Why do I drive a Prius? To help save cities like Miami. Even though they keep building in areas that are going to be wiped out by the ocean I'm here to make a difference. Doing everything I can.
I've never even been there and I root for the jets over the Dolphins. It stuns me that people in that very state voted in a racist sexual predator who thinks climate change is a hoax when their best city is at risk of being destroyed by this very crisis.
Driving a Prius won't save Miami from flooding, only delay it a bit. Replacing a gas hog with a Prius counts only as a first step, out of very many steps along this path. A Prius is not actually green, merely less brown than prior cars. To reach that goal, overall carbon reductions would need to be in the 80% range, far more than a Prius gets you for just your personal transportation alone. And other energy segments need to be addressed too, such as your home energy consumption, food, consumer goods, workplace, etc. My own home is now energy-net-zero, thanks to various conservation improvements and home solar energy production. This achieves an even larger carbon reduction than my switch to a Prius. But I'm still a long way from reaching that overall 80% reduction in other carbon-emitting sectors.
My all-electric home (no gas service) now has air-source heat pumps. A single zone mini-split for the contiguous kitchen / dining / living areas, which bleeds off enough heat to the bedrooms to greatly reduce the remaining electric resistance heat needs in them. And a heat pump water heater in the garage (moved from the original resistance water heater location in a kitchen closet, that space now converted to pantry enlargement). I don't have reasonable yard space for a ground-source heat pump, which is also quite expensive due to the cost of burying the collector pipes. But we put such a system in dad's ancient and leaky farmhouse. It had plenty of field space available, and needed a large system to replace the old central wood-fired furnace. And it is in a colder climate where an air-source system would be more stressed in the depths of winter.
Yeah, I've been looking into Geothermal. It's about 20k with financing to have it installed. The good part of the deal is once you pay it off that's it until you have to replace the compressor thing. I'm nervous that it wouldn't be strong enough to handle a New York winter. I like your approach to your house though and I think that's very cool.
Mini-splits generally do not. But we still have the home's original in-wall blowers (same category as baseboard) as backup. Spouse sometimes turns them on for rapid warming after we have been away for an extended period. Central heatpumps often have electric or natural gas backup, but I'm not sure that all do. My heat pump water heater has both a top resistance element, for a small amount of rapid hot water when we return from a trip (can also be set to operate if the slow heat pump gets too far behind), and a lower resistance element to allow conversion to a traditional electric unit in case the heat pump unit fails. This conversion does require rewiring the unit. I did it once when the evaporator fan run capacitor failed, shutting down the heat pump. The manufacturer had gone bankrupt (from a recall and too many warranty failures), and it took several days to find and acquire a suitable replacement part, and the spouse isn't going to be happy with cold water that long. The cap itself was an easy plug-in replacement.
Pretty sure at this point Miami and many low-lying coastal cities are probably goners by the end of the century. For Florida, even if they pull a Holland dams/dikes system to keep Miami from flooding, saltwater intrusion into the everglades and aquifers is going to destroy their freshwater supply.
Between past ice ages, sea level has sometimes risen as much as 200-ish feet above current level. Though it seems quite unlikely it could get that high in the time of anyone alive today.
From what I've seen the flood walls are just a temporary stop gap solution. Funny to see the real estate is still booming along the water fronts. All this kind of talk reminds me of that George Carlin routine 'save the planet' where he goes 'pack your shit folks, we are going away'.
Freshwater supplies throughout Florida and adjacent states rely mostly on Floridan aquifer. I know very little about it, but saline intrusion would be an appropriate topic for study. US Geological Survey and its Florida analogue have published a lot. Available for reading at various 'dot gov' websites that are blocked in some parts of the world So, look at total dissolved solids in well water at varying distances from coast. Bear in mind that withdrawals are increasing rapidly and this is a very porous chunk of limestone. Orlando is ~30 meters 'up' but its wells are not. == Sea-level rise by 2100 exceeding one meter would represent a very large increase above current rates. One hopes that is unlikely but I consider our ability to extrapolate it forward to be weakly constrained by data and (especially) analyses.
Making a case for coastal retreat: The case for strategic and managed climate retreat | Science (does not mention Miami or Florida)
