Yves here. Pentagon-affiliated researchers were warning in the early 2000s of mass climate migrations, such as out of to-be-largely flooded areas like Bangladesh, and how that would be geopolitically destabilizing. Below is a comparatively minor aspect of that phenomenon, of retirees who formerly preferred warmer climates now reversing the former pattern of moving to the southern US and preferring the cooler temperatures further north. I imagine Europe is seeing similar shifts among more affluent groups.
This may not seem that consequential in the big picture, but it does affect real estate values and the level of commercial activity in the new less favored versus the new “not hot” spots. And this effect likely extends beyond those who move or split their time between two locations. For instance, Florida is a vacation spot, separate from its residence appeal to oldsters. Golf courses are are a big draw, not just for them but also for vacationers. Golfing in torrid heat is not an appealing proposition. So “peak season” will probably become shorter. That in turn means fewer tourist amenities, like good restaurants, which in turn will dent its appeal as a retirement or other part-time location.
Now one can argue that less travel, as in more people staying put and not going far for vacations or traveling between residences, would be a very good thing. But we are still a long way from that happening. In the meantime, home-shuffling, for those that can afford it, makes matters worse at the margin.
By Kait Parker. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections
>For over 50 years, Florida and other sunny Southern states have experienced a migration pattern: the influx of the snowbird, a not-so-rare breed of Northern-state dwellers seeking to escape winter by flocking south to join their sunbird counterparts. But now a reverse trend is taking shape: Some sunbirds are moving out, spurred by the escalating impacts of climate change.
New research is shedding light on population changes across the South, especially in places already significantly impacted by climate change like Florida and Texas. Heat seems to be playing a role in this northern migration, but that doesn’t tell the whole story – people are also relocating on a smaller scale within cities, out of communities that are flooding with increasing frequency.
Heat Is Driving People North
The U.S. South has always been hot, which made it a challenging place to live before the 1960s. The high heat and humidity could mean heat illness or even death for those without adequate ways to cool down. But then came air conditioning, a lifesaving invention that transformed the landscape. In fact, despite warming trends due to climate change, heat-related deaths are still down by about 3,600 per year thanks to widespread HVAC systems.
As a result of this new indoor comfort, Americans flocked to the South in droves. Snowbirds, tired of the bitter cold of the North, became notorious for moving to a warmer climate in their golden years – but it wasn’t just retirees. Populations in counties in the South boomed across every age group and education level.
That is, until recently.
Sylvian Leduc and Daniel J. Wilson, both researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, looked into migration trends and found a clear signal: Fewer people are moving South.
Their study, “Snow Belt to Sun Belt Migration, End of an Era?” looked at the change in population in counties that experience both extreme cold and extreme heat. From the 1970s to the 2010s, there was a consistent signal of growth in communities in the South that experienced extreme heat days.
But now the authors find that some U.S. residents are moving away from areas where extreme heat is on the rise, a shift they attribute to climate change.
Just How Hot Is Hot?
With rising global temperatures, it’s not surprising that our hottest days are also on the rise. Heat waves, defined as two or more days of extreme heat, are increasing almost everywhere, but in the U.S., the trend is pronounced in the South.
The above graphs use data from long-standing weather stations monitored by NOAA.
Places like Miami, Tampa, and New Orleans aren’t just experiencing a little more heat than they did in the 1960s when AC first moved to town. They’re experiencing more than eight additional heat waves each year. Not only that, those heat waves are lasting longer and the season they occur in has increased by more than 80 days.
In the same vein, days considered to be extremely cold are on the decline.
In the above map depicting the change in the number of unusually cold days since 1948, it’s a veritable Where’s Waldo to find the spots that have seen any increase. The communities that have seen a decrease in extreme cold days dominate the map.
Leduc and Wilson said this shift is adding to the reversal of trend and sending, or keeping, more people north.
Their study also looked at demographics and found that the population wasn’t shifting equally – early-career, well-educated professionals and retirees saw the most significant shift away from the South. Both groups are traditionally the most mobile. Snowbirds have long flocked South for their golden years to escape the cold, but the study found those numbers have reversed over the last 10 to 20 years.
>Escaping the Flood
With climate change causing more heavy downpours and sea level rise, floods are happening more frequently. And that is causing big shifts in how and where Americans choose to buy property.
Forty percent of the population lives near a coast, where sea level rise is contributing to flooding. While on average it has risen five to eight inches, it is rising faster along the East and Gulf Coasts. This means when hurricanes threaten these areas, they are causing even higher, more destructive storm surge.
South Florida, where sea levels have already risen by a foot and could add an additional two feet by 2050, is a glaring example of the trend. Jeremy Porter leads climate implications research at First Street, an organization that links climate change with financial risk. He said that in Miami, tidal flooding received so much media coverage in recent years that homebuyers began purposefully avoiding flood-prone neighborhoods because they’d seen them on the news.
