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VideoTapir
Oct 18, 2005

He'll tire eventually.

Failed Imagineer posted:

Yeah again, I get it's not possible for everyone, and I guess there is some additional hassle like making sure you can prove your grandpa was an Irish citizen, but it's still under-used in a way which I feel reflects a lack of concern for the future trajectory of the US (or maybe the same people are also not convinced of the future stability of the EU, which is fair I guess)

Most white Americans are or have been convinced that the US is the greatest country in the world, that nowhere can compare. i mean all those immigrants keep coming to the US (and only the US) for a reason. If Ireland were so great why did so many leave? We have cartoon charicature views of every country we have heard of, which is only a small fraction of them. What little we know is generally at least 30 years out of date, often longer. I am not sure any nation has ever been so thoroughly propagandized.

Meanwhile, most 'irish americans' aren't eligible for Irish citizenship. You'd have to go out a few more generations than just grandparents to cover more than a small fraction.

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Failed Imagineer
Sep 22, 2018

VideoTapir posted:

Most white Americans are or have been convinced that the US is the greatest country in the world, that nowhere can compare. i mean all those immigrants keep coming to the US (and only the US) for a reason. If Ireland were so great why did so many leave? We have cartoon charicature views of every country we have heard of, which is only a small fraction of them. What little we know is generally at least 30 years out of date, often longer. I am not sure any nation has ever been so thoroughly propagandized.

Meanwhile, most 'irish americans' aren't eligible for Irish citizenship. You'd have to go out a few more generations than just grandparents to cover more than a small fraction.

Totally agreed with your first para.

To your second point, it's actually hard to know how many Irish Americans are 1/4 or greater Irish ancestry. Surprisingly the only results I can find from a cursory google were from a frivolous 538 sponsored SurveyMonkey poll in 2015. They had about 1000 respondents and of that about 12% self reported as a quarter or more Irish, which would correspond to the 30-40m potential Irish passports.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-irish-are-people-who-identify-as-irish-american/

Obviously that kind of self-reporting is kinda crap data to infer from, but it's interesting to note that there was a large cohort of respondents who claimed to have "some Irish ancestry" but did not identify as "Irish-American", which suggests that the numbers might not actually be crazily inflated as you might suspect.

And making a wild assumption that of those 30-40m maybe 75% were bullshitting or unable to verify their ancestry, you could still have a potential 10-12m new passports, which for the record would be twice the current population of the island of Ireland.

I realise this is the climate change thread so I won't take this little weekend pondering any further off-topic. It's just interesting to me how insular the US is (I get it, propaganda plus huge, diverse country), and how that viewpoint could be affected by the coming decades of instability

Beelzebufo
Mar 5, 2015

Frog puns are toadally awesome


On the "what happens to cities" things, it's not actually as simple as saying "look at Rome". Rome's demographic decline starts as power shifts to Constantinople, and precipitously declines with the sacking of Rome. It's important to note that until the modern era cities were usually net population losers, since disease, poor sanitation and things like fires meant that they had a high death rate among the lower classes. It's only with the creation of sewers and other public infrastructure that we start seeing endogenous urban growth versus people coming in from smaller population centres to feed cities. But overall, it's not that people flee to the countryside. That was mostly rich romans retreating to their villas to avoid invading armies, or moving to other population centers like the rising italian city states. People talk about the collapse of Rome like it left huge empty anarchy behind it, but the barbarian kingdoms pretty much establish themselves immediately, and they were all fleeing the enormour organized forces of the Mongols.

This isn't to say that a loss of central authority isn't in the future for a lot of areas, but cities like Damascus, Mogadishu or hell, even Baghdad haven't experiences more than a blip, despite 2 decades of instability. Even Allepo is bouncing back despite having been basically annihilated. In an industrial society, the dynamics between cities and rural areas is very different. I don't know how this translates into the future, I don't know what it means for personal attempts to mitigate climate risk, but the idea that people are going to be fleeing the cities seems to be a misreading of history.

Certain cities will probably be abandoned eventually though. Like I don't know how Miami survives longterm without being basically domed.

