When will home prices start droping in coastal areas?

[gfretwell]

[Paul_Walker]

Several large insurance companies are considering not offering flood insurance to NEW owners. If that happens your property value will plummet when banks refuse to give them a mortgage.

[<josh]

No, it&#39;s wind coverage that&#39;s being dropped, not flood.

Flood insurance is a federally-run program, part of FEMA. Private insurers don&#39;t generally offer their own flood insurance, they sell NFIP flood insurance, at least up to the limits of the FEMA program. There are private excess flood policies available for people whose homes or businesses exceed NFIP limits.

[gfretwell]

Bullshit "Insurance companies" DO NOT offer flood insurance. It comes from the government. Insurance companies only handle the paperwork. The government collects a lot of tax money from waterfront property and they are not willing to let that go. The fact still remains that most flood claims come from areas far from the coast. According to FEMA, no state is safe from floods

[Ermalina]

NOT TRUE.

Here&#39;s a VERY "reas "If we follow business as usual, and we don&#39;t get off this course where year by year we&#39;re getting larger and larger emissions of CO2, then we&#39;ll have large sea-level rises this century and I think that will become more apparent over the next decade or two," Dr Hansen said.

"The last time it was 3C warmer, sea levels were 25 metres [82 feet] higher, plus or minus 10 metres [33 feet]. You&#39;d not get that in one century, but you could get several metres [3.3 feet per meter] in one century," he said.

"Half the people in the world live within 15 miles of a coastline. A large fraction of the major cities are on coastlines."

Here are some FACTS:

1. Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth.

1. The Ayles ice shelf (40 square miles) in the Canadian Arctic has broken up, 16 months ago

"Until now, there had not been a similar event among the six major shelves remaining in Canada&#39;s Arctic, which are packed with ancient ice that is more than 3,000 years old."

1. Greenland&#39;s ice shelves are melting and breaking free of the land

Here&#39;s an interesting excerpt from some "reasonable scientists"

"A study in The Journal of Climate last June observed that Greenland had become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.

Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming.

. . . given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.

"Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario," said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.

"Here in Miami," Leatherman said, "we&#39;re going to have an ocean on both sides of us."

Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration, said Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions. Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland&#39;s northwest, have disappeared for good.

[Goedjn]

How so? It would obviously work. We even have empirical evidence of that. Although personally, I&#39;d recommend launching the dust in cannisters off a railgun. You want your reflectors in the stratosphere, not scattered in a column throughout the whole atmostphere.

[Ermalina]

Whether or not it would "work", let alone "obviously work", has not been determined.

However, there are serious folks who advocate research along those lines. Check out the news coverage:

"Can Dr. Evil Save The World?"

Excerpt:

[Protege of Edward Teller and weapons researcher at Lawrence Livermore Lab, Lowell] Wood&#39;s proposal was not technologically complex. It&#39;s based on the idea, well-proven by atmospheric scientists, that volcano eruptions alter the climate for months by loading the skies with tiny particles that act as mini-reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the Earth. Why not apply the same principles to saving the Arctic? Getting the particles into the stratosphere wouldn&#39;t be a problem -- you could generate them easily enough by burning sulfur, then dumping the particles out of high-flying 747s, spraying them into the sky with long hoses or even shooting them up there with naval artillery. They&#39;d be invisible to the naked eye, Wood argued, and harmless to the environment. Depending on the number of particles you injected, you could not only stabilize Greenland&#39;s polar ice -- you could actually grow it. Results would be quick: If you started spraying particles into the stratosphere tomorrow, you&#39;d see changes in the ice within a few months. And if it worked over the Arctic, it would be simple enough to expand the program to encompass the rest of the planet. In effect, you could create a global thermostat, one that people could dial up or down to suit their needs (or the needs of polar bears).

[Paul_Walker]

Algae in the ocean produce 3/4 of our oxygen. Reducing the amount of sunlight to them would be completely counter productive and possibly even suicidal..

[Goedjn]

Interesting theory. Why do you think that the amount of sunlight is currently a limiting factor?