Not only is Florida sizzling in record-crushing heat, but the ocean waters that surround it are scorching, as well. The unprecedented ocean warmth around the state — connected to historically warm oceans worldwide — is further intensifying its heat wave and stressing coral reefs, with conditions that could end up strengthening hurricanes.
Much of Florida is seeing its warmest year on record, with temperatures running 3 to 5 degrees above normal. While some locations have been setting records since the beginning of the year, the hottest weather has come with an intense heat dome cooking the Sunshine State in recent weeks. That heat dome has made coastal waters extremely warm, including “downright shocking” temperatures of 92 to 96 degrees in the Florida Keys, meteorologist and journalist Bob Henson said Sunday in a tweet.
These are horrifying temperatures- and they are basically boiling coral, all marine life, etc. But there are other things to worry about, including, of course, hurricanes, but also algae blooms, etc. And, no surprise, another insurer has said fuck this place:
Another property insurer is dropping coverage in Florida.
Farmers Insurance will stop writing new business and not renew its existing “Farmers-branded” automobile, home and umbrella policies in the Sunshine State, the company said Tuesday.
Last month, Farmers said it was only pausing new business in Florida. The company is also limiting new home policies in California, where it is based, according to news reports.
“This business decision was necessary to effectively manage risk exposure,” the company said in a statement.
The move will impact 30% of the company’s business in Florida, or roughly 100,000 policies. Policyholders affected by the decision will be given notice that their coverage will not be renewed.
You can fool idiots on Fox News and Town Hall about how climate change is a hoax, but not the accountants.
This is a story of bad governance on the macro and micro level- the entire 30-40 year slow motion climate crisis coupled with the absolute inaction of the Florida state government to do anything to stabilize the insurance market. Literally the only thing they have done in the past five years is to pass a bill holding insurers accountable for paying out claims. That’s it. I’ll cede this topic to Betty who surely knows more than me, but they have done nothing that I can tell to slow down construction in dangerous areas, increase structural regulations, etc.
And not to sound too awful, but we absolutely have to make sure the federal government does not bail all these people who have built mansions in hurricane alley get rebuilt when they are inevitably wiped out this year or next year or whenever. It’s coming.
Baud
Reminds me of that old commercial.
“You can’t fool Mother Nature.”
Elizabelle
I know. I am horrified for what this portends for the marine life.
Floridians, not so much. (Sorry, Betty.) Humans are more adaptable, and have had a lot more warning.
AndyG
I wonder how long it will be before banks stop issuing 30 year mortgages on property in southern Florida… and how long it will take the real estate market there to collapse after that happen.
catclub
Good luck with that. Flood insurance rationalization has not happened because lots of rich people will oppose it.
Feathers
Federal flood insurance was supposed to be a one time buyout. Instead it became a vehicle for building massively expensive homes in areas prone to natural disasters. There’s a reason why historic pictures of old Cape Cod showed shacks along the beach – that’s what you built! If a storm knocked it down, you’d put up another shack.
Note: I may have the name of the program wrong, but I was a 70s kid from inside the Beltway, and I remember the head shaking as the program turned into handouts for the rich instead of a lifeline for the lower income people who’d lived on the shore previously.
OzarkHillbilly
@AndyG: Without insurance there is no mortgage, so pretty damned soon.
scav
@Elizabelle: on the downside, that does mean there is simply a horde of economic migrants to the south of us, threatening to come up and dilute our precious voting rights with their foreign ways. Worse, this lot is generally too old to work in the fields. Closing down asylums and letting the inmates loose on the streets to fend for themselves does have consequences.
Kelly
Insurance companies are exiting the rural woodsy market here in the west. We haven’t had any unusual changes in our coverage but some friends recently had to change homeowners companies. I can’t remember the company. Their agent said that their old company was dropping a lot of rural accounts. Easily found other coverage. Change is in the air.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Baud: Mother Nature bats last, and she always bats a 1000…
Fair Economist
I’m surprised Farmer’s is canceling renewals, and not just stopping new policies (like in CA). Big insurance companies are starting to fund in-house climate change research so they can have some idea what they’re risking, now that historical results aren’t representative. I wonder if they predicted something really nasty for FL in the relatively near future.
Bupalos
There are a lot of looming catastrophes sitting under the category of climate change. The one I’m gradually coming to fear most is the way immiseration may interact with politics and push authoritarianism over the finish line. We already see it with the effect climate refugees have on politics here and in Europe.
I can’t not agree that there is no way we should bail out climate-wrecked McMansions, and certainly should not rebuild them. At the same time, downward mobility breeding fascism is just about the most proven theorem in politics. There are a lot of bubbles that climate change threatens, where it’s hard to see how they can get unwound before the global greenhouse gets it’s needle in.
Martin
Yeah, we’re gearing up for a relandscaping of the yard to reduce our fire risk. Fire and drought resistant plants, moving things from proximity with the house, making existing items like fences less flammable, etc. Was hoping to do it this fall.
rikyrah
The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) tweeted at 0:45 PM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:
.@SenTuberville isn’t confused, he knows exactly what he stands for.
white nationalist (noun): one of a group of militant white people who espouse white supremacy (see white supremacist) and advocate enforced racial segregation. https://t.co/C3SiA9I0u0
(https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1678822865867534338?t=QCcyGPrInhzf1tfpmRIG0w&s=03)
Mobile
I believe the maximum payout from the National Flood insurance program on a home destroyed by flooding is $250,000. There are very few waterfront homes available in that price range in Florida. Owners of houses above that price point are on the hook for the rest. Futhermore, while flood insurance used to be a bargain, annual premiums on new policies are now out of sight.
rikyrah
David Darmofal (@david_darmofal) tweeted at 0:51 PM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:
Biden-Harris administration plans to cap how much families pay for child care through a government program https://t.co/yQSRes6riL
(https://twitter.com/david_darmofal/status/1678824275984228353?t=MJU7IisskABSoKmq–mBkg&s=03)
rikyrah
This is a Lifetime Movie![]()
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Terry (@BeingTerryJane) tweeted at 8:12 AM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:
You steal NINE MILLION from your job in two years, purchase a MILLION dollar house down the street from thus said job, and after you got caught you proceeded to forge the judges signature claiming your charges were dismissed so you can open a hookah lounge.
