By Sterling Burnett and Anthony Watts
A recent debate in nation states that Miami should either plan to evacuate the Florida coast or become an adaptation model to cope with rapidly rising sea levels due to climate change and the refugees that will be born from it. The story is not only untrue, but also ridiculously silly. There is no evidence that the United States faces the loss of any major coastal cities to climate change or that climate change has or will create climate refugees.
nation published an exchange between Daniel Aldana Cohen and Samantha Schuyler titled “Should we start preparing for the Miami evacuation?“
Cohen, one assistant professor of sociology at UC Berkeleywrite:
It is urgent for governments and social movements to start planning for the millions of people to land in new places. Preparing to evacuate Miami is a perfect starting point. Its inhabitants are a multi-racial, multi-national and multi-generational assemblage spanning the class spectrum. Tragically, many of them have been climate migrants—like Puerto Ricans displaced by recent hurricanes.
If cities across the country are forced to plan for how they integrate new Miamis into their communities with green public investment, they will begin to plan for climate migration in general. This will also trigger conversations about density zoning, respecting tenants’ rights, upgrading infrastructure, taxing the rich, building green banks, fighting racism and police violence.
Throughout his article, Cohen addresses nonscientific concerns such as emancipation, the “Great Migration,” environmental injustice, and racism. The only thing missing from Cohen’s argument is the facts and data that provide evidence for the need to withdraw from Miami or that climate refugees are or will become an issue.
Address Cohen’s climate refugee concerns first, as discovered This And This, neither storm frequency nor intensity increase during modern warming. So the storms that get worse won’t drive people away from Miami, or push people from islands near Miami to the US mainland. As for the climate refugees Cohen believes have flooded into Miami, which he believes will soon become a flood, it turns out he’s wrong again. Not a single proven climate refugee, as discussed at Climate Realism, Thisnor is there any reason to believe that the United States or any other country is about to be overrun by climate refugees, as discussed This And This.
ARRIVE of the country credit, Cohen’s article has a counter-reaction from Samantha Schuyler, nationown research director. Unfortunately, Schuyler’s response was only slightly less bewildering.
“At some point, if South Florida does not change its approach to navigating climate change, then evacuation will be necessary,” Schuyler wrote. “But if we withdraw from Miami too soon, we will lose a vibrant city that could have been a training ground to learn how to adapt to the future of the planet.”
As discussed in many articles on Climate RealismThis And Thisfor example, there is no evidence that sea levels are rising at a typically rapid rate.
NASA satellite instruments, which have measured sea levels since 1993, show that global sea levels are rising at a rate of 1.2 inches per decade. As shown in A glimpse of the climate: Sea level risethis rate is approximately equal to the rate of sea level rise that has occurred since at least the mid-1800s. Furthermore, there has been little or no increase in sea level rise in recent years.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintains a tide gauge just off the coast of Miami on Virginia Key. NOAA’s Virginia Key Tide gauge shows Sea level in Miami is rising even more slowly than the global average of 1.2 inches per decade, as shown in Figure 1 below. Miami, no sign of accelerating sea level rise.
So if sea level rise is slower than the global average, with no signs of accelerating, what makes Cohen’s and Schuyler worry that Miami could soon become uninhabitable?
At the core of Cohen’s and, to a lesser extent, Schuyler’s concerns about climate change that pervades Miami are faulty computer models and actual land subsidence.
Cohen and Schuyler appear to have joined other pop culture climate analysts to capture the worst-case scenarios generated by computer climate models of the future. However, in a recent report, some climate scientists are preventing future warming and say other researchers should avoid questionable climate models. What does this study confirm? Climate realism Firstly reported in August 2021climate model Representative Centralized Roadmap 8.5 (RCP8.5) generates “Unbelievably hot forecast of future warming.”
Without the worst-case scenario, predictions for sea level rise would be reversed. One piece of evidence Cohen cited to make his stance on rapidly rising sea levels is: Miami-Dade County Flood Vulnerability Viewer, a computer mapping tool for Miami that shows what the future will look like with sea level rise. However, even this evidence does not support Cohen’s claims. By side-by-side comparison, as shown in Figure 2, you can see for yourself that Miami does not need to be “evacuated” at all.
Miami’s real problem isn’t sea level rise as much as land subsidence. Much Miami was built on reclaimed marshland, and then built with modern infrastructure. That extra weight causes a subsidence of the land, known as subsidence, which allows seawater to seep in as the surface sinks near sea level. It also means that during heavy rains and storm surges, the subsidence areas don’t drain as they did years ago.
This is clearly mentioned in the scientific paper Land subsidence contributes to the risk of coastal flooding in southeast Florida, published in the Proceedings of the IAHS 2020. The article states:
Preliminary results show that subsidence occurs locally (< 0.02 km2) with a strength of up to 3 mm year−1, in urban areas built on reclaimed marshland. These results suggest that the contribution of local land subsidence affects only small areas along the southeastern coast of Florida, but in those areas the risk of coastal flooding is significantly higher than in coastal areas. with areas not subject to subsidence.
Subsidence is also driven by the withdrawal of fresh water from the area’s groundwater reserves to meet the growing population needs of the Miami metropolitan area.
So, as the comparison in Figure 2 shows, “only small areas along the southeast coast of Florida” are affected, and Miami itself barely needs evacuation.
Climate activists such as Cohen and his mass communicators in nation simply making statements and don’t count on no one fact checking to point out their lies as has been done here. It is an indictment of the shoddy state of journalism today.
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