Tech workers who fled to Austin during the pandemic are being repelled — Austin is #3 in the country for outmigration now — by a summer that has smashed all records for heat, with well over a month of days above 100 degrees.

This is a profoundly different weather than Austin had 20 or 30 years ago.

🧵 #climatemigration #climatechange

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-workers-moved-to-austin-regrets-2023-8

In areas most vulnerable to climate change-enhanced disasters, like Florida, the cost of home insurance has gone up so much that it’s now affecting how much lenders will give — potentially pushing many out of the home ownership market altogether.

Others are risking having no insurance at all, gambling on complete financial ruin should their home be damaged or destroyed.

🧵 #climatemigration #climateimpacts #climatechange

https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/americans-are-bailing-on-their-home-insurance-e3395515

One thing I've discovered in my own reporting is how many incipient threats are just waiting in the wings, for a single bad season, a single black swan event to make entire towns uninhabitable.

People who don't live out west don't know this, but entire towns have burned to the ground, forcing everyone to leave.

A prime example: Grizzly Flats, California.

1,200 residents. Most of their homes burned to the ground in 2021

#climatechange #climatemigration

https://www.wsj.com/articles/they-moved-to-rural-california-for-affordable-homes-then-the-caldor-fire-destroyed-the-town-11636207202

@mimsical

Can it really count as a "black swan event"? I'm thinking of how climate change makes suchlike fires increasingly likely to happen.

In the old times, it would have been one. But that was a different world. Today's probabilities include a lot more fires.

:-(

@unchartedworlds @mimsical

Honestly, it wasn't rare for such things to happen in the 19th century. You just don't know about them because that was the past, and those communities were far more isolated than they are now.

Then in the 20th century, organizations such as the US Forest Service dedicated themselves to making fires rare, and town-destroying fires nonexistent. Unfortunately, as the threat receded into the past, funding for such efforts dried up ; and there's a legacy of poorly-thought-out practices which left more available fuel for destructive fires. It can be nearly impossible to do a "controlled burn" in California, for instance, owing to a variety of conflicts among regulatory agencies.