At the beginning of the year, I made a folder for my next Yale Climate Connections video, and just titled it “2021WTF” – because the last 8 months or so of climate extremes have left a lot of folks speechless, and not a little bit worried.
Since then I’ve bagged about 7 or 8 hours of interviews, with scientists, and also local weather casters, who are often doing some of the most relevant analysis of climate change as the majority of people experience it – not as graphs or computer models, but in specific events in particular places, that are often beyond the scale of living memory.
Not sure exactly what I’ll end up with, but there will be a lot of gems coming out of this, like the one above – John’s discussion of the increased pressure on Florida and Coastal homeowners, as well as anyone across the US who lives near a flood plain, squeezed between increasingly doubtful real estate prices and rising insurance costs.
The banks will continue to create 30-year mortgages as long as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac keep buying them. They really need to start “blue-lining” properties as growing flood risks reduce the expected value of homes over a couple of decades. The houses will be financially “under water” because of the increasing likelihood that they will be under water (or burned down, in some regions).