According to NOAA [2], the "relative sea level trend" in Miami Beach is 2.39 mm/year.

At those rates, in 100 years, the sea will have risen about one foot, not six.

1: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/

2: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212150739.h...

That accelerating projection "has the potential to double the total sea level rise by 2100 as compared to projections that assume a constant rate -- to more than 60 cm instead of about 30".

Two feet instead of one. I still don't see where six feet is coming from.

I read $SOMEWHERE recently that the the worst case scenario predicted six feet. But that's, IIRC, if we do absolutely nothing, the methane in the Arctic is all released, and Greenland melts. The more likely scenario is somewhere from 1-3 feet.

So unless memory fails me, the article didn't just pull it out of its arse, but a source would've been nice rather than just throw a number out there with no backing whatsoever.

1: https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

BTW, they already know that a lot of the melting in Greenland is from the bottom up (geothermal) rather than from the top down. But of course you don't hear too much about that, do you?

https://www.newsweek.com/puzzling-heat-deep-inside-earth-mel...

https://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-shee...

But it is losing mass when iceberg calving is accounted for.

"Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr."

Edit: And i thought this article on the scale of a gigaton of water was interesting as well:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

Or 0.5mm sea level increase (from your link).

Misreading the link - as many newspapers have done, and it's wrong absent further data - results in 6'

EDIT: As noted by Accipitriform I made the same mistake I pinned on many newspapers.

http://www.southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/wp-content/upl...

What I mean is, if you watch a movie, you suspend disbelief and willingly assume the context they give you to be real for the sake of the movie without questioning it. You do that because you want to be entertained. And if you took everything literally and demanded that the context be aligned with reality, it wouldn't be any fun. As such, few people walk out of something like a Mission Impossible movie believing that any of it was actually possible.

I had a discussion in online chat with co-workers in the last week or so regarding the wild fires currently burning in the US west. One lamented how sad the effects of climate change like these are. Out of curiosity, I looked at historical stats for wildland fires. Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion. The person was surprised and admitted that he didn't have any actual reason to believe that the occurrence or size of fires was more or less - he just assumed they were more and that the cause was climate change.

So to be clear, I'm not saying that climate change doesn't exist. Nor am I saying that wildland fires are not somehow affected by climate change. Only that people tend to take narratives that are created and repeated by journalists as facts, without questioning them, much as they would a movie.

This data suggests that our houses are built with better standards, fewer people are smoking, and our appliances are safer so there are fewer fires but it's pretty clear that our problems have grown much worse overall.

[1] https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_documents/SuppCosts.p...

We now spend over 5 times as much on fire suppression at the federal level than we did 30 years ago after adjusting for inflation. This growth outpaces cost of living, healthcare, and inflation significantly.

But to try to do do better: what's your source on fires?

Your coworker had the impression that wildfires are becoming larger and more damaging, and that climate change is a principal cause of this, due to widespread coverage to that effect (examples: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]). (Which I suppose was your point.)

And many of those journalists are repeating each other, but eventually you find that a lot of those statements originate from the National Interagency Fire Center [7]. There, the raw numbers pretty clearly show an upward overall trend from, oh, about 1953 or so. Before 1953, the numbers look a lot different, and if someone were to just casually plug all those values into a graph, they could make the point that wildfires aren't getting worse after all. That person would be completely ignoring the massive increase in wildfire suppression efforts over that same period, of course, but they wouldn't want that to get in the way of their surprising finding.

Further investigation into the subject would start to reveal all kinds of neat subtleties that would be missed from a quick glance at numbers, both from non-climate-related factors like increased habitation in the wildland-urban interface areas [8], as well as climate-related factors like the massive number of dead trees in western forests as a result of increased bark beetle activity [9] [10].

And then someone might begin to be in a position to have a more interesting discussion on the subject. :-)

[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2018-08-01/wi...

[2]: http://www.climatecentral.org/western-wildfire-trends

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/wildfires...

[4]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634369281/wildfires-could-be-...

[5]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2...

[6]: https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi...

[7]: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html

[8]: https://www.wildfirex.com/2013/07/25/population-climbs-in-wi...

[9]: https://www.fs.fed.us/research/invasive-species/insects/bark...

[10]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-sierra-dead-tr...

First, I only used data from 1983 and later (not the 1960s as I said, and certainly not prior to the 1950s as you assert that some people do) because their footnote said that the sources for data prior to 1983 are not known or can't be confirmed.

