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(@cerridwen)
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I'm sensing that South Florida is going to be hit hard by climate issues within the next five years forcing people to migrate out of the area removed link Is anyone else getting that?


   
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(@jeanne-mayell)
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I don't at the moment have a vision for the next five years like you do.  And there are no such visions in our readings of the U.S. over the next five years.  We did predict a few years ahead those big hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico, the southern east coast, and Houston.  I will look for Florida next time I do visions for the next five years and post it here, but for now, I don't see it. 

I got strong visions 4-6 years ago for South Florida's long term climate future. It's posted in this article. If you check out the article, remember that the long-term visions have since been added to in later dates on the main prediction page. 

 I saw that by the end of the century South Florida is under water.  I saw it would become a playground for boating enthusiasts who on a calm day could look down on buildings below the surface.

It seemed so ironic when a few years ago Governor Rick Scott send a directive to all government employees forbidding them to use the term climate change or global warming in any documents. Ironic because his state stands be the hardest hit by water of any state. 

People will try to fortify against storms and rising seas until enough people realize how climate change works, that it is exponential in growth, and will get much worse more quickly over time.  When you build a house or building, you need it to last about 50 years. That's not going to be viable in this part of the state. 


   
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(@paul-w)
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I think that one of the more overlooked aspects of rising sea levels is that people won't be able to migrate fast enough. I'm not saying that they are going to be swept away in a tsunami or anything but that there will be a collapse in the south Florida real estate market.  When banks start refusing to finance existing home sales and insurance companies refuse to insure or charge outrageous premiums that no one can afford the financial devastation will be wide spread.  People who hang on too long will be financially ruined and won't have the resources to relocate to higher ground. 


   
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(@cerridwen)
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Yes, I'm not sensing a huge tsunami (Hollywood type of disaster) but problems related to real estate due to storms and a ripple effect that is bad for the economy.


   
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(@coyote)
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Paul W, you really hits the nail on the head on this one. The story of climate change in the decades to come will also be one of cascading economic failures. If Jeanne's intuition of 20 feet of sea level rise by 2100 holds true, then an average 2-3 feet of sea level rise per decade for the next 80 years will overwhelm an economic paradigm that is predicated on the assumption that next year will look pretty much the same as last year. In addition to all of that high-value real estate that will have to be abandoned en masse, think about our ports and the infrastructure that has been built up around them. Loading docks and dredging operations will be inundated/battered by increasingly stronger storms, thus disrupting overseas commerce and just-in-time supply chains; it would be like a No-Deal Brexit being unleashed in slow motion on the entire industrial world. The ( silver lining to all of this (hopefully) is that economic chaos will hasten the end of a power- and wealth-obsessed era that humanity has outgrown.

Cerridwen, per your senses about South Florida, I remember seeing visions posted in this site that by 2024, lots of properties will be condemned because of coastal flooding, while many Americans will be migrating north and west away from the Atlantic seaboard. South Florida, along with southern Louisiana and the Houston area, is more imperiled by rising seas than any other region in the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if things start hitting the fan for them in 2-3 years. 

 


   
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(@jeanne-mayell)
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Coyote, well put.  Your analogy of sea level rise to a No Deal Brexit is a good one only magnify it by a thousand.  A billion people live along the coasts of the world.  A billion people will have to move inland. And as you put it, along with those people is an import/export trade infrastructure in every port that will have to be completely replaced and moved. 

The thing people need to understand is that climate change is accelerating.  You described an average sea rise of 3-4 feet per decade if my projection of 20 feet by 2100 is correct. 

You probably know this, but it will not work that way. It will not rise in a linear way. 

It will speed up over time and the further into the future we go, the faster seas will rise. 

So sea level rise might not seem like much even by 2050. It's the acceleration that is the problem.  If you put a penny in the bank each day and it doubles each day, the rate of savings is accelerating. So how much do you think you'll have in a month?  $300? $30,000? No $5 million. And most of it will accrue in the last week. Climate change is not doubling every day. They don't know what the rate is yet because the Antarctica ice sheets have barely begun to melt. 

