I have been a believer that there are too many people in the world for a long time. And that climate change with its rising temperatures, rising sea levels will reduce the amount of habitable land--too hot, coastal flooding, destruction of fresh water estuaries...
A recently released report in Nature found that rural areas around the world have been undercounted and the world population is probably much higher;
The significant underrepresentation of rural population we found in the gridded datasets raises the question whether such gaps in the census are more widespread than assumed to date, and how reliable current global population estimates really are. For example, is it possible that global population estimates from the United Nations36 (7.98 billion in 2022) or World Bank37 (7.95 billion in 2022), both relying heavily on national population censuses, miss a significant part of the world population?
Not only is the world more crowded the reduction in habitable land will lead to climate migration putting more pressure on the remaining land. Look at it this way, in 1980 had our focus been to keep population levels steady, we would have half the pressure on Mother Earth than we have today.
An article in today's Guardian, 'Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insure', predicted climate change will bring an end to capitalism. Noting that,
The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.
Basically, places deemed uninhabitable, or close to it, will be shut out from the insurance market and further investment.
Günther Thallinger, added this is bad for the overall financial sector,
“This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry,” he said. “The economic value of entire regions – coastal, arid, wildfire-prone – will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.”
For years I have been talking about how climate change will devastate certain areas and encourage climate migration. The inability to buy insurance and a dearth of investment to a local is going to devastate certain parts of America and the world at large. More publicity like this will push people to move and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For years I have writing about the coming mass exodus of climate migrants from the South and coastal areas to the North. You can read them at Climate Migration One of the factors besides climate driving this surge will be the inability to buy insurance, or paying exorbitant prices for it.
As climate change begins damaging more regions around the USA and world, risks to insurers will start to rise from having to pay for catastrophes (LA wildfires, hurricanes in Florida...), to seeing the price of housing stocks fall as people begin moving North to escape climate change and the unaffordabilty of insurance (to even the possibility of not being able to buy homeowner insurance). I have noted on several occasions that insurers have abandoned places like Florida.
I mention this because today I read an explaining how a climate catastrophe in one region could trigger a crisis in the insurance market and a larger crisis in financial markets. Here is a link that connects to the article
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Below is a link to a Breaking Points' video on how the Florida's housing boom is unraveling and people are leaving the state. The report noted that;
--There's a dearth of buyers, with several listings on the market for some time have seen no lookers.
--Large institutions have turned to sellers.
--Insurance has jumped 400% in the last five years.
--Insurers have been leaving in droves.
--The Lender of Last Resort, or Support in this case, that is meant to support the Florida home owners insurance market is floundering and in trouble.
They paint a bleak picture, that has only been exasperated by two major hurricanes in the last few months.
I have been writing about climate migration, on how people will begin to leave southern climes in favor of the north. I even wrote an article for the March/April issue Life In the Finger Lakes. It was a followup to a blog post I did for them five years earlier.
I have several posts on Climate Migration
Parts of Texas are searing with temps above 110°F; Abilene hit 113°F yesterday. Demand for electricity is at record levels--driving up utility bills. This will push climate migration north.
What will also contribute to climate migration north is the unraveling of support staff, or workers, that make every day life possible. High temperatures make working outside during the summer nearly impossible.
Heat wave casualties are increasingly showing up in Texas and other locales. A UPS driver in north Texas passed out because of heat a few days ago and crashed his truck. Nearly 40 deaths in Dallas County this summer are being investigated as heat-related, according to the medical examiner. Climate change is increasingly putting a hurt on Americas south.
To learn more read my article on, Climate Migration
I have been posting on climate migration for years and will continue to do so.
Abraham Lustgarten has written an insightful book on climate migration, On The Move, The Overheating Earth And the Uprooting of America. Not surprising given that Lustgarten is a reporter on Climate Migration for ProPublica and the New York Times.
