Sydney millionaires find out that Nature doesn't negotiate

[BritDownUnder]

Last week a large coastal storm, combined with a king tide (An Australian term for an extra high tide), damaged a lot of expensive coastal property. one woman was on TV saying that the council should have warned her for the possibility of storm damage.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... water.html

I don't think you can attribute this to global warming but it does illustrate the future cost of sea level rise. If people whose houses are worth more than a million are not prepared to defend their expensive homes from the sea I think it is unlikely that the people of Bangladesh will be able to.

I will attempt to post a picture from the Daily Mail which shows a good shot of the damage.



That blue thing on the beach is a swimming pool.

Only two of the seven houses had solar panels.

Before the Rio Earth summit in 1992 President George H W Bush said that the 'American way of life is not up for negotiation'.

[woodburner]

Rich people's attitude "I must be closer to the beach than anyone else", indicates gross selfishness and stupidity. Serves them right with a gross disrespect for nature. Anyone wanting to swim in a shark's habitat needs to think first, not risk it and kill afterwards. We can't do with any shark, we can do without billions of people.

It may be antibiotic resistance that is the turning point.

[kenneal - lagger]

The one with the new concrete canoe looks as if it had a "green" grass roof or was that Astro turf?

It can be attributed to Global Warming if it was more intense than usual and/or more frequent than usual, both of which are manifestations of Global Warming.

[biffvernon]

I don't think you can attribute this to global warming but it does illustrate the future cost of sea level rise.

Is this event the result of global warming is the wrong question. The right question is by how much has global warming shifted the probability distribution curve of extreme events such as this?

[woodburner]

The right question is "How stupid do you have to be to build there?

[emordnilap]

Those people can afford it.

[vtsnowedin]

Those people can afford it.

I don't know about Australia but in the USA those rich idiots would have subsidized flood insurance on their "second home" and the tax payers would be on the hook for rebuilding it.

[biffvernon]

That's very much the case in the UK too. After some expensive houses in the Thames valley a few years ago the government was exercised to force insurance companies to equalise premiums where risk was unequal.

[BritDownUnder]

I am not sure if the same would happen in Australia. The rich are quite unpopular. I read that in this case the owners of these properties declined to contribute AU$140,000 each to contribute to a council built seawall. They thought that by paying around $10,000 of rates per year they were entitled to $250,000 of council expenditure in return.

Having said that I had to pay a 'flood levy' followed by a bushfire levy on my taxes. This levy has not been removed, a bit like, Mr Pitt's 'income tax' that was introduced as a temporary measure during the Napoleonic Wars.

So I ended up paying for the relief measures for people who built their homes in flood plains and close to dry bush. Having said that my house is on a flood plain that last flooded in 1955.