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through

BIG HEADLINE posted:

You know, everyone in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast US is waiting for the cicadas to come back in May, and I just had a depressing thought that "at least we'll see some insects." I cannot remember the last time I had to clean bug guts off my windshield, even after driving on the interstate for 60+ minutes.

Then I thought "what if they're already dead and they just don't come out of the ground at all?"

on the plus side insect populations and diversity in north america doesn’t actually seem to be on the decline for the most part (despite the popular stories written to the converse). i agree that many anecdotal experiences show fewer bug splats, say, but that isn’t necessarily indicative of a loss of bug life in north america (versus some place like europe, where things do seem to show decline).

to be clear i am not suggesting we should not take measures to maintain; on the contrary we should do everything we can. it does make me feel like this small slice is perhaps not as bad as it seems, which is nice.

part of this is just down to sheer size of landmass and incomplete development, however, which means that maintaining it is certainly no guarantee. there are definitely some species that have had population reductions outside of the norm thanks mostly to habitat destruction.

there’s a good article on it here

https://theconversation.com/insect-apocalypse-not-so-fast-at-least-in-north-america-141107

tldr your cicadas are likely fine especially if recent brood cycles are any indication

MightyBigMinus
Jan 26, 2020

i just watched a year old docu about the irish potato famine narrated by mr. particular skills called 'the hunger'

it was excruciatingly cspam, its gonna be the exact beat-for-beat playbook of how we ignore the famines in india and the sahel for the a decade

in that case people mostly fled to the cities because its the only place any sort of relief or imports or poor houses or passages elsewhere could be coordinated (also because they were being evicted en-masse)

Beelzebufo
Mar 5, 2015

Frog puns are toadally awesome


MightyBigMinus posted:

i just watched a year old docu about the irish potato famine narrated by mr. particular skills called 'the hunger'

it was excruciatingly cspam, its gonna be the exact beat-for-beat playbook of how we ignore the famines in india and the sahel for the a decade

in that case people mostly fled to the cities because its the only place any sort of relief or imports or poor houses or passages elsewhere could be coordinated (also because they were being evicted en-masse)

That's actually a good example (though obviously as you said influenced by human-induced factors from their colonial occupier).



Even as Ireland's population declined catatrophically due to the famine, 3 counties recorded population growth. Those green spots are obviously Dublin, Belfast, and Cork, still the 3 largest cities on the island. Again, I don't think you can use the past as prologue here necessarily, especially not on a global scale, but in times of crisis modern cities tend to be population gainers, not losers.

Source: https://brilliantmaps.com/potato-famine/


E: even Port-Au-Prince started growing very soon after the earthquake.

Ironically the main place I can think of I've seen metro population decline or stagnate post disaster is in the US.

New Orleans is about where it was pre Katrina, but the growth seems to have stopped and reversed. It was already experiencing a decades long decline however. Detroit, similarly, is still on the downslope since the financial crisis, but again the population of Detroit actually peaked in the 50's and has been downward ever since.



Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Mar 13, 2021

TACD
Oct 27, 2000

MightyBigMinus posted:

i just watched a year old docu about the irish potato famine narrated by mr. particular skills called 'the hunger'

it was excruciatingly cspam, its gonna be the exact beat-for-beat playbook of how we ignore the famines in india and the sahel for the a decade
I hadn’t heard of this doc until now and it’s a grim watch but a good rec. Really incredible how none of this is taught in British schools and how we continue to do exactly the same things to gently caress people over here and around the world.

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day

His Divine Shadow posted:

Not from the history I've read? During societal breakdowns cities shrink and the population flees to the countryside (not with great results for them perhaps) and central authority declines, so it's not as capable of this robbing the periphery anyway. See roman decline and bronze age collapse for instance.

