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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 25 2019, @07:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-would-have-guessed dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sea level rise, driven by climate change, is causing increased flooding during high tides along much of the U.S. coastline. Though such floods are usually minor, a new study suggests that car traffic patterns could help reveal how floods harm an area’s business revenues.

Tidal flooding events “are not one in a hundred years or one in a thousand years. They’re once a week,” says Miyuki Hino, an environmental social scientist at Stanford University.

Though increasingly frequent, such floods often last only a few hours. That can make it hard to tally the economic losses they cause. Hino and her colleagues sought to quantify those impacts by looking at parking data in the historic downtown of Annapolis, Md., located on the Chesapeake Bay. 

The team first built a database of flood events using flood images posted to social media at the same times that tide gauge readings showed high water levels, in order to eliminate rain-caused flooding. Hino’s team estimates there were 44 tidal floods in 2017, classified as minor, modest or severe.

The team then looked at parking transactions in a nearby lot for changes in parking revenues. Flood events coincided with drops in visitation ranging from 37 to 89 percent, depending on the severity of the flooding, the researchers found. That contributed to about 3,000 fewer visitors, or a 1.7 percent decrease, in 2017, according to the study published online February 15 in Science Advances.


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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 25 2019, @07:41PM (3 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday February 25 2019, @07:41PM (#806529) Journal

    Yeah, let's just move New York City, totally easy, right?

    And then when we need to move all our farmland to Canada, that'll be totally easy too.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @10:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @10:17PM (#806618)

    He's not the one to pay for it. He's just an statistician with armchair scientist pretentions, everything is easy for him (only matrices are hard).

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @11:51PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 25 2019, @11:51PM (#806675) Journal

    Yeah, let's just move New York City, totally easy, right?

    Over the time frames that climate change acts on, yes. For example, in a century, most of the property in NYC will have been condemned twice over. It's just not that hard for a business or family, which was going to move anyway, to move to higher ground as part of the move.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @02:36AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 26 2019, @02:36AM (#806730) Journal

    And then when we need to move all our farmland to Canada

    Whose climate predictions claim that the US won't be able to grow food any more? It's certainly not the IPCC.

    But having said that, if we were trying to do that for some reason, moving farmland just isn't that hard, because you aren't actually moving farmland. You're just moving some equipment and such to a different bit of property. Again, not a hard problem. Have we already forgotten just how much farmland was "moved" in the past century?