As someone that has been passionate about Climate Migration for years Lustgarten points out changes and raises issues I had not thought of. For example, rising heat will lead to increased suicides, thefts and assaults.
The book has a social justice bent pointing out that rising temperatures will drive demand for energy which will balloon utility costs in some of the poorest regions of the country. It cites a report that Climate Change will also disproportionately hurt poorer communities that were hurt by redlining decades ago; with things like a "heat island effect" that can spike temperatures 22°F more because of increased concrete and asphalt surfaces , and buildings and a lack of green space.
Increasing temperatures will increase pollens and allergens and lead to rise of vector-borne diseases and pandemics.
Follow the Water
Water scarcity may be the key determinant in leading to Climate Migration as more of America becomes parched. A research study in Mexico found the key variable in driving migration was the greater the drought the greater the out migration.
Many areas of the country are at risk of losing their source of water. Arizona has published reports saying that by 2035 it will run out of water as the Colorado River dries up. The Ogallala aquifer in America heartland is down 150 feet. The Water Resources Institute that monitors water believes competition for water will be two to three times greater by the mid-century. Noting,
Extreme water stress--a characterization normally reserved for countries close to the equator--will plunge much of the land west of the Missouri Rive, roughly where the 100 th meridian divides the verdant East from the arid Great Plains, by 2040...
Adding that speculators are hoarding water. Yuk!
As temperatures rise farming will require more water putting more stress on the demand for water.
Nuanced Migration
Lustgarten provides a more nuanced perspective on Climate Migration. People are not going to whole sale beginning moving. And if they move they may not necessarily all move to America's north. People in rural southern areas may initially move to large metro areas like Atlanta.
However the north will experience a population rise, as well as the economic benefits.
The poor in the South may stay be stuck in the South and we may create islands of the wealthy.
All in all, On the Move is interesting, thought-provoking and worth a read.
For several years I have been advocating that climate migration will drive people from southern climes northward in the USA. Newsweek reported that 3 of 5 largest home price declines in the country were in metropolitan areas in Florida over the last year. Meaning people are beginning to realize that rising temperatures and rising sea levels will increasingly make Florida uninhabitable. Citing ATOM sources Newsweek said,
The biggest year-over-year decrease in typical profit margins—which can be calculated as the percentage difference between median purchase and resale prices—was recorded by ATTOM in the metropolitan area of Hilo, Hawaii, where the homeowners' margin was down from 80.5 percent in the second quarter of 2023 to 45.3 percent in the second quarter of 2024.
It was followed by Port St. Lucie, Florida (down from 95 percent to 73.9 percent); Daphne-Fairhope, Alabama (down from 49.8 percent to 34 percent); Crestview-Fort Walton Beach, Florida (down from 60.7 percent to 45.1 percent); and Naples, Florida (down from 84.9 percent to 69.2 percent).
This does not portend well for Florida.
Meanwhile my hometown of Syracuse was mentioned as being one of the fastest rising areas.
A few days ago CBS reported that the heat tolerance threshold for humans is much lower than believed; It is not the 95° plus 100% humidity that has been used for decades. Instead heat stress with high humidity begins to set in at 87°. They call it the wet bulb temperature. It was based upon research done by Penn State
This change to lower the heat tolerance threshold has not taken effect yet, but when it does it will mean that all of our calculations for where it is safe or not safe to live, as well as climate migration and more will be changed. Meaning people will be abandoning the South sooner and migrating North. I believe upstate New York and America's north overall, will see a surge in climate migrants.
The larger concern is that we continue to underestimate climate change because we did not totally understand it.
I have several posts on Climate Migration. I even wrote an article for the Life of Finger Lakes on how people will begin to leave southern climes in favor of the north. It was a followup to at I did for them five years earlier.
I am very concerned that upstate New York and America's north overall, will see a surge in climate migrants. So much so that we will be completely inundated.
I had written an article for the March/April issue Life In the Finger Lakes on how people will begin to leave southern climes in favor of the north.
