Rising seas that inundate coastal properties cause billions of dollars in damage and essentially have bankrupted FEMA. You and I ( the country's taxpayers) fund the National Flood Insurance Program, and the program heavily subsidizes waterfront homeowner's flood insurance most of whom are extremely wealthy.
But starting October 1 of this year, those subsidies are about to change as insuring waterfront housing becomes riskier and riskier to taxpayers and private Insurers due to sunny day flooding, storm surge, and heavy rain from coastal and inland storm systems. Primarily, rich residents of the coast will be most affected and feel the most pain.
The squawking from politicians has already begun with New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the loudest so far.
The approach threatens home values. In Florida, the cost of flood insurance will be ten-fold. In case anyone is curious, if your driver's license says you live in Florida, you live in a flood zone.
Created by Congress in 1968, the National Flood Insurance Program is the primary provider of flood coverage, which often is not available from private insurers. The program is funded by premiums from policyholders but can borrow money from the federal treasury to cover claims.
The average annual premium is $739. Until now, FEMA, which runs the program, has priced flood insurance based largely on whether a home is inside the so-called 100-year flood plain, land expected to flood during a major storm.
But that distinction ignores threats like intense rainfall or a property’s proximity to the water. Many homeowners pay rates that understate their true risk.
The result has been a program that subsidizes wealthier coastal residents at the expense of homeowners farther inland, who are more often people of color or low-income. As climate change makes flooding worse, using tax dollars to underwrite waterfront mansions has become increasingly hard to defend.
But the financial consequences of that new reality will be staggering for some communities.
The flood program insures 3.4 million single-family homes around the country. For 2.4 million of those homes, rates will go up by no more than $120 in the first year, according to data released by FEMA — similar to the typical annual increases under the current system. An additional 627,000 homes will see their costs fall.
Because federal law prohibits FEMA from raising any homeowner’s flood insurance rates by more than 18% a year, it could take 20 years before some current homeowners are charged their full rates under the new system.
FEMA declined to make public the full amount of the rate increases that homeowners will pay over time. But insurance brokers are able to see those costs for individual homes, and they are far greater than the initial increases discussed by FEMA.
In Florida and elsewhere, the rates will primarily impact those making the big bucks while living on barrier islands for now.
An ice melange is essentially a mixture of crumbled icebergs, snow, and sea ice that surround the humongous marine extensions of glaciers' ice platforms in Antarctica.
A study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that the ice melange was the likely driver of the calving of the most enormous iceberg in Antarctica. It was calved from the Antarctic peninsula's Larsen C Ice Shelf in 2017. In 2021 the iceberg disintegrated. It was one of the largest icebergs on record and was the size of the US state of Delaware.
These floating glaciers do not add to sea-level rise as they are already in the sea. When they calve an iceberg whatever resistance is provided to hold back the land ice is gone. The ice sheet becomes more vulnerable threatening a surge of land ice to pour into the ocean and raise sea levels The melange plays a similar role.
Rob Raugh writes on the findings:
Ice melange normally "heals" cracks – but it’s thinning due to climate change.
New research shows that thinning of layers of ice melange could be a major driver of ice shelf collapse, according to a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"The thinning of the ice melange that glues together large segments of floating ice shelves is another way climate change can cause rapid retreat of Antarctica's ice shelves," said co-author Eric Rignot, UCI professor of Earth system science.
"With this in mind, we may need to rethink our estimates about the timing and extent of sea-level rise from polar ice loss – i.e., it could come sooner and with a bigger bang than expected."
"A lot of people thought intuitively, 'If you thin the ice shelf, you're going to make it much more fragile, and it's going to break,'" said lead author Eric Larour, Nasa JPL research scientist and group supervisor.
Instead, the model showed that a thinning ice shelf without any changes to the melange worked to heal the rifts, with average annual widening rates dropping from 259 to 72 feet.
Thinning both the ice shelf and the melange also slowed rift widening but to a lesser extent.
But when modelling only melange thinning, the scientists found a widening of rifts from an average annual rate of 249 to 367 feet.
The difference, Larour explained, reflects the different natures of the substances.
"The prevailing theory behind the increase in large iceberg calving events in the Antarctic Peninsula has been hydrofracturing, in which melt pools on the surface allow water to seep down through cracks in the ice shelf, which expand when the water freezes again," said Rignot, who is also a Nasa JPL senior research scientist.
"But that theory fails to explain how iceberg A68 could break from the Larsen C ice shelf in the dead of the Antarctic winter when no melt pools were present."
To be honest, I did not know that ice melange had a healing effect on ice shelves. I always assumed it only had a buttressing effect on glacial retreat. We learn something new every day.