Under Rick Scott, Florida officials can't use the term "climate change"

[angus]

I would say that FL Republicans are sticking their heads in the sand, but around here digging a hole in the sand and sticking your head in it might accidentally give you some indication that sea levels are rising.

It isn't just Republicans.  And they aren't so much sticking their heads in the sand as trying to squeeze out every last construction and tourism dollar.  A five-foot sea level rise will affect about 99 thousand homes in Miami, worth about 32 billion dollars collectively.  Similar statistics exist for Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, etc.  Key West will no longer be accessible by road, unless Floridians want to spend a hundred billion dollars raising the highway that leads to it, because it will be mostly submerged one day, and Key West itself will probably be a very small, uninhabitable, treeless sandbar in any event.  Amazingly, the pace of development isn't slowing.  Construction on a one-billion dollar shopping mall in Broward County is ongoing even as I type this.  In Miami, a 750 million-dollar convention center is being built, along with an 1800-room hotel, all of which will be under water in less than one hundred years, even if conservative estimates of sea-level rise are correct.

Start talking about climate change and that money starts to dry up.  Legislators who get blamed for putting millions of construction workers and tourism-industry workers out of work are legislators who will soon be out of work themselves, wouldn't you imagine?

[angus]

Dems at least talk the better game on climate change, and they do vote the better game too.

Actually there's something to that.  Several counties, including Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach, all of which have a majority of Democrats on the county board of commissioners, have begun to spend money on climate impact studies and talk more openly of the impending sea level rise.  There was an article about a month ago talking about this, and one has invited executives from a Dutch company which specializes in protecting below-sea-level properties.  The Netherlands American Business Chamber in Miami (NABCM) used to have a website but I can't seem to find it just now.  I think I remember reading that one was proposing several artificial floating islands that could adjust with the tides, complete with golf courses, apartment complexes, shopping malls, desalination plants, and the like.  Still, the county commissioners are up against property disputes and procrastination from Floridians of all political stripes.

[angus]

If Angus is right, my house will be underwater at one point. I live on the Intracoastal, after all.

Well, who knows?  I'm just quoting others, by the way.

The IPCC published in 2013 a prediction of 0.15 to 0.35 meters by 2100.  These predictions assumed a certain rate of mass loss from glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.  In 2014, the National Climate Assessment predicted 1 to 4 feet by 2100 and the RPC45 model predicted up to 1.3 meters by 2100.  One model predicts up to 12 meters, although that one makes some extreme assumptions.  I like the five-foot number for city planning, even though it is sort on the high side.

There are lots of interactive maps you can play with to see what the coastline looks like for various sea level increases.  Here's one from NOAA that lets you go up to five feet.  There are others that let you take it up to 21 meters.


Of course, if all the ice on the globe melts, then here's what North America looks like:



I don't think any models are predicting this scenario.

[angus]

Continue on though about how florida is going to be completely underwater soon (although im sure no one would be upset anyway)

Just for your edification, to continue generally means that one has started something.  I never said that Florida would be "completely under water soon"--I never even said that Key West would be completely underwater soon, let alone the state of Florida--so it is not possible for me to continue on about how Florida is going to be completely underwater soon.

As for no one being upset, that's demonstrably false.  Plenty of us will be upset by Florida's diminishing landmass.  First, there are all the tourists and developers I mentioned above.  Secondly, the many posters who post here who live less than five feet above sea level.  Third, me.  And my family!  (Despite all the negative posts about Florida on this forum, some of posters love Florida.  And so do our families.)  I travel to Florida regularly.  My son's first experience on a real ocean beach was in Miami.  His first swimming pool experience happened in Destin.  The first real shipwreck I ever dived was just off Key Largo.  Even now, we're planning a two-week trip to Florida in June.  I've been diving the reefs in Florida and in the Caribbean, as well as in other tropical and subtropical zones in various seas around the globe, and in the seventeen years that I've been diving them I've seen the increasing bleaching of the coral.  It's palpable.  I can compares underwater photos that I made with ones I made a decade later in the same spot and the degradation is unmistakable.  It's a sad state of affairs.  And it's not just the reefs--although to lose the biota they support does make me wistful--but it's the land itself.  Some of the finest beaches, in fact, probably the very finest beaches in the United States are in Florida--and yes I have also visited several of the Hawaiian Islands and some of the US protectorate islands in the Caribbean--Florida has some pulverized white quartz that doesn't get hot under your feet the way the yellow sand in California, Texas, and the Carolinas do.  It's quite a loss, really, when we lose it.  And we will.  Whether the seas rise one foot or five feet over the next several decades no one really knows, and no one is predicting that Florida will be "completely under water" but everyone is predicting that Florida will lose some coastal territory.  

You may also have noticed that I have made this response avoiding the use of the phrase which shall not be mentioned.  I suspect that most Floridians will learn to do that as well.  Call it what you will, but coasts do change.  Florida coast changes regularly, and we know this from the writings of Spanish chroniclers dating back nearly five centuries.  The difference now is that the current changes are probably anthropogenic.

I do understand the economic pressure put upon the governor and his legislature to avoid alarming the tourists and the contractors, but the sooner that they are honest with themselves, the better off all of us will be.  The pressure to avoid mention of it by name is not helping matters.