“It’s not out of the question that Miami Beach loses 20 percent of its population and most of those people go to the mainland,” Keenan told Scientific American. “I’m talking about the next 20 years.”
It’s not going to take 20 years for the exodus out of Florida to begin. It could happen far sooner and there will be no one around to make Miami the next Venice. As soon as banks and insurance companies stop loaning money and protecting property from flooding in the state, housing values will plummet. The risk to these institutions will simply be too great. At which point, people will begin to walk away from their mortgages, just as they did during the last recession. With the people gone, so goes the tax base along with businesses and infrastructure which can no longer be supported. Those that then stick around because they ignored the warnings and refused to move will eventually be living in a third world ghetto which in a few more generations will be disappearing beneath their feet.
But it won’t stop there. The initial several million people crawling out of Florida with no homes, money, jobs or the prospect of getting any will be reduced to living in government run Hoovervilles and standing in bread lines. This will not only crash the real estate market in total but will overturn the rest of the economy. The federal government will eventually be stretched to the limits.
Of course, all this does not happen in isolation with just one city, one state or one region. The whole planet will be battling similar climate related problems that are likely to exacerbate conflicts with each other in a scramble for scarcer resources. The costs in attempting to address all the issues will be staggering. Leaving little left and concern for the more mundane problems we watch on the news today.