It was a followup to a blog post I did for them five years earlier.
I have several posts on Climate Migration
It was reported today that Phoenix has seen a spike in deaths from heat strokes in recent years. In my article for Life in the Finger Lakes I noted how a CBS Sunday morning segment interviewed a woman that drove her car wearing oven mittens..
Here is a link to the article, ‘Just brutal’: Why America’s hottest city is seeing a surge in deaths
Phoenix is not along. Much of Mexico has seen a spike in temperature with Mexico City hitting its highest recorded temperature ever. What makes this even more worrisome is that water supplies are dwindling in Mexico City and some are forecasting its aquifer will run dry some time in June.
All this means people are going to be moving north.
More news on how climate change is forcing people to move, this time to escape rising temperatures and calamities. Propublica had a story out today on how flooding is increasingly forcing people to move. Noting that,
the number of people forcibly cast out of their homes by natural disasters, counted very few displaced Americans in 2009, 2010 and 2011, years in which few natural disasters struck the United States. But by 2016 the numbers had begun to surge, with between 1 million and 1.7 million newly displaced people annually.
Click on the link below to read the rest of the article.
The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What”
The insurance crisis in climate stricken areas is getting worse and will ultimately affect all of us--the only question is how and the severity. People cannot get homeowners insurance in places like Florida, California, Texas... States may extend themselves by offering cheap homeowners insurance to residents, only to face a huge financial crisis should a major weather event (hurricane, fire...) occur--which is highly likely. Then turn to the Feds. I have been writing about how climate change and rising costs for insurance, help.. will force climate migration north.
I had written an article for the March/April issue Life In the Finger Lakes on how people will begin to leave southern climes in favor of the north. Climate Migration--Is A Change in Store For the Finger Lakes? It was a followup to a blog post I did for them five years earlier.
I have several posts on Climate Migration
Today on Amanpour and company, a Bloomberg reporter talked about the depth of the crisis and how it is spreading. Link below.
Things are getting very serious and we are in the early stages of what will become the new normal--AND IT IS ONLY GOING TO ACCELERATE!
Back on March 1st I posted an article I had written for the March/April issue Life In the Finger Lakes on how people are beginning to leave southern climes in favor of the north because of rising temperatures and rising costs for help, insurance... Climate Migration Is A Change in Store For the Finger Lakes? It was a followup to a blog post I did for them five years earlier.
Newsweek just put out an article Prices Fall as Homeowners Desperately Try to Sell on how the price of homes in Florida are starting to fall because of the surge in homeowners insurance, one the factors I mentioned in my article. Saying,
The Sunshine State's number of motivated sellers on Zillow remained much higher than in other states like California and Texas. As of Wednesday morning, California had 1,032 motivated sellers for a total of 74,792 properties listed, while Texas counted 1,829 out of a total of 1818,888.
The high number of motivated sellers in Florida might be explained, in part, by the skyrocketing home insurance premiums in the state. In the past three years, the cost of home insurance has grown by 102 percent, according to the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I), as the risk posed by extreme weather events is rising. Several private insurers have left the state or have stopped offering new policies.
Still early in this trend, we will see.
The following is from the March/April issue of Life in the Finger Lakes.
Climate Migration
Is A Change in Store For the Finger Lakes?
I don’t think many of us were surprised to learn that 2023 was the hottest year on record for the eighth year in a row. Or that we recorded the highest ocean temperature ever last year. What did surprise many of us were the Canadian wildfires last summer that filled our air with smoke for weeks. Clearly climate change is beginning to affect us in unimaginable ways.
How are we in the Finger Lakes going to be affected?
The biggest change may be a large influx of climate migrants looking to escape stifling heat and flooded coastal areas. For them, the Finger Lakes Region is a climate haven.
