The scaremongering is ramping up, as is the invective. Why not? They’re science cannot stand on it’s own
Every Coastal Home Is Now a Stick of Dynamite
The Langfords got out of Houston just in time. Only two months after Sara and her husband, Phillip, moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck, destroying their previous house and rendering Sara’s family homeless.
By comparison, Norfolk felt like paradise. In Larchmont, the neighborhood the Langfords fell in love with, young children scratched chalk doodles on the sidewalks, college students and senior citizens ran side by side on nature trails, and crepe myrtle trees popped pink along silent streets.
But as the couple toured the area, situated on the banks of a sluggish river that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, they noticed something alarming about the homes they were seeing. “We were looking at one house close to the water, and [our real-estate agent] started talking about flood insurance,” Sara recalled to me. “I said, ‘Really? In this area?’” The houses were about half a mile from the river, but monthly flood-insurance premiums on the homes were $800 to $1,000—almost as much as their mortgage payment.
The horror! Of course, both areas are low-lying, and the land barely rises way far away from the water. It’s called geography.
You can imagine each of the homes in Larchmont—and elsewhere along the coast—as a stick of dynamite with a very long fuse. When humans began to warm the Earth, we lit the fuse. Ever since then, a series of people have tossed the dynamite among them, each owner holding the stick for a while before passing the risk on to the next. Each of these owners knows that at some point, the dynamite is going to explode, but they can also see that there’s a lot of fuse left. As the fuse keeps burning, each new owner has a harder time finding someone to take the stick off their hands.
Norfolk and many coastal cities like it might be closer to exploding than many of their residents think. The payment term for a standard mortgage loan is 30 years, and the median length of homeownership is 13 years. Meanwhile, the lowest-lying parts of Norfolk are roughly five to 10 feet above sea level, and climate scientists believe that sea levels in the city could rise by as much as two feet before 2050. How many more times will the dynamite change hands before it blows up?
Sewells Point is the longest tide sea gauge in Virginia, and is slightly above what would be expected during a Holocene warm period, but, it is still showing 1.56 feet per 100 years. And some of that can be chalked up to land subsistence. So, not 2 feet by 2050.
Actually Teach it is more properly called topography.
And again by using only the 100year data, you are implying that the the sea level rise has been consistent over that period. It hasn’t. The rate of increase has been increasing.
If the oceans were truly rising we wouldn’t be seeing rich criminal politicians like Obozo the SCOAMF buying overpriced waterfront properties in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii. All the mucky mucks like Oprah and Zuckerdroid would be buying homes in places like Tahoe or Colorado instead of Maui and Kauai.
Don’t worry about the wealthy, worry about poor folks who cannot afford to move.
Rich folks can live a few years on a coast and then move.
And certainly don’t base YOUR decisions on what the wealthy do or think. They rarely set a good example to guide us commoners. They are no smarter than others, just richer.
In most cases, you have to be pretty wealthy to live right on the coast. But my old neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia was pretty low-lying, with our house having the finished floor 12½ feet above sea level. I could take my bike to one of two beaches, Buckroe or Grandview.
A lot of middle-class homes in the neighborhood, and one of Mrs Pico’s friends had the only house in the area with a basement. The only thing she had in her basement was a pump!
Now? Our house is 630 feet above sea level!