GWARL! https://t.co/NvKoDyJ5zE
(https://twitter.com/BeingTerryJane/status/1678754096923254784?t=4tCcfXjuYn2MA00c8I23fg&s=03)
Hoodie
Seems to me that human-induced climate change will upend a lot of the working assumptions of the property insurance industry and make the whole enterprise questionable. Private insurance relies on the ability to estimate the likelihood of particular events to properly price products, but that’s hard to do if you don’t have historical data on which you can reasonably rely. The atmospheric warming generally introduces more energy into the system, leading to things (e.g., greater moisture levels and steeper temperature gradients) that can increase instability. We can’t accurately estimate the risk associated with that increased energy because we have never experienced it – and it’s still increasing. For example, a lot of those 100 and 500 year flood plain estimates are becoming invalid, but we really don’t know what to replace them with or how long a given estimate will continue to be valid. The best you might be able to do is extrapolate from trends, but that could easily be way off in a rapidly changing environment. Moving out of a market like Florida removes that issue for a given company, but it won’t stop there (e.g., look at Vermont). The industry can’t keep running away from the problem. I don’t see how you deal with this without government intervention.
Bugboy
OTOH having potential home buyers unable to secure homeowner’s insurance surely will have some impact on construction, no? Oh, who the hell am I kidding? In fact, some of the biggest violators of common sense over building condos on a sand bar are the people who are so rich they don’t need insurance. Then, that suuuuweeet FEMA money replaces their “investment”, should it be washed out to sea. Thanks, Obama!
Suzanne
Hey, they told student loan borrowers to go suck it, so I have no problem returning the favor.
OzarkHillbilly
Fucked around, he did. Finding out, he is.
Raoul Paste
A neighbour just a few doors down has a second home in Florida,. They have just finished repairing its major damage (half the house destroyed) from last year’s storm.
It didn’t cost them a thing because they had excellent insurance, as they described it. Farmers insurance
Miss Bianca
@Hoodie:
I’ve been pondering this prospect myself for some time, watching property insurance skyrocket here in CO as well (wildfires in the urban/rural interface being the biggest visible cause).
Ken
(Frowns, then gets out pen and paper and starts diagramming the sentence, paying careful attention to the negatives. Ten minutes later…)
I agree! With 90% confidence.
Kelly
We haven’t had any bad news about our homeowner’s insurance since Oregon’s 2020 Labor Day fires. A friend of ours in a similar woodsy, rural neighborhood had to find a new insurance company this year. Their agent easily found them other coverage with a small premium increase. I don’t remember which company dropped them but their agent said that company was getting out of most rural coverage.
Delk
And, Florida is now America’s inflation hotspot.
Edited for spelling
Betty Cracker
In four years, our homeowners insurance went up 400%, and our flood insurance premium almost tripled. We’re something like 30 feet above sea level, which is practically the Alps in Florida, and have never made a single claim in 25 years.
There are lots of people who just can’t afford the increases, and if they own their homes outright, they go uninsured. From what I hear, the shitshow that’s still unfolding after Hurricane Ian makes that seem like a reasonable gamble since insurers are just flat-out screwing people regardless.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s just the free market speaking, not “cancel culture”. These whiny crybabies…….
geg6
@AndyG:
Not soon enough, I say.
lowtechcyclist
I’ve always suggested capping Federal flood insurance payouts, and any other Federal disaster-related payouts, at (say) 150% of the median single-family residential home sale price in the previous year. Can quibble over the exact percentage, but the idea is that average Joes and Janes should still be protected, while people who can afford mini-mansions in (heretofore) desirable locales would be mostly on their own.
Like Feathers, I remember when construction near beaches tended towards shacks, because that’s what you could rebuild cheaply and easily. And the original idea of Federal flood insurance, IIRC, was that whole towns along small rivers and creeks in Appalachia and similar locales would get wiped out if a major storm suddenly dropped a shit-ton of water into that holler.
Van Buren
I will mourn the loss of Key West. Unfortunately, it will disappear before the State House and Governor’s Mansion.
OzarkHillbilly
@Soprano2: Nononoooo, It’s not his fault he’s getting sued left and right, he’s innocent he tells ya INNOCENT!!!
OzarkHillbilly
Ouch.
geg6
@Raoul Paste:
My friend and her husband have a house in Stuart (just down the road from Ft. Pierce, possible site of Cheetolini’s docs trial). She’s been bad mouthing PA incessantly since she came home (she’s a snowbird) because it hasn’t been sunny like “fabulous” FL. Can’t wait to tell her this news. I’m gonna laugh my ass off. How do you like PA now?
I love my friend, but she’s really blind and stupid about FL.
Kelly
@Martin: The Beachie fire came within 20 feet of our home. We have a 6 foot gravel path around our home instead of foundation plantings. Well watered shrubs beyond the gravel. The original family that built the place did for ease of maintenance. Fire resistance is a nice bonus.
I have a friend that works for Jeld-Wen window company who tells me the windows are where the fire gets in. Jeld-Wen tried to develop fire resistant windows but was only able to up the glass survival time from a minute or so to 2 minutes or so.
Rain gutters full of summer dried debris are a common ignition point as are wooden decks.
No matter what you do if the fire is big enough or your luck is bad the fire can get thru. My brother had a extensive green grass and gravel defensive perimeter and his neighbor’s 100+ foot fir tree fell burning onto his home.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
If I were stealing that sort of money, you bet that early on in the game, I’d be researching which countries don’t have any sort of extradition agreement with the U.S., stash most of my money in an offshore account, keep my passport up to date, and have a bag always packed just in case it seemed like people were starting to think something was a bit hinky here.
lowtechcyclist
@lowtechcyclist:
H/T to Mobile @13 for responding to this before I even posted!
Suzanne
I love the rain here. Because I know what it means to not have it.
Besides, I listen to people around here complain about heat and humidity once it crosses 80 degrees. BIH, the humidity is, at most, somewhat uncomfortable. They think they could cope in FL or AZ?! Phoenix is going to hit 120 this week. People will die. 85 degrees and 70% humidity is, like, not a damn thing in comparison to that.
