America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys

Lori Rittel is stuck in her Florida Keys home, living in the wreckage left by Hurricane Irma two years ago, unable to rebuild or repair. Now her best hope for escape is to sell the little white bungalow to the government to knockdown.

Lori Rittel - stuck in her Florida Keys home.

Her bedroom is still a no-go zone so she sleeps in the living room with her cat and three dogs. She just installed a sink in the bathroom, which is missing a wall, so she can wash her dishes inside the house now. Weather reports make her nervous. “I just want to sell this piece of junk and get the hell out,” she said. “I don’t want to start over. But this will happen again.”

The Great Climate Retreat is beginning with tiny steps, like taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas from Staten Island, New York, to Houston and New Orleans — and now Rittel’s Marathon Key. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map.

By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008.

Read the Bloomberg story by Phashant Gopal - “America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys.”

Heat on over climate change

More than 140 million people in Africa, Latin America and South Asia could move to another part of their country by 2050 to escape the worsening impacts of climate change, unless urgent action is taken to curb global warming and help people adapt, the World Bank says.

Moving: Venezuelans cross the International Simon
Bolivar bridge into Cucuta, Colombia, as rising numbers
 of Venezuelans flee in a burgeoning refugee crisis.

Globally, the numbers of people forced to leave home because of water shortages, crop failures, sea-level rise, storm surges and other climate threats was likely to be much higher, researchers said.

But if global warming is effectively kept to limits set in the Paris Agreement on climate change, and people are helped to adapt, then the numbers migrating in the three regions will drop to about 40 million people, the study predicted.

‘‘We have a small window now, before the effects of climate change deepen, to prepare the ground for this new reality,’’ World Bank head Kristalina Georgieva said.

That preparation needs to include making economies less vulnerable to climate change, helping farmers adapt their growing techniques, and making city infrastructure more resilient to storms, rising sea levels, f loods or drought, the study noted. Cities also need to create enough jobs, and boost health and education services, to meet the needs of the growing number of people migrating to urban areas.

Without that preparation, cities could face serious repercussions, said Kanta Kumari Rigaud, who led the creation of the World Bank report.

‘‘We could see increased tensions and conflict . . . but that doesn’t have to be the future,’’ the environmental specialist said. ‘‘It won’t be a crisis if we plan for it now.’’

In the worst-case scenario, more than 85 million people could leave home by 2050 in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, and 17 million in Latin America, the report noted.

And the number of climate migrants could accelerate after 2050, unless there is urgent action to hold global warming to below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, the report noted.

The most vulnerable people, however, will be unable to move and will remain trapped in increasingly unviable areas, it predicted.

Many more people are migrating within their own countries than across borders, doing so for economic, social, political and environmental reasons, the World Bank report said.

In 2016, storms, floods and other weather-related disasters — not all of them driven by climate change — forced 23 million people to move within their countries, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

‘‘Although cross-border movement is much more attention-grabbing and can appear more dramatic, right now the internal movement of people forms the bulk of what’s going on,’’ United Kingdom-based Climate and Migration Coalition coordinator Alex Randall said.

Migration was not necessarily a bad thing, he said, and could be a good way to adapt to climate change and improve people’s lives.

‘‘It can be a positive, empowering experience. But it comes with risks as well. The emphasis should be on how we make migration safe,’’ he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Although much migration is likely to take place from the countryside to urban areas, cities themselves will grapple with climate impacts as well.

For example, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and storm surges. Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, by comparison, could see slower population growth as it relies on increasingly unpredictable rainfall, the World Bank study noted.

Regions and cities that are likely to attract large numbers of climate migrants include Nairobi, the southern Indian highlands between Bangalore and Chennai, and the central plateau areas around Mexico City and Guatemala City.

But lack of clear data about how a particular area will be impacted by climate change, and when, makes it difficult for cities, governments and communities to plan.

Nonetheless, ‘‘(it’s) important to help people make good decisions about whether to stay where they are, or move to new locations where they are less vulnerable,’’ Ms Georgieva said.

Story in today’s Shepparton News by Alex Whiting (Reuters) - “Heat on over climate change.”

Contradicting a world famous physicist

D

are I contradict Stephen Hawking?

Yes, he is wrong!

Stephen Hawking.

Escaping earth sounds easy, if you say it quickly.

However, it is not easy and the human effort, commitment, ingenuity, imagination and desire would be wasted and, even worse, it would amount to us acquiescing to the “throw away” concept, but in this case actually throwing away the world.

Hawking wants us to admit to defeat, admitting that we can no longer control our wants and escape to that “somewhere else” and continue in our wasteful ways.

What we should be doing is applying our effort, commitment, ingenuity, imagination and desire to ensure we can make our home here on earth liveable.

The ABC has reported on Hawking’s recent appearance at Sydney’s Opera House in its story: “Humanity won't survive another 1,000 years unless it escapes Earth, physicist Stephen Hawking warns”.

"We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity," the physicist said.

- by Robert McLean.