When the hazards damage analyst says this about your state, don’t you think maybe you should consider moving?
Were a big hurricane to slam Miami or Tampa Bay, the damage would easily reach $100 billion, said Charles Watson, a hazards damage analyst.
“The bottom line in Florida, the polite way I can put it is: You’re doomed,” he said.
Frankly, hurricanes are less of a worry than seawater. Unless they want to turn it into an aquarium, southern Florida is most definitely doomed. A couple of Republicans are actually willing to contemplate this fact, but it’s too late anyway and it hardly has any impact on the GOP as a whole:
Curbelo, a Hialeah native, says he doesn’t view climate change as an ideological question, of conservative versus liberal, but rather a “real issue that demands real solutions.”
“I actually believe that more people agree with me in my party than they’d like to admit,” [Representative Carlos] Curbelo [R-Miami] says. “Unfortunately it’s become part of the political game.”
I mean, which game is that? Is that the game where the Democrats listen to scientists and the Republicans take money from ExxonMobil and accuse the rest of us of being religious cultists?
People are just in denial about the reality of the situation. A client of mine just sold their multi million dollar ocean front home in Key Largo for full asking price and it was only on the market for a couple of weeks. They didn’t sell because they’re worried about South Florida being on its way to becoming an aquarium – they’re just elderly and down sizing.
It’s not just sea level rising, Florida is sinking.
I remember the old PBS documentary, “The Making of a Continent” about continental drift. Sometimes Cuba is solidly connected to the mainland. Sometimes both Florida and Cuba are underwater. Right now, Florida is a peninsula and Cuba is an island, but the land is sinking. Man made sea level change threatens to hasten the sinking.
You’d think the GOP would be worried about Florida for no other reason than its 29 electoral votes. If the people of what’s left of Florida turn on them, they are SCREWED!
29 electoral votes plus two Senators for 2% of the Senate and 27 representatives for 6.2% of the House! To get a majority, they need 53.4% of the rest of the country.
The part of Florida that will be left is mostly the cracker part. So it will become more republican, not less.
Not once the people further south move to (slightly) higher ground.
Hey, isn’t about time we started building a wall, to isolate the FL crazy? And step up recruiting a “Day’s Watch” to do the guarding stuff.
Summer is coming.
I saw it coming back in the early 1970s, sold my south Florida home, left the best job I ever had and moved back to the midwest. The US of Denial might be better off building a pipeline to transport fresh water to Miami rather than icky tar sands oil to the gulf from Canada.
if a really big one like Andrew hits, the cost of insurance is going to really rise. And from my perspective, I see no reason why my insurance company which insures my home in the Midwest, in a not high-hazard area, should be covering people in the coastal areas.
You forget something. Insurance companies will insure anything for a price. And insurance prices have been going up in Florida. Not enough to drive people away though, obviously.
One of the problems is that hurricanes don’t hit often enough for the insurance pricing.
Yeah, the insurers know there’s a big risk, but if they charge more than the other insurers, they won’t get any business. And besides, the CEO will have cashed in his stock options and moved on by then.
It’s a fairly good argument for federalizing insurance for rare, catastrophic events: you need a dispassionate long-term view of the risks, and deep pockets for covering the damage.
I guess people in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, et al shouldn’t be living there either want with knowing tornados will be passing through. Jesus…
No, I am speaking specifically of the beach houses. I used to go to Nags Head and the Outer Banks. Pretty much sand and crabs. In the 1980s, changes were made in insurance laws, and the houses went up. Where 30 years ago there was nothing, today there are thousands of houses. I have no interest in contributing to the protection of those houses. I do not want to spend money on them. Not a single fucking dime.
… or even a penny.
Rates are determined by locality and regulated by state insurance regulators. Risk in Florida does not affect your Michigan rates. But you do have to be concerned about the people your Republican Governor is appointing to the state insurance board.
why bring facts and science into it?
As is always the case, wingers take a very complex issue, one with many interconnected variables, and synthesize it into a simplistic and logically incorrect assertion. They then cite one observation by a scientist about the solar sunspot cycles, snip out the parts they wish to use to make their fallacious case, and present it as the final authoritative judgment by the scientific community at large.
Hey, I’m not a scientist. I just have a high curiosity level and a bullshit detector that always seems to be set at its maximum sensitivity level. Which is why people giving scientific credence to the opinions of a meteorologist when it comes to climate change just makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out with my thumbs.
I suggest this. We might at least be able to save the children.
https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=B214US1214D20150410&p=grr+doom
Well, that didn’t work at all. I was trying to link to a video of the cartoon character Grr singing the Doom Song. I figure that’s about as advanced as Conservative Republicans can handle.
Yes. In the widest discourse, the question isn’t whether Florida is going to be here in 50 years or not but whether the GOP is going to win in 2016. To Mara Liasson or Mike Allen or Chuck Todd or whoever “listening to scientists” and “taking money from ExxonMobil” are just strategic choices in the greater context of the important thing, the campaign.