Five years ago, I wrote a piece for Life in the Finger Lakes, “Is Population Growth Coming to Upstate New York?” The article predicted a rise in our population from an inflow of climate migrants. So far there continues to be a net outflow of residents from New York State. However, prognosticators and national media have since begun to tout our area as a climate haven.
In his book How to Prepare for Climate Change, CBS correspondent Daniel Pogue recommends moving to cities along the Great Lakes such as Buffalo. “Cold, snowy Syracuse and Buffalo could be shelters from the storms,” Pogue said in an interview. He added, “Florida and Arizona are the worse places for you to retire.” Several other organizations believe the Great Lakes Region will be a climate haven, such as Wisconsin Public Radio, Crains Detroit, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and NOAA.
For years I have been talking about how climate change--rising temperatures, rising sea levels, increasing wildfires, increasing severity and frequency of tornadoes/hurricanes, salination of fresh water estuaries. etc---Will drive people north and away from coastal regions.Climate Change is Driving Migration North In recent days it was reported that New Orleans, a major coastal city in the south, may run out of fresh drinking, potable, water.
This summer's heat wave has helped to dry out the Mississippi River reducing its water flow. A weakened outflow from the Mississippi means less force to combat the inflow of saltwater. It is expected that in October New Orleans will not have fresh water to drink.
I have been working on an article about climate migration, which is inevitable. However, what I find very concerning is the attitude and perspective of the writer's and prognosticators whose work I have been reading as I research the topic.
Many continue to believe that we can do with Mother Earth as we wish, as we have been doing for thousands of years. . In other words, there appears to be very little change in the believe the we can continue to do as we please; all we need to do is more judicious in our actions. Just figure out how many people can live in a certain location.
Very little, or no discussion, about how we can best preserve and save our Mother. I would argue if we make our focus how we can best protect our Mother, we will in the process save ourselves.
I will post the article once published.
I have been saying for years that America's north and Canada is going to see an iinflux of burnt birds looking to escape the devastating affects of Climate Change in the South.
A heat dome over Texas is pushing feel like temperatures to 120° F in the state. The Dallas Morning News is claiming that Texas will be the hottest place in the world for the next few days.
Other measures are not only saying living in America's south will be unbearable, but impossible. Home owner's insurance is spiking in certain parts of the south. One woman in St. Augustine, Florida got a bill for $36,000 for her historic home.
Add that some insurers such as Farmers are leaving Florida. Similarly we are seeing other insurers refusing to underwrite homes in Florida and other parts of the south and even southern California.This does not bode well for housing and life in Florida and parts of the south.
The Question I have? Where are all these climate migrants going to go? Add that our southern borders are bursting with climate migrants from Central and South America. We have dilemma.
The heat brought by climate change is challenging farmers. It is also raising the cost of farm insurance.
I could go on and on.
Climate Migration is a problem that has been simmering for years and is now accelerating. The lovely life many of us in upstate New York and in other parts of the North have enjoyed is about to come to a thunderous stop.
Be Well.
madis
According to the United Nation World Population Prospects 2022 world population reached 8 billion today. This is not a good thing, it means we will be putting more pressure on Mother Earth because there are more of us. Add overconsumption and it is not surprising we have an environmental crisis--more people consuming, polluting...
As challenging as it will be to feed, house and take care of everyone the larger concern is the inherent conflict/war continued population growth poses. According to many we are facing a food crisis because of war in Ukraine, a reduction farmland and more mouths to feed. The World Food Programme says we are facing hunger crisis of unprecedented proportions
The World Wildlife Fund estimates 1.1 billion people around the world lack access to water. The drought in the America's west these past few years highlights our problem. How water shortages are brewing wars - BBC Futurehttps://www.bbc.com › future › article › 20210816-ho...
We already see the conflict that Climate Migration is causing around the world. America is being flooded with people crossing its southern border fleeing climate change in their home countries. This is creating internal conflict within America. Governors in southern states have begun packing people in buses and sending them north. While talking heads gin us up over the issue.
More people consuming more will create conflict.
