When do rising sea levels make Florida beachfront real estate less valuable?

Ten years ago, here on this blog… Are markets so inefficient that global warming isn’t being priced properly?:

During our two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale we learned that a beachfront house costs between $3 and $8 million. Most of these are approximately the same height above sea level as a crushproof cigarette pack. If the seas are rising up to swallow Florida, as the climate change doomsayers predict is imminent, why are these houses still worth so much?

The beachfront houses of Ft. Lauderdale aren’t worth $3-8 million anymore, just as the Climate Doomers predicted. The price to live in a house that Science proves will be swept away soon is $5-40 million. Is there any new Science that could explain this meteoric rise in the nominal price? “A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes” (Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 2025) looks at IPCC predictions vs. observations. The paper says that sea level worldwide is rising at about 1.5 mm per year. How does that compare with the Climate Doom narrative from the IPCC? The authors say that the observed sea level rise is somewhat lower than predicted and dramatically lower for Florida: “the overestimation along the Atlantic coast of North America is 4 mm/year to 5 mm/year; the highest overestimation found anywhere”.

The authors found little evidence of acceleration of sea level rise (Conclusions), but the same section seems to contradict the above map: “Empirically derived long-term rates of sea level rise in 2020 were in majority found to be in excess of the contemporary projected rates of rise. The current generation of projections can therefore be considered conservative”. Maybe someone here can read this more carefully and figure out how most of the rates based on local measurements are lower than the model predictions while at the same time the model predictions are “conservative” regarding doom.

The IPCC:

[Global mean sea level] GMSL from tide gauges and altimetry observations increased from 1.4 mm yr–1 over the period 1901–1990 to 2.1 mm yr–1 over the period 1970–2015 to 3.2 mm yr–1 over the period 1993–2015 to 3.6 mm yr–1 over the period 2006–2015.

GMSL will rise between 0.43 m (0.29–0.59 m, likely range; RCP2.6) and 0.84 m (0.61–1.10 m, likelyrange; RCP8.5) by 2100 (medium confidence) relative to 1986–2005.

If we take the 1.5 mm/year rate of the new paper and a 50-year time horizon for beachfront house ownership, the sea level rises 3 inches in Fort Lauderdale over the next 50 years. If we use the 3.6 mm/year rate, the sea level rises 7 inches. In other words, the acceleration prediction by the IPCC would need to materialize in order for the sea level to rise by half a meter (20 inches).

Our house is at 11′ above sea level (approximately 3 miles inland within Abacoa) so I think we need a rise of about 7′ (2 meters) before it becomes impractical to occupy (need a bit of buffer to handle storm surges). Even under the Doomiest Doomer’s prediction, that will take so long that the house will have required reconstruction, potentially elevated by a few feet, purely due to age.

From September 2024, WSJ, regarding a (present-day) sea level house too shabby to be left standing:

(Imagine the environmental impact of dumping all of those almost-new solar panels into a landfill!)

Finally, let’s look at the climate change alarmists. Here’s Democrat Senator Merkley saying “Climate chaos is the existential threat of our time. We need bold climate action now, before it’s too late” less than a year ago:

Today, however, he/she/ze/they demands that gasoline be as cheap as possible so that people will maximize consumption and CO2 emission:

(Curiously, the tweet complaining about “Trump’s illegal war” was posted a day after Trump had announced the U.S.’s surrender to Iran (“ceasefire”), i.e., when the war was already over.)