Don't look to Rome for a useful historical perspective; look at modern state collapses like the Soviet Union and wars in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Conspiratiorist fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Mar 14, 2021

road potato
Dec 19, 2005
If anyone is interested in continuing prepper type discussion, it seems to come up a fair bit in the 'post your bug-out-bag' thread over in The Great Outdoors.
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3933065


I've been listening to the How To Save A Planet podcast lately. I tentatively checked out a few episodes, and I think the summaries are pretty useful for getting into a subject that you are not super well-versed in. They also cross-post some good relevant episodes from non-climate based podcasts. If you are just a casual ponderer of climate change or are looking for some simple approaches to help others get some concepts, this can be a good place to start.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3933065

The Oldest Man
Jul 28, 2003

There's also an emergency preparedness thread over in GIP: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3941131

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

His Divine Shadow posted:

Not from the history I've read? During societal breakdowns cities shrink and the population flees to the countryside (not with great results for them perhaps) and central authority declines, so it's not as capable of this robbing the periphery anyway. See roman decline and bronze age collapse for instance. This doesn't work for preppers because they are not from those places, don't integrate into those places and don't join the community, they have a very city-person view of the whole thing and completely miss the point, that these small places are tightly knit communities who will join together and hoard resources in a more communal way, instead of fighting each other (disclaimer: maybe different in the UK/US, you're a screwed up and classist society in a lot of ways).

I think the fundamental problem with applying this analysis to post-industrial society is that while the countryside still produces a surplus, they're today dependant on the redistrubution and protection of urban centers for survival. Agriculture and the conditions for hunting, fishing and foraging have changed dramatically since the coppar era where agricultural communities largely had to be very self-sufficient.

Agriculture today is specialized and heavily fuel dependant. Produce is mostly put to international markets rather than to be enriched and consumed locally which swaps the equation. Local communities are also remote and scarcely populated, leading to them being prone targets for violence from state and non-state actors in times of crisis.

A lot of this could be percieved in real-time in Africa and Asia in the last decades as industrialisation has roared forward. The more infrastructure there is, the more important urban centers become for redistribution and security which makes rural communities less self-sufficient . As such when infrastructure collapses, people flee to the cities to survive. If those cities destablize, they flee towards others.

His Divine Shadow
Aug 7, 2000

I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
I can't say I buy that analysis fully, but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see for the answer to become clear, we can compare notes if there's still paper around :v:

His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Mar 14, 2021

Oracle
Oct 9, 2004

Failed Imagineer posted:

Totally agreed with your first para.

To your second point, it's actually hard to know how many Irish Americans are 1/4 or greater Irish ancestry. Surprisingly the only results I can find from a cursory google were from a frivolous 538 sponsored SurveyMonkey poll in 2015. They had about 1000 respondents and of that about 12% self reported as a quarter or more Irish, which would correspond to the 30-40m potential Irish passports.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-irish-are-people-who-identify-as-irish-american/

Obviously that kind of self-reporting is kinda crap data to infer from, but it's interesting to note that there was a large cohort of respondents who claimed to have "some Irish ancestry" but did not identify as "Irish-American", which suggests that the numbers might not actually be crazily inflated as you might suspect.

And making a wild assumption that of those 30-40m maybe 75% were bullshitting or unable to verify their ancestry, you could still have a potential 10-12m new passports, which for the record would be twice the current population of the island of Ireland.

I realise this is the climate change thread so I won't take this little weekend pondering any further off-topic. It's just interesting to me how insular the US is (I get it, propaganda plus huge, diverse country), and how that viewpoint could be affected by the coming decades of instability

The problem with your math is twofold: one, you assume that the entirety of that 25% Irish is from a single 100% Irish grandparent, when it may be two great-grandparents were half Irish or any other permutation thereof of inheritance, and two: that anyone’s grandparent that was 100% Irish must’ve been fresh off the boat, when in actuality plenty of Irish kept marrying each other for generations after relocating to America. Mine came over in the 1840s (with apparently half their village up and relocating nearby) and spent two more generations marrying the same drat people they’d been hooking up with in the Auld Country. My most recent Irish immigrant was my great-grandfather who came as a child with his parents and siblings in the 1890s, so while my dad could ostensibly apply for citizenship, I’m SOL. Unless I can piggyback on his citizenship after he gets it, which I doubt.

