Miami Beach has always flooded (during full moons water can rise right up through the ground).
I have lived in FL all my life (41 years), my family spans back 12 generations from me. King tides are nothing new, nor is Miami flooding during them. I live in the Keys which is lower lying than Miami beach but we have the safety of the barrier reef that mellows the tidal changes, this is just a sensational piece due to a rare but historically recurring event. Miami is not flooding for good, we are in a weather cycle coming off El Nino into a lunar cycle, it happens from time to time. It's not exactly intellectually honest to attribute a known phenomenon (King tides, which is the reason Miami is currently flooded) to climate change. It was not climate change in the 1800's when the old timers dealt with them. This is not meant to be a dissertation on climate change, rather to highlight pieces like this do more damage than good to the arguments that climate change science presents when items like this are highlighted as the predicted outcomes.
The floods are worse this year because we have a combination of El Nino weakening the gulf stream which in a normal year has some effect on pushing tides longitudinal as well as flattening them and King tides which are caused by a lunar event, not anything terrestrial. It is an unusually event for sure but has historically happened before. This is a combination of two natural phenomena, nothing more nothing less. It should not be attributed to climate change which has it's own real concerns. Climate change is not contributing to the current situation of Miami being flooded. Attributing it to it, does more to discredit climate change and give voice to fear mongering than it does to further it's cause.
> Climate change is not contributing to the current situation of Miami being flooded
What is that based on?
> The floods are worse this year ...
Everyone in the article is talking about long-term increases in sea level rise and flooding.
* a University of Miami study reporting that Miami Beach has seen a 200 percent increase in flooding in the last decade
* current (conservative) estimates predict a three-foot rise over the next 100 years
* The city is already elevating its roads
* the city’s new hydraulic pumps, installed as a result of initiatives by Miami Beach’s mayor Philip Levine
* Steps are being taken, buildings are being raised
* what they’re [developers are] doing now is elevating the building at a minimum of 3 feet
* The water will start coming up from the floor,” he [Alan Faena] said. “There’s not much we can do. That’s the reality.”
* the Rockefeller Foundation recently funded Miami's “resilience officer,” the first of many in what the foundation expects to be a global array to help organize various cities' responses
If the occurrence of the conditions required for flooding are happening at increased probability driven by climate change, then one could reasonably attribute increased flooding to climate change.
If only way to be sure is to wait for the data to show up 50-100 year baseline data for flooding, then by the time you act - all the costly infrastructure commitments have been made... it's another form of socializing the costs while privatizing the profits.
Climate change isn't the only thing that increases the probability. Over the long term they may eventually be the largest cause, but currently I would cite many, many other issues.
Sea walls, land use changes, water pumping, loss of wetlands all affect the severity of tides. All these things could be changed to avoid issues while completely ignoring climate change for now.... Yet they do nothing. Ocean bathymetry is extremely complex, messing with one thing on a shoreline effects everything around it. Just yelling "It's all climate change" is both stupid and dangerous. Trying to stop the shoreline from moving is stupid, expensive, and in the long term, dangerous.
Sure thing, all the other states you mention speak to the capacity of the shoreline to absorb some amount of water increase (from any source). Independently, if the frequency and intensity of flooding events is predicted to increase in the future, one would think that long term zoning regulations to preserve or increase the capacity of the shore to absorb flooding would be cheaper than, fix-it-quick with big infrastructure projects after catastrophic damage has already occured. That's why it's cheaper to address it now, rather than wait until the building policy completely breaks down.
The clear consensus is that AGW is real. That is a far cry from saying that there is a clear consensus that it must be dealt with ever, let alone that it must be dealt with in the near-term.
There's no consensus that it "must" be dealt with, however, there is a clear consensus that if we don't deal with it (which is a quite possible scenario) then places like Florida Keys will cease to be inhabitable within the next 50-100 years.
> There's no consensus that it "must" be dealt with
If you mean that there is no political consensus in the United States, yes, that's true beyond a doubt.
If you mean that there is no consensus among scientists and experts in the field, then that's wrong. There is and has been a clear consensus that we "must" act urgently.
Scientists have a clear consensus that if we don't do it, then we'll have certain consequences.
However, if we're looking at the actions of everyone who might actually deal with it, then there's a clear consensus that we're actually choosing to face the consequences instead.