Second, I graphed the data since 1983 and there was somewhat of a trend upwards (not no trend like I said). But it didn't look significant to me. Especially not in climate terms. And especially given that realiable data only covers 35 years. And especially given that the numbers swing wildly with how we manage fires. That is, a trend in either direction could easily be created by increasing or decreasing budgets to keep them from starting and/or fighting them, like the swings you reference prior to the 1950s.

But in any case, as I said, I not saying that wildland fires are not somehow affected by climate change. Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them.

Sure, but the challenge is that critically questioning a common narrative takes significantly more effort than a quick review of a single dataset, especially when that narrative is coming from a fairly large body of professional researchers in multiple fields.

This is a big problem right now in the politics surrounding several different fields. A lot of interested laymen now have the tools to do some quick analysis on datasets, and then they draw conclusions from that that are contrary to the accepted science in that field. It's especially common in climate science because it's always been such a politically charged topic.

People accepting common narratives is essentially "epistemic learned helplessness" (http://web.archive.org/web/20130111103623/http://squid314.li..., one of my favorite essays), and that's a good thing. It's an immune response to bad ideas like being opposed to vaccination.

There is certainly room for asking questions about accepted ideas. Any time something doesn't make sense in some subject, absolutely go searching for an answer. You may even get to be one of the fortunate and talented few who find a significant question or even a flaw in some field. But, there's a fine line between asking questions, and drawing conclusions from a brief review and then indicting other people for not "critically" examining the subject.

Secondly I’m not sure I’m “indicting” anyone. Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts. This isn’t an indication of a lack of critical thinking. It’s an indication of a lack of thinking of any kind whatsoever.

> Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion.

That is called a "conclusion", no matter how many weasel-words you salt it with or how many times you say, "no, really, I wasn't drawing a conclusion". You've since walked it back to, "oh, I meant there wasn't a significant trend", and I shrugged and accepted that and replied solely to your criticism of other people.

Which was:

> Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them.

And now, you're choosing to expand from "people aren't critically questioning things" to, "oh, actually, I meant that they aren't thinking at all". Before you do that, you might want to think a little bit more about epistemic learned helplessness.

> Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts.

Nice, you're doubling down. Well, your "two minute gathering of facts", first, was erroneous, and second, your "observation" was either obvious, or wrong, pick your flavor. Obviously, people accept any manner of statements without personally verifying them. Nobody has the resources to become an expert on every bit of news coming from legions of researchers or journalists, and further, if they spend just two minutes attempting to verify a single factoid in something, they may well get it wrong, as you did.

Instead, people rely on other people to develop the specialized knowledge required to gather and synthesize the facts of a subject, and then other people still to report on that. It's imperfect, and sometimes (often) somebody somewhere in that chain gets something wrong, but it's still a better approach than armchairing everything you read, which has a far greater chance of leading you to the wrong ... well, "question", I guess, instead of "conclusion".

By the way, re-framing conclusions as questions is such a well-known tactic that it has a name: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

I didn't have a conclusion then, and I don't have one now. If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all. And 35 years of reliable data seems a little light to me. One would think we'd need several centuries to get real confidence.

But what I really question, are variables that would affect the numbers and size of fires such as how many were created by people, and the amount of effort put towards fighting them. The data we're looking at is not an observation of just nature. But it seems to be treated as if it is.

I would love to address each of your statements point by point, but it's been an interminably long week and I don't have the time. But this one I can knock out pretty fast.

I pulled the 1983 - 2017 series data from NIFC and created four different data sets from it, and charted each one. Each chart shows the values in red, the simple linear regression from 1983 to 2017 as a single red line, and a 5-year-running average in blue.

First, the raw data: https://ibb.co/iNQi8U ... there's a negligible change to the running average from 1983 to 1997, but from 1997 to 2009 there is a visually obvious increasing trend. The linear regression shows a 400% increase in acreage burned per year from 1983 to 2017.

Now, there are three different ways someone might "take out" 6 of the last 10 years. I think it's completely absurd to make any kind of argument by just deleting 60% of the data you don't like until the result looks the way you want it to look, but I'll play along. For each of the following charts, I just edited the same 6-highest years from 2007 to 2017.

One way to do this is to simply delete the years from the dataset. You pretend they didn't happen, and see what the overall data looks like then. And here it is: https://ibb.co/gRuzhp ... so here we see that there's still a clear upward trend, even with those years removed. The trend has been reduced to a mere 300% increase from 1983 to 2017, but there it is. You can see the obvious change in the data in the sharp decrease in the 5-year running average line.