I still remember the 122 degree day.
jimmiraybob
@Bupalos:
The thought of what an accelerated climate crisis might do to national politics has crossed my mind more than a few times this year. That’s why the promise to “Make America Florida” has come to have an added level of terror.
mainsailset
Waiting for that lightbulb moment when the insurance industry publicly recognizes that there is no safe from climate change disasters place where they can retreat to make their mega bucks.
hrprogressive
Sounds like an opening for Florida Dems if they try.
“The GOP has literally made you uninsurable. You are one hurricane away from losing everything, without an insurance check coming to pay for your replacement costs”
patrick II
My own special pet peeve is people who have intimate, first-hand knowledge of climate change and its effects and still vote Republican. I am talking about all of the farmers throughout the Midwest who know damn well that their planting season starts two weeks earlier than it did thirty years ago and just leave the larger climate problem for their children or grandchildren to solve. Because Trump is being picked on, evidently.
Suzanne
@Kelly:
There is real fire-resistive glazing (made of ceramics), but it’s not for the residential market. It can only be used in fixed window assemblies, within fire-rated walls or barriers. It is ludicrously expensive.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
They’re different than us. Were it me I would think “I cannot believe my luck, riding the overpriced pillow gimmick that long!”
trollhattan
@Kelly: It looks increasingly dire for woodland homes in the west, but how rapidly things change seems to vary from state to state.
Everybody I know in California living those places has seen fire insurance premiums increase multifold.
Me, keeping an eye on that flood coverage.
Steve in the ATL
@scav: clearly, we need to harden the border between Georgia and Florida. Build the wall!
Steve in the ATL
@lowtechcyclist:
OMFG you don’t use your REAL passport! Freakin’ amateurs….
trollhattan
Not just Florida.
I recall reading one of the possible tipping points is when oceans heat sufficiently to block the historic currents, such as the Gulf Stream. That would trigger climate chaos, and quickly.
Chris
See. This right here, the climate issue, is why I find it incredibly hard to be optimistic about Florida’s long-term prospects.
In order to un-fuck itself, Florida desperately needs people who want to make it a stable, healthy, and functioning society in the long term, rather than a playground for corporate pirates and corrupt politicians looking for smash-and-grab opportunities.
The problem is, the kind of people who actually care about that kind of thing – whether they’re businesses looking for a place to invest, or people looking for a place to live – are increasingly going to take one look at Florida’s long-term climate prospects and say, well fuck that.
Which means the kind of people who want to move to Florida are, increasingly, going to be either completely delusional ideologues who don’t care about global warming because they don’t think it’s real, or crooks who don’t care about global warming because they’re not planning to be there that long.
Neither is the kind of person healthy societies are built on.
That’s already the way things are trending. It’s only going to get worse.
cain
Look y’all – the GOP has a solid plan to fix this problem and that’s getting those LBGTQ+ folks to stop eyeing our kids sideways, putting family first and getting women back in the home, and ya’know what else? Why, anotha tax cut for hard working Americans – nothing says “merrica like a good healthy tax cut. Don’t worry none about them hot oceans – it’s all normal.
America! Fuck yeah! – GOP
trollhattan
@Steve in the ATL: Everybody has that safe, behind the painting, in which are the gold coins, pistol and silencer, lair keys, and several passports. You could look it up.
patrick II
@trollhattan:
I have seen pictures of homes that are built to be fire-resistant being the only home left standing and untouched in a burned-down neighborhood. One key seems to be a sprinkler system. But as long as they keep building homes without some design changes in the woods as if a fire in a wooded area is never going to happen, they will burn down.
cain
@rikyrah: here in the northwest – a million dollar home is what a 400k home was about a decade ago. It’s kind of nuts. It ain’t no mansion.
Steve
Maybe a no-rebuild clause in any federally-subsidized insurance or bailout. We’ll help cover you, but once the house goes, that land is no longer eligible for future insurance.
Martin
@Bupalos: the biggest problem I see in the US is the nature of our consumption based culture. A general downsizing of homes is needed, an elimination of many toys – boats, RVs, etc. A significant shift from single family to multi family construction (CA has more multifamily than single family housing starts for the first time I think ever), and so on.
My generation is really stuck on the acquisition of goods as a signifier of success, and winding that back isn’t going to be easy, and a LOT of climate change hangs on that very tendency – more, bigger stuff is the marker for standard of living, and less, smaller stuff is a marker that you’re doing worse. I’m not sure that can be deprogrammed. I get a LOT of pushback any time I even suggest that there will be social changes in this direction.
I think this is a big reason why Europe has had an easier time addressing climate change – they never really adopted that cultural view unlike the US.
cain
♬pa de pa pa ba pa ♬
Martin
@Mobile: That payout isn’t really a problem. I have a house valued at $1.4M, but the replacement cost is about $250K. The rest of the value is land. If my house burned down tomorrow, I still have the land value, I only need the $250K to replace the house.
Unless the land is taken by the sea, a lot of those waterfront homes can be at least mostly rebuilt by those funds. The real problem is that the land is being taken by the sea.
cain
@Betty Cracker: I guess things are going to get worse until they realize maybe they need to change who runs the govt. The GOP has absolutely no tools to fix this issue – ideologues usually done.
Suzanne
@patrick II: We know how to do fire-resistant construction in the commercial sector. It’s just that a lot of residential owners and production builders don’t want to spend the money or involve the additional trades that are required.
Steel or concrete structure (with fireproofing on the steel), sprinkler systems, fire-rated and non-combustible building skins (walls and roof).
lollipopguild
@Fair Economist: One problem with Florida is that most of the people live in the area from Orlando down, meaning that the most vunerable part of Florida is also it’s most populated part.
Tony G
@Suzanne: Of course, rich people love socialism as long as it benefits them.
Tony G
@Steve in the ATL: The Mason-Dixon Line would be a good place to Build That Wall.
cain
@Martin: In way, asia and others have some similar issues – they’ve finally come to the point where they are getting financial success, burgeoning middle class and now they have to put the brakes on it.
I think what’s going to happen with climate chaos is that the human population is going to no longer be sustainable. We’ll either have a war where it’s not oil that we need but fresh water and food.
I worry about all the other non-human species that also has to contend with this – or even the fact that they will be hunted to extinction.
