How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?

That IS very cool. I can’t help but appreciate the insight and forethought that goes into the decision to construct such massive waterworks projects.

I like that map and it goes all the way down to the tract level of detail. I was confused about the range of risk then saw the sub-heading "Score combining environmental, social, economic, and infrastructure effects on neighborhood-level stability.". Thinking in terms of neighborhood stability make more sense when viewing the percentiles.

My neighborhood is in the 55th percentile but then right across the main street, where the houses are bigger, it drops to 25th percentile. Both neighborhoods seems pretty stable but I guess when the chips are down crime is going to increase faster in a poorer neighborhood.

Most Americans are unaware of both how many people live outside of the United States and how bad things can get there.

This is not true.

Even in the most cataclysmic scenarios, scientists project Sea level to rise 2m by 2100, and most of Florida is above that level.

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-best-and-worst-case...

Really smart point.

The problem is not that we couldn't improve cities to sustain -30 Celsius winters. This is doable. The problem is that places suitable for agriculture would vanish in the upper half of the continent. Canadians need to import many of their food and they are like 40 million people, Europe would need to find a way to feed 500 million people.

Cities resilience to war will be a concern much before climate resilience.

Mmmm what to say.. I lived in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and I would say these cities are not really resilient. Yeah no major dams or glaciers that will trigger natural disasters but every typhoon season parts of these cities are flooded. Past three years I have been knee deep in water 3x a year in Shanghai, I have never seen anything like it (coming from Europe).

> Doesn’t Chicago have a bunch of people die every time there’s a heatwave because of lack of AC and such?

There was a heatwave in the 1990s that killed thousands in Chicago. Since then, the city has done a lot to handle them. While people still die during heatwaves, not as many as would have prior to all of the planning and effort. I guess it depends on how you define “a bunch”.

The growing risk factor for Chicago is flooding and dangerous storms. So far this is causing economic damage but not really killing anyone. Who knows if that holds.

Chicago is lowest for adjusted risk because it just scores very low for physical risk on their scale. Compared to other cities the adjustment to its risk score for resilience is about typical - not great and not terrible - which suggests that yes, for what physical risks it does face (summer heat) it could probably do more to reduce those risks.

david pogue in "how to prepare for climate change" mentions chicago and the great lakes area in general as a "climate haven", so the idea is not complete bs.

This is America, not a Europoor country.

> USHCN

This was the network that had heat island issues because it was volunteer stations highly biased towards urban areas.

It was superseded by USCRN (which you linked to) in 2005. USCRN is 114 stations intentionally situated away away from development. USCRN shows MORE warming than global networks, around .3* C per decade, and it recorded 2024 as the warmest year on record.

The article you are indirectly citing (https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/08/u-s-government-has-an-ac...) is easily disproven if you analyze the numbers: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-most-accurate-record-o...

If you predict an event that is 100 years away and 30 years pass, does the event that is still 70 years into the future vanish simply because the present arrived as predicted by the forecast?

Mind you, the forecast told us that we're still fine in 2026.