Continuing the tradition of climate journalists seeing things that you or I cannot, in particular a vast migration of people fleeing the climate-ravaged sunny south to the frigid inland north, Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica frets nobly in the New York Times that “Helene was just the latest in a new generation of storms that are intensifying faster, and dumping more rainfall, as the climate warms. It is also precisely the kind of event that is expected to drive more Americans to relocate as climate change gets worse and the costs of disaster recovery increase.” Expected to by whom? Well, everybody we know. The rush to the climate haven of Buffalo, New York or possibly Oshkosh, Wisconsin stampedes on within the fevered brains of opinion writers.

The piece insists that:

“Researchers now estimate tens of millions of Americans may ultimately move away from extreme heat and drought, storms and wildfires.”

Not “some researchers” or “a few obsessed zealots”. Researchers. In serried ranks with experts who say. But then it immediately concedes that:

“While many Americans are still moving into areas considered high risk, lured by air-conditioning and sunny weather, the economic and physical vulnerabilities they face are becoming more apparent.”

But not more apparent, evidently, to the people who keep moving south including to Florida. But still, you can always find someone. So:

“One study by the First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing, found that roughly 3.2 million Americans have already migrated, many over short distances, out of flood zones, such as low-lying parts of Staten Island, Miami and Galveston, Texas. Over the next 30 years, 7.5 million more are projected to leave those perennially flooded zones, according to the study.”

So a gnat of fact and a camel of speculation. Especially as these people are moving “over short distances” such as from one neighbourhood to another. It does happen. As the piece later concedes, under the heading “nuance”, with “The research contains plenty of nuance ⎯ cities like Miami may continue to grow overall even as their low-lying sections hollow out.”

Gosh. People adapt. Who knew? But it won’t help because the speculation is in and it’s socially unjust:

“All of this suggests a possible boom for inland and Northern cities. But it also will leave behind large swaths of coastal and other vulnerable land where older adults and the poor are very likely to disproportionately remain.”

Relax. Most of the elderly are still able to move if they want to, and if there’s a mass exodus the poor will at least see property prices fall. But anyway, the computer says that which is to come will be unburdened by what has been:

“The Southern United States stands to be especially transformed. Extreme heat, storms and coastal flooding will weigh heavily on the bottom third of this country, making the environment less comfortable and life within it more expensive and less prosperous.”

Note that we’re even done here with researchers speculate and experts envision. It’s just sold as fact. Which is odd given how other stories are telling us there are no climate havens, so you might as well get drowned on the beach as go inland and get drowned.

Now we want to be fair here. The writer does make a late lunge for sanity with:

“Such projections could turn out to be wrong ⎯ the more geographically specific such modeling gets, the greater its margin of error.”

Alas, he faceplants instantly by adding:

“But the mere fact that climate research firms are now identifying American communities that people might have to retreat from is significant. Retreat has not until recently been a part of this country’s climate change vernacular.”

Well, no. But let’s move away from the awful cold to somewhere nice and warm has been a chronic refrain of millions for three-quarters of a century now, even if they considered it an advance not a retreat, and they certainly knew winter was climate not weather in the above-mentioned Buffalo and Oshkosh.

At some point you get the feeling they’re pulling your leg. Toward the end he cites a Florida demographer that:

“The older these communities get, the more new challenges emerge. In many coastal areas, for example, one solution under consideration for rising seas is to raise the height of coastal homes. But, as Mr. [Florida State University’s Mathew] Hauer told me, ‘adding steps might not be the best adaptation in places with an elderly population.’”

OK. So the crisis comes down to people not knowing what a ramp is. Try not to flee in disorder.