Suzanne
@Steve:
In general, we want to reuse land. It’s much more sustainable to build where we already have roads, infrastructure, social services, etc. The exception would be where the land’s physical geography is such that we couldn’t count on any structure lasting, like, ten years. And we would want to encourage low-cost replaceable construction.
We will never solve the construction part of the climate crisis with low-density gobbling up of land elsewhere to maintain low-density lifestyles.
Another Scott
@Mobile: Correct.
FEMA.gov:
I assume that private flood insurance is very, very expensive if available at all, so most people roll the dice and hope for special help if/when disaster strikes.
The NFIP is $20.5B in debt to the Treasury as of 4QFY22. (4 page .pdf) They have (as of September 2022) $16.1B in resources (funds and borrowing authority) to pay claims. Google tells me that there was $165B in natural disaster damage (not all from flooding) in 2022.
As usual, we’re not adequately prepared…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@Kelly: Yeah, the strategy is not unlike that of the pandemic. You can’t fully protect every home, but if you can cut the chance of ignition of every home by 50%, then the ability of a fire to steamroll a neighborhood largely disappears. You’ll still lose some, but it’ll prevent the fire from getting critical mass.
We’ve already seen that here with fires near me – the fires struggle to get established in the newer developments, with smaller trees, more hardscape, etc. and it becomes that much easier for firefighters to get in front of it.
My plan is once we do it, to then reach out to all my neighbors and try and get them to take some steps, etc. In CA insurers now give rebates if you do this kind of work, and there is assistance from the water district as well.
I’ve been working on the city who are struggling to figure out what to do with the public landscaping. We have these huge pine trees lining the arterial near my house that no longer get enough water and are breaking large limbs pretty frequently. They’re a serious fire risk. The city is aware but doesn’t have a plan to address it, so I’ve been making sure they don’t get any time to forget about it. They can delegate the choice of what to plant to the water district and then just start replacing them. It doesn’t need to be this whole big thing.
Martin
@patrick II: Surveys show that pretty much everyone recognizes that climate change is a problem, but it’s a problem for someone else. Why should I support a cultural change here from CA if it’s only going to affect Florida, and in Florida they ask why they should support a cultural change if it’s only going to affect CA, etc. That’s the whole country right now. I’ll be fine, it’s someone else’s problem.
CaseyL
@cain:
That’s what makes me the most angry about GCC: Not content with immiserating and killing ourselves off, humans are determined to take everyone else with us.
Mobile
@Martin: New homes being built on flood plains today in Florida must meet the Miami Dade building code. Living areas must be built above the flood stage. The foundation structure must be concrete and have collapsible walls which will not impede flood waters. Meeting code requirements can be very costly. A new two bedroom home, located on the water completed a few months ago, in my neighborhood in Pasco County, FL, cost about $700k to build. The lot cost $250k. Add the cost of docks, lifts, pools, etc, you end up with a modest 1500 sf home at a most exorbitant price. Theoretically, this home should withstand a direct hit from a Gulf swell. I sure hope so. I live next door.
Martin
@trollhattan: Yeah. I’ve been active with my city’s planning commission and we were talking about a new parcel that the city is buying that is at the interface of the city up against the foothills – really high fire risk. The older planners were saying that because there are building so little single family now – almost everything has been multifamily – that would be a good place to put single family because it’s kind of removed from the city a bit. My response to that was ‘it’s gonna fucking burn’ and the younger planners were like ‘yep’. That got them a bit of a platform – they argued the city should build an urban island there surrounded by non-flammable sports fields and things like that. Housing is so desperately needed, it’s not like people won’t move into it.
This is why I advocate for turning the world over to young people. It’s so hard to break out of modes of thinking you have decades of investment in, and so many of them have to be thrown out. That expertise is still incredibly valuable to support how to do it right, but the decision making is too often all wrong.
Old Man Shadow
Hard not to think that life as we know it is gonna be over soon and humanity and a whole shit ton of wildlife will follow soon enough.
Living in Southern California, I’ll probably get a front row view of what happens when 20-30 million folks don’t have enough water to go around.
raven
@Mobile: My friends in Ft Meyers had the only house on their street built after Andrew and the code changed. They were also the only house that didn’t get waxed by Ian. As a result they were able to sell the house and move to Brevard, NC.
Baud
Via reddit, more FL news
Martin
@patrick II: Ages ago my old boss was that guy. Had a house on Top of the World drive in Laguna and was one of the few houses that survived. Stucco and steel construction and he had a lap pool in the yard with an industrial pump installed to a sprinkler system on his roof. He sent his wife down the hill when the fire broke out, and jumped in the pool and rode it out, turning on the sprinklers when the fire came over the bluff. The fire went right over him, but took all the neighboring homes out. No damage to his – just a lot of cleanup.
German, was in the Hitler Youth Corp before his parents got the hell out. He saw worse.
Zelma
I live in a town on the Jersey shore where the average selling price of a house (actually the lot) is approaching $2 million. I fulfilled a family dream and bought a cottage here 40 years ago. Most of the houses on my block were likewise cottages or pretty unassuming “up-side down” houses. In the past ten to fifteen years I have watched all but four of these houses leveled and replaced with huge McMansions. There are houses in town on the water selling for $10 million and more. It’s insane.
Since federal flood insurance does in fact limit structure payments to $250,000, I have asked myself how these folks get mortgages. Plus all of the major insurers have opted out of the area and rates have tripled for the dubious insurance one can get. Then I discovered that over half of the sales are cash sales. I suppose shore real estate looked like a good investment when interest rates and other returns were so low. That may be changing. I’ve noticed a slow down in sales of houses in the $3 million plus range.
We haven’t had a really bad storm here since 1962. Sandy did some damage but it mostly hit north of us. But I really feel it’s only a matter of time. But even where Sandy hit they have just rebuilt, usually bigger. I guess there’s an atavistic desire to live close to the ocean.
Yutsano
Thus is the power of the actuary. They run their models, come up with a big fat NOOOOOOPE for Florida, hand it to the corporate bigwigs, and suddenly Farmers is out of the state. They won’t be the last.
