Forced moves from the red areas to the blue areas

From an Article by Oliver Milman, The Guardian, September 24, 2018

A study published last year found that the economies of the southern states, along with parts of the west, will suffer disproportionately as temperatures rise. In what researchers called potentially one of the largest transfers of wealth in US history, the poorest third of counties are expected to lose up to 20% of their income unless greenhouse gas emissions are severely curtailed. Wealth, and potentially people, are expected to shift north and west.

Meanwhile, cities already struggling with heat will see wealthy residents head for cooler climes. Last year, 155 people died in Phoenix due to a particularly fierce summer. Increasing heat will start testing the durability of the populace, even those shielded by air conditioning. In the western states, wildfires are getting larger, razing homes in ever more spectacular ways and choking thousands of people with carcinogenic smoke.

Further to the south, at the border, there are suggestions that people from Central America are being nudged towards the US because of drought and hurricanes in their homelands, part of a trend that will see as many as 300 million climate refugees worldwide by 2050.

“People will get very grumpy and upset with very hot temperatures,” said Amir Jina, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago who co-authored the research on economic losses. “Even if you have air conditioning, some areas start to look less habitable. By the middle of the century parts of the south-west and south-east won’t look attractive to live in.

“That insidious climate migration is the one we should worry about. The big disasters such as hurricanes will be obvious. It’s the pressures we don’t know or understand that will reshape population in the 21st century.”

Prodded to name refuges in the US, researchers will point to Washington and Oregon in the Pacific north-west, where temperatures will remain bearable and disasters unlikely to strike. Areas close to the Great Lakes and in New England are also expected to prove increasingly attractive to those looking to move.

By 2065, southern states are expected to lose 8% of their US population share, while the north-east will increase by 9%. A recent study forecast that the population in the western half of the US will increase by more than 10% over the next 50 years due to climate migration, largely from the south and midwest.

But these population shifts are uncertain and are bound by a tangle of other factors and caveats. People will still largely follow paths guided by nearby family or suitable jobs. Even those who do want to move may find favoured locations too expensive.

Some will just grimly hang on. “With property rights as strong as they are in the US, some people may choose to go down with the ship,” said Harvard’s Keenan. “The question is whether they have the means and the options to do anything else.”

“People can usually cope with being a little less comfortable, but if you see repeated storms or severe damage to crops, that will trigger change,” said Solomon Hsiang, who researches how climate change will affect society at the University of California.

“There will be pressure to move a little north. It won’t be everyone, though, it won’t be like the great migration of wildebeest in Africa. Whole cities picking up and moving would be hugely expensive.”

Smaller towns are giving relocation a go, however. In 2016, the community of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana was the first place to be given federal money to replant itself. The population, situated on an island being eaten away by the sea, is looking to move to a former sugar cane farm 30 miles inland.

“We are called climate refugees but I hate that term,” said Chantal Comardelle, who grew up in the Isle de Jean Charles community.

“We will be the first ones to face this in the modern US but we won’t be the last. It’s important for us to get it right so other communities know that they can do it, too.”

About a dozen coastal towns in Alaska are also looking to relocate, as diminishing sea ice exposes them to storms and rising temperatures thaw the very ground beneath them. One, Newtok, has identified a new site and has some federal funding to begin uprooting itself.

A buyout of damaged and at-risk homes has already occurred in New York City’s Staten Island in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, while certain flood-prone houses in Houston, pummeled by Hurricane Harvey last year, are also being purchased and razed.

But the cost of doing this for all at-risk Americans would be eye-watering. Estimates range from $200,000 to $1m per person to undertake a relocation. If 13 million people do have to move, it seems fantastical to imagine $13tn, or even a significant fraction of this amount, being spent by governments to ease the way.

“As a country we aren’t set up to deal with slow-moving disasters like this, so people around the country are on their own,” said Joel Clement, a former Department of the Interior official who worked on the relocation of Alaskan towns.

“In the Arctic I’m concerned we’ve left it too late. Younger people have left because they know the places are doomed. These towns won’t be relocated within five years and I’m sure there will be a catastrophic storm up there. My hope is no lives will be lost.”

Ultimately, the US will have to choose what it wants to defend and hope its ingenuity outstrips the environmental changes ranged against it. Not everyone will be able to shelter behind fortifications like the ‘big U’ planned to defend lower Manhattan. Wrenching decisions will have to be made as to what and where will be sacrificed.

“We won’t see whole areas abandoned but neighborhoods will get sparse and wild looking, the tax base will start to crumble,” said Stoddard, mayor of South Miami. “We don’t have the laws to deal with that sort of piecemeal retreat. It’s magical thinking to think someone else will buy out your property.

“We need a plan as to what will be defended because at the moment the approach is that some kid in a garage will come with a solution. There isn’t going to be a mop and bucket big enough for this problem.”

