1). “The Great Climate Migration: Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration”, Sept. 15, 2020, Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, at < https://www.propublica.org/
2). “Where Will Everyone Go?”, July 23, 2020, Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, at < https://features.propublica.
3). “Will Texas become too hot for humans?”, June 30, 2023, Sarah Griffiths, BBC, at < https://www.bbc.com/future/
4). “As the Earth Warms, Duluth Is Looking Pretty Cool”, Apr. 16, 2019, Kendra Pierre-Louis, 1,476 words, The New York Times.
5). “The Great Climate Migration: Climate Change Will Make Parts of the U.S. Uninhabitable. Americans Are Still Moving There”, Nov. 10, 2020, Lucas Waldron & Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, (includes an excellent short video discusses the problems of the SunBelt and its nearly totally autocentric disaster prone major cities), at < https://www.propublica.org/
6). "Future of the human climate niche", May 26, 2020, Chi Xu et. al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, vol. 117, no. 21, pp 11350 - 11355, at < file:///C:/Users/Admin/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The pace of climate related disasters in the U.S. has been increasing noticeably for a couple of decades now, as well as the size and cost of those disasters. The U.S. population has been moving to the South and the West for well over a century now, but the costs of the natural hazards, including problems caused or made worse by Global Warming, are becoming so expensive that it is difficult to believe that the U.S. can indefinitely continue to encourage people to move to these disaster prone Sunbelt areas.
The long-term shift of the U.S. population to the Sunbelt might end over the next couple of decades.
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Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration
Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?
by Abrahm Lustgarten, photography by Meridith Kohut
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This article, the second in a series on global migration caused by climate change, is a result of a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.
Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.
But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?
I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.
So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?
I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat — 20 more days than the previous record.
For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.
I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing — was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and ProPublica mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (A detailed analysis of the maps is available here.)
What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly 1 in 2 — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.
Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.
There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third in 2016, and 3 out of 4 now describe climate change as either “a crisis” or “a major problem.” This year, Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care as an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities found that even Republicans’ views are shifting: 1 in 3 now thinks climate change should be declared a national emergency.
Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save — often at exorbitant costs — and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer safe.
It has already begun.
Let’s start with some basics. Across the country, it’s going to get hot. Buffalo, New York, may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Arizona, does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer — which supplies nearly a third of the nation’s irrigation groundwater — could be gone by the end of the century.
It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million Americans — largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin — will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.
The challenges are so widespread and so interrelated that Americans seeking to flee one could well run into another. I live on a hilltop, 400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising waters. But by the end of this century, if the more extreme projections of 8 to 10 feet of sea-level rise come to fruition, the shoreline of San Francisco Bay will move 3 miles closer to my house, as it subsumes some 166 square miles of land, including a high school, a new county hospital and the store where I buy groceries. The freeway to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Berkeley. The Latino, Asian and Black communities who live in the most-vulnerable low-lying districts will be displaced first, but research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread: Nearly 1 in 3 people here in Marin County will leave, part of the roughly 700,000 who his models suggest may abandon the broader Bay Area as a result of sea-level rise alone.
From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities, making a stable life there all but impossible. Coastal high points will be cut off from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland, saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. Eight of the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas — Miami, New York and Boston among them — will be profoundly altered, indirectly affecting some 50 million people. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will. Barrier islands? Rural areas along the coast without a strong tax base? They are likely, in the long term, unsalvageable.
In all, Hauer projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wildfires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might move — though difficult to predict precisely — could easily be tens of millions larger. Even 13 million climate migrants, though, would rank as the largest migration in North American history. The Great Migration — of 6 million Black Americans out of the South from 1916 to 1970 — transformed almost everything we know about America, from the fate of its labor movement to the shape of its cities to the sound of its music. What would it look like when twice that many people moved? What might change?
Americans have been conditioned not to respond to geographical climate threats as people in the rest of the world do. It is natural that rural Guatemalans or subsistence farmers in Kenya, facing drought or scorching heat, would seek out someplace more stable and resilient. Even a subtle environmental change — a dry well, say — can mean life or death, and without money to address the problem, migration is often simply a question of survival.
By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more insulated from the shocks of climate change. They are distanced from the food and water sources they depend on, and they are part of a culture that sees every problem as capable of being solved by money. So even as the average flow of the Colorado River — the water supply for 40 million Western Americans and the backbone of the nation’s vegetable and cattle farming — has declined for most of the last 33 years, the population of Nevada has doubled. At the same time, more than 1.5 million people have moved to the Phoenix metro area, despite its dependence on that same river (and the fact that temperatures there now regularly hit 115 degrees). Since Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992 — and even as that state has become a global example of the threat of sea-level rise — more than 5 million people have moved to Florida’s shorelines, driving a historic boom in building and real estate.
Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.
The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.
Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people’s long-term decision-making.
Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it themselves. The regulations — called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements — are justified by developers and local politicians alike as economic lifeboats “of last resort” in regions where climate change threatens to interrupt economic growth. While they do protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities, the laws also satisfy the demand of wealthier homeowners who still want to be able to buy insurance.
