WILLIAM S. BECKER
During 2023, better data and tools have produced new insights into how Americans are reacting to global warming. It’s a mixed picture.
Millions are moving away from dangerous weather, and millions are moving into it. Yet, we still are not doing nearly enough to address the root cause of climate change or adapt to the changes already underway.
Many of the most important insights came from the First Street Foundation, which analyzes the effects of global warming on communities and real estate in the United States.
Take floods, the most common weather disaster in the U.S. The foundation reported in December that a new precipitation model shows more than 1.3 million people can now expect 100-year floods every eight years. First Street found more than half of us live in places twice as likely to be flooded as previous estimates showed.
In 2018, using an advanced modeling tool, researchers at the University of Bristol found that 41 million Americans are at risk of 100-year floods, over three times more than estimated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). First Street’s new analysis is bad news not only for people who like living near water but also for taxpayers, insurance companies and governments struggling to balance their budgets. Federal data show disasters with damages exceeding $1 billion have grown from three per year in 1980 to 25 in 2023. Federal disaster relief only kicks in once municipalities and states have exhausted their resources.
But even these numbers underestimate the growing flood threat in the United States. One-hundred-year events are no longer the greatest risk. Monster hurricanes in recent years, such as Matthew, Irma and Harvey, produced 500- and 1,000-year floods. By 2017, the United States had experienced at least 24 500-year events.
The impact on communities is predictable. Repeated floods cause property values to decline, insurance premiums to rise and local budgets to contend with damages to infrastructure. People who can afford to move do so, leaving low-income and elderly homeowners behind. Communities must either raise property taxes for remaining homeowners or allow public services to decline. Both create pressure for more people to leave.
That’s not the only problem. Last February, First Street reported that flood-prone properties along U.S. coasts are overvalued by as much as $237 billion, creating a bubble that threatens the stability of the U.S. housing market.
First Street reports that millions of Americans are already leaving places at high risk of routine flooding. Some 3.2 million Americans have left flood-prone places, creating “abandonment zones” in cities. It predicts the number will grow to 11 million over the next three decades.
Demographers have predicted for years that climate change would cause millions of Americans to migrate to safer places. A study by the University of Georgia in 2016 estimated that rising sea levels could swamp 13 million people by 2100 — 70 percent from southeastern states. Yet, while millions are moving away from flood-prone places, First Street has found a disturbing countertrend: Americans are moving “in droves” to flood-prone locations in southern and southeastern states.
Americans also are flooding into places at risk of deadly heat. Axios reports, “Almost all of the fastest-growing major metro areas across the U.S. are getting significantly hotter, and many are also at risk for other natural disasters. Huge numbers of Americans are flocking to the country’s fastest-warming cities.”
Axios found the population in Las Vegas rose 181 percent from 1991 to 2021, while the number of very hot days increased by 115 percent. In Austin, Texas, the population grew 167 percent while sweltering days rose 553 percent. In McAllen, Texas, very hot days went up 724 percent while the population increased 118 percent. (Axios defined “very hot” as high temperatures at or above the 95th percentile for each area from 1991 to 2020.)
Not long ago, Northeastern and Midwestern cities began promoting themselves as “climate havens” where people could find sanctuary from deadly weather. But while climate impacts may be less severe in those places, experts agree that no place in the United States is immune from record heat, drought, floods, wildfires, sea-level rise, or coastal storms. Americans will not find places where life is good — the best one can hope for is where life is less bad.
In 2020, ProPublica and the New York Times magazine published a series on global migration caused by climate change. It found “a nation on the cusp of a great transformation,” with one in two Americans facing a decline in the quality of their environment. By 2070, it said, at least 4 million Americans could “live at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life.”
“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,” the authors concluded. “It already has begun.”
Scientists and researchers have warned us about this disruption for nearly 40 years, but government leaders remain in the grip of the fossil-fuel industry. Thanks to Congress’s chronic malfeasance, taxpayers and society at large subsidized the industry with more than $757 billion in economic, social and environmental costs during 2022 alone, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Climate scientists warned in 2021 that most of the world’s proven fossil-fuel reserves are “unextractable” for even a 50-50 chance to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the preferred goal of the Paris Climate Accord. Major oil and gas companies ignore that finding. The International Energy Agency forecast the industry would invest nearly $530 in exploration and production in 2023 — the most since 2015, when nations signed the Paris accord.
In November, U.S. government scientists released the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). “Climate changes are making it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families; reliable public services; a sustainable economy; thriving ecosystems, cultures, and traditions; and strong communities,” they said. “Many of the extreme events and harmful impacts that people are already experiencing will worsen as warming increases and new risks emerge.”
In sum, 2023 taught us we face a “stampede of devastating events and the toll each one takes on our lives and the economy,” in the words of Dr. Kristina Dahl, a contributor to NCA5. Yet our governments’ responses still are “woefully insufficient and incremental.”
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