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

His Divine Shadow posted:

I can't say I buy that analysis fully, but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see for the answer to become clear, we can compare notes if there's still paper around :v:

https://i.imgur.com/hBsTIAt.mp4

Failed Imagineer
Sep 22, 2018

Oracle posted:

The problem with your math is twofold:

Sure, that was barely even back-of-envelope math, just some speculation

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


Beelzebufo posted:

:words:

Certain cities will probably be abandoned eventually though. Like I don't know how Miami survives longterm without being basically domed.

It's screwed, the ground is porous and all the freshwater will be displaced by saltwater. All the vegetation will die and you won't have any tap or sewage. I have no idea how we're going to tell millions of people their entire city is mow un-inhabitable after decades.

I on the other hand am interested to see what happens to Las Vegas.

Axetrain
Sep 14, 2007

Dont forget nuclear weapons still exist and what happens to nuclear armed states when they get put under an unprecedented resource squeeze.

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
in re greenland chat:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/15/greenland-ice-sheet-more-vulnerable/

wapo posted:

At first, Andrew Christ was ecstatic. In soil taken from the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet, he’d discovered the remains of ancient plants. Only one other team of researchers had ever found greenery beneath the mile-high ice mass.

But then Christ determined how long it had been since that soil had seen sunlight: Less than a million years. Just the blink of an eye in geologic terms.

And it dawned on him. If plants once grew at multiple spots on the surface of Greenland, that meant the ice that now covers the island had entirely melted. And if the whole Greenland ice sheet had melted once in the not-so-distant past, that meant it could go again.

“Oh my god,” he thought.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


BIG HEADLINE posted:

You know, everyone in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast US is waiting for the cicadas to come back in May, and I just had a depressing thought that "at least we'll see some insects." I cannot remember the last time I had to clean bug guts off my windshield, even after driving on the interstate for 60+ minutes.

Then I thought "what if they're already dead and they just don't come out of the ground at all?"

I have been driving round trip Atlanta to San Diego monthly and have clean the windshield of one inconvenient bug at grand total of twice.

Flip Yr Wig
Feb 21, 2007

Oh please do go on
Fun Shoe

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

It's screwed, the ground is porous and all the freshwater will be displaced by saltwater. All the vegetation will die and you won't have any tap or sewage. I have no idea how we're going to tell millions of people their entire city is mow un-inhabitable after decades.

My shittiest cousin sells real estate in Miami. He was always my shittiest cousin, so I wasn't shocked to learn this.

Flip Yr Wig fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Mar 21, 2021

Zeta Taskforce
Jun 27, 2002

Crosby B. Alfred posted:

It's screwed, the ground is porous and all the freshwater will be displaced by saltwater. All the vegetation will die and you won't have any tap or sewage. I have no idea how we're going to tell millions of people their entire city is mow un-inhabitable after decades.

I on the other hand am interested to see what happens to Las Vegas.

My guess is that millions of people are not going to abandon their city, at least all at once. Sea level rise happens gradually enough that there isn't a clean cutoff between habitable/uninhabitable, just a gradually increasing levels of inconvenience. Even now parts of many cities experience "sunny day flooding". It takes a combination of events all happening at once, but if you have a persistent onshore wind that happens during an astronomical high tide or king tide (when the sun and moon align), you're going to have flooding somewhere. A storm will do it too, it doesn't even take a big storm. But what already happens every few years will start happening every year, then multiple times a year, and then (poor) people will just get used to timing their movements around the tides, abandon ground floors, and and try not to think about the raw sewage that will inevitably get mixed in during a particularly big tide.

There are (relatively) high points in Miami. Little Haiti ranges from 7 to 14 feet above sea level. Rich people will do what they do best and displace poor black and brown people. It won't be official policy of course. Developers will buy up tracks of land, tear down affordable housing and put in luxury condos. They will use eminent domain if they have to. They will pass it off as a good thing, how nice it is that they are investing money in the community. Meanwhile everyone else will be displaced into low lying areas. The rich will get richer since scarcity will raise the prices of high ground. Banks won't make mortgages in low lying areas so you will have more rich people who are cash buyers buy up tracks of lovely houses for pennies on the dollar and rent them back to the poor.