Will
I hardly ever like running people out of the Democratic tent, but I’m ok with leaving Florida behind. Don’t try and win it back, don’t make promises we know we can’t keep cause truth is a lot of Florida is already lost. The time it is going to take just for us to stop, much less turn around climate change means they are gone. Stop wasting the money there. Start building the infrastructure the Midwest and Great Lakes region is going to need when it becomes the stablest area of the country. Florida went balls deep with DeSantis, their fucking around, let them find out. Democrats absolutely should not bail Floridians out when the find out part starts happening repeatedly.
gvg
@lowtechcyclist: The problem with that is that the poor get pushed into LIVING in those dangerous less desirable shacks and mobile homes, not the “irresponsible rich”. Then along comes the major flood event, which the poor also don’t have cars to flee in, and they live in more crowded areas with worse transportation, smaller roads, smaller bridges, fewer roads etc. And they don’t have money to flee and stay somewhere else. Hurricanes and floods have a proven history of a lot more false alarms than hits too so you can’t flee and stay in a hotel for a week three times a year for “nothing” if you are poor. Then the big one hits and you have a bunch of poor people dead, not a bunch of rich people crying about their fancy house they don’t have anymore.
You can’t set this up so it doesn’t hurt the poor (and middle class frankly) and only hurts the pocket books of the rich, UNLESS YOU DON’T ALLOW THE BUILDING OF SHACKS AND UNSAFE STRUCTURES AT ALL. Which to be honest, Florida does better than many other states, since Andrew in the 1990’s. Our codes got much tougher. Other states have not really followed our lead (Texas). We have weakened some of it and we have not banned building in some areas that we should due to floods….we have not dealt with flooding yet. Wind born forces we are better. We also do warnings and evacuations pretty well. It gets pretty frustrating watching other states screw up and dither (Texas) when they should have been watching us learn the hard way years ago and not repeating our mistakes.
We aren’t dealing with insurance at all and that is the current crop of idiots who surpass prior republicans in stupidity in unbelievable measure. These ding dongs don’t understand any business at all. Totally not my daddy’s republicans. And I am old. I cannot believe what I am seeing sometimes and also their voters are also pig ignorant not to know these guys are fools.
lee
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread is the fresh water problem Florida is facing or will face.
Martin
@Mobile: Yeah, I’ve looked at Florida’s building codes for hurricanes and it’s suprisingly impressive. Like, at one point FL didn’t fuck around on that stuff (my understanding it was fallout from Andrew).
At the same time you have a never-ending condo catastrophe taking place, and even if you do get well built homes, you still have the potential problems of multiple storms coming through and trashing the infrastructure making the place hard to live that way. Not to mention the problem of runaway energy demand due to cooling all of those homes. Florida uses more power than California does and has half as many people. Texas uses more than both CA and FL combined with half as many people as CA and FL combined.
Mobile
@Chris: In Florida, the person who moves to the state in spite of the real possibility of a calamitous outcome brought about by climate change is more likely an old person betting that the reaper will arrive before any climate catastrophe.
PaulWartenberg
Hey, there are other Juicers stuck in Florida having to cope with this insurance nightmare.
My insurer hasn’t dropped me – yet – but I’m dreading the moment they do. I’m pretty sure they’ve stopped taking new clients on, because almost everybody else is getting stuck with the state-run Citizens and THAT is a nightmare unto itself.
The current Republican-run Florida lege just passed a special session bill back in December claiming it was ‘home insurance’ reforms but it was mostly an attempted cash payout to the remaining insurers to stay in-state and did nothing to reduce the skyrocketing rates. And it STILL didn’t keep Farmers here, did it.
25 years now of straight-up Republican control of Florida. Our lakes and rivers are full of toxic algae, Red Tide is washing up on the gulf, we’ve got hurricanes aiming our way for the next six months, our condos are starting to collapse on themselves (remember the poor souls in Surfside), and the legislature is helping developers pave over what’s left of our wetlands to add more strip malls that will get flooded in the next superstorm.
trollhattan
@Martin: Wind, and topography can turn fire into a swath-cutting monster few construction schemes can fend off.
Less intense fires I suppose are where good siting, construction and property maintenance pay off.
The shocking official report on the Paradise Fire summarizes just how fast a wildfire can travel, given the combination of high, dry wind, dry fuel, ignition point in a river canyon.
Eight miles in 45 minutes.
gvg
@Steve: Then it’s not insurance.
Martin
Speaking of which, just got an alert for a fire above Anaheim Hills. It’s been a nice stretch since the last fire season.
Mobile
@raven: You have very smart friends.
JMG
II live in a place, Cape Cod, that was created by climate change, when the glaciers receded as the Ice Age ended. And it’s a place which physically changes every winter when the nor’easters tear up beaches and redeposit the sand elsewhere. Everyone here has to be aware it’s a vulnerable area. Home insurance is only available through a special state program, which to date has not been that expensive, because we haven’t had a hurricane landfall here in over 30 years. As the ocean warms (that’s relative of course, over 70 degrees is warm for this part of the Atlantic, the likelihood of a major hurricane increases each season.
BTW, the shacks a previous poster referred to were summer dwellings only, without heat or electricity and inhabited mostly by a dine collection of New England eccentrics. Ever since the start of the 20th century, people have built mansions, real ones without the Mc, by the shore, albeit at a discreet distance of 100 yards back at the most.
Alce_e _ ardillo
@PaulWartenberg: No amount of cash paid out to insurers will suffice to keep them in the market long term. Even if they tried to stick it out, the big reinsurers, GeneralRe, SwissRe, Lloyds etc would pull the plug and leave them hanging.
rikyrah
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) tweeted at 11:23 AM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:
New: A new poll just found that a large plurality of Americans support Biden’s “Bidenomics” economic plan, with only 20% opposed to it. https://t.co/h5i21ljJLf
(https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1678802280814870533?t=5VLYUgoyucf_NvadqwRnGw&s=03)
sdhays
@cain: I was in Beijing in 2003, and the government was incentivizing people having cars – even though traffic was already so bad that you could only drive every other day depending on what kind of license plate you had and they already had a smog problem that was nothing like what they have today.
When I heard that the government was still pushing everyone getting a car, I didn’t know what to say. They’ve obviously changed that policy now (and built a ton of infrastructure that wasn’t there when I visited), but…horse, barn, etc.
sdhays
@Baud: Why doesn’t the Surgeon General just personally treat them with horse toothpaste or something?
I seriously wonder if the problem is that no one qualified is willing to apply.