"Must" implies a degree of certainty, a statement that we will have to deal with it one way or another, and thus we will deal with it - however, that doesn't seem to be the case here, it is quite plausible that we will choose to not deal with it properly. It would be nice if we acted urgently, but there's no "must" there - it's quite likely that we will not do so.
If we want to use the word "must" then it might be more appropriate to say that irreversible climate change is the thing that must occur, given the current global political 'climate'.
I generally agree, and don't want to bicker over the wording, except one important point ...
> if we're looking at the actions of everyone who might actually deal with it, then there's a clear consensus that we're actually choosing to face the consequences instead.
Very many are denying that climate change is happening, or falling back to denying the consequences, or falling back to saying there's nothing we can do about it.
At least from the political perspective, I feel that most of it is simply justification and rationalization.
After you've made a decision that for your country/company/party/economic group/whatever the desired course of action is to not work against climate change, then you still have to communicate and "sell" that decision to everyone else, and denying the consequences or saying that we can't do anything has much less backlash than openly saying "fuck you, got mine".
While it's also true that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!", I believe that most of the involved politicians understand the future consequences (at least the mid-term consequences to their particular area) quite well, but politic communication is about telling whatever will get your goals achieved the best, not about communicating your personal beliefs truthfully.
It's the same thing with jobs - can you imagine any politician telling to a distressed area/industry "no, your jobs are never going to come back" even if that's an obvious truth?
The above linked article does the same thing the OP does, that is makes a statement about Miami then points to flooding on Miami Beach. Miami is mainland and Miami Beach is a barrier island, yet the increased flooding is only ever claimed on Miami Beach the barrier island, ignoring the fact that the mainland is sea level but sees no increased flooding nor as kls points out there is no increased flooding in the Florida Keyes.
Personally, I didn't know about the Gulf El Nino issue kls pointed out, but there is no ignoring the lunar events (2016 Supermoon) and so it will be interesting to see if flooding begins to decline as the moon begins to move away from the Earth for a couple decades. Again the linked article is very clear the increased flooding is attributable to tide (lunar) events for the most part.
Like all articles it also fails to acknowledge that Miami was swamp turned into land that could be through engineering a massive canal/waterway system and Miami Beach wasn't originally a beach it is artificial, complete with manufactured sand. One thing to also keep in mind is the continued development of Miami Beach over this 10 year time period, which has also meant more recently the island lost land that used to soak up rain water like a sponge in lieu of asphalt that floods (compare this to Florida Keyes where much of the land is protected from development and continues soaking rain water). Again if this were a natural phenomenon caused by climate change as opposed to over development and tide events, Miami and the Keyes would see increase flooding as well but these studies appear to be limited to Miami Beach.
With respect, I see no basis for most of this comment. It reads like an attempt to find any reason but climate change, for which there is overwhelming evidence, and for which rising sea levels have been and are strongly likely to remain a consequence.
> the linked article is very clear the increased flooding is attributable to tide (lunar) events for the most part. ... it will be interesting to see if flooding begins to decline as the moon begins to move away from the Earth
That is not what the article says. The article does not at all attribute the increased tide height to lunar activity; the words "moon" and "lunar" do not appear in the text. Everyone says this is a long-term problem and they do not mention any possibility of improvement due to the moon.
> the island lost land that used to soak up rain water like a sponge
The water causing the floods is coming up through the ground from the sea, not coming down from the sky. Rain isn't an issue.
> if this were a natural phenomenon caused by climate change as opposed to over development and tide events, Miami and the Keyes would see increase flooding as well but these studies appear to be limited to Miami Beach.
What is that based on? The article explains the reason that Miami Beach is affected.
I have lived in FL all my life (41 years), my family spans back 12 generations from me. King tides are nothing new, nor is Miami flooding during them. I live in the Keys which is lower lying than Miami beach but we have the safety of the barrier reef that mellows the tidal changes, this is just a sensational piece due to a rare but historically recurring event. Miami is not flooding for good, we are in a weather cycle coming off El Nino into a lunar cycle, it happens from time to time. It's not exactly intellectually honest to attribute a known phenomenon (King tides, which is the reason Miami is currently flooded) to climate change. It was not climate change in the 1800's when the old timers dealt with them. This is not meant to be a dissertation on climate change, rather to highlight pieces like this do more damage than good to the arguments that climate change science presents when items like this are highlighted as the predicted outcomes.