All this will work out great for Flip Yr Wig's lovely cousin. He will get to sell the rich people all that new housing in Little Haiti and then get more commissions selling all the lovely housing in low areas, and even more commissions renting that lovely housing out.

Climate gentrification is already happening. https://archive.curbed.com/2020/2/10/21128496/miami-real-estate-climate-change-gentrification

The Oldest Man
Jul 28, 2003

Zeta Taskforce posted:

My guess is that millions of people are not going to abandon their city, at least all at once. Sea level rise happens gradually enough that there isn't a clean cutoff between habitable/uninhabitable, just a gradually increasing levels of inconvenience.

Miami's built directly on top of a limestone aquifer, which is the source of its municipal fresh water. Once that's been sufficiently poisoned with sea water, the city is effectively on the same fresh water footing as Dubai: 100% desalination required, except without a giant firehose of oil money to pay for it. This is in addition to chemical and sewage contamination of the aquifer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-29/miami-s-other-water-problem

So eventually (probably in the 2040s), Miami needs to be prepared to desal its entire municipal water supply or millions of people are going to wake up after a bad hurricane season and find that they can't drink their tap water. Maybe they won't all abandon ship right away, but that's going to be the day the music stops.

e: quite obviously, richies are going to plan ahead for this (by building private water systems) or react to it to stay if they want (by trucking in water and retrofitting existing developments with storage cisterns and catchment systems), but Miami-Dade as a whole is actually a pretty poor area and that's not going to work for the millions of non-billionaires who live there.

The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Mar 22, 2021

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

Haha 28% of extant species are on the endangered list.

Seems bad

V. Illych L.
Apr 11, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

Arglebargle III posted:

Haha 28% of extant species are on the endangered list.

Seems bad

not to worry, they won't be there for long

BIG HEADLINE
Jun 13, 2006

"Stand back, Ottawan ruffian, or face my lumens!"
Don't worry, we'll store their genetic information on that MOON ARK that's never getting built.

Zeta Taskforce
Jun 27, 2002

The Oldest Man posted:

Miami's built directly on top of a limestone aquifer, which is the source of its municipal fresh water. Once that's been sufficiently poisoned with sea water, the city is effectively on the same fresh water footing as Dubai: 100% desalination required, except without a giant firehose of oil money to pay for it. This is in addition to chemical and sewage contamination of the aquifer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-29/miami-s-other-water-problem

So eventually (probably in the 2040s), Miami needs to be prepared to desal its entire municipal water supply or millions of people are going to wake up after a bad hurricane season and find that they can't drink their tap water. Maybe they won't all abandon ship right away, but that's going to be the day the music stops.

e: quite obviously, richies are going to plan ahead for this (by building private water systems) or react to it to stay if they want (by trucking in water and retrofitting existing developments with storage cisterns and catchment systems), but Miami-Dade as a whole is actually a pretty poor area and that's not going to work for the millions of non-billionaires who live there.

I knew that Miami is built on permeable limestone so that levees and other structures are not feasible. You bring up another dimension that makes complete sense but I hadn't really thought of. Over long time scales Miami was always doomed but the short term thinking means that Miami will be doomed at best medium time scales and at worst overnight if they get hit with a bad hurricane. Limestone isn't exactly a rare or expensive material. Why on earth would you mine it next to a major urban area using toxic chemicals in a waterlogged quarry that immediately floods and makes rock ponds? Why are thousands of homes not connected to sewer systems, even though the water table is at most a couple feet below the surface? Money would delay the inevitable and make a softer landing, but good luck getting that from a low tax state where a majority of residents move there to die and want to pay as little as possible while they wait for that to happen.

BIG HEADLINE
Jun 13, 2006

"Stand back, Ottawan ruffian, or face my lumens!"
Not just Miami: https://www.hrsd.com/swift/potomac-aquifer-diminishing-resource

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/va-wv-..._center_objects

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




Like all of FL is on limestone.

