More musings on higher ground

From last week's hurricane post.

A common, perhaps even the standard framing of rising sea levels is that it's a existential threat for all coastal cities, and while I understand the desire not to downplay the crisis, this isn't true. For cities with relatively high elevations like Los Angeles (a few low-lying neighborhoods, but most of it hundreds and some of it thousands of feet above sea-level) or cities with at least moderate elevations and little danger from tropical cyclones (like almost all major cites on the West Coast), we are talking about a problem but not a catastrophe (The remnants of hurricanes we do see in California are generally more good news than bad. Kay broke our recent heat wave and gave some relief to firefighters). Some beaches will be lost and a few people will have to relocate, but compared to drought and triple-digit temperatures, that's a fairly manageable situation.  

Of course, the real tragedy of this framing is not that it overstates the threat to the West Coast, but that it dangerously understates the immediate and genuinely existential threat to many cities on the East and Gulf Coasts. 

While New York City is not in danger of total oblivion the way Miami or Jacksonville are, it is far from safe from the threats associated with rising sea levels. The area has frequently been hit by hurricanes including two category 3s in the past hundred years. Given climate change trends, the city probably won't have to wait nearly so long for the next one.

This is one of the things that makes the following New York Times article from a while back so strange.

What do you do when the sea comes for your home, your school, your church?

You could try to hold back the water. Or you could raise your house. Or you could just leave.

An estimated 600 million people live directly on the world’s coastlines, among the most hazardous places to be in the era of climate change. According to scientific projections, the oceans stand to rise by one to four feet by the end of the century, with projections of more ferocious storms and higher tides that could upend the lives of entire communities.

Many people face the risks right now. Two sprawling metropolitan areas offer a glimpse of the future. One rich, one poor, they sit on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean: the San Francisco Bay Area (population 7 million) and metropolitan Manila (almost 14 million).

Their history, their wealth, and the political and personal choices they make today will shape how they fare as the water inevitably comes to their doorsteps.

I have been meaning to write something about this article since it came out, but recent events in Florida have made it too timely to put off any longer. The New York Times felt the need to go all the way to San Francisco to do the story despite the fact that New York City has more people, lower elevation, and faces a far, far greater risk from tropical cyclones. This is not quite as bad as the San Francisco Chronicle doing features on earthquakes and wildfire smoke and using NYC as one of the two examples, but it’s close.

Not to say that the Bay Area doesn't have some low lying country and we do experience storm surges and king tides or that fixing these problems won't require considerable money and political will (and possibly a small degree of managed retreat), but for the most part they can be fixed, and compared to California's real environmental crises (droughts, heat waves, non-coastal floods, mega-fires and their smoke), rising seas and storm surges are low on our list of worries.

Even out of that context, the article is still bizarre and with its depiction of first world problems, cringe-inducing. The devastation of a city of almost two million people hit by five to seven typhoons a year and vulnerable to tsunamis is unironically listed next to rich people losing beach houses.

[What about the threat of California mega-floods you’ve been hearing about? This is very much a real problem with frightening and relatively recent precedents -- as recently as the 1860s, Governor Stanford had to take a rowboat to his inauguration – but other than both being caused or exacerbated by climate change, these risks have almost nothing to do with the problems described in the NYT piece. The flooding described here is non-coastal.]

The different elevations of Manila and San Francisco and how they affect the impact of rising sea levels is largely undiscussed. There is exactly one mention of tropical storms, none whatsoever of tropical cyclones, and the fact that certain areas are more vulnerable than others is almost completely ignored. All coastal cities are treated as effectively interchangeable.

As we've said before, the all coastal cities are equal narrative embraced by the New York Times is extraordinarily dangerous. It inevitably underplays the to cities from New York all the way to Houston along the coast, particularly in Florida. The States largest city, Jacksonville, is only a few feet higher than Fort Myers. Miami is actually lower (Miami Beach is effectively zero). Even before climate change kicked in, Florida had been playing a decades-long game of Russian Roulette. With more frequent and powerful storms, we will almost certainly see death tolls and property damage that dwarf the impact of hurricane Ian, and we will see them in the not too distant future.