Ireland is going to have to move property and key infrastructure such as railway lines away from coastal areas due to climate breakdown, according to Trinity College Dublin’s (TCD) first chair of climate science Prof Karen Wiltshire.
I live in a progressive city in a progressive state, that claims to believe climate change is real. We just spent the last 10 years rebuilding the seawall that protects our precious iconic waterfront district. It was rebuilt exactly 0 inches taller than before, because increasing the height did not create short term profits.
Until Miami literally goes under and insurance companies force closures nothing will happen. Once it does all those decrying it will suddenly change tune to why we haven’t been doing something since forever.
This really saddens me. I've lived within a few miles the coast basically my whole life and I've seen the floods get worse; Friends' houses getting ruined. The river that flows by my house to the sea regularly consumes the nearest neighborhood to it now, once a year or so. Noone is moving because of it. People are moving here, in fact, and all the new houses are on stilts with first floor parking. I know it's gonna keep getting worse, and when it finally gets bad enough, where are these people gonna move. All the "nice" towns a little further inland are entierly single-family zoned and woefully unprepared for all the people who will have to move. My town's population is like 6 of those "nice towns", and like half of it is gonna be underwater or so flood prone that you can't live there. It's gonna be really bad.
Ireland has a long coastline but most of it near mountains, so there is fortunately scope to gradually retreat uphill.
The large flat part is in the middle - the central Shannon basin is only 35m above sea-level, but unless East Antarctica goes too, that's safe for the moment. As for temperature rise, it's a cool country that may expect relatively little warming, due to the cold blob south of greenland, at least while ice continues melting. So, Ireland may need to prepare for large influx of people escaping heat elsewhere.
It slows down, an effect of cold water from melting ice passing south of greenland, which has a local cooling effect, while the atlantic as a whole gets warmer. Consequence is a greater heat contrast along that front, which may intensify the sequence of low pressures bringing wind and rain, which is what Ireland has just experienced this summer. But the high-resolution models do not show that AMOC stops abruptly, that was a feature of simpler models designed to replicate palaeoclimatic changes at the end of the ice ages, when the amount of ice available to melt was much higher.
/ well, I live a few km inland and outside of tsunami risk for now. I probably won't live long enough for that to change too much since I'm already in my 40s.
You laugh now, but wait until the entire population of New York and Florida are knocking at your door. That is, the population that doesn't see the writing on the wall and leave for Colorado first.