How are the economics of all this playing out? What's it saying to that?

Well, let's acknowledge this is the first time an economics chapter has made its way into the National Climate Assessment.

So this is a huge deal.

If you know anything about economists, they're really slow.

They take their time.

They're very disciplined.

But change and new things happen.

So let's talk about that.

Putting heavy construction on the sand sinks the sand.

You're building on top of a sponge, right? You've got a big sponge in the bathtub, and you wanna build a brick, a Lego wall.

Well, it's, for a while, for a couple bricks high, two or three bricks high, um, the sponge will float, and you can put a Lego guy on there or something, and it'll work.

But at some point in time, the weight of those bricks, the higher and higher you go, the more and more bricks you add, the sponge isn't gonna be able to hold it.

It'll just fill up with water and sink.

That's functionally what we're talking about here.

Eventually, the gulf still overwhelms even what the mighty Mississippi can create.

The water's already there.

What ultimately do you see as some of the essential components, the essential foundations for adaptation? effective or adaptation strategies so that we're not just sort of doing it on the fly but doing it intentionally

well sometimes doing it on the fly is as good as it's going to get because the nature of change is so unpredictable sometimes it is predictable sometimes it is within the ambit of peer-reviewed science and we have a sense a pretty strong sense and robust evidence as to where where we're going and what trajectory we're on.

And in those cases, we have a lot of opportunities to fundamentally prepare.

In other cases, there is a great deal of uncertainty.

So these strategies, these design interventions, these various techniques and tactical interventions that we undertake in the name of adaptation, are really quite diverse.

But I think to reframe your question, from a matter of public policy, what are the strategies that we should undertake as a matter of public policy? And this plays out at a national, state, and local level, at least here domestically in the United States.

And I think we have to understand that in the exercise of delivering government services, making investments in everything, capital investments from the development of schools, the purchase of fleets, everything that we do in the name of making investment in the public good should consider climate and climate impacts in the calculations, particularly the economic calculations.

I'll ask Jesse first, but I'm going to ask both of you.

Professor Jesse Keenan, co-author of the study, spoke to Carl Nassman.

What we face, uh, in New Orleans and all of Southeast Louisiana, uh, is the prospects that in the coming decades, and really in the coming century, uh, the area will be inundated by a combination of land loss and sea level rise.

Uh, and at that-- in that context, we have time.

Uh, we have time to make investments in adaptation, uh, and more particularly, to build land.

Uh, and this has been, uh, an immediate, uh, let's say, political challenge in the last, uh, year, year and a half, uh, with some major projects being canceled.

But we do have time.

We have generations to begin the process of thinking and preparing for this inundation and moving not just populations, but businesses, industry, and the like.

like.What do you mean when you said building land as, as one of the solutions potentially to this?

The data that, that you and your colleagues were looking at, what does it suggest New Orleans will look like, you know, maybe not in 10 years, but certainly within decades?

Yeah, you know, the timeline here is a major challenge for science.

We know that the, the, uh, temperatures today, uh, um, are roughly where they were during the last interglacial about 125 to 150,000 years ago.

At that point in time, sea levels were much, much higher than they are today.

And the question is, what's that lag or how long is it gonna take? Decades, generations? What are we looking at? We just don't know at this point.

But we can begin to imagine that we need to start the planning process, uh, much sooner than later, certainly in the next few generations.

So we're looking at more intermittent flooding.

Can you-preserve and move that under these circumstances?