A slightly more correct way to handle this is to decide that there's something wrong with the data for those years, and replace those years with approximate average values for the time period. This is occasionally done in climate science by people much smarter than me in cases where it's discovered that, say, a weather station sensor malfunctioned for a period of time. This chart looks like this: https://ibb.co/fvr1v9 ... it's fairly identical to the previous one.

Now, the other way we can do it, the most dishonest way we can do it, is to replace the values for each of those years with "0". As in, for that entire year, we subtract all wildfire activity, and pretend that the year went by with nary a spark. What does it look like then? https://ibb.co/hEWehp Ah! Now we finally get the flat trend we wanted. You can see the really obvious negative forcing on the 5-year running average when those years are left in the dataset but with "0" values.

There are answers to your other questions. The neat thing about news articles on this subject is that most of them can be traced back to some study, expert statement, or research paper. So if you're really interested in getting your questions answered, it shouldn't take more than a few hours' effort.

For example, one of my earlier links, https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi..., included a nice graph of federal funds spent on fire suppression. At the bottom of that graph is a link to the NIFC data it was sourced from. So, there's a reasonable answer for "the amount of effort put towards fighting them".

And then you could look at that graph, and then look back at the increase-in-acreage graphs, and imagine what they would look like if federal spending on wildfire suppression were mostly flat, maybe just tracking with inflation.

Moreover, six feet of sea level rise isn't going to happen instantaneously. It will take decades. Property will slowly be lost, but people will just move inland (or move away). And a key question is, whose property goes underwater? If it's wealthy people on the beachfront, they can afford the loss. If it's poor people, that's something else. We saw that in New Orleans, where the worst Katrina flooding happened in the poorest neighborhoods.

This also excludes the idea of simply building seawalls to protect low-lying areas. I mean, that's half of Holland, so it works. Making major social decisions on a distaste for the concept of global warming is foolish, though. Governments should operate pessimistically when it comes to threats to the land and people they govern. It should be assuming it will happen, on the worst-case side, not denying the threat because we don't like to think about it. Think that way, you might as well disband the fire department too. It's expensive and your house probably won't burn down.

I beg to differ, it's the first sentence of the title of the article: “Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. […]”

Then there's, “Barring a stupendous reversal in greenhouse gas emissions, the rising Atlantic will cover much of Miami by the end of this century. The economic effects will be devastating: Zillow Inc. estimates that six feet of sea-level rise would put a quarter of Miami’s homes underwater, rendering $200 billion of real estate worthless.”

I don't know what you're arguing against the GP for. The question is, how are we to figure out how _concerned_ we should be? Clearly one day the good citizens of Miami are not going to be waking up to water lapping at their bedsheets. What timescale are we talking about? Who are Zillow? What options does the city of Miami have? Comparatively speaking is Miami an outlier or a typical case? I think journalists and news outlets do a major disservice to an important topic when they make alarmist headlines and skirt around the practical matters at the heart of articles such as this. The crux of the story, that Miami's freshwater is in peril before Miami's real estate is a valuable story to tell us.

But please spare us the melodramatic, “What nobody knows is when that will happen, or what happens next.”

You mean to say that the people in charge of managing these water systems are standing by dumbfounded and helpless? Maybe we should replace them by people who are able to problem solve in the face of adversity.

Considering that almost all projections have undershot global warming and sea level rise, and recent empirical observations have supported accelerating increases, we should be looking at worse that RCP8.5 scenarios which is already a full meter by 2080-2100.

Sea level rises by 2100 that are only 1"/.3m all rely on huge decreases in CO2 emission and global policy responses, which is unlikely based on existing evidence.

edit: https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70189089 (saline intrusion in Biscayne aquifer, access via referrer https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/06/global-warmin... and free access)

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... (nomenclature for future climate scenarios)

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report (assessments and risks under future climate scenarios)

edit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0146-0 (evidence that projections are below current observed rates and overly conservative, even in some worst cases)

One of our political parties has been paid to ensure that doesn't happen.

As for whether they're helpless or not... that depends largely on whether the rising sea level infiltrates the aquifer to the point where it becomes brackish rather than fresh water. And even then, the problem can be dealt with, by turning to desalination (probably of straight seawater).

For "Who is Zillow?", they're the #1 real estate website. Property values are their business, and they have lots of data (and a corporate perspective, rather than a scientific one, for better or worse). What options does Miami have? Spend more money on protecting the aquifer from mining and contamination, and maybe invest in desalination. Is Miami an outlier? Kinda. Most coastal cities are also on river mouths, and thus have better fresh water resources. But overstretching the fresh water supply is often a problem, even if that fresh water isn't itself endangered - see Los Angeles, for example.

