Climate Change Has Already Hit Home Prices, Led By The Jersey Shore

[Pavel + 384]

Sea-level rise is already hitting home prices along the Atlantic Coast, new data shows. Between 2005 and 2017, increased tidal flooding erased $14.1 billion in home values across eight states, according to research by First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that seeks to quantify the effects of climate change on coastal communities. The group found that 820,000 homes are now worth less than they would have been otherwise, including 75,000 homes in New York State and 15,000 in Connecticut. The sea has risen about eight inches since 1900, and the pace is accelerating, with three inches accumulating since 1993, according to a comprehensive federal climate report released last year. Scientists predict the oceans will rise another three to seven inches by 2030, and as much as 4.3 feet by 2100. Welcome to Day D
 

[franco + 96]

People are mining sand at massive rates. Which means there is less sand in the ocean and beaches will erode. They usually do it right offshore or at a river mouth.

[damirUSBiH + 327]

So, cute... Oil industry asks taxpayers to protect its refineries from climate change. 

https://apnews.com/amp/4adc5a2a2e6b45df953ebcba6b63d171?__twitter_impression=true

Why don't they take their big money and huge tax cuts and clean it up themselves?

 

[rainman + 263]

Yep. I agree.  https://apnews.com/amp/4adc5a2a2e6b45df953ebcba6b63d171?__twitter_impression=true 

This would be hysterical if it weren't, y'know, pathetic. 

Edited August 23, 2018 by rainman

[50 shades of black + 254]

I don't have house on the sea, I've got an umbrella and wellies and a good rain coat for bad weather and shorts and sunglasses for good weather so I've got it covered thanks. 

[pinto + 293]

Climate change is a naturally occurring event. However, we are accelerating the changes with pollutants. The problem with that is that since humans have not had such a significant impact before, we can't count on the earth healing itself as it has done before.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

I suspect part of the reason these homes are worth "less" is that the insurance industry is charging extra premiums for shore homes.  Who wants to take the insurance risk on?  Given the ferocity of recent hurricanes and the pathetic response of various levels of government, basically nobody.  If you cannot get insurance at regular rates, then the price of the house falls to adjust.

Before anyone chimes in about flood insurance, I remind writers that water damage may not be insured if it is treated as related to "storm surge."  I have seen a Judge down in Alabama coming to the conclusion, and so writing in his Opinion in a lawsuit against an insurer, that the "storm surge" was caused by "the storm winds" pushing water ahead.  That, of course, is total nonsense.  I chalk up that Opinion to the Judge's lack of training in physics.  A "storm surge," which is the rapid rise of water levels as a hurricane pushes ashore, is caused by the drop of atmospheric pressure in the eye of the storm.  How is that?  the "eye" has a much lower barometric pressure than the rest of the storm.  As the "eye" makes landfall, the low-pressure core travels ashore, at the speed of the storm movement. The low pressure core causes water from the high-pressure outside to push in, and the inrush of outside water causes the center core water level to rise.  You can get these storm surges of sixteen feet, all caused by pressure differentials.  As the Eye is moving inland, it looks like it is being "pushed" by the wind.  It is not; it is coming from the air pressure differentials. 

Judges don't understand any of this because judges and insurance companies are not physicists.  So they issue absurd Opinions, and then those Opinions become "alternative facts," as The Donald would say.  Meanwhile, since wind damage is not an insured loss, the claim is Denied. 

There are other things happening with insurers, new underwriting guidelines, and shore properties, which is beyond this post, but which have led to a new product of mine, developed by physicists for homeowners (me being the plural physicists).  That product is a storm shutter designed to withstand a 2x4  (a piece of lumber 2 inches by 4 inches in cross section, a standard piece of wood used in house building in the USA) fired at the shutter from an air cannon at 60 mph.  The shutter will not allow the board to penetrate and break the window glass.  As this is a product that will push the insurance industry, I anticipate that the new underwriting requirement will be for homeowners to have such shutters or they will refuse to write a policy.  In that case, I have this captive market, of hundreds of thousands of homes along the Eastern Seaboard, from Florida to Massachusetts.  That should earn me a few billion dollars.  Another great marketing opportunity, flowing from an intense study of physics in school.  Hey, being a nerd is profitable; it will pay for my own personal Sukhoi  Su-27 fighter jet, able to go from runway lift-off to 60,000 feet in 57 seconds flat - straight up!  Kerosine, ya gotta love it.  Afterburners for the  masses.

Edited August 24, 2018 by Jan van Eck

[Robert Ziegler + 121]

Now, what about a Galveston Beach House? (Has nothing to do with climate change....)