Porter and his team have studied the migration patterns of people living in flood-prone areas with a fine-tooth comb. Their research found 818,000 “climate abandonment area” – locations that had lost population directly due to flooding risk that had increased due to climate change. That added up to 3 million people having moved with an additional 2.5 million expected to leave areas with a high flood risk over the next 30 years.
The study was able to identify moves that others had missed: those that happen locally. Unwilling to stay in a home under increasing threat of flooding as a result of climate change yet unable to leave a city due to jobs or family, people are moving out of flood-prone neighborhoods while staying within their community.
Hurricanes Ian, Helene, and Milton have all caused significant damage to parts of the west coast of Florida in the last two years. Porter said the destruction will likely drive yet more population change in the near future.
“There’s this one rare event that happens and they can’t remember any other ones, people don’t respond to that,” he said. “But if you’re getting hit by an event and then next year you’re hit by another event and then maybe two years out you’re hit by another, people eventually tire of that and they’ll move away.”
Whether climate change impacts are forcing people from their homes due to flooding or they are leaving by choice for a cooler future, the migration patterns in the U.S. are changing – with profound potential consequences for Southern communities if climate change goes unchecked.
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IMO, this is an emerging pattern in Europe too. The Mediterranean region might for instance see a shift from summer stays to winter travel. It is actually occurring:
Demasiado sol y poca playa: el cambio climático ya está transformando el turismo en España
Too much sun and too little of beaches: Climate change is transforming tourism in Spain.
The most damning thing are the torrid nights when you can’t sleep.
Western Europe has much less climatic variation than the USA because it is a peninsula of peninsulas, each moderated by surrounding seas and by the Gulf Stream and with the Alps to prevent north-south weather system mixing (tornadoes, hail storms etc). Coastal Norway is a lot more hospitable than Boston or New York in winter.
There are changes at the extremes but the number of people in Andalucia or Sicily is much smaller than Florida or Arizona or Texas. The cultural gradients outweigh the climatic ones, even within a country like Italy or France.
Eastern Europe is a different matter, with properly Continental climate zones, but I still don’t think many Russians are moving to the Caucasus or vice versa, except as economic migrants. Of course, Crimea and Sochi etc are famously temperate second home destinations as well as geopolitical footballs….
Even if the temperatures aren’t extreme in Western Europe there has been certain migration to, at least for what i have seen, to the Mediterranean coasts in Spain, mainly by retirees but also workers who work online. The very mild winter there is excellent at some age and a sharp contrast with, let’s say, Birmingham. Many British migrated there (less so after Brexit but still). In fact in Jávea (Alicante) is where i go to a second hand book store only in English to refresh. A parallel to New Yorker retirees going to Florida. Within Spain, the central plains are semi-continental (because surrounded by mountains in all directions and because altitude 600-700m) and many among the elder move from Madrid to Valencia, Alicante, Málaga… Now you find English, German, Netherlanders, Ukrainian…
But as I said, in summer, the night temperatures have become a problem.
I’ve been looking at “AMOC problem” maps and am wondering if Galicia is the place to buy property if you’re rich……it’ll suffer Atlantic storms, but then again it always has done, and the temperature variation over the seasons doesn’t seem half as bad as a lot of western Europe, should the AMOC collapse faster than predicted.
Plus I loved my trip there in late 90s! :)
The problem is that if the current collapses Galicia will be also affected. In ways difficult to predict. But i guess it will be milder compared to Northern coasts. Now, in the Atlantic coast, the Cantabric shoreline facing North (Bilbao, Santander…), when Atlantic wind is SW, which is now more frequent apparently, it is surprisingly warm there.
Ah I actually recognise the milder Bilbao effect from when I travelled so I get your point. Thanks.
Yep: I’m guessing that the Spanish getaway will look more like the “Canary Islands” model – go there in winter months. For many years before I moved to Sydney, I’d get a winter dose of Vitamin D via a trip to Gran Canaria. High season was ALWAYS the winter months in the Canaries because why fly 4 hours from Northern Europe to look like a lobster when a 2 hour flight will give you sleep at night and a nice tan in mainland Spain March-October?
Unfortunately my holiday pattern, then living in Sydney, caused a chronic (likely genetic) lack of vitamin D to only be diagnosed upon my return to UK when I no longer did “winter sun”. Mainland European former colleagues have been reporting that summers are becoming unbearable.
Oh yes , this last summer in SW France was unbearable, we had hardly one sunny dry day.
How does flooding effect driving an EV car? assuming the picture is a normal GAS vehicle.
