‘Climate Change’ Makes Every Coastal Home Like A Stick Of Dynamite Or Something

The scaremongering is ramping up, as is the invective. Why not? They’re science cannot stand on it’s own

Every Coastal Home Is Now a Stick of Dynamite

The Langfords got out of Houston just in time. Only two months after Sara and her husband, Phillip, moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck, destroying their previous house and rendering Sara’s family homeless.

By comparison, Norfolk felt like paradise. In Larchmont, the neighborhood the Langfords fell in love with, young children scratched chalk doodles on the sidewalks, college students and senior citizens ran side by side on nature trails, and crepe myrtle trees popped pink along silent streets.

But as the couple toured the area, situated on the banks of a sluggish river that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, they noticed something alarming about the homes they were seeing. “We were looking at one house close to the water, and [our real-estate agent] started talking about flood insurance,” Sara recalled to me. “I said, ‘Really? In this area?’” The houses were about half a mile from the river, but monthly flood-insurance premiums on the homes were $800 to $1,000—almost as much as their mortgage payment.

The horror! Of course, both areas are low-lying, and the land barely rises way far away from the water. It’s called geography.

You can imagine each of the homes in Larchmont—and elsewhere along the coast—as a stick of dynamite with a very long fuse. When humans began to warm the Earth, we lit the fuse. Ever since then, a series of people have tossed the dynamite among them, each owner holding the stick for a while before passing the risk on to the next. Each of these owners knows that at some point, the dynamite is going to explode, but they can also see that there’s a lot of fuse left. As the fuse keeps burning, each new owner has a harder time finding someone to take the stick off their hands.

Norfolk and many coastal cities like it might be closer to exploding than many of their residents think. The payment term for a standard mortgage loan is 30 years, and the median length of homeownership is 13 years. Meanwhile, the lowest-lying parts of Norfolk are roughly five to 10 feet above sea level, and climate scientists believe that sea levels in the city could rise by as much as two feet before 2050. How many more times will the dynamite change hands before it blows up?

Sewells Point is the longest tide sea gauge in Virginia, and is slightly above what would be expected during a Holocene warm period, but, it is still showing 1.56 feet per 100 years. And some of that can be chalked up to land subsistence. So, not 2 feet by 2050.

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