At least 30 states, including Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, have developed so-called FAIR plans, and today they serve as a market backstop in the places facing the highest risks of climate-driven disasters, including coastal flooding, hurricanes and wildfires.
In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.
That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.
As a result, Florida’s taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion — more than seven times the state’s total budget — as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.
On a sweltering afternoon last October, with the skies above me full of wildfire smoke, I called Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to — suggesting that Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north. But like other scientists I’d spoken with, Keenan had been reluctant to draw conclusions about where these migrants would be driven from.
Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California, his phone began to ring, with private-equity investors and bankers all looking for his read on the state’s future. Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. It’s an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch directions. “And once this flips,” he added, “it’s likely to flip very quickly.”
In fact, the correction — a newfound respect for the destructive power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans’ appetite for reckless development — had begun two years earlier, when a frightening surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules.
On Oct. 9, 2017, a wildfire blazed through the suburban blue-collar neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, virtually in my own backyard. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Inchlong cinders had piled on my windowsills like falling snow.
The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn’t have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as “basically zero risk,” according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions. (He now does similar work for Cape Analytics.) But Van Leer, who had spent seven years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate — and price — the risk of their happening again, had begun to see other “impossible” fires. After a 2016 fire tornado ripped through northern Canada and a firestorm consumed Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he said, “alarm bells started going off” for the insurance industry.
What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever. Typically, fire would spread along the ground, burning maybe 50% of structures. In Santa Rosa, more than 90% had been leveled. “The destruction was complete,” he told me. Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. “It’s hard to forecast something you’ve never seen before,” he said.
For me, the awakening to imminent climate risk came with California’s rolling power blackouts last fall — an effort to preemptively avoid the risk of a live wire sparking a fire — which showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my own life choices were on a collision course. After the first one, all the food in our refrigerator was lost. When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. All around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing. Then, as now, I packed an ax and a go-bag in my car, ready to evacuate. As former Gov. Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel like the “new abnormal.”
It was no surprise, then, that California’s property insurers — having watched 26 years’ worth of profits dissolve over 24 months — began dropping policies, or that California’s insurance commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. In February, the Legislature introduced a bill compelling California to, in the words of one consumer advocacy group, “follow the lead of Florida” by mandating that insurance remain available, in this case with a requirement that homeowners first harden their properties against fire. At the same time, participation in California’s FAIR plan for catastrophic fires has grown by at least 180% since 2015, and in Santa Rosa, houses are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire-vulnerable zones that proved so deadly in 2017. Given that a new study projects a 20% increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.
It’s only a matter of time before homeowners begin to recognize the unsustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the sort of cultural awakening to risk that Keenan observes, can strike a neighborhood like an infectious disease, with fear spreading doubt — and devaluation — from door to door. It happened that way in the foreclosure crisis.
Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.
Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention investment. My Bay Area neighborhood, on the other hand, has benefited from consistent investment in efforts to defend it against the ravages of climate change. That questions of livability had reached me, here, were testament to Keenan’s belief that the bluelining phenomenon will eventually affect large majorities of equity-holding middle-class Americans too, with broad implications for the overall economy, starting in the nation’s largest state.
Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.
Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it’s easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.
Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans’ irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.
And that’s when the real migration might begin.
As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians’ exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my house and getting — ”
He cut me off: “Yes.”
Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60%, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers — “Okies” not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri — unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns. Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent life did some towns bounce back stronger.
The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.
A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation’s wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20%. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. At that point, the authors write, “abandonment is one option.”
Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America’s cropland — plus the steady baking and burning and flooding — suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States — mostly across the South and the Southwest — will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10%.
That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. In 1950, less than 65% of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10% will live outside them, in part because of climatic change. By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities — not the places that empty out — that wind up bearing the brunt of America’s reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty.
So what will happen to Atlanta — a metro area of 5.8 million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by 2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure. Atlanta — where poor transportation and water systems contributed to the state’s C+ infrastructure grade last year — already suffers greater income inequality than any other large American city, making it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.
Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change, but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That Atlanta hasn’t “fully grappled with” such challenges now, said Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, means that with more people and higher temperatures, “the city might be pushed to what’s manageable.”
So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions.
Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.
In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20% more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10%, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.
The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by roughly 10%, according to one model. Once-chilly places like Minnesota and Michigan and Vermont will become more temperate, verdant and inviting. Vast regions will prosper; just as Hsiang’s research forecast that Southern counties could see a tenth of their economy dry up, he projects that others as far as North Dakota and Minnesota will enjoy a corresponding expansion. Cities like Detroit; Rochester, New York; Buffalo and Milwaukee will see a renaissance, with their excess capacity in infrastructure, water supplies and highways once again put to good use. One day, it’s possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine country and the country’s new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with Vancouver to its north.
Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I talked through the implications of this looming American future. The facts were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many intangibles — a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost of moving — that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.
Al Shaw contributed reporting.
Clarification, Sept. 16, 2020: This article was updated to clarify that the mapping of danger zones was done by ProPublica staff.
