As the Guardian reported yesterday:
New York City is sinking in part due to the extraordinary weight of its vertiginous buildings, worsening the flooding threat posed to the metropolis from the rising seas, new research has found.
The rate would appear to be small. It is 1mm - 2mm a year. But then add this to the fact that water levels around New York have risen about 22cm since the 1950s, with that trend increasing, and something a banker told me a while ago looks to be all too real a prospect.
When discussing climate change that banker suggested that sinking cities was the biggest problem he thought the sector faced. Over 80% of the property portfolio of many banks was, he suggested, in cities where the likelihood of flooding was likely to increase rapidly. Give it thirty years or so, he reckoned, and the security that those properties had to offer in forms of loan collateral would disappear.
I asked if this was panicking the sector. He said it wasn't. Property loans tend to be much shorter for commercial property than domestic mortgages, and commercial property was often the most vulnerable platt of the portfolio. But, he assured me that all bankers took the view that they would be able to offload their risk to someone else before the water hit the basements and destroyed the functioning of the properties on which their asset worth depended.
The reality was that it was easy to tell that's he knew that was just nonsense. What he really thought was that all those offering these loans now would be long gone before the problem hit, taking their bonuses with them. That was the real reason why they were were not concerned. It was someone else's issue, or so they thought, and they'd take the money and ignore the consequences now.
That said, Frank Sinatra might need to think again about New York, as might bankers.
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I think, like you, that some of these bankers must get up in the morning, get in the shower and think how they make life worse for everyone else.
“It was someone else’s issue, or so they thought, and they’d take the money and ignore the consequences now.”
And that is the big problem in so many parts of life right now.
Those making the decisions do not/will not have to live with the consequences.
“It was someone else’s issue, or so they thought, and they’d take the money and ignore the consequences now.”
That’s exactly, and explicit, what banker’s thought about sub-prime loans. Perhaps many of them may have walked away with the Money. But it didn’t end well for the rest of us.
Not just New York. Antwerp, 4mtrs above sea level, centre of Bx 10(ish). The joke is “Bruxelles-sur-mer”. However, with both Antarctica & Greenland “letting go” this is now a certainty, & all the dykes in the world will not stop it – because the land behind the dyke (which is permable) will gradully become saline. It is also worth noting that ice loss is accelerating – thus, end of this century is not an impossibility. Florida, Miami and the odious Repubes will resolve themselves by replicating Atlantis. It is happening now.
Put it this way. Just 125,000 years go, global temperatures were perhaps 1 or 2°C higher, and carbon levels were actually a shade lower (the climate has not caught up with the rapid forcing we’ve imposed on it, and like any dynamic system could easily overshoot). But sea levels were 6 to 9 metres higher. So if you are living or working today at less then 6m below sea level you should be worries because once the ice sheets disappear there will be no gong back for thousands of years. That includes significant chunks of central London and the Thames estuary, Essex and Kent, the south and east coast particularly the Fens, and the Humber and Severn estuaries, and parts of the Lancashire coast. Gulp.
The bankers can play at being ostriches like the rest of us, but their children and grandchildren will not be thanking them. Unless of course they’ve used their ill gotten gains to prepare a castle on higher ground.
This iswhy I find the reaction to a Wash barrier as reported in The Guardian today really very odd – and I am a fenland and Wash bird watcher
Maybe it’s the port and cruise-ship tourism that people don’t want in The Wash.
This reminds me of an article about Bangladesh I read recently. Two thirds of the country is less than 15 feet above sea level making it highly vulnerable to climate change, including rising sea levels. As a consequence millions are migrating to shanty towns in the larger cities inland.
This is putting huge demands on ground water supplies to the extent that it’s causing subsidence – the shanty towns are sinking.
The Government then needs to borrow money to fund infrastructure projects to ameliorate the problem the best they can.
They then of course have to repay the money and no doubt some of that will end up in New York!
It’s kind of ironic that the bankers of New York too are facing the twin threats of subsidence and rising sea levels.
Climate change ultimately will be a great leveller!
You know, it had crossed my mind…………………………
But more than anything your post illustrates the short termism that seems to drive everything we do – make your money and get out – short term profit making. That why we a need states with systems and continuity – even the better private sector institutions had these until ‘shareholder value’ took hold.
Spot on
Oh the immoral hypocrisy of bankers knows no limits! What does the state being the lender of last resort achieve for bankers? Well it keeps them in work of course! What does Andrew Bailey’s rapidly increasing base rate achieve? Well it throws non-bankers out of work of course!
Hmmm you might think right-wing Libertarians would get this and give up trying to “weaponise distrust of the state.” You’d be exceptionally naive to think so. You’d be better thinking that in nature there are always free-riders around ready to take advantage and the human being creation of the state is one of the main means to keep them in check!
We really need the sort of mindset that people who plant arboretums have, doing something often in middle or old age that only your grandchildren will see come to fruition.
Whats the saying, live like you will die tomorrow and farm as though you will live forever.
Worried about New York? At least there’s a hinterland under the same government. In the Eastern Mediterranean: what used to be called the Levant:
Facts from 2021:
1a. 70% of Israel’s population lives on the coastal strip. (Gaza too is situated on the Mediterranean coastline.) The water supply to the coastal towns and cities, such as Tel Aviv, is pumped from wells drilled into the aquifer. The water extraction rate is already greater than the replenishment rate. 97% of well water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption.
1b. The sea level of the Mediterranean is expected to rise by between 50cm and 1 metre by 2100. The coastal aquifer will receive an influx of salt water, contaminating the wells, without increased refill from inland water sources needed to maintain the hydrostatic pressure differential.
2a. The climate predictions for the River Jordan expect a decrease in natural flow of 25% by the end of the century. An increased risk of flood events, due to climate-driven changes in rainfall patterns, will increase sediment runoff, which in turn will decrease the storage capacity of the Sea of Galilee, which is Israel’s main reservoir, and which is currently shared with Jordan. Nutrient runoff will affect the water quality too. Jordan is the most water-poor country in the Middle East.
2b. Changing rainfall patterns are already felt in Israel with more-frequent flash-floods in the South, in the Negev. The winter of 2021 saw the Air Force’s main fighter planes sitting in flooded hangars. Floods create run-off into the Dead Sea, damaging the banks and causing subsidence problems for industrial and tourist complexes in the area and affecting the local economy.
2c. Turkey is already planning 22 new dams on the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
3. One-quarter of Egypt’s population, and one-quarter of its grain fields are found in the Nile delta. The Nile delta is threatened by a 50cm-1m sea level rise which will flood the delta. The headwaters of the Nile itself are already receiving less rain due to climate-caused changes in precipitation, with failure of the annual flooding in some recent years.
And is it then any surprise Israel is controlling the Palestinian population through access to water?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/17/how-israel-uses-water-to-control-west-bank-palestine