend to come from red states?  are they being punished for their sins?  Cities like New York, Boston and LA are all coastal too, you dips[inks]ts

If you listen to the climate alarmists, the effects of climate change are being felt now and it still has not slowed growth in the mostly already hot/wet/stormy Sun Belt.  The idea that Florida is going to simply "go away" sometime in the next 50-100 years reads as terminally-online, liberal wishcasting.  

New York? Sure. Because it is built on an island. Maybe a lot of the city will be moved up the Hudson, though. Boston probably has a better chance of surviving because there is more room to build on higher ground. The climate will probably actually improve in those areas. I can see places like White Plains and Methuen being heavily gentrified and built up around the end of my life (2060-2080).  LA? It will probably do alright so long as they can get water. The climate probably won't get that much worse for them.


I'm not totally sold on mass retirement in the North TBH.  Currently, the northernmost states that take in significant retiree migration are North Carolina and Tennessee.  Do we really expect MI and WI to have winters like present day NC and TN by 2100?  For Canadian border states to compete directly with Florida for retirees would probably require an utterly catastrophic scenario where it doesn't snow at sea level anywhere in the continental US in an average winter!

They don’t need to have anywhere close to snow-free winters, although I agree that Midwest winters aren’t necessarily getting milder in the short to medium term. Not dying of heatstroke in heatwaves during the rest of the year is more important.

True, but wouldn't the person who wants to retire on the beach in Florida's present day climate end up on the beach in NC where it hasn't snowed in 20 years in this scenario, not in Michigan or New England?  I think there's some real risk of Florida losing population in the long run, but those people presumably still want to live in the South.

IPCC projections for the climate in 2100 tend to be around a 5° F temperature increase and 3 feet of sea level rise. This is noticeable, but it will have a fairly modest effect.

Here's a list of Eastern seaboard cities ordered by temperature/latitude.
Daily Mean Temperature
Miami: 77.4°
Jacksonville: 69.3°
Charleston: 66.5°
Virginia Beach: 61.6°
D.C.: 59.3°
Philadelphia: 56.3°
New York: 55.8°
Boston: 51.9°
Portland: 47.5°
Halifax: 45.5°.

Climate change tends to increase temperatures more in cold areas than warm areas, so the temperature increase should be milder in warm areas than cool. A rough estimate of the climate circa 2100 would be:
Miami: 80.9°
Jacksonville: 73.4°
Charleston: 70.8°
Virginia Beach: 66.3°
D.C.: 64.2°
Philadelphia: 61.5°
New York: 61°
Boston: 57.4°
Portland: 53.4°
Halifax: 51.5°

Miami's climate shifts into the clearly tropical range and probably becomes too warm for most Americans. Northern Florida & Georgia continue to absorb many retirees, as do the Carolinas, and probably more go to the Virginia coast. The Jersey shore is increasingly muggy in summer, and people increasingly vacation in Maine, but the water is still cold off of Nova Scotia even in the height of summer.

With respect to sea level rise, it should not be a substantial threat to any city besides New Orleans. Building levees around low-lying areas will be worth it in cities where a single acre contains $10m of property.



The most probable scenario current is RCP6.0, which isn't as bad as the "2000s business-as-usual projection" (RCP8.5) but still amounts to 3-4 C (5-7 F) of increase in average global temperature by 2100, with no indication that there will be no further warming after then.

I think you and Skill and Chance are overly optimistic about our medium-term ability to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere, and the severity of climate impacts we'll see at ___ warming level or ___ atmospheric CO2 level. But I agree with Skill and Chance in that future would-be Florida retirees would most likely end up in parts of the Upper South instead of New England or the Great Lakes region.
Keep in mind, we've already had some global warming. RCP 6.0 projects about 2.5-3° C of warming from the 2000 temperatures by 2100. I assumed 5° F, which is squarely midrange for RCP 6.0.
Also, RCP 6.0 is probably more pessimistic than what will actually happen. I'd guess emissions peak between 2050-2070, so a more plausible result by the end of the century is 4° F.

