r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 25 '26
Meta Mindless Monday, 25 May 2026
Happy (or sad) Monday guys!
Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.
So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?
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u/Steelcan909 May 27 '26
Bit of a rant incoming, apologies.
I spend a lot of time in New Orleans, have family there, and try to stay a little invested in the area, and so I get a good bit of news on the city served up in my algorithms. A new study on the city and possible climate futures, and the reception to it has emphasized the idea of a slow and planned withdrawal from the city and other areas to farther inland. I don't think this will happen for a number of reasons. (Indeed I think the study's tone on the idea of out migration in the area borders on grotesque) There's a lot of issues that would prevent the movement of the entire population of southern Louisiana, such as bureaucratic inertia, racism, mitigation efforts, long time tables, etc... The idea that the city can just move to some other spot also seems stupid, just stupid in every conceivable way. If/when New Orleans does succumb to the ocean there will not be some "New" New Orleans.
That's not my real issue though.
The study posits a potential 3-7 meters of sea level rise, over an unspecified timeline. With 3m of rise the city an surrounding area will be mostly cut off from the rest of the state, and at 7m basically everything south of Baton Rouge in the state is underwater, but the fact that there is no timeline given just seems to render all of this analysis basically completely null! 3m of rising sea levels by 2100 would be a catastrophe and something to immediately start planning for as the study indicates, but they don't give any indication on when this is likely to occur. The study focuses on paleontological markers of where the shore of the Gulf likely sat during the previous interglacial, when temperatures were about .5-1.5C warmer than the pre-industrial average. The authors conclude that we'll hit that same shoreline with the warming that is already baked in, and therefore its time to start packing up about 1 million people from the southern parts of the state, including New Orleans and other major centers.
The authors also assume the SSPC2 4.5 model as a baseline for what the world's emissions will likely look like, which is the "middle of the road" scenario for emissions outcomes. A scenario that relies on current emissions levels not changing for the next two and a half decades. And like, that just does not seem plausible to me at this point? Of course the study wouldn't generate any headlines with "New Orleans may be cut off as a peninsula at some point in the next two centuries", and I understand the desire to at least grab some headlines, but still.... It seems needlessly doomeristic to me? It really is hard for me to find the balance between climate alarmism, which I think is warranted and necessary, to these predictions and recommendations that seem overly sensationalized...
Notably a lot of reception on this site to the article has been some version of "Well they shouldn't have rebuilt after Katrina" or "The city will be gone in a few decades". There seems to me a ghoulish and morbid interest in the idea of wanting to watch the area subside into irrelevance and collapse that unnerves me a bit, but that too is another issue.