Kelly
@trollhattan: The Beachie fire was about 750 acres at the top of the Little N Santiam river canyon when the 80 to 90 mph east wind started blowing it down river around 10 pm. The flames reached our neighborhood, 20 miles west and 2000 feet down hill around 3 am.
Baud
@sdhays:
Ridiculous. Every one knows you cure malaria with canine suppositories.
patrick II
@Suzanne:
Maybe high insurance rates will change their mind. Even on older buildings, fire-resistant roofs, and sprinkler systems are easy enough adds. Perhaps a government loan program could provide further incentive.
Suzanne
@Mobile:
This is absolutely right. Like, a 100-year event doesn’t mean much if you’re going to live 10-15 more years. Might as well enjoy yourself.
trollhattan
@Kelly: 20 miles? Shit!
I had a sideline soccer dad chat with a fellow whose house survived the Santa Rosa Coffey Park Neighborhood “Tubbs” Fire, said primarily because Oakland FD showed up and made a stand right there. The before/after pics in this article are stark, nearly everything burned and it was not a wooded area.
Santa Rosa considered the highway an impregnable firebreak and found differently.
He said that flaming landscape redwood bark chunks–popular in California–were picked up by the wind and started spot fires a mile ahead of the fire itself.
laura
I don’t see why Casey DeSantis and her liberty mamas for freedom and liberty can’t fix this in a jiffy.
Martin
@trollhattan: Oh, yeah, I’m aware. We don’t really have that kind of fuel here where I live, so getting that head of steam right where I live is pretty hard. You also don’t need to go all that far to find canyons with that kind of fuel. My son moved up where the CZU fire was, which went just north of where he now lives and you drive around and realize just how completely, utterly fucked these people are. He’s ‘in town’ where things are quite a bit better, but most people live in the surrounding hills and canyons and my god – you can’t even see the homes for the tree canopy. Our worry for him is he doesn’t have a car, so his ability to evacuate is limited. He can get to the beach in about 15 minutes provided the fire isn’t yet in *that* canyon, and push comes to shove, he just waits it out there (we can get to him in 7 hours). Hell, he could probably safely ride down the middle of the 17 in that kind of scenario as his bike will probably be the only vehicle moving. Paradise looked a lot like that area – it’s all fuel. Might as well marinade the town in kerosene.
But when you get into higher density housing things become manageable against fire. Single family can go either way. My house is mostly stucco with a little wood siding in the front, but a concrete tile roof. With a bit of work it can become the house that doesn’t light up and take out the neighbors house, but it can’t become the house that isn’t taken out when the neighbors houses light up. So we all need to become that house that resists.
Next town over they have more of that woodland feel – lots of overgrown trees and such, unlike here. They’re pretty screwed. We did have a fire 2 years ago come close but our neighborhoods were pretty easy to protect according to the firefighters. They know which neighborhoods they don’t stand a chance trying to protect and which ones they can dig in and stop a fire. They want to see changes to make it better, of course, but we’re just over the line of ‘not hopeless’. They say they don’t worry about the medium density stuff – among other things, they have fire sprinklers, and are built to much tougher fire standards for things like exterior cladding, proximity to flammable sources, etc.
Kent
Except that it really won’t be $250,000. It will be double that in a major disaster if you can even find the lumber, sheet rock, fittings, and contractors to do the work.
raven
@Mobile: They lived in Tucson for 40+ years and moved to Florida because of family and it was less than safe to go fishing in Mexico. Five years ago they drove from Ft Meyers to Gainesville, thought the hurricane had turned, went back and it did turn, right back at them so they took off again. We had Five dogs and two cats with us for a week until they decided it was safe. They’d had enough of that shit.
Dan B
@Suzanne: In one big fire 8n California straw bale structures were untouched. It surprised me.
Martin
@trollhattan: That’s the kind of neighborhood I’m in. Like I said, if you can keep it from starting on the homes you stand a chance – but once it gets it, forget it. There’s really remarkable video on board with one of the fire crews driving in and their utter disbelief. The neighborhood they were supposed to enter and defend was already completely gone by the time they arrived – minutes. They just kept driving until they found homes not on fire.
I remember watching from a helicopter shot one of my local fires hopscotch through a neighborhood. Embers would hit a yard two blocks past the farthest house on fire and light up a tree or something in the yard. Firefighters were doing a good job of playing whack a mole, and thankfully they were able to keep on top of it and keep it from really taking root. That’s where these measures can help – to just lower those odds. They don’t do shit in a situation like Santa Rosa, though.
Suzanne
@Martin:
It would be helpful (ironic understatement alert) to stop building wood frame construction in these areas. Timber does better, steel studs do better, steel and concrete do much better.
rikyrah
Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) tweeted at 2:02 PM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:
NEW: “Judge Cannon has set the upcoming trial to open on Aug. 14 at her tiny satellite courthouse in the northern reaches of her district…That decision means Trump’s jurors are set to be drawn from the most brightly red corner of a vast court district.” https://t.co/dH94qXX1BJ
(https://twitter.com/KaivanShroff/status/1678842255833022464?t=tpdmbR9eunrncRylJ3XZdw&s=03)
rikyrah
Did the seaweed invade Florida yet? I had read that it was coming.
Matt McIrvin
You know, a while back I was thinking about how disaster movies about giant asteroids hitting the Earth always imagined we had almost no advance warning, when in real life you might have decades of advance warning. And I thought about how a more realistic treatment might be more like “Glengarry Glen Ross” than anything else: a story about how real estate and insurance and builders and scammers and frauds react to the news that some area is going to be devastated by a giant meteor hit, say, 40 years down the line.
Then I realized I was just imagining a story about global warming in Florida.
That was before the movie “Don’t Look Up.”
Mobile
@raven: I’m only here because my spouse wants to be here. I am in every respect a died in the wool Yankee. Spouse is merely a galvanized yankee.
Jay
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests
Steve
@Suzanne: I’m all for density, but not in places that have proven themselves subject to repeated and predictable climate-driven destruction. At that point, it’s time to move–hopefully somewhere dense.
geg6
@Baud:
Sounds like one of those shithole countries the right is always going on about.
Martin
@Old Man Shadow: It’s not going to play out like that.
