| ▲ | nejsjsjsbsb 6 months ago |
| Climate change enters the chat... |
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| ▲ | adrianN 6 months ago | parent | next [-] |
| Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings (other than war, which to my knowledge never was insurable) in most areas of the world. |
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| ▲ | agsnu 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | A significant portion of human structures are located close to the coast (seaborne trade having been a huge enabler of economic development for a few hundred years) and are exposed to flooding from rising sea levels, or built in valleys that are increasingly at risk from flooding due to far-above-long-term-historic-norms precipitation runoff (higher atmospheric temps lead to more energy in weather systems; see eg massive floods in Europe in the past few years). | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Compared to the other challenges climate change poses those are fairly simple engineering problems. The Netherlands manage fine with large parts of the country below sea level. | | |
| ▲ | avianlyric 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | You’re ignoring things like the geological conditions in the Netherlands, they have very peaty soil which is fairly impermeable to water. Which makes the task of keep the sea back pretty easy, you just build a big wall. But if you look in places like Florida, the ground conditions there are substantially more porous. If you try to keep the sea back there with a simple wall, it’ll just flow under the wall through the soil. You would have to dig all the way to bedrock and install some kind of impermeable barrier to prevent most of Florida from flooding due to sea level rise. Something that’s unbelievably cost prohibitive to do. The Netherlands only exists below sea level because their ground conditions meant it was possible to pump out the country using technology available in the 1740s. If the ground conditions weren’t basically perfect for this kind of geo-engineering, the Netherlands simply wouldn’t exist as it does today. You’re using an example that exists purely as a result of survivorship bias, as an argument that it’s practical to apply the same techniques or achieve the same outcomes anywhere else. Completely ignoring the fact that your example only exists because a unique set of geologic conditions made it possible, and those conditions are far from universal, and not in anyway correlated with places we humans would like to protect. | | | |
| ▲ | jyounker 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Netherlands has been planning for the impacts of sea-level rise for decades now. At least twenty years ago the government broached the idea (with TV commercials) that they were going to have to abandon some are areas to the sea. | |
| ▲ | llamaimperative 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A few critical ingredients being: no denialism about their vulnerability, strong social and economic commitment to reducing vulnerability, lack of reflexively blaming floods on illegal immigrants or trans people | | | |
| ▲ | graemep 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | and sea level rises are slow enough that countries with more high ground than The Netherlands can just not rebuild/maintain old houses in vulnerable positions and build higher (often just a bit further in) instead. Some buildings buy the coast (especially in port cities) and have steep rises anyway. There is a huge threat of cultural loss - e.g. Venice. |
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| ▲ | ekianjo 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | soco 6 months ago | parent [-] | | Said the American living in a log cabin in Montana. But if you're from, say, Tuvalu, or Venice, the 15cm rise of the last decades is definitely noticeable, and the trend has no reason to stop or decrease. | | |
| ▲ | ljf 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Agreed - Where I live now, 8 thousand years ago I could have walked all the way from the UK to Holland. Even just 1000 years ago the coastline here went four miles out to sea compared to today. In the last 20 year we've seen the erosion of the coastline here accelerating - regular news stories about people losing their houses to the sea: https://www.norfolk.gov.uk/article/56352/Challenges-of-coast... It doesn't matter if you think it is human caused or not, the sea level is undeniably rising: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha.... | |
| ▲ | vintermann 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sea level naturally varies (if we define it liberally). It's at the times of maximums - high tide plus storm surge - we notice, otherwise it's easy to miss. But when those high tides plus storm surges hit, we really notice sea level rise. | |
| ▲ | ekianjo 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I live next to the sea, for your information | |
| ▲ | georgeplusplus 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | it used to be reported that Venice is sinking into the water but now the climate nut jobs have flipped it to it’s actually because it’s rising. I guess it’s all relative | | |
| ▲ | soco 6 months ago | parent [-] | | It's difficult to not be sarcastic but let me try my best: Venice sinking is what happens when water is rising. | | |
| ▲ | avianlyric 6 months ago | parent [-] | | Eh, Venice is also sinking regardless of sea level rise. That’s what happens when you build a city on top of what is practically a swamp. No surprise that big heavy buildings put on top of loose, waterlogged soil are gonna slowly sink into that soil. |
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| ▲ | swiftcoder 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't know about that. The Iberian peninsula is not historically at much risk for natural disasters, and we now suffer alternating forest fires and floods pretty much every year... | | |
| ▲ | lores 6 months ago | parent [-] | | I remember forest fires yearly in northern Spain in the 80s. Are they more violent now? | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Mostly they seem to have planted a lot more Eucalyptus, which makes the fires worse. The severe floods on the other hand seem to be catching everyone by surprise. | |
| ▲ | nejsjsjsbsb 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Climate change deals frequency, rather than novelty. Oh and as crypto bros like to say: we're early. |
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| ▲ | notabee 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's not really true. The introduction of so much extra energy into the atmosphere is going to make weather extremes worse all over the world, and harder to predict as historical models become less relevant. Large scale pattern changes like the AMOC shutting down are going to completely change many local weather patterns so that e.g. places that have little history of tornados will start having them, or places that used to be too wet for wildfires will suddenly experience them in extreme drought conditions. Despite scientists' best efforts, we're running a global experiment with no control group and predictions will only become more difficult the harder we push the system into a new state. | |
| ▲ | rbanffy 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings Floods, storms, droughts, fire? They appear to be getting worse. More restrictive codes designed for better fireproofing buildings, for instance, can solve a number of problems in California in fire prone areas. Another thing that has a political solution is forest management. Lack of water can be solved by desalination, which becomes an energy problem rather than a water one. Very dry areas can benefit from solar panels because they reduce water loss from evaporation, thus reducing the pressure on water supplies. It is expensive, but that's another problem. | |