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Will Texas become too hot for humans?
It's 9.15 pm in San Antonio on 17 June. At this time, young children would usually be asleep and their parents enjoying a balmy summer's evening. But not this year, when temperatures have reached triple figures in parts of Texas, and extreme humidity has made it feel hotter still, even after sunset.
Millions of people have been issued with excessive heat warnings and the extreme temperatures have claimed the lives of several people already. Temperatures peaked at 119F (48C), smashing countless high-temperature records across the state. More are expected to be broken in the coming week as the heatwave expands to the north and east.
These unusually-high temperatures have primarily been sparked by a ridge of high pressure parked over the Southern US called a "heat dome", which occurs when the atmosphere traps hot ocean air like a lid. (Learn more about how the heat dome is causing record temperatures.)
John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas State Climatologist and director of the Southern Regional Climate Centre at Texas A&M University, says there are other short-term contributing factors too. "The Gulf of Mexico is unusually warm… and it's also around the time of the summer solstice."
There are longer-term trends at work too. The frequency and intensity of extreme heat events have increased around the globe due to climate change and are predicted to get worse.
The hotter bigger picture
Texas has warmed between 0.5-1F in the past century. "In the coming decades … summers are likely to become increasingly hot and dry, creating problems for agriculture and possibly human health," warns the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It predicts that 70 years from now, the state will have three or four times as many days per year above 100F (38C) as it has today.
Many people have found it too hot to work without air conditioning (Credit: Getty Images)
The National Integrated Heat Health Information System's Climate Explorer tool also offers a worrying glimpse into Texas's future. It predicts that Austin and Travis County's average daily maximum temperature in June could rise to 99.7F (37.6C) between 2060 and 2090 if no steps are taken to mitigate the potentially crippling effects of climate change. Austin's Office of Sustainability's estimate is even higher with a summer average high temperature of 103.8F (39.9C) at the end of the century for the city.
The human cost
Extreme heat is currently the deadliest natural hazard in the US, with young children and adults over the age of 65 among the most vulnerable to heat-related illness and death. Analysis by The Texas Tribune found more than 275 people in Texas died from heat-related illness in 2022, which was a two-decade high, and this year's heatwave appears to be worse.
Young children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor who cannot afford technology including air-conditioning to help keep them cool are particularly vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat. High air temperatures can cause heat stroke, dehydration and affect people's cardiovascular and nervous systems.
"This heatwave has been very stressful for people in the region, and especially dangerous for people with underlying health risks," says Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central, a non-profit that analyses climate science. Research by Climate Central found a "significant increase" in the number of days above local "risky heat thresholds" in several Texas cities, when heat-related health risks increase. For example, Austin has 53 more risky heat days per year than in 1970.
"Climate change is increasing the number of risky heat days in most places, mostly by increasing the length of the heat season," he explains. So far, the current heat dome has claimed at least a dozen lives in Texas and Louisiana.
The upper environmental limit that healthy people can handle is a wet-bulb temperature of 95F (31C) at 100% humidity
At what point the heat becomes unbearable is personal, but a study published in 2010 estimated that a "wet-bulb" temperature of 95F (35C) at 100% humidity, or 115F at 50% humidity is probably as hot as most humans can maintain a healthy core body temperature by sweating. Above that "critical environmental limit" our body temperature rises continuously and the risk of heat-related illnesses such as heat stroke increases.
But a team of researchers from Penn State University discovered our resilience to heat is probably lower than this after testing how healthy people handle hot temperatures in a sweaty experiment in their laboratory. They showed that the upper environmental limit is a lower wet-bulb temperature of 95F (31C) at 100% humidity.
The heatwave in Texas has in places exceeded this band of dangerous temperatures, so whether people can live happily in the state also largely depends on whether they have access to air conditioning and can afford to use it, or whether they have to work outside under the hot Sun.
This has left people asking: when it is too hot to work? In Houston, McDonalds workers went on strike this week after experiencing issues with their air conditioning. Meanwhile roofers, welders and those in professions that can't rely on these technologies have been struggling to keep their body temperatures within the normal range.
And even when they aren't life-threatening, hotter temperatures can impair cognition, motor control and affect our ability to perform everyday tasks. This is problematic, because whatever happens to the climate in Texas, most people will still need to work.
There are also wider implications for society. It's well-established that warmer weather can make us more aggressive, increasing rates of violent crime and the probability of social unrest. (Read more from BBC Future about the strange ways heatwaves can warp the mind).
The human body is limited in its ability to control its core temperature without additional means to cool off (Credit: Getty Images)
James Doss-Gollin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, in Houston, Texas, believes infrastructure upgrades could help people to cope with future heatwaves in the US, but they come at a cost.
There are plans to improve wind and solar resources in Texas between now and 2030 at an estimated cost of US$66.5 bn (£52.7bn), while residents could add rooftop solar panels or back-up batteries to their homes, which could lighten the load on the transmission system during peak hours, he explains. "It's important to make sure the things that benefit people who can afford them also provide benefit to others and we're not leaving people behind."
