How It Will Happen.

We're experiencing many climate change related extreme weather events such as record drought followed by record rain in California.  These events, while extreme, do not seem to be moving the needle on attitudes toward global warming, especially not Congress and the new President and the people he's appointed to Federal offices.

I continue to believe what I've stated numerous times in the past, that it will be the rise in sea level that is going to get everyone's attention.

But that attention will come long before Miami and New Orleans are actually underwater.  This is how it will look like,

Coastal Cities Could Flood Three Times a Week by 2045

The lawns of homes purchased this year in vast swaths of coastal America could regularly be underwater before the mortgage has even been paid off, with new research showing high tide flooding could become nearly incessant in places within 30 years.

Such floods could occur several times a week on average by 2045 along the mid-Atlantic coastline, where seas have been rising faster than nearly anywhere else, and where lands are sagging under the weight of geological changes. 

Washington and Annapolis, Md. could see more than 120 high tide floods every year by 2045, or one flood every three days, according to the study, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE. That’s up from once-a-month flooding in mid-Atlantic regions now, which blocks roads and damages homes.

“The flooding would generally cluster around the new and full moons,” said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a Union of Concerned Scientists analysts who helped produce the new study. “Many tide cycles in a row would bring flooding, this would peter out, and would then be followed by a string of tides without flooding.” 

The study did not analyze the West Coast, where flooding problems are less widespread, although parts of the San Francisco Bay Area are highly vulnerable.

This is how it's going to happen.  Each year the high tides will get higher and soon will begin overcoming barriers and flooding yards and streets.  And soon after that homes will start to flood at high tides.  And then not just at high tides.

While it is not clear when such high tides will occur on the West Coast, it is certain to eventually follow the East Coast.  For ocean front houses on the East Coast, in thirty years their property will be worthless.