Complications
Jun 19, 2014

Arglebargle III posted:

Haha 28% of extant species are on the endangered list.

Seems bad

I assume you mean this and I'd like to point out that the studies didn't measure insects at all.

No particular reason.

Just thought I'd put it out there.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Complications posted:

I assume you mean this and I'd like to point out that the studies didn't measure insects at all.

No particular reason.

Just thought I'd put it out there.

:unsmigghh:

GordonComstock
Oct 9, 2012
If I remember correctly from my climate class, long before Miami is 100% desal, the water table in many places will have risen enough to cause differential settling for major roadways in low lying areas (roadways are designed to be water proofed from the top, not the bottom). So like Dania Beach, it has one road that gets out the beach and it's extremely low. When that road needs to be entirely retrofitted, who will pay? Dania doesn't have the money, and why would the state invest money in that road? Tourism dries up, Dania Beach functionally dies. I suspect it'll happen slowly that way, with population centers slowly shifting towards more resilient communities. This is why Miami is raising all their roads, it'll slow this transition. Miami still dies, but slower and later.

Beelzebufo
Mar 5, 2015

Frog puns are toadally awesome


GordonComstock posted:

If I remember correctly from my climate class, long before Miami is 100% desal, the water table in many places will have risen enough to cause differential settling for major roadways in low lying areas (roadways are designed to be water proofed from the top, not the bottom). So like Dania Beach, it has one road that gets out the beach and it's extremely low. When that road needs to be entirely retrofitted, who will pay? Dania doesn't have the money, and why would the state invest money in that road? Tourism dries up, Dania Beach functionally dies. I suspect it'll happen slowly that way, with population centers slowly shifting towards more resilient communities. This is why Miami is raising all their roads, it'll slow this transition. Miami still dies, but slower and later.

Yes, the whole thing with climate change is going to be shifting baselines. Populations are going to react to these gradual changes by moving away, and no one new is going to move in. but that's not going to be possible for everyone, so you are going to have either people squatting in these barely livable places or refugee tent cities springing up for all the people who couldn't afford to move until their homes became literally unlivable.

Zeta Taskforce
Jun 27, 2002

GordonComstock posted:

If I remember correctly from my climate class, long before Miami is 100% desal, the water table in many places will have risen enough to cause differential settling for major roadways in low lying areas (roadways are designed to be water proofed from the top, not the bottom). So like Dania Beach, it has one road that gets out the beach and it's extremely low. When that road needs to be entirely retrofitted, who will pay? Dania doesn't have the money, and why would the state invest money in that road? Tourism dries up, Dania Beach functionally dies. I suspect it'll happen slowly that way, with population centers slowly shifting towards more resilient communities. This is why Miami is raising all their roads, it'll slow this transition. Miami still dies, but slower and later.

I am not familiar with Dania Beach. My guess is that it has a beautiful climate and is visually stunning. If that is the case, and assuming that municipal water and sewage keeps working, people will put up with a lot in order to keep living there. One of the things they will have to put up with is having their cars get destroyed by driving on that road that often floods. Ask anyone up north what the salt does to their cars in the winter, driving on a road that is salty because it gets flooded all the time is worse, especially having to drive through a seawater puddle or a few inches of sea water. My guess they will try to carry as normal until it dies a spectacular, sudden death when it is hit by a hurricane and the beach is cut in half, the entire road is washed away and banks and insurance companies refuse to finance the rebuilding.

davebo
Nov 15, 2006

Parallel lines do meet, but they do it incognito
College Slice

Zeta Taskforce posted:

insurance companies

I feel like this is gonna be the death knell for a lot of places. Why would they even offer home insurance in a place they know is just waiting to be wiped out? To cover their impending losses they'd have to make it way more expensive than what it would cost people to move, so you'll just get places full of people who can't afford to move and can't afford insurance. Things will not go well for them.

For that matter why would banks offer mortgages to anyone buying in doomed areas after a certain date? What good would it do them if there's a disaster, the homeowner can't afford payments and the banks end up with an entire town's property no one will inhabit again? Unless, you know, the plan is that the government will bail them out anyway.