Those who cannot afford technology to help them adapt may consider moving somewhere cooler if extreme heat becomes the norm in Texas and elsewhere in the US. (Read more from BBC Future about how to stay cool in a heatwave.)
A wider problem
The prospect of more unbearable heatwaves each summer is not unique to Texas. According to a 2021 report by researchers at Rutgers university, if the Earth reaches three degrees of global warming – which some estimates suggest is likely – around 1.2 billion people will be at risk of heat stress every year.
Moving on
"Over the next 50 years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country's history," says author Jake Bittle, whose book The Great Displacement, tell stories of people forced to leave their homes due to extreme weather events.
Around 162 million Americans are expected to experience a decline in the quality of their environment and by 2070, with four million could be living outside "the ideal niche for human life," according to a collaborative effort between ProPublica and The New York Times
For now, people are moving to Texas from other US states to escape other weather-related problems such as frequent tornadoes to drought. One study found Houston to be a "receiving community" for climate migrants from New Orleans looking to put down new roots following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Another study predicts that rising sea levels will force 13 million Americans to move away from the coasts, with Houston and Dallas potentially getting thousands of new residents. But predicting the movement of people is notoriously difficult, and people may seek refuge from extreme weather within and out of the US Gulf Coast region.
Whether Texas one day becomes so uncomfortably hot for humans that they decide to leave remains to be seen. Nielsen-Gammon says the highest temperature ever recorded in Texas was 120F (49C), which is just one degree higher than the peak recorded in this heatwave.
"Gradually, as the global climate warms, there is the possibility temperatures keep increasing (in Texas) in tandem," warns Nielsen-Gammon.
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Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration
Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?
by Abrahm Lustgarten, photography by Meridith Kohut
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This article, the second in a series on global migration caused by climate change, is a result of a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.
Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.
But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?
I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.
So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?
I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat — 20 more days than the previous record.
For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.
I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing — was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and ProPublica mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (A detailed analysis of the maps is available here.)
What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly 1 in 2 — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.
Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.
There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third in 2016, and 3 out of 4 now describe climate change as either “a crisis” or “a major problem.” This year, Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care as an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities found that even Republicans’ views are shifting: 1 in 3 now thinks climate change should be declared a national emergency.
Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save — often at exorbitant costs — and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer safe.
It has already begun.
Let’s start with some basics. Across the country, it’s going to get hot. Buffalo, New York, may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Arizona, does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer — which supplies nearly a third of the nation’s irrigation groundwater — could be gone by the end of the century.
It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million Americans — largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin — will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.
The challenges are so widespread and so interrelated that Americans seeking to flee one could well run into another. I live on a hilltop, 400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising waters. But by the end of this century, if the more extreme projections of 8 to 10 feet of sea-level rise come to fruition, the shoreline of San Francisco Bay will move 3 miles closer to my house, as it subsumes some 166 square miles of land, including a high school, a new county hospital and the store where I buy groceries. The freeway to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Berkeley. The Latino, Asian and Black communities who live in the most-vulnerable low-lying districts will be displaced first, but research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread: Nearly 1 in 3 people here in Marin County will leave, part of the roughly 700,000 who his models suggest may abandon the broader Bay Area as a result of sea-level rise alone.
From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities, making a stable life there all but impossible. Coastal high points will be cut off from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland, saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. Eight of the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas — Miami, New York and Boston among them — will be profoundly altered, indirectly affecting some 50 million people. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will. Barrier islands? Rural areas along the coast without a strong tax base? They are likely, in the long term, unsalvageable.
In all, Hauer projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wildfires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might move — though difficult to predict precisely — could easily be tens of millions larger. Even 13 million climate migrants, though, would rank as the largest migration in North American history. The Great Migration — of 6 million Black Americans out of the South from 1916 to 1970 — transformed almost everything we know about America, from the fate of its labor movement to the shape of its cities to the sound of its music. What would it look like when twice that many people moved? What might change?
Americans have been conditioned not to respond to geographical climate threats as people in the rest of the world do. It is natural that rural Guatemalans or subsistence farmers in Kenya, facing drought or scorching heat, would seek out someplace more stable and resilient. Even a subtle environmental change — a dry well, say — can mean life or death, and without money to address the problem, migration is often simply a question of survival.
By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more insulated from the shocks of climate change. They are distanced from the food and water sources they depend on, and they are part of a culture that sees every problem as capable of being solved by money. So even as the average flow of the Colorado River — the water supply for 40 million Western Americans and the backbone of the nation’s vegetable and cattle farming — has declined for most of the last 33 years, the population of Nevada has doubled. At the same time, more than 1.5 million people have moved to the Phoenix metro area, despite its dependence on that same river (and the fact that temperatures there now regularly hit 115 degrees). Since Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992 — and even as that state has become a global example of the threat of sea-level rise — more than 5 million people have moved to Florida’s shorelines, driving a historic boom in building and real estate.
Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.
The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.
Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people’s long-term decision-making.
Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it themselves. The regulations — called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements — are justified by developers and local politicians alike as economic lifeboats “of last resort” in regions where climate change threatens to interrupt economic growth. While they do protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities, the laws also satisfy the demand of wealthier homeowners who still want to be able to buy insurance.
At least 30 states, including Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, have developed so-called FAIR plans, and today they serve as a market backstop in the places facing the highest risks of climate-driven disasters, including coastal flooding, hurricanes and wildfires.
In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.
That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.
As a result, Florida’s taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion — more than seven times the state’s total budget — as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.
On a sweltering afternoon last October, with the skies above me full of wildfire smoke, I called Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to — suggesting that Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north. But like other scientists I’d spoken with, Keenan had been reluctant to draw conclusions about where these migrants would be driven from.
Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California, his phone began to ring, with private-equity investors and bankers all looking for his read on the state’s future. Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. It’s an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch directions. “And once this flips,” he added, “it’s likely to flip very quickly.”
In fact, the correction — a newfound respect for the destructive power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans’ appetite for reckless development — had begun two years earlier, when a frightening surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules.
On Oct. 9, 2017, a wildfire blazed through the suburban blue-collar neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, virtually in my own backyard. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Inchlong cinders had piled on my windowsills like falling snow.
The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn’t have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as “basically zero risk,” according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions. (He now does similar work for Cape Analytics.) But Van Leer, who had spent seven years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate — and price — the risk of their happening again, had begun to see other “impossible” fires. After a 2016 fire tornado ripped through northern Canada and a firestorm consumed Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he said, “alarm bells started going off” for the insurance industry.
What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever. Typically, fire would spread along the ground, burning maybe 50% of structures. In Santa Rosa, more than 90% had been leveled. “The destruction was complete,” he told me. Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. “It’s hard to forecast something you’ve never seen before,” he said.
For me, the awakening to imminent climate risk came with California’s rolling power blackouts last fall — an effort to preemptively avoid the risk of a live wire sparking a fire — which showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my own life choices were on a collision course. After the first one, all the food in our refrigerator was lost. When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. All around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing. Then, as now, I packed an ax and a go-bag in my car, ready to evacuate. As former Gov. Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel like the “new abnormal.”
It was no surprise, then, that California’s property insurers — having watched 26 years’ worth of profits dissolve over 24 months — began dropping policies, or that California’s insurance commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. In February, the Legislature introduced a bill compelling California to, in the words of one consumer advocacy group, “follow the lead of Florida” by mandating that insurance remain available, in this case with a requirement that homeowners first harden their properties against fire. At the same time, participation in California’s FAIR plan for catastrophic fires has grown by at least 180% since 2015, and in Santa Rosa, houses are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire-vulnerable zones that proved so deadly in 2017. Given that a new study projects a 20% increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.
It’s only a matter of time before homeowners begin to recognize the unsustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the sort of cultural awakening to risk that Keenan observes, can strike a neighborhood like an infectious disease, with fear spreading doubt — and devaluation — from door to door. It happened that way in the foreclosure crisis.
Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.
Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention investment. My Bay Area neighborhood, on the other hand, has benefited from consistent investment in efforts to defend it against the ravages of climate change. That questions of livability had reached me, here, were testament to Keenan’s belief that the bluelining phenomenon will eventually affect large majorities of equity-holding middle-class Americans too, with broad implications for the overall economy, starting in the nation’s largest state.
Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.
Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it’s easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.
Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans’ irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.
And that’s when the real migration might begin.
As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians’ exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my house and getting — ”
He cut me off: “Yes.”
Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60%, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers — “Okies” not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri — unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns. Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent life did some towns bounce back stronger.
The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.
A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation’s wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20%. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. At that point, the authors write, “abandonment is one option.”
Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America’s cropland — plus the steady baking and burning and flooding — suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States — mostly across the South and the Southwest — will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10%.
That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. In 1950, less than 65% of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10% will live outside them, in part because of climatic change. By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities — not the places that empty out — that wind up bearing the brunt of America’s reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty.
So what will happen to Atlanta — a metro area of 5.8 million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by 2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure. Atlanta — where poor transportation and water systems contributed to the state’s C+ infrastructure grade last year — already suffers greater income inequality than any other large American city, making it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.
Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change, but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That Atlanta hasn’t “fully grappled with” such challenges now, said Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, means that with more people and higher temperatures, “the city might be pushed to what’s manageable.”
So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions.
Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.
In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20% more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10%, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.
The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by roughly 10%, according to one model. Once-chilly places like Minnesota and Michigan and Vermont will become more temperate, verdant and inviting. Vast regions will prosper; just as Hsiang’s research forecast that Southern counties could see a tenth of their economy dry up, he projects that others as far as North Dakota and Minnesota will enjoy a corresponding expansion. Cities like Detroit; Rochester, New York; Buffalo and Milwaukee will see a renaissance, with their excess capacity in infrastructure, water supplies and highways once again put to good use. One day, it’s possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine country and the country’s new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with Vancouver to its north.
Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I talked through the implications of this looming American future. The facts were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many intangibles — a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost of moving — that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.
