Sea Level Rise Course
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Sea Level Rise: How Big a Real Estate Risk?
Experts have been generally unwilling to assign probabilities to different levels of potential SLR, noting that we have no real basis for assigning probabilities
But if you can't differentiate between the probability of 2 feet, 6 feet, or 10 feet of SLR, you're not answering the questions people have
It was only in 2017 that NOAA came out with a study assigning probabilities, and it's worth noting that the probability of anything like 6-10 feet of SLR remains very small
If you had to estimate the most likely level of SLR, it would be between 0.5 and 1.0 meters. But what should we do with the higher numbers, even if they're improbable?
For example, you would never get on an airplane that had a 1% chance of crashing, or even a .1 or .01% (still equivalent to 3 crashes a day). Small probabilities of large impacts matter! And that's where we are with SLR
So what can we say about the pace of sea level rise that risk-averse real estate market participants may want to assume?
1.5 feet by 2100 appears very likely under any emissions scenario. Would that be significant? Absolutely, especially given the interplay of tides and storm surges
But it could be a lot more. And we'll continue to learn a lot about what's happening in Greenland and Antarctica that could significantly revise the estimates.
So to summarize this thread
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But it could be a lot more. And we'll continue to learn a lot about what's happening in Greenland and Antarctica that could significantly revise the estimates.