http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/23/2967411/coastal-property-values-crash-climate-science-deniers/
By Joe Romm on May 23, 2014 at 12:21 pm
“When Will Coastal Property Values Crash And Will Climate Science Deniers Be The Only Buyers?“
CREDIT: NY Times
The latest scientific observations provide strong evidence we are headed toward the high end of sea level projections. And we already knew that devastating storm surges will become routine on the East Coast.
This raises the question: What year will coastal property values crash?
I first posed the question five years ago. Back then we were getting a bunch of studies suggesting sea level rise in 2100 would be 3 to 6 feet. Since then the evidence for that has become even stronger.
Just this month, multiple studies found that both the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and Greenland are poised to continue their accelerating ice loss, with WAIS apparently now in a state of irreversible collapse. This in turn has led top climatologists and glaciologist to warn that we are headed toward the high end of sea level rise projections this century and beyond.
What does that mean for coastal property? As a National Geographic article on the subject last year put it:
In a state exposed to hurricanes as well as rising seas, people like John Van Leer, an oceanographer at the University of Miami, worry that one day they will no longer be able to insure — or sell — their houses. “If buyers can’t insure it, they can’t get a mortgage on it. And if they can’t get a mortgage, you can only sell to cash buyers,” Van Leer says. “What I’m looking for is a climate-change denier with a lot of money.”
South Florida will likely be ground zero for the coastal property collapse. As a 2013 Rolling Stone explained, the region suffers from “two big problems.” First, it has “remarkably flat topography. Half the area that surrounds Miami is less than five feet above sea level.”
So even with a mere three feet of sea-level rise, “more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone.” In short, half of southern Florida could be gone in a century. Jeff Goodell explained in Rolling Stone:
Even worse, South Florida sits above a vast and porous limestone plateau. “Imagine Swiss cheese, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like,” says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This means water moves around easily – it seeps into yards at high tide, bubbles up on golf courses, flows through underground caverns, corrodes building foundations from below. “Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here,” says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas.
…(read more).
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