Zeta Taskforce
Jun 27, 2002

davebo posted:

Unless, you know, the plan is that the government will bail them out anyway.

Exactly. This is what happens now. The wild card is the the National Flood Insurance Program. It is already subsidized by tax payers; premiums are priced way too low. It sort of does OK if it is a normal year but big events already wipe out its reserves, which is not how insurance is supposed to operate. If it were to be priced the way it should then there would already be developments that would be cut out. I work for a (very small) bank. Anytime we do a mortgage we do a flood search. It it costs about $13 to order one and it comes back right away and if a property is in a flood zone we are more than happy to do the loan. Your regular hazard insurance doesn't cover floods anyway, they are more than happy to insure it in case it burns down.

There is a lot of political pressure to keep things the way they are. To generalize, poor people are victims when a river overflows its banks, rich people are victims when the coast floods. The costal communities that are highest risk are very pleasant areas and they support a lot tourism and construction jobs. Anyone who can afford 7 or 8 figure beach home - keep in mind these are not usually primary residences - is by definition well connected and part of the political donor class. None of this is lost on senators, representatives and governors. And don't worry, if there are enough million dollar beach houses, then the money will be there to raise the roads and protect "critical infrastructure". So yeah, you are already subsidizing some hedge fund manager's beach mansion.

munce
Oct 23, 2010

More cool Greenland info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event

"Dansgaard–Oeschger events (often abbreviated D–O events) are rapid climate fluctuations that occurred 25 times during the last glacial period.

In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet increased by around 8 °C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[3] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 °C change over 30–40 years is more common.

The processes behind the timing and amplitude of these events (as recorded in ice cores) are still unclear. More recently, these events have been attributed to changes in the size of the ice sheets[7] and atmospheric carbon dioxide."

If one of these kicks off there won't be anything gradual about sea level rise, or climate change in general. And if they are caused by atmospheric CO2 and changes in the ice sheets then that seems like a real possibilty.

Good times.

VideoTapir
Oct 18, 2005

He'll tire eventually.

davebo posted:

I feel like this is gonna be the death knell for a lot of places. Why would they even offer home insurance in a place they know is just waiting to be wiped out? To cover their impending losses they'd have to make it way more expensive than what it would cost people to move, so you'll just get places full of people who can't afford to move and can't afford insurance. Things will not go well for them.

For that matter why would banks offer mortgages to anyone buying in doomed areas after a certain date? What good would it do them if there's a disaster, the homeowner can't afford payments and the banks end up with an entire town's property no one will inhabit again? Unless, you know, the plan is that the government will bail them out anyway.

Insurance companies already don't do flood insurance, that is the government. And banks will issue loans to anyone who will tale them so long as they can sell the loans to some sucker.

Zeta Taskforce
Jun 27, 2002

VideoTapir posted:

And banks will issue loans to anyone who will tale them so long as they can sell the loans to some sucker.

If you own mutual funds, a 401K or are vested in a pension then YOU are the sucker.

Ornery and Hornery
Oct 22, 2020

Failed Imagineer posted:

I don't understand why more Americans don't avail of the foreign passport options at their disposal. I get not everyone has the resources, but for a lot of countries it doesn't take much at all, maybe just a processing fee.

As an Irish person I'm kinda glad that the tens of millions of Americans eligible for an Irish passport aren't doing so, but I would if the situation were reversed because the window of opportunity is going to be closed at some point in the future. And an Irish passport entitles you to live and work in the 26 other EU countries as well as the UK

Whoa this seems rad as heck.

I don’t think I have any Irish in me but now I’m tempted to research other stuff.

Do other EU countries have that sweet passport access and EU work/live benefits?

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endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse

Ornery and Hornery posted:

Whoa this seems rad as heck.

I don’t think I have any Irish in me but now I’m tempted to research other stuff.

Do other EU countries have that sweet passport access and EU work/live benefits?

A lot of them do, yes, for certain distance to a citizen.

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