Two feet of rise this century is very significant

From an Article by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, February 12, 2018

WASHINGTON (AP) — Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are speeding up the already fast pace of sea level rise, new satellite research shows.

At the current rate, the world’s oceans on average will be at least 2 feet (61 centimeters) higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Sea level rise is caused by warming of the ocean and melting from glaciers and ice sheets. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets. It confirms scientists’ computer simulations and is in line with predictions from the United Nations, which releases regular climate change reports.

“It’s a big deal” because the projected sea level rise is a conservative estimate and it is likely to be higher, said lead author Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado.

Outside scientists said even small changes in sea levels can lead to flooding and erosion.

“Any flooding concerns that coastal communities have for 2100 may occur over the next few decades,” Oregon State University coastal flooding expert Katy Serafin said in an email.

Of the 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) of sea level rise in the past quarter century, about 55 percent is from warmer water expanding, and the rest is from melting ice.

But the process is accelerating, and more than three-quarters of that acceleration since 1993 is due to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the study shows.

Like weather and climate, there are two factors in sea level rise: year-to-year small rises and falls that are caused by natural events and larger long-term rising trends that are linked to man-made climate change. Nerem’s team removed the natural effects of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption that temporarily chilled Earth and the climate phenomena El Nino and La Nina, and found the accelerating trend.

Sea level rise, more than temperature, is a better gauge of climate change in action, said Anny Cazenave, director of Earth science at the International Space Science Institute in France, who edited the study. Cazenave is one of the pioneers of space-based sea level research.

Global sea levels were stable for about 3,000 years until the 20th century when they rose and then accelerated due to global warming caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute in Germany, who wasn’t part of the study.

Two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century “would have big effects on places like Miami and New Orleans, but I don’t still view that as catastrophic” because those cities can survive — at great expense — that amount of rising seas under normal situations, Nerem said.

But when a storm hits like 2012′s Superstorm Sandy, sea level rise on top of storm surge can lead to record-setting damages, researchers said.

Some scientists at the American Geophysical Union meeting last year said Antarctica may be melting faster than predicted by Monday’s study.

Greenland has caused three times more sea level rise than Antarctica so far, but ice melt on the southern continent is responsible for more of the acceleration.

“Antarctica seems less stable than we thought a few years ago,” Rutgers climate scientist Robert Kopp said.

Antarctic Sea Ice Rapidly Disappearing

World faces narrow window to cut carbon emissions

From an Article by Amanda Reilly, E & E News, February 9, 2016

Humans have only a small window to zero out carbon dioxide emissions that could lead to changes affecting the globe for tens of thousands of years, according to new research published today.

The study in the journal Nature Climate Change warned that the climate change debate has focused on time frames that are too short, largely ignoring long-term changes to the ecology and geology of the world.

The only way to avert these long-term changes, the authors wrote, is by shaping a new energy system with net-zero or net-negative carbon dioxide emissions within the next few decades.

“Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from burning fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years — and some of it will be there for more than 100,000 years,” Peter Clark, an Oregon State University paleo-climatologist and lead author, said today in a statement. “People need to understand that the effects of climate change on the planet won’t go away, at least not for thousands of generations.”

Researchers from the United States, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, France, Australia and the United Kingdom participated in the study.

The authors contend that researchers and policymakers have overwhelmingly focused on relatively short-term shifts linked to climate change, changes in the last 150 years and their effects up to the year 2100. Using computer models, the research team projected how human actions will affect the globe over the next 10,000 years.

It found that humans have only a few decades to halt “potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”

“Our greenhouse gas emissions today produce climate-change commitments for many centuries to millennia. It is high time that this essential irreversibility is placed into the focus of policymakers,” said Thomas Stocker, a climate modeler at the University of Bern in Switzerland. “The long-term view sends the chilling message [about] what the real risks and consequences are of the fossil fuel era.”

The team predicted that sea levels will rise by 25 meters with warming of 2 degrees Celsius and 50 meters with warming of 7 C, over a time frame of the next several centuries to millennia. On the low end, 122 countries will see at least a tenth of their population affected by higher sea levels.

The latest report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that sea levels could rise by 1 meter by 2100.

“It takes sea-level rise a very long time to react — on the order of centuries,” Clark said. “It’s like heating a pot of water on the stove; it doesn’t boil for quite a while after the heat is turned on — but then it will continue to boil as long as the heat persists.”

According to the authors, studies that focus only on near-term risks, as well as the economic practice of discounting future climate impacts, tend to play down the future, more severe impacts.

While short-term emission reduction targets — such as the ones nations committed to in the recent Paris climate deal — are “important,” the authors said, only a “complete transformation” of the globe’s energy system within the next few decades will halt severe impacts. They called for a “fourth industrial revolution” entailing changes in energy, land use and agriculture.

“We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren,” said Harvard University geology professor Daniel Schrag, a co-author of the study. “We need to think carefully about the long-term scales of what we are unleashing.”

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