[TechBro8615]

> it'll most likely be underwater by 2050

To be fair, you could make a similar argument for San Francisco, a city positioned on a fault line that many consider "overdue for the big one."

Over the next 30 years, your risk of dying from a natural disaster in SF might even be greater than in Miami. At least climate change is (mostly) a slow burn. Even with hurricanes, you can see them coming a few days in advance and evacuate. But an earthquake is a sudden and rapid catastrophe that can (will) occur on some unpredictable day in the future. That said, I do agree that erosion seems like a more plausible sudden risk for a coastal city like Miami, especially if it caused yesterday's building collapse.

Climate change messaging, in general, does a poor job of presenting long-term risks and differentiating between them. People aren't concerned about a gradual rise sea levels, temperatures, or even natural disasters – as long as they're confident we can prepare for or predict the catastrophes. But I expect we react differently to a perceived increase in risk of unpredictable and sudden disasters. If the risk of my building collapsing is going to double every year, that's more frightening to me than the possibility of a few more hurricanes.

Fact is, most people just don't care about existential risks. The people who do tend to be neurotic and unpleasant (see: the past 15 months).

[3minus1]

> positioned on a fault line that many consider "overdue for the big one."

Not really related to your main point, but I believe this is a common misconception about earthquakes. S.F. may be likely to have an 8.0 earthquake once every 300 years (I made these numbers up), but just because it's been 400 years since the last one doesn't mean a big one is more likely now. It's more like any given year has a 1/300 chance no matter how long it's been since the last one.

[bruce343434]

And yet, the odds of a longer streak of consecutive years become smaller: (1/300)^n

[cableshaft]

I don't live on the West Coast, I've only visited. But we did have an F3 tornado touch down within 6 miles of my house earlier this week. Rendered about 30 homes unlivable, and completely obliterated one, although thankfully no deaths. Pretty rare for the area, last one of any significant size was in the 1970s. I agree hurricanes they've gotten stupid good at predicting where they'll be.

Tornadoes don't have that luxury. I did prepare a bit ahead of time since I saw a lot of dark red on the radar, but so often the worst of it skirts around us and we never had tornados since I moved here so I wasn't super concerned. Passed out and woke up to tornado sirens and if it was 6 miles further south could have woken up to a tree crashing into my living room or my house being smashed to a pulp.

Part of the reason climate messaging comes across as poor is because it's hard to predict the future with total precision. The predictions are most likely relatively correct in aggregate but any single prediction will undoubtably be wrong, including the degree in which it will get bad (are we going to heat up by 2 degrees, 4 degrees, 8 degrees by 2100?) and the precise timeline (is it going to happen by 2100? 2050? some even say 2030).

So if things don't play out exactly the way it's predicted, people use that as an excuse to claim that it's not a concern and go back to doing the easy thing of whatever the hell they want and letting corporations do as much bad shit to the environment as they want.

Another issue is things like wildfires and earthquakes and hurricanes have other causes besides climate change, and there's been freak weather throughout history, so is it just a freak weather incident like in history or did climate change contribute? Climate change messaging just claims that the overall frequency and intensity of incidents will increase, not that it caused any given one. So that's easy for people to handwave away also for years and decades also, as 'well maybe we're just going through something that was going to naturally occur anyway, like an Ice Age'.

I agree that most people don't spend too much time thinking about existential risks (nor should they necessarily, that's one way to not live much of a life at all). My concern isn't for my personal life, I'm much more likely to die from health or old age before this gets really bad. I'm more concerned about not wanting to contribute to a mass extinction event any more than I already am, and try to get better while still living a full and productive life.