Al Shaw contributed reporting.
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(Text of) “As the Earth Warms, Duluth Is Looking Pretty Cool”, Apr. 16, 2019, Kendra Pierre-Louis, 1,476 words, The New York Times.
DULUTH, Minn. -- As the West burns, the South swelters and the East floods, some Americans are starting to reconsider where they choose to live.
For advice, a few of them are turning to Jesse Keenan, a lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. At least once a day, Dr. Keenan, who studies urban development and climate adaptation, gets an email from someone asking where to move to be safe from climate change. The messages come from people who are thinking about moving not because they have already been hit by catastrophe, but because they see the writing on the wall.
So, what does Dr. Keenan suggest to these advance planners? Maybe climate-proof Duluth.
That's a slogan that he created as part of an economic development and marketing package commissioned by the University of Minnesota Duluth. Some community leaders think they can spur growth by bringing in more people, and they sense an opportunity in climate change. And Duluth isn't the only urban area that has climate migration on their radar. In a February speech, the mayor of Buffalo, Byron W. Brown, declared his city a ''climate refuge.''
Dr. Keenan emphasized one day in mid-March as we stood on the ice of Lake Superior that the Duluth slogan was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The science behind it, though, is no joke.
Nowhere in the world is immune from climate change, including Duluth. ''We're getting more precipitation in bigger amounts than we ever really observed,'' said Kenneth Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
''But when you stand back and look around, it's almost like, 'But we've got it good.'''
Climate projections suggest that, because of geographic factors, the region around Duluth, the Great Lakes area, will be one of the few places in America where the effects of climate change may be more easily managed.
First, it's cool to begin with. That means, as temperatures increase, it will remain mild in relative terms. By 2080, even under relatively high concentrations of carbon dioxide emissions, Duluth's climate is expected to shift to something like that of Toledo, Ohio, with summer highs maxing out in the mid-80s Fahrenheit.
''We're not seeing worse heat waves or longer heat waves or more of those long nights that don't fall below 75 degrees,'' Dr. Blumenfeld said. ''Instead, what we're seeing is warmer winters, fewer days during winter where we get to negative 30 Fahrenheit.''
Because the region will remain relatively cool, it will have a lower wildfire risk than the West or the Southeast. Wildfires thrive in hotter temperatures, which dry out plants and make them easier to ignite.
And, because Duluth is inland, it's mostly protected from the effects of sea level rise.
Duluth, which sits at the western end of Lake Superior, the greatest of the Great Lakes by volume, also has fresh water. A lot of it. Superior is so voluminous that, if poured out, it would submerge North and South America under a foot of water.
''At the end of the day, it's really about fresh water,'' Dr. Keenan said. ''It's that simple. You've got to have fresh water.''
You've got to have quite a bit, in fact. To meet our minimum needs, from drinking to cooking and cleaning, the World Health Organization says we need 13 to 26 gallons of water a day, or about 50 to 100 liters. The average American uses 80 to 100 gallons.
The city hasn't formally adopted Dr. Keenan's climate refuge plan so far, but it has the attention of the mayor, Emily Larson. ''This idea that we have this national researcher who has identified Duluth as a place that has kind of a secret sauce when it comes to being a place for refuge and sustainability and resiliency, that is something you want to be a part of,'' she said.
For the plan to work, people would need to actually move to Duluth. The city's infrastructure can accommodate 150,000 people, but the current population is just 86,000. From 2010 to 2016, though, the city added only 56 people.
Presented to the public at the end of a two-day conference focused on understanding Duluth's future in a warming world, Dr. Keenan's research, which partly aims to predict which states are likely to see more people leaving because of climate change, suggested that present-day Texans and Floridians might make excellent future Duluthians.
''What do people from Florida really want?'' said Dr. Keenan, himself a former Floridian who still keeps a residence in the state. ''They want the infinite horizon of the ocean.''
This may be why one of Dr. Keenan's sample advertisements, ''Duluth, it's not as cold as you think,'' featured an image of a surfer in a wet suit.
That appeared to be tongue-in-cheek, too. When he showed the photo during his presentation, the audience laughed. Duluth does have a surf season. But the proposed ad glides past the fact that it's in winter. Surfers head out into the lake in temperatures as low as minus 15 Fahrenheit, or minus 26 Celsius.
''We had one week in particular that it was negative 60 almost every day with wind chill,'' said Kyle Skarp, an electrician, as he watched friends play board games in the back room of Blacklist Artisan Ales, a brew pub in Duluth. ''You didn't want to go outside. And not because it was uncomfortable, but because it's unsafe.''
Mr. Skarp said he liked the idea of more people coming to Duluth. He said it would mean more jobs.
But not everyone agrees with Dr. Keenan's plan. Because it favors those who are financially able to move, it selects for the affluent and, he acknowledged, raises questions of gentrification.
After the presentation, Karen Diver, a faculty fellow at the College of Saint Scholastica who served as special assistant to the president for Native American affairs during the Obama administration, cautioned that the city had an uneven track record when it comes to embracing diversity.
