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Moving away from cars

As difficult, and complicated, as contemplating the move away from cars might be, it can be strangely contextualized by reckoning with the move away from Florida:

The Sunshine State rode a post-pandemic growth wave to surpass New York as the country’s third-most populous state, and has four of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas‍—including Cape Coral–Fort Myers, which Hurricane Ian slammed in 2022, producing the third-most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Will Florida’s lifestyle migrants decide they would rather live on higher ground? “The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone,” warns the Wall Street Journal.

Fat chance. To the extent that these storms will push anyone from Florida, it will not be people with the means to go, but people without the means to stay. This phenomenon—sometimes called “climate gentrification”—cuts against one popular idea of climate migration, in which wealthier households move to more secure locations and leave the poor to face extreme weather.

Locals are already conscious of this outcome. “The price of repairs may mean we lose our character,” Sam Henderson, the mayor of Gulfport, told the Tampa Bay Times after Helene. “There will be a different kind of people who can afford to live here, moving forward.”

So, a series of counterintuitive developments – much like many of these communities themselves – where, rather than becoming cheaper and less habitable, Florida becomes more expensive and more appealing.

If history is any guide, this devastating hurricane season will increase the state’s rents and home prices, rather than drive them down, and Florida’s growth will continue apace.

Then again, as hundred-year-storm chasers know, history may not be much help in the era of unprecedented weather events fueled by a changing climate. The hazards of long-term sea-level rise are distinct from those associated with disaster recovery, which comes with rebuilt, functioning infrastructure and a sense of returning to normal. Future climate change risks are not included in FEMA flood maps, insurance policies, or Florida land-use planning—and seem not to impact the way people consider the risks of coastal property.

Oh, yes. People prefer less complication.

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New Unscripted: Expedition to Antarctica

The new episode of my interview podcast Unscripted focuses on Patricia Yager, professor of marine sciences, and her recent experience co-leading a research expedition to the Amundsen Sea Polynya in western Antarctica.

While many research projects on the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration were focused on sea level rise and the physical processes related to the melting, Yager served as co-chief scientist and lead P.I. on the project Artemis, designed to better understand the impact of melting glaciers and ice shelves on the coastal ocean’s biological productivity.

“The glaciers are not melting because the air temperature is warm,” Yager said in the interview. “The glaciers are melting because the ocean is warm.”

Listen to the interview on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Unscripted.

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Climate in the Weather Space

F*x news is preparing to channel (sorry!) the weather forecasting and reporting sphere when it launches a round-the-clock weather streaming service next week. Potential problems with this seems quite obvious and the WAPO is only so successful in getting network executives to talk about how (and whether) the service will cover climate change in the context of extreme weather events:

For Fox, which has seen sponsors inch away from its more polarizing political content, weather offers a potential way to hook viewers without turning away advertisers, analysts say. But questions linger as to how the streaming service will cover climate change, given Fox News’s history of questioning the seriousness of climate change and how much humans contribute to it. Asked in September whether human activity played a role in recent extreme weather, contributing Fox News meteorologist Joe Bastardi said that “at the very least, you can’t tell what CO2 is doing.”
A landmark U.N. climate report published in August details “unequivocal” evidence that human activity is warming the planet by emitting heat-trapping gases, primarily carbon dioxide.
Fox Weather declined a request for an interview with one of its executives but has indicated that it will treat climate science more seriously in its new endeavor. Echoing recent remarks from Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott, Sharri Berg, the longtime Fox executive now heading Fox Weather told Variety, “If you’re asking about climate change, climate change is part of our lives. It’s how we live. It’s not going to be ignored,” adding, “we will be reporting facts.”

Okay, so… what are they? Wait – show, don’t tell, remember? But this might be the most revealing aspect of their devious plan:

But, she added, Fox Weather will be courting controversy however it covers climate change. If the service reports accurately on climate science, it could alienate core Fox News viewers, who have been primed to question it, Fisher said.
“There is a line that they are going to have to walk to keep advertisers feeling like their brand is safe there but not going too far away from their base,” she said. “If something major happens, like a hurricane or a heat wave, all eyes are going to be looking to them to see how they are characterizing it.”

Reassuring bullsh*t and attacking liberals in the face of climate catastrophes will not be helpful. So this venture will either be truthful and short-lived, or profitable and very harmful. Teach the controversy all you want, but – there’s no whether.