You’re going to have two kinds of crises: the refugees after a disaster, like we had after Katrina, and the scenario where climate losses start to pile up faster than GDP and you now have a contracting economy.
Residents won’t have a problem with water – CA has more than enough water for the residents. The first thing that will go is the states cattle and dairy industry. That’s more water than the 40 million of us residents use, and it’ll get priced out or bought out and $15 double-doubles will rip through the states restaurants and so on. People will get priced out of what they want to eat first. Certain industries will be forced out entirely. That’ll also hit a lot of CAs ag export community. There will be a slow centering of crops toward nutritional value over cash value.
States like TX are really struggling with energy production mainly because demand is rising faster than they can build. CA would be fine with that except that the shift to electrify transportation is going to really stress that badly – we’re going to have to build faster than we did in the 60s. I don’t think that’s going to be possible and so I think personal transportation is going to get curtailed in various ways. It’ll just be too expensive. It’s already starting with growing percentages of the public unable to afford even used cars.
We’re not going to see some kind of species collapse, but we’re going to have to rethink what we eat, how we get around, what we buy, and so on. And I don’t expect that will come easily. I’m most optimistic about CA because CA more than any other state seems to be pretty clear-eyed about it. I think we’re still trying to have our cake at a time when we need to get real about that, but the plans I see out of the state are pretty complete. There’s no hand-waving ‘and then a miracle happens’ like I’m seeing out of the feds and other states. 85GW of new renewable generation in the next 12 years is a really fucking tall order, but I think that’s what it needs to be. We now have phase out plans for gas cars, diesel trucks and locomotives. Why we haven’t banned gas lawn equipment is beyond me though. That seems like an easy one.
Suzanne
@Steve:
Yeah, we have to have a threshold. Pretty much everywhere is subject to natural disaster risk. Every major city on earth has gone through destruction and rebuilding….. fire, earthquake, flood, storm, tsunami, heat wave. There’s a point — and actuaries and experts can find it — where rebuilding is unwise.
Homes are really the crappiest structures we build, as a cohort. That doesn’t have to be that way.
Suzanne
@Jay: Mr. Suzanne sent that article to me earlier. I get so excited when I see birds sitting and crapping on those damn spikes.
Kent
My theory of how Florida collapses? First it will be slowly, and then suddenly.
A whole lot of things are slowly going wrong with Florida. Sea water intrusion into aquifers is diminishing the supply of fresh water. Sea level rise combined with coastal subsidence due to aquifer depletion will continue to threaten the lowest shoreline properties, and so forth.
But I also predict a tipping point. Some summer we will not just have one massive Cat 5 hurricane, but several that will wipe out large swaths of urban Florida. And at that point vast numbers of people and corporations are just going to say….”Fuck It” cut their losses and walk away. If block after block gets abandoned or even half-abandoned it will make the rest unviable. You can be that one guy who clings to your home but if all your neighbors are gone and there is no grocery down the street anymore, and the city’s tax base can no longer support the infrastructure necessary to keep you going then you are on your own.
At some point the destruction will be so complete that it just won’t ever be repaired and whole cities could be largely abandoned. The won’t be abandoned completely by people. Just by people and businesses with all the money. And when that happens what you are left with is Haiti.
That’s my prediction anyway. Climate-driven change will come slowly and then suddenly.
Captain C
@OzarkHillbilly:
Or, maybe no one wants to sell or buy crappy pillows peddled by a MAGAt public asshole. I guess this is a case of getting canceled by the Free Market.
Martin
@Suzanne: I agree. Among other benefits, we need to build thermal mass because the cooling requirements are already getting out of hand. But that’s also an argument for shared walls, etc. and so I’m of the view that CA should ban new single family homes at this point. It’s a lot easier to get steel and concrete construction in multifamily homes, and to reduce those HVAC costs. For existing single family, raise the standards way up for rebuilds and additions, and with the elimination of R1 zoning, one time those too may turn into multifamily. This would allow us to build the 3 million new homes we need without continuing to push into undeveloped areas, make sure new construction wasn’t adding to the fire problem, improve HVAC efficiency and transit efficiency, and so on.
Suzanne
@Martin:
Yes, continuous insulation and R-value requirements are changing a lot. Frame construction is really not the way forward.
There’s some great construction methods out there. ICFs, 3-D printing, SIPS panels….. all of which lend themselves to modular construction. And they help solve multiple problems. Getting the building culture to change will be a challenge. The residentials are the most old-school.
Redshift
@Suzanne:
Except that with climate change, it’s not working out that way. It’s causing “100 year” events to happen a lot more frequently than that, and that means you’re likely to suffer through one of those when you’re least able to handle it.
Kent
7 years ago we moved back to the Pacific Northwest from Texas.
Texas was always going to be a temporary stop for us. We wound up there for my wife’s medical training through the residency match. The top programs in Texas were much more interested in recruiting my wife who is bilingual than programs in CA and other states. She didn’t get an interview at any top program in the Pacific Northwest. So Texas it was and with kids in school and me working too, we just wound up staying longer than we had ever planned. She kept getting promoted into better and better jobs and suddenly years go by.
In any event, 2016 was our GO date. Our oldest daughter was graduating HS in 2016 and the next youngest was 5 years younger. Over the several years prior to 2016 I did more endless analysis than you can possibly imagine, searing out a new homestead. The Pacific Northwest was the default because I’m from there but we looked all over and spent lots of vacations checking out future homes. We peeked at Upstate NY, Minnesota, Asheville NC, Pittsburgh, Boulder and Fort Collins, Albuquerque, northern California, Oregon and Washington as well as Boise and Salt Lake City.
Climate resilience was a huge factor along with political climate, career opportunities, educational opportunities (for the kids) etc. And we didn’t just want a place for us. We wanted to put down multi-generational roots knowing that wherever we landed was likely where our kids would go to college, make careers, have grand kids, etc. And our choice would greatly affect their futures as well.
We wound up in Camas WA in the Portland suburban metro mainly for family connections and it is also extremely nice. But absent that we could easily have wound up in Minnesota or the upper Great Lakes area which I think will also be very climate resilient long-term.
The question I kept asking was “Is this going to be the right place for our kids and grandkids to make their future?”
But who knows. The only think I know for certain is that it isn’t going to be Texas.
Kent
@Redshift: Exactly.