''From my perspective we haven't even figured out how to interact in a positive way with our indigenous people,'' said Ms. Diver, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa who lives near Duluth on her tribe's reservation.
Mayor Larson seemed to acknowledge that. ''I think we have a tremendous amount of work to do as a community to truly be a place where migration and immigration are seen as being strength and vitality and growth,'' she said.
Ultimately, if Duluth decides to invest in attracting climate migrants, whether voluntary or displaced, the city may face competition.
At least one other Great Lakes city, Buffalo, 700 miles away on the eastern tip of Lake Erie, also has winter cold, and the same geographic blessings as Duluth. Buffalo is predicted to have fresh water even as the climate warms, and its summers will remain relatively cool.
''We've never had a 100 degree day,'' said Stephen J. Vermette, a professor of geography at Buffalo State.
But Buffalo has already received what could be described as a wave of climate migrants, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in the autumn of 2017.
They came partly because Buffalo has an established Puerto Rican population, which meant that many prospective migrants had friends and relatives in the city.
At the same time, Buffalo had advertised itself on Puerto Rican television in search of Spanish language teachers. They came because they had connections and knew that there was a chance they could make a life there.
''About 10,000 people came here after the hurricane in Puerto Rico,'' said George Besch, chairman of the board of directors at Designing to Live Sustainably, a nonprofit group working to help the Buffalo-Niagara region adapt to climate change.
According to Matthew Hauer, an assistant professor of sociology at Florida State University, people who migrate, whether by choice or not, still like to stick close to home, moving just far enough to get out of harm's way but often remaining within the same state or region.
When people do go far away, he said, they either move for higher paying jobs, or they ''tend to follow kin networks and friend networks.''
Collectivist Action posted an excellent short article here at The Class Struggle about the Environment, on July 3, 2023. The issues brought up in that article inspired me to read some more technical articles and summarize some of the basic facts we face.
The effect of the now immense human population (8 Billion and still growing) on this planet, Our one and only home: terraforming Mars is a ridiculous fantasy Elon Musk's flights of fancy at the launch pad aside.
Global Warming is the most acute of the many deleterious changes in the biological and physical environment of the Earth. One of the major consequences of Global Warming is the move of climate zones Poleward, most clearly seen in the giant continental land masses of the Northern Hemisphere. Many good articles have been published about the likely future consequences of Global Warming.
Temperature Changes we can Expect:
Figure 1). Shows the changes that one group of researchers / computer modelers predict. The most important projection posted on the Map for Figure 1). is the increase in the area where the Mean Annual Temperature (MAT) is 29o C (84.2o F). That means the average temperature, over the entire year and for all 24 hours of the day. A MAT of 29o C (84.2o F) is too hot for human habitation, including the growing of most crops. Areas, with a MAT that high, cannot be lived in by humans; they can be crossed by caravans or truck convoys and such, but they are uninhabitable. The first part of this essay is based on material from
What is very significant about the expansion of areas with a Mean Average Temperature (MAT) of 29o C or higher is that if population changes continue, as they have in the recent past, 3.5 Billion people live in areas that will have a MAT of 29o C or higher. That is an uninhabitable level of temperature and these people will migrate to other places. These would be levels of migration that could not be sustained by the places that would have to receive the migrants. The amounts of people involved would be well over 100 times the contemporary level of immigration, the side effects of which have played a major role in the Far-Right Movements that the ultra-rich are funding and fostering.
Figure 2). Is from the same research/computer modeling article as Figure 1. What shows up on Figure 2 is the shift of human economic activities and habitation poleward. This is shown in the Green improved suitability as reflected in the displacement into the green areas versus the displacement of people and their activities out of the orange and red areas. This is most marked in the Northern Hemisphere with its much larger amount of land, much of it in the warm temperate areas that will become warmer and drier, and even more in the cool temperate areas that will see longer growing seasons.
Figures 3 & 4, show basically the same situation for land use. The present situation is shown in Figure 3; and in Figure 4 the situation projected for 50 years into the future (2070 for an article prepared in 2020). There could be, if anything, more agricultural land with a suitable climate for producing crops in 2070 than there is now. Of course, moving nearly the entire area where major amounts of crops are grown several degrees poleward, a distance that amounts to several hundred miles, is an immense undertaking. Many of the areas, that might have suitable temperature and moisture conditions projected for 2070, have absolutely zero infrastructure in terms of irrigation, transportation, storage, and processing facilities. These areas also do not necessarily have adequate soils, when compared to the current cropping areas.
Moving the crop production areas to new regions would also require massive expenditure of resources. The farmland in South and East Asia, that currently feeds something on the order of 2 billion people in India and China, would become too hot and dry to continue to produce the level of staple crops that it does now.