Anecdotal but look up flooded cars in Nottinghamshire, UK. There are several channels on YT where someone just films several roads that flood at the best of times. I won’t venture opinions as to the drivers but the most comments are about the BMW drivers who think they can drive through what is NATIONALLY known as a terrible stretch. ICE cars, unless having high engine stuff like a Land Rover ingest water ASAP and are royally messed up.
Electric vehicles suffer huge internal damage and are similarly immobilised, permanently.
The Notts council no longer has the money (or will) to keep putting up signs and has simply decided that a variant of “Darwin Awards” approach. Watching the reactions of idiot drivers is a guilty pleasure of mine.
A word of warning for anyone thinking of going from south to north in Europe. If the Gulf Stream fails (and it may do so sometime in the next decade or so), things will get much colder than they might like, to around the same as Labrador in Canada.
Hate to be pedantic but the Gulf Stream is not the issue. It’s the AMOC which contributes most of the heating to Western Europe. The Gulf Stream isn’t at risk, but if the AMOC stops then the Gulf Stream will likely continue but not at a rate that will stop London UK from experiencing weather akin to London Ontario.
Terry Flynn: but not at a rate that will stop London UK from experiencing weather akin to London Ontario.
No worries. London temperatures will just by back to what they were in Elizabethan and Dickensian times
https://justhistoryposts.com/2017/11/30/when-the-thames-froze-over-the-little-ice-age-thames-frost-fairs/
‘Between roughly 1300 – 1850, the world experienced the ‘Little Ice Age’ … there were 3 significant intervals of particular cold, c. 1650, c. 1770, and c. 1850 ….between 1400 and 1835, this also resulted in at least 24 winters where the River Thames froze over which led to merriment for all.
‘…In 1536, Henry VIII sleighed along the river from central London to Greenwich, whilst in 1564 his daughter Elizabeth I used the frozen river for archery whilst children would play football. But in the seventeenth century, as the cold hit its peak, the river froze over more often and for longer. The first recorded frost fair occurred in 1608, but one of the most famous fairs was the one of the winter of 1683-84….’
And so on.
I wonder if they’re moving north or simply moving less South. I’ve seen parts of the Carolinas absolutely boom with wealthy retirees in recent years. They have most of the warm weather benefits with less flooding/hurricane risks and costs, and really a longer period of pleasant outdoor weather for people who don’t need everyday to be t-shirt weather.
It could also be that as the overall population become poorer, fewer can afford the move to Florida/Arizona and play golf everyday lifestyle. They may be moving closer to children/grandchildren to provide and/or receive care.
That’s an excellent thought that. Over the past few decades plenty of cashed up baby boomers made the move south. But now people aren’t so cashed up anymore and moving can be very, very expensive. And children/grandchildren may not have the money to blow on plane trips to visit the elders in Florida anymore. It’s a different time now.
Plus even if the kids/grandkids have money and time to travel every year, Florida in midsummer or midwinter may not be all that appealing. Non-coastal Carolinas can be almost as hot as Florida for summer day time highs but a lot less humidity and cooler mornings and evenings.
The well off elderly in my circle do circuits to see their kids in different parts of the country and pay for lavish family vacations. They really have to work for quality time with grandkids. Some of them do winter in Florida, but they bought in years ago when the prices were much lower and they spend their summers in the North.
the memo has not been getting around.
Post-Covid, US population grew by something along the lines of 3.4 million people.
At the same time, the population of the South grew by something along the lines of 3.6 million people.
Thank you for pointing out my home city, Jacksonville FL, is the only major metropolitan area in Florida with no significant change in heat wave frequency or heat wave season length over the last 60 years. We enjoy the most beautiful weather in Florida and maybe that is why our population growth has pushed us up to number 10 in population of all US cities. The only flocking North we see here are people from Miami Dade county.
Here in hurricane alley we the acclimated welcome the trend and look forward to getting back those parking spaces. Akron will be the new Miami and I’m told it no longer smells like rubber.
However isn’t the polar vortex now a thing and a huge cold weather front on the way to the Midwest? They may still flock to our Appalachian piedmont–800 ft ASL and so safe from the Atlantic if not Helene.
Clearly the city fathers hope so as they vigorously clean up the mess left by the recent disaster. And that goes double for our nearby sister city. I once lived in Atlanta and now Atlanta is moving to me.
That said, surely all those people going to Arizona are nuts. 120 F is barely survivable. Those I know who live there want out, however much they hate the cold.
Yes, the Great Arizona Bake-Off requires tonnes of AC in the Phoenix valley. Higher elevations like Tucson or Flagstaff have somewhat more livable climes.