The article itself did not focus on making predictions on global warming. The title, while a bit sensationalised, is not wholly inaccurate and was probably picked by the editor not the writer. The other two claims that I could find were about the potential damage of a six-foot sea level rise, which was probably accurate even if it didn't list out the likelihood of such a rise, and the article by the Union of Concerned Scientists which made a claim about the likelihood of increased flooding that seemed reasonable to me.

It is not trying to make the case for/against global warming to a non-scientific audience. It is trying to make the case against bullish development in S. Florida to investors who subscribe to Bloomberg. The point is basically, "Even if these guys don't end up under the ocean in 50 years, they're still going to have to pay more in taxes and water rates just to keep the city afloat"

I don't know if I agree with the GP that this article would be considered fluff, or that it could be an easy target for pundits, but I definitely see that pattern pop up a lot. ACLU/EFF frequently disappoint me with completely valid points steeped in FUD and bad methodologies that make them easy to rebut. The opposition finds the errors, turns around, gets their base hype on some key emotional rebuttals or mocking while ignoring the real valid points, and all we end up with is stronger division between sides.

I wonder if there is a long term business model here... Invest in land and prepare it to survive being surrounded by water, build infrastructure etc and then sell it to the same type of people who buy bunkers for end of the world situations.

Kind of makes you wonder why we haven't already been doing this on areas just off the current coast. Guess that old saying really is accurate -- necessity is the mother invention. Dutch Docklands is one of the companies building these new facilities. Their mock ups [1] look amazing.

[1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States

No. Miami (and pretty much all of South Florida) sits on top of a sand bar on top of porous limestone rock. The ocean will just come up through the limestone rock and through the sand no matter how tall your sea wall is.

The Netherlands has a completely different geology, so plans for one place can't be compared with plans for the other.

Is it really a fair critique to insist that articles must be written to make sense to people who believe the moon is made of green cheese? And that every couple hundred words written for the general public must be fully-cited?

And the point of the article isn't strictly limited to global sea rise, but rather the multiple issues facing Miami's water supply due to its history of development, the fact that most of its freshwater comes from underground sources, and its geography. I didn't find the article to be either misleading or "fluff" though it isn't something that would be helpful to a geologist or someone who is already familiar with alot of this already.

Your point about the title is also misleading since, in nearly all news outfits, the editor picks the title not the author. To me, the main story the article is trying to tell isn't "the city is drowning", but rather that if you're considering investing in Muni-bonds for Miami (as a typical Bloomberg subscriber might), then you need to do more research compared to other cities as there are alot of issues under the surface. The same probably goes for real estate and other development (also typical subscribers to Bloomberg).

Note that your home does not need to be permanently underwater to have it destroyed by a storm. Not even a hurricane-type thing; there are parts of Miami that require permanent water pumps today to stay dry. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...

So for instance the first thing I did after seeing this headline was to go cross-reference the data with the NOAA. They put Miami's expected sea level rise at 0 to 1 feet over the next century [1]. So what is the reason for the discrepancy? Which figure is more likely? Why? 3,691 words and the reader will be in no way whatsoever capable of even proposing a suggestion to this question.

[1] - https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html

That's a false description of what NOAA says. The sea level trend is an instantaneous rate, not a projection of any sort.

It's too burdensome to ask that all articles about the detrimental effects of climate change present a proof of said claims. At some point in time it's pointless to engage in an endless reproving of claims that most sane people already believe in.

I personally know someone with the belief that climate change is a political conspiracy. Any evidence to support climate change just points to a bigger "cover-up" and validates their beliefs. Almost always this is not an isolated belief but a pattern of thinking, and the person holds similar conspiracy theory beliefs about other issues. This is not a political left/right issue (the person I happen to know happens to be a left-wing conspiracy theorist). This is an issue of mild paranoid psychosis that is not being recognized and treated seriously because the symptoms are not very disturbing to others, and the people suffering from it happen to be relatively high-functioning. Eventually as these people age the symptoms get worse and they end up driving those close to them away.

The chart on p. 32 is a bit tricky to read, because this particular model is estimating maximum sea levels, not mean sea levels. Maximum sea level here is measured relative to a fixed reference of year 2000 mean sea level, and the 20th-century typical max was 1.5m above mean year 2000 sea level. The 99.9th-percentile line at 4.2m is therefore showing a 2.7m rise in the max sea level above pre-2000 norms. The colored blue and red ranges below the 99.9 lines represent the 50th-95th percentile estimates of the two different models. (In this case, at La Jolla specifically.)