Way too many Americans have no idea what a 100-year or 1000-year flood actually is.
All it means is that under PAST climate models, there is a 1/100th or 1/1000th chance of such a storm happening in any given year. You are basically rolling a 100-sided dice every year.
But with climate change, all bets are completely off. And no one can remotely predict the probability of future storm events anymore because past data is no longer informative.
Anoniminous
In 2019 Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas with 185 mph winds with gusts over 200 mph. The estimated storm tide was 20 to 25 ft. When – and it is a “when” – a hurricane of that magnitude hits southern Florida you can kiss the Miami-Dade metroplex good-bye.
Suzanne
@Redshift:
I am fairly risk-averse, so I agree with you. But obvs others do not, and so far, more people in Florida are dying of heart disease and cancer and diabetes than of climate change. Same impulse that makes old people in Sun City have unsafe sex. They got to the age at which they said, “Fuck it”. That’s not my calculus, but it’s clearly theirs.
Kent
Imagine that hitting any coastal city in Florida.
lee
@Martin:
Commercial lawn care. Electric equipment isn’t up to it yet.
ETtheLibrarian
And all those people moving to Florida pushing all that construction…… The WaPo ran a story about Zephyrhills a town in Florida that is pausing construction because they can’t supply enough water.
Redshift
@Suzanne: Ah, I get your point.
Martin
@lee: It would be as soon as it got banned. We have electric semis. There is a solution here as soon as there is a need.
lee
@Martin: there already is a need, yet they don’t exist yet.
The good news is that by the end of the year a new battery technology should be on the market with considerablely more storage. It might be enough to make electric commercial lawn equipment viable.
Kent
There are actually a lot of commercial landscapers who use Ego battery powered string trimmers and various other battery powered mowers and tools. They just go through LOTs of batteries, but they are actually more bulletproof than gas engines.
The big commercial riding mowers probably not so much. But as soon as someone builds a ZTR or large width walk-behind mower with good swappable batteries they will probably work.
The problem is that a lot of landscaping companies work like 12 hour days and so that is a LOT of batteries to keep charged.
Martin
@Kent: You don’t even need to go through that many. I’ve got a commercial grade shaft drive battery string trimmer/hedge trimmer/tree saw, etc. It uses 2 batteries and charges in the runtime of the device, so 4 batteries gives you continuous use if you have access to power.
My city and former employer both used backpack battery mounted leaf blowers like 6 years ago. There are electric commercial zero-turn mowers on the market – multiple ones. Sure, you might need to change the terms of contracts to get access to electricity on site, but that doesn’t seem that hard to do in enough cases to make this all work.
Also, I support these contractors owning F-150 Lightnings that can charge their batteries off the truck battery. They may work 12 hour days, but they generally don’t travel that far. The guy who does my neighbors yard does about 10 contiguous properties here. He parks our front and doesn’t leave for about 4 hours.
RevRick
@trollhattan: In 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the global temperature would rise by 5 degrees.
He also thought it would take a thousand years to get to that level. And here we are 127 years later.
Ksmiami
@Suzanne: no more asphalt, planting urban forests and greening rooftops would actually help a lot
Geminid
I was looking up news on the Black Sea Grain Initiative that will expire July 17, and I ran into an article in The Maritime Executive about an order by Evergreen Shipping for 24 methonal-fueled container ships, capacity 15,000 TEU. Samsung Heavy Industries (Korea) will build 16, and Nihon Shipyard Co. (Japan) will build 8.
The Maersk shipping line has ordered 24 similar sized container ships, according to Offshore Energy. A smaller 2400 TEU “feeder ship” is on its way from Ulsan, South Korea to Copenhagen where it will be christened by European Council President Ursal von der Leyen and then ply the Baltic Sea. It’s a Hyundai!
The EU is requiring shippers servicing European ports to transition to carbon neutral fuel, and Maersk has set a goal of net-zero carbon by 2040. The “ISCC-cerified green biomethanol” fuel for the smaller ship and perhaps the larger ones will be supplied by Netherlands-based OOCI Global.
Maritime transport accounts for about 2.8% of global carbon emissions. That’s not huge, about the share of air transport. But the clean energy transition will involve multiple solutions in many areas, and this is only one of them.
Ksmiami
@Suzanne: Tbh Phoenix should never have grown so large. Same with Las Vegas. Neither city is conducive to human life.
JohnC
@lee: Lawns are the problem in such a variety of ways.
Geminid
@Martin: Have you seen any hydrogen fuel cell-powered buses yet? I read that Foothill Transit has added 30 fuel cell buses to their 400+ bus fleet. I think they are on the other side of LA from you, but I thought maybe a local transit company may have acquired some too.
Alameda County got out in front in this area. They started running fuel cell powered buses 20 years ago. Right now it looks like fuel cell power may beat out battery power for Class 8 trucks. Hyundai and others are already selling them in Europe, and Cummins Engines is entering the field shortly.
Cummins just inaugurated an electrolyser production line in Fridley, Minnesota. Rep. Ihlan Omar spoke at the ceremony about the good jobs it would provide for Minnesotans including immigrants.
Miss Bianca
@Martin: Colorado is getting set to ban gas lawn equipment, actually…sort of surprised to think we might be ahead of CA on this one!
Martin
@Geminid: We had a fuel cell bus back in 2015, and then they added battery electrics after that. The fuel cell wasn’t reliable, though. The battery electrics were great – BYD design, built up in Lancaster. Buses usually only have a daily range of 200 miles or less, so they’re good choices for battery.
They’re doing fuel cell up at port of LA for drayage. We’ve got pretty good green hydrogen generation around the area. I agree they’re good choice for long-haul. My guess I that solid-state hydrogen storage will be the key to hydrogen trucks. Not sure how far from production that is.
Martin
@Geminid: Oh, IMO just mandated (like today) that all cargo ships be net zero by 2050, with enforcement starting in 2027. So new ships are going to need to pretty fucking quick switch over given they usually have 25 year lifespans.
That’s a global requirement. Guessing the EU requirement forced the issue.
Ramalama
@Martin: Oh man, what a scene you painted there.
Section 22
@Ken: thanks for doing this. I, too, was perplexed!
Bloix
@AndyG: Banks will lend on properties as long as they can be insured. Oh, wait …