Figures 5 - 7 demonstrate a similar move of suitable land, for the agriculture needed to support a human society, in North America. Figure 5 shows the current distribution of “highly suitable” agricultural land. Figure 6 shows a projected distribution of “highly suitable” agricultural land in 2070 assuming moderate levels of Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Figure shows a projected distribution of “highly suitable” agricultural land in 2070 assuming high levels of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs). In both cases the suitable land areas are expected to migrate several hundred miles Northward, clearly the result is more drastic for the high emissions scenario. As stated above, massive resources would be required to move or build the necessary infrastructure to harvest the crops that now are grown much farther South. The area of highly suitable agricultural land is increased in the Moderate and especially in High GHG scenarios.
Another important issue is the vulnerability of various SunBelt regions, and the major cities located there to climate related disasters. Figure 8 points out various climate related problem areas in the U.S., that occur all over the country, but that have particularly disastrous conditions in the South and Southwest. Figure 9 is a map showing how the counties in the U.S, are projected to be affected economically by the 2080 - 2099 period. Most notable are the severe economic losses expected in the S.E. Quadrant of the U.S. The counties there have projected economic losses that mostly range 15% to nearly 30%. Meanwhile the Northern Tier of states is projected to have 5% to 12% gains in their County GDP figures.
The current effects of Global Warming are seen in the rather dramatic amounts of drought that are affecting North America, as shown in Figure 10. California, after earlier, very unusual, rains that arrived in what were called the Rivers of Moisture during the spring and summer, has largely been removed from any level of drought in most of the state. These rains, associated with the appearance of a strong El Nino in the Central Pacific, also caused serious flooding and erosion damage. Drought is a recurring problem in California, and the spring / summer rains and floods will not keep California, and its many reservoirs, wet. Most of the rain fell in the Southern part of the state, and the state water storage system is oriented toward capturing snow melt from the Rockies and is located in the Northern part of the state. There is not much storage capacity in Southern California and it is not designed to catch rain that falls on the Southern part of the state. The dramatic effects of the recent massive fire disaster on the Hawaiian Island of Maui made inclusion of the Hawaiian Islands a necessity for the map in Figure 10.
Finally, Figure 11 shows what is generally referred to as the Great Oceanic Conveyor. A system of surface and deepwater currents that move warm water out of the Tropical Seas up to the High Latitude Oceanic areas (far and away mostly a phenomenon of the Northern Hemisphere). Those currents then release heat in the North Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the North Central Pacific. The water moving in the Conveyor, is significantly cooled by this release of heat at the higher latitudes, and the cooled water then descends into much deeper waters of the oceans and returns cool water the the equatorial regions. In particular, The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), keeps Western and Northern Europe much more temperate, providing the region with much milder winters than would otherwise be the case at the relatively high latitudes of Northern and Western Europe.
The location of Greenland and the cold dense meltwater from the rapid melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, near the area where the Gulf Stream warm surface current part of the AMOC, might disrupt this flow of warm water to the far northern Atlantic. If that happens Northern and Western Europe could change over to a climate regime more like that of European Russia. Thus we could easily see a period of perhaps several hundred years or more during which the moderated winters of Northern and Western Europe would be replaced by a much colder winter climate. There are definite signs that the Gulf Stream is weakening and nobody knows exactly what will happen if the Gulf Stream continues to become weaker and might be diverted away from the North Western part of Eurasia where the moderating effects are felt.
Different aspects of the problems that are increasingly plaguing the Sunbelt are discussed in “The Great Climate Migration: Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration”, Sept. 15, 2020, Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, “Where Will Everyone Go?”, July 23, 2020, Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, and “Will Texas become too hot for humans?”, June 30, 2023, Sarah Griffiths, BBC, “As the Earth Warms, Duluth Is Looking Pretty Cool”, Apr. 16, 2019, Kendra Pierre-Louis, 1,476 words, The New York Times, and “The Great Climate Migration: Climate Change Will Make Parts of the U.S. Uninhabitable. Americans Are Still Moving There”, Nov. 10, 2020, Lucas Waldron & Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, (with an excellent short video discusses the problems of the SunBelt and its nearly totally autocentric major cities)
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Climate Change Will Make Parts of the U.S. Uninhabitable. Americans Are Still Moving There.
Instead of moving away from areas in climate crisis, Americans are flocking to them. As land in places like Phoenix, Houston and Miami becomes less habitable, the country’s migration patterns will be forced to change.
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Over the past year, the advent of a professional economy powered by people working from home has quickened the conversation about where to live, particularly among millennials. “Is now the right time to buy property in Minnesota?” “Is Buffalo the new place to be?”
How important is proximity to fresh water? Should you risk moving somewhere that has fire seasons? How far north do you have to go to find liveable summers?
Americans have defied the norms of climate migration seen elsewhere in the world, flocking to cities like Phoenix, Houston and Miami that face some of the greatest risks from soaring temperatures and rising sea levels.
Those patterns seem likely to change.
New data from the Rhodium Group, analyzed by ProPublica, shows that climate damage will wreak havoc on the southern third of the country, erasing more than 8% of its economic output and likely turning migration from a choice to an imperative.
The data shows that the warming climate will alter everything from how we grow food to where people can plausibly live. Ultimately, millions of people will be displaced by flooding, fires and scorching heat, a resorting of the map not seen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Now as then, the biggest question will be who escapes and who is left behind.
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