Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
^ Pfft, people need to give that wishful thinking a rest, dude.
This idea of global warming and available freshwater fulfilling Chicagoans’ fantasy of people bolting en masse from the coasts (which are now under water!) and the South to the shores of Lake Michigan, whereby Chicago asserts its destiny of being the supercity of the Western Hemisphere is.........like.........never gonna happen.
|
The way it will work is simply that over time, the relative attractiveness of various places will marginally change. A business will choose to re-locate to city-A or city-B and the appeal of the environment or the relative risk or disruption to business will probably be a little more in Chicago's favor in 2040, relative to Phoenix or Dallas, than it is today. Jobs attract residents. There's going to be a number of marginal decisions that were close to going to Milwaukee, Minneapolis or Chicago's way in 2020 that would go Chicago's way in 2040. But we aren't going to wake up one morning and suddenly have to battle thousands of Florida swamp and jet-ski people for water.
There will likely be more events--extreme heat summers, droughts, hurricanes--that displace thousands of people in a short period of time. It happened during the dust bowl. I know people who went to Boston from Santa Barbara because of fires. Katrina sent people all over the country. In the future, just like today, most of those people will go to places that are currently experiencing growth. Chicago and Minneapolis will probably get more of them in the future than we do today, because we will be relatively more appealing than we are today.
My expectation is that in a couple decades, Chicago will grow 0.5% faster (or shrink 0.5% less slowly) than it would absent the affects of climate change.
Threaded Mode