Here are some articles: 

1. https://grist.org/science/the-scientist-who-first-warned-of-climate-change-says-its-much-worse-than-we-thought/

2. https://grist.org/science/sea-level-rise-is-already-happening-how-bad-can-it-get/

 

 


   
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(@coyote)
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Thanks for the links Jeanne; I thought the Grist article did an especially good job of breaking down such a complex issue into digestible chunks. I've also been looking to James Hansen these past several years, given his track record for being right, and am fully on board with the idea of exponential sea level rise that will come in distinct pulses; it's the way positive feedback loops work in nature. When you take the ever-accelerating melting of Arctic permafrost (which is a HUGE reservoir of methane gas), you get one frightening cycle of warming air, melting glaciers, and rising seas, ad nauseum. I only wanted to state that even with a hypothetical linear rises in sea level, 2-3 feet per decade would overwhelm society's traditional modes of problem-solving. Who knows what exponential changes in sea level will unleash.

Back to the original topic of South Florida; Philip Stoddard, mayor of South Miami, is actively trying to get his constituents to pull up stakes and move inland because of the region's vulnerability. This might be what heroism looks like in a public servant in the 21st century.

 


   
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(@paul-w)
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Another link (You Tube video) that I ran across today. It's a TED talk in which the scientist giving the talk points out that the estimated cost to the global economy (estimated by the insurance industry) of three feet of sea level rise is 28 trillion $. The scientist goes on to point out that the current estimate for sea level rise in the 22nd. century IS in fact exponential and could easily reach thirty feet.

 


   
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(@jeanne-mayell)
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Thanks, Paul.  It's staggering to realize that all of this delay and cost was to keep one industry rich. Only psychopaths would do this given that they have had this information. Koch Brothers and others. Rick Scott and friends.


   
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(@thebeast)
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" A person who has no remorse,

a person who has no conscience,

a person who has no ethics,

a person who has no compassion,

is a sociopath .

And an economic order which does not have a conscience,

which does not have ethics,

which does not have compassion,

which justifies its amorality by saying, well, all that responsability is, is to accrue money for this group of people which are our stockholders,

is a sociopathic economic system . "

Marianne Williamson

 


   
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(@jeanne-mayell)
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Almost 20 years ago I donated to the making of a low budget film called The Corporation and in reward they sent me the final product. Later, I saw that the film won awards and succeeded reaching a large audience.

In it they explained how corporations have to focus on profit alone. They interviewed CEO's, some of whom were caring peopl, who said that even if they wanted to do the right thing, they could not.  They had to focus entirely on profit.  If they didn't, they'd be replaced by someone who would. It was the way the corporation was structured. The bottom line is profit, ever increasing profit.

I thought of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey horror movie where the computer operating a space ship became a monster. Our monster is the "free" market society's corporation - a monster that had no aim but it's own, humanness, heartless, insatiable growth.

It was unfair and inaccurate  of me to call all these CEOs and their minions psychopaths.  They serve a machine that is inhuman. 


   
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(@michele-b)
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Oh, Jeanne,

What an awesome thing for you to be able to do and be a part of!

Reminds all of us that we can not only vote with our conscience but donate to causes and projects as well! 


   
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(@yofisofi)
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Yes, corporations are narcissistic and dictatorial by nature. That is why someone who primarily identifies as a businessman (e.g. Perot, Trump, Schultz) is a threat to democratic freedoms if he or she becomes president of the U.S. or any other democracy. They run on a platform of applying their skills/know-how as a businessman to running the government, but those business skills are narcissistic and dictatorial. On the contrary, one reason a democratic government exists is actually to keep the narcissism and dictatorship of business in check, giving employees the rights (and the power/venue to demand those rights) that they wouldn't otherwise have in their employment.

 


   
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