| ▲ | CalRobert 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems like having the ocean at your door would be bad for the structure? Or burning down in a hot dry period… | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 6 months ago | parent [-] | | Why would a city like London or Paris burn down in a hot dry period? | | |
| ▲ | mr_toad 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | London is at much more risk of flooding. Parts of London were built on wetlands not much above sea level, and there’s a big river running right through the middle. | |
| ▲ | arrowsmith 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 1666 has entered the chat. | |
| ▲ | snacksmcgee 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're refuting a lot of established facts about the risks of climate change, in a way that seems indicative of a certain ideology. Can you explain more what your position is? | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 6 months ago | parent [-] | | My position is that climate change is an existential threat to civilization, but buildings are not at a risk that would make them uninsurable. We build cities both in very wet and very hot and dry climates without much trouble. Those are engineering problems we can solve without much trouble. | | |
| ▲ | llamaimperative 6 months ago | parent [-] | | But with lots more money, which is what insurance deals with Of course they’re insurable at some premium. The question is whether there is any premium someone is willing to pay that can also cover the risk. | | |
| ▲ | notabee 6 months ago | parent [-] | | It's also a social coordination problem. For example a neighborhood where all the homes have to be fire resistant is going to fare a lot better, and probably be cheaper for the individual home owners to build and insure, than the one fire-resistant home in a neighborhood of tinder boxes. I don't think the prognosis is good for the U.S. in that regard. We have very little social cohesion and a lot of parties interested in making the situation worse for their own benefit. |
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| ▲ | nejsjsjsbsb 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Except for Fire? | |
| ▲ | helboi4 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | topspin 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How did climate change cause vast neighborhoods of single-family wooden mcmansions to be constructed with ~3 meters of separation? |
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| ▲ | jeffhuys 6 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Pole drift. |
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| ▲ | soco 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Does it really matter if my house burns because of pole drift or because of climate change? I don't like it burning either way. So if there is something I can do against my house burning, (and I know there are things I can do against that) I will definitely try that. And I believe we agree that we could do things, right? | |
| ▲ | defrost 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Magnetic, rotational, geodetic .. ? What are you trying to say? | | |
| ▲ | sampo 6 months ago | parent | next [-] | | > What are you trying to say? Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe... | | |
| ▲ | defrost 6 months ago | parent [-] | | Might as well throw in the risk of being wiped out by a comet. Climate risks are greater and more immediate than either comets or poles shifting. |
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| ▲ | falcor84 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can there even be geodetic drift of the poles? I sort of assumed that our lat/lon system is based on the poles being fixed points as a matter of definition. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 6 months ago | parent [-] | | Each ellipsoid is rigidly defined (well, some historic ones are sloppy), so WGS84 won't drift .. (that's a bold statement, is it true down to the micron and if so what are the absolute* datums to reference against?). That said, there are literally hundreds of historic pre WGS84 ellipsoid|datum pairings, each with a somewhat different "survey map pole". Historically geodectic poles have shifted as a function of datums. The main point here, such as it is, was to poke at the infomation free aspect of "polar drift" as a comment .. which pole and what does that have to do with climate change? etc. | | |
| ▲ | avianlyric 6 months ago | parent [-] | | We still use many of those old ellipsis and datum’s today. When you’re doing human things, like surveying land, and defining property boundaries. It’s nice to work with a coordinate system which remains fixed relative to the area you’re surveying, and doesn’t drift due to annoying things like tectonic movement, or your entire country slowly tipping into the ocean. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 6 months ago | parent [-] | | FWiW I'm old enough to have navigated via LORAN and travelled through over two thirds of the 190+ countries on the planet tying in multitudes of old datums to the "new" WGS84 standard as part of a career in geophysical surveying (Gravimetrics, tides, magnetics, radiometrics, EM, etc.) I'm not old enough to have seen Great Britain and relate isles pressed down by the weight of kilometres of ice though .. that'd be a great great great grand something that saw that. | | |
| ▲ | avianlyric 6 months ago | parent [-] | | Sure everyone these day maps their local references back to WGS84, but the local references are still tied to local datum. Plate tectonics can result in some parts of the world moving at up 10cm a year, which over 10s to 100s of years can add up to something pretty significant. Funnily enough an OSM April Fools joke is a good place to learn more[1]. Talking of the UK. Ordinance survey still maintain their own master geodesics, and geographic references, which allows them to tie the OS grid (which what the land registry uses to locate property) back to WGS84, as both WGS84 and the UK slowly drift around due to various reasons (such as improved tech to refine the definition of WGS84, tectonic drift etc). You joke about the ice age and glaciers, but the UK is still “recovering” from all that ice, resulting in vertical movement of about 1m every 100 years. Which given how long property rights can last (Oxford University is almost 1000 years old), can actually turn into a material difference, and real land disputes, over time, if not properly corrected for. Each of these adjustments may seem insignificant on their own, but they accumulate over time, and it gets complicated when these adjustments are forced to interact with humans, our somewhat fuzzy perception of reality, and general disregard for well defined coordinate systems which don’t align well with our “intuitive” understanding of the world. None of this is any different to how we deal with issues that are thrown up by our increasing ability to measure time accurately. We track International Atomic Time (IAT), which is time as tracked by a set of atomic clocks, but then we apply various adjustments to get UTC, which is human time. Those adjustments exists purely to keep UTC aligned to what humans expect, because the earths orbit wobbles enough that the absolute time produced by IAT doesn’t match up perfectly with how we’ve historically measured time. All of this seems a little silly, but we now live in a world where everyday systems depend on measures accurate enough that all this minor drift becomes important. |
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| ▲ | ekianjo 6 months ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Still waiting for the water to flood New York... |
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