In terms of sea level rise, I was too pessimistic. RCP 6.0 sea level projections by 2100 are about .6 meters, not the .9m I assumed. This is a more or less trivial amount of sea level increase, and should not pose a risk to any cities besides New Orleans (which is of course already below sea level).
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Death of a Salesman
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Posts: 238
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« Reply #2 on: March 18, 2023, 06:08:55 PM »

We can consult the 2013 IPCC report for simplicity's sake here.


Just to clarify this for everyone, these figures are for 2100 relative to the 1986-2005 norms.

The first number is temperature increase, the second is sea level increase.

RCP 2.6: 1° C, .45m
RCP 4.5: 1.9° C, .53m
RCP 6.0: 2.5° C, .55m
RCP 8.5: 4.2° C, .72m

RCP 8.5 and RCP 2.6 are both implausible. The likely outcome is probably somewhere between RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0.

As far as I can tell, since the reference period, the sea has risen by about .15m. The temperature has risen by about .3° C.

For 2100, relative to current sea level and temperature
RCP 4.5: 1.6° C, .38m
RCP 6.0: 2.2° C, .40m.

The impact of sea level increase on American society will be minimal. Many liberals have indulged in catastrophic and dishonest propaganda wherein topographic maps are altered to showcase the 70 meters of sea level increase that would result if all the icecaps were to melt. At current rates, this would take about 12,000 years. In actuality, it would never happen, because 670 ppm of carbon dioxide is not enough to melt the East Antarctic Icecap. It is possible that those levels, if maintained for the 3rd millennium, could eventually melt Greenland and West Antarctica and result in an Eemian ocean level (~7m). Making projections about this seems unwise, and it is likely that by this point we will either possess the capability to alter the climate as we like or have destroyed ourselves by some other means.

The temperature increases will likely be around those I wrote earlier in this thread. In equatorial climates, they will be unpleasant. In the northern areas of the world, they will make winters milder. They will not play an especially important role in American society.

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Death of a Salesman
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« Reply #3 on: March 18, 2023, 10:58:13 PM »


OK, then I was incorrect.  The ~2.5C/5F really is in addition to the 1st century of ~1C/2.5 F warming.  That's significant.

Currently, the "we expect it to snow every winter" line is between D.C. and Virginia Beach, and the  "heavy snow is plausible but rare" line is between Virginia Beach and Charleston, so RCP 6.0 would still basically end snow in the Upper South. 

Plausibly retirees towards the end of the century (who would I suppose be our children and grandchildren), will tend to stay in place to a greater degree as winters in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest become increasingly mild. This would result in a slowing of the trend of population shifts towards the South. The gap in sunniness should remain, however, so I doubt that this population shift entirely ceases. Active migration out of the South because the climate has become intolerable does not strike me as likely.
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Death of a Salesman
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Posts: 238
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« Reply #4 on: March 19, 2023, 10:53:49 AM »

OK, then I was incorrect.  The ~2.5C/5F really is in addition to the 1st century of ~1C/2.5 F warming.  That's significant.

Currently, the "we expect it to snow every winter" line is between D.C. and Virginia Beach, and the  "heavy snow is plausible but rare" line is between Virginia Beach and Charleston, so RCP 6.0 would still basically end snow in the Upper South. 

Plausibly retirees towards the end of the century (who would I suppose be our children and grandchildren), will tend to stay in place to a greater degree as winters in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest become increasingly mild. This would result in a slowing of the trend of population shifts towards the South. The gap in sunniness should remain, however, so I doubt that this population shift entirely ceases. Active migration out of the South because the climate has become intolerable does not strike me as likely.

This seems reasonable.  Note that VA is on the bubble.  Given that Virginia Beach today getz heavy snow every 3 or so winters, there would likely still be periodic heavy snow events near DC in RCP 4.5.   I do suspect that we ratchet down toward RCP 4.5 as institutions play catch-up.   

I do wonder what RCP 6.0 does to the Texas cities?  Given that retirees and WFH techies happily tolerate 110F+ dry heat in Arizona, I doubt the I-35 cities would depopulate, but Houston gets hotter than South Florida in midsummer and almost equally humid.  It's also vulnerable to hurricanes.  That could be a big issue.   

Houston's climate gets worse, and the oil and gas industry is probably much smaller by this point. I'd guess that Houston probably becomes more like Rust Belt cities unless they have a viable alternative industry.
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