Image: Thomas Hart Benton, Spring Storm, 1958. Tempura on board.

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Brown ocean effect

What maps would look like if they showed only solid land. The light blue indicates swamps, marshes, and wetlands.

Hurricane Ida grew quickly powerful after just a couple of days before roaring ashore and inundating people who have seen it before and likely will again:

By the time Hurricane Ida made landfall in Port Fourchon, La., on Sunday, it was the poster child for a climate change-driven disaster. The fast-growing, ferocious storm brought 150-mile-per-hour wind, torrential rain and seven feet of storm surge to the most vulnerable part of the U.S. coast. It rivals the most powerful storm ever to strike the state.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we’re going to have to get used to as the planet warms,” said Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the physics of hurricanes and their connection to the climate.

And the recent UN Climate report aside, scientists have been talking about this for years:

previous NASA-funded research by Theresa Andersen and J. Marshall Shepherd making the case that a “brown ocean effect” — evaporation from moist warm soils — can energize tropical systems.

A NASA news release on the 2013 research explained:

Before making landfall, tropical storms gather power from the warm waters of the ocean. Storms in the newly defined category derive their energy instead from the evaporation of abundant soil moisture – a phenomenon that Andersen and Shepherd call the “brown ocean.”

“The land essentially mimics the moisture-rich environment of the ocean, where the storm originated,” Andersen said.

The map above says it all, and when we look at the photos from Sunday-Monday, listen to what we tell ourselves about what we see.

Image via the New Yorker

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Logically circular

So… climate change is resulting in more and more severe storms of all kinds, and now (soon) one of the drivers of our gloriously enhanced CO2 budget will be able to power your home when the power gets knocked out because of those more severe storms:

Believe it or not, this battery-powered truck can really power your house when the lights go out, and better still, doing so won’t require a rat’s nest of extension cords or even a portable generator. What Ford calls Intelligent Backup Power enables this all-electric rig to feed power from its enormous battery pack through its hardwired wall charger directly into your home’s electrical system.

As you might suspect, electric cars store positively enormous amounts of energy in their batteries. After all, it takes a lot of juice to move a multi-ton vehicle at interstate speeds for hundreds of miles. When it goes on sale next year, the new Lightning will offer two battery pack sizes, the smaller of which should provide 230 miles of range and the bigger one about 300. Ford hasn’t said how large these electron reservoirs are, but we’re estimating they’ll clock in at roughly 110 and 150 kWh, respectively.

The F-150 Lightning can provide up to 9.6 kW of power output. According to Ford, that’s more than enough to fully power a house at any one time, and considering the size of the battery, it could do that for at least three days (based on a daily average of 30 kWh). The automaker says you can make that power last for up to 10 days if you ration the electricity accordingly. Kind of like hypermiling for your home.

Definitely some prepper fanboy-ing going on with this soothing new pickup, though we are far beyond any shyness or shame about making fun of things both ironically and unironically at the same time. Ah, the land of opportunity. No need to waste your time hating on only one brand of irony.

ETA – Actually, there is no real reason to be hating on much of anything and this example nutshells the fundamental conundrum as first articulated (over to your right, there >). Can we market our way out of this? It’s like the punchline to this entire site.

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Updating the artwork

The Prado is collaborating with the World Wildlife Fund to deface some famous works of art to reflect the effects of climate change:

Marta Zafra raises the sea level on Felipe IV a Caballo (Philip the IV on Horseback) by Velázquez, circa 1635.

The Parasol that supplies the title for Francisco de Goya’s El Quitasol of 1777 becomes a tattered umbrella barely sheltering miserable, crowded refugees in the sodden, makeshift camp of Pedro Veloso’s reimagining.

If Velasquez and Goya getting the Banksy treatment seem too much for you, try ocean acidification, lack of fresh water, and drought on for size and pay some attention before the price gets any higher.

Bravo, Prado.

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The Real Eschew

Given the vicissitudes of the news cycle over the last four months, this is a pretty solid distribution of issues over the last four debates. As long as Health Care stays in the top three or four, voters might be able to stay focused on the ridiculous costs of living, and even of dying, quite frankly.

And Democrats can actually do several things at once, as long as one of those things is holding criminals accountable for crimes.

Bonus Fun Fact: subpoena means “Under Penalty.”