Maine has been ahead of Florida for a while now as the oldest US state – https://www.prb.org/resources/which-us-states-are-the-oldest/
There is definitely a migration of older people coming to Maine to retire – I know many of them personally. But there is also a big drain of younger people who grow up in Maineleaving the state once they get out of high school. One reason for the emigration is the lack of good jobs here – tourism is the dominant industry and most service jobs don’t pay particularly well. Another reason is the skyrocketing cost of living due to all the older retirees moving in and tourists buying up property for 2nd homes.
Last I checked, on Orr’s Island and Bailey Island, where my father’s family lived for many many generations, the median age is 56. Those old geezers are tough to get through the winters! A man on Orr’s Island runs a small but very good wine shop out of his house during “season”. He came from Fairbanks, Alaska. He says Maine winters (with their strong wet winds) are colder than Fairbanks.
That sounds about right. We looked at buying a house in Harpswell years ago – it’s pretty much my favorite town in Maine. The real estate turned out to be far too expensive for us. If you can afford the sticker price though, the great thing is the taxes in that town are really cheap. I’m assuming that’s because there are hardly any kids and thus a very low education budget.
As a millennial, so younger than the average age, I looked at moving to Maine. They don’t pay teachers well, and there are other states with lower cost of living and higher teacher salaries. I’m looking at Minnesota and upstate New York. Although Western Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are also on my radar.
I’ve been watching a YouTube channel called American resiliency, and she goes through the data at the state level. I’ve been using her as a source to inform my choice about where to move. I’m trying to get out before the great salt lake dries up and becomes a toxic wasteland.
The numbers quoted in the article for sea level rises made me to question the other stats quoted.
Why do you think the sea level rise numbers are off? Sources?
The sea level rise numbers are actually conservative. They ignore any rapid injection of ice into the ocean from the likes of Greenland or Thwaites Glacier.
I live in a coastal California community and the loss of sand on the beach is a result of more intense storms (wave action) as it is sea level rise. Coastal erosion occurs in big gulps. (I’ve accessed my local beach since 1966 and the ‘gulping’ and sea level rise is evident.)
See this: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-sea-level-rise-california-coast/
I once read about another interesting thing that could contribute to sea level rise. Every localize “big mass” exerts its own little bit of localized gravity right around itself. The Greenland and Antarctic Ice Caps contain enough mass to exert a little bit of local gravity on the sea right around themselves, pulling a bunch of water just a little bit “higher” within a few miles of themselves.
If/when those ice caps disappear, that localized gravity will also disappear, and the no-longer-gravitationally-attracted nearby ocean water will sag back away and spread out a little.
My own point of anecdata is corroborated by the graphic maps in the post. I lived for most of my life in the San Francisco/Monterey Bay areas of mid-California. Over the course of my seven decades the heat waves have inched-up along with the population.
Then in 2020 the SCZ Lightning Complex Fire two miles from my house burned-out 900 homes of my friends and neighbors, exacerbated by Covid removing 105 able-bodied inmate firefighters from their 70-year old camp in the heart of the fire zone (not slaves; lives were transformed). I’ve settled in a far corner of the Pacific Northwest where the weather suits me just fine. Actually less total rainfall (more spread out) and just a little colder when the Polar Vortex reverses.
I don’t do well in the heat. Less well if I’m on fire…
I also grew up in the SF Bay Area and my experience is similar. I have friends who moved to the coast of southern Oregon. They say the cold ocean current (“Humboldt current”) means that it very rarely ever gets above 80F. and snow is very rare in winter. A mild climate for folks who don’t like inland heat.. Also, the electricity, gasoline, insurance etc. are significantly less than California and no sales tax.
The San Juan and Cascades rain shadow areas are my idea of heaven, but make sure you bought above the tsunami zone for whenever the Cascadia Fault does a full rip.
A question on blog etiquette.
This looks like an article that I want to blog about.
What I typically do is link to the original article (in this case Yale Climate Connections) write my poorly conceived and poorly written thoughts (that part is mandatory), and then post at the end, “H/T Naked Capitalism,” with the link to this post.
Am I being a do-bee or a don-t bee here?
Half-backing is not a new phenomenon and was originally unrelated to meteorology.
It began when northerners left one state they had already trashed (FLA) for another state (NC) where a similar trashing is well underway.
Climate driven migration will make a joke of wall building, deportation, etc…All of Trump’s armies and all of Trump’s men aren’t going to keep out climate migrants. The same goes for Trump-like politicians in Europe and elsewhere. 100 million people (perhaps many more) on the move aren’t going to be stopped by walls, fences, armed patrols, concentration camps, etc…
Sea level rise is about 10cm in the last three decades. That’s trivial. The Important factors causing flooding are intensified rainfall and increased coastal storms, and both are caused by increased atmospheric temperature. So claims in the article to the contrary are not valid. Which does not mean that people won’t be retreating from the coast as well as from the hot areas, because storms and rainstorms are a thing.