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Climate news floods Florida

Even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture knows that without studies showing its dangers, climate change is not really happening, news outlets in Florida are banding together to talk about the weather:

Now six Florida news organizations — The Miami Herald, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, Palm Beach Post, Orlando Sentinel, and WLRN — are forming a partnership to cover climate change stories together. They’ll start out by sharing content across their newsrooms, but over time are hoping to collaborate on reporting as well. The partnership may also expand to include universities and nonprofit newsrooms.

“We aim to be the ProPublica of environmental reporting for our state,” Nicholas Moschella, editor of The Palm Beach Post, said in a statement.

Many of the participating news organizations have worked together in some capacity in the past. The Miami Herald and WLRN have had an editorial partnership for 15 years and share newsrooms, for instance, and the Herald, WLRN, Sun Sentinel, and Post are already partners on The Invading Sea, an investigation into sea-level rise. “This is an opportunity to maximize our ability to cover the biggest story of our lives,” said Julie Anderson, executive editor of the Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel, both Tribune papers.

Just for scale, the  U.S. is also surrounded on two sides by water and supposedly split down the middle by… indecision.

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Afford to do, afford not to do

What is the concept of afford, and does it work both ways? The question is not whether it can work two ways, but for the concept to be meaningful at all, it has to be fully operational with regard to meaning.

We’re not just deciding what to spend money on — wait, yes we are! In so doing, any action must be considered in the context of its opportunity cost, and with further unpacking of the consequences of not spending money on certain things, the consequences this decision assures.

For instance, Mr. Sarda said, it’s relatively straightforward for businesses to calculate the potential costs from an increase in taxes designed to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Indeed, this is one of the most common climate-related risks that companies now disclose. But it’s trickier to take scientific reports about rising temperatures and weather extremes and say what those broad trends might mean for specific companies in specific locations.

Previous studies, based on computer climate modeling, have estimated that the risks of global warming, if left unmanaged, could cost the world’s financial sector between $1.7 trillion to $24.2 trillion in net present value terms. A recent analysis published in the journal Nature Climate Change warned that companies are reporting on these risks only “sporadically and inconsistently” and often take a narrow view of the dangers that may lie ahead.

The financial context of whether or not to do something – can we pay for doing the thing – extends in validity only as far as this framing is reversed: can we afford not to do something.

That is, the so-called cost of addressing climate change – or homelessness – large problems who’s answers supposedly involved gross amounts of expenditure that could be determined to be too large must also be considered in their reverse outlines. What is the cost of doing nothing? Is this affordable? Here the concept actually has meaning and may provide a constructive way forward.

But if we decide not to spend money on ameliorating climate change expressly because the measures are deemed prohibitively expensive, and yet the broad effects of climate change prove to be even more expensive than the proposed steps, then the affordability argument is invalid, if not disingenuous. While it may be the case that some consequences are unknowable in advance, that truth equally invalidates the affordability argument in advance. If it can’t be known whether a step would be worth it, it likewise cannot be known whether ignoring a step might be a price too high.

TL;Dr – Decisions made to ignore the effects of climate change must be taken for a reason other than the affordability argument.

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Contradiction Valediction

The newer approach of media to report the widespread destruction of the natural world and the ‘unprecedented pace’ of extinctions,

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Countervailed by the older approach of companies using lawsuits to kill any actions to hold them responsible for the climate change they helped cause:

The stated goals of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC) include a $40-a-ton fee on carbon dioxide emissions in return for the gutting of current climate change regulations and “protecting companies from federal and state tort liability for historic emissions”.

Microsoft has become the first technology company to join the CLC, which includes oil giants BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Total and ConocoPhillips among its founding members. Handing legal immunity to these oil companies would squash a cavalcade of recent climate lawsuits launched by cities and counties across the US, including one by King county, Washington, where Microsoft is based.

The name of the consortium alone has Orwell blanching in the afterbar, as Whitman and Descartes stroke their beards. The recent talk about the demise capitalism has no better illustration. Who are these companies negotiating with? Similar to President Garbage – an antagonist without a conscience, who are congressional investigators negotiating with? There are laws? Backed by what, if a shameless head of state or a group of corporations guard their power with only impunity? Fighting something isn’t a basis on which you will prevail, thought both seek to codify their impunity by its mere existence. Look at these defenses. They are but dares. What say us?

Image: elephant in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy at the foot of Mount Kenya. AFP/Getty