I've read about potential disaster shit forever and I hadn't seen this till now
a quarter of America's food is grown under that inland sea on the map
here's a long article which goes into detail including how the 1862 storm was the final death knell for the rancheros in the Central Valley who were forced to sell their land to settlers for next to nothing
The cities of 160 years ago could not boast municipal wastewater facilities, which filter pathogens and pollutants in human sewage, nor municipal dumps, which concentrate often-toxic garbage. In the region’s teeming twenty-first-century urban areas, those vital sanitation services would become major threats. The report projects that a toxic soup of “petroleum, mercury, asbestos, persistent organic pollutants, molds, and soil-borne or sewage-borne pathogens” would spread across much of the valley, as would concentrated animal manure, fertilizer, pesticides, and other industrial chemicals.
i'm still staggered at how apocalyptic this is and how small it is in public consciousness, even the researchers who modeled the ARkStorm hadn't heard about the Great Flood of 1862 when they began according to the article
See you down in Arizona Bay. What would even be the response to this? The food supply greatly interrupted so an increase in imports. All that flood land filled with toxic waste that will cause cancer and other problems for years to come. The upfront loss of lives and property. The government would either have to buy up all that useless land or real estate would parcel it up and devour it. Then they would probably get a tax break for doing so. It wouldn't be useful for farming for a time. I could see the areas near cities being developed after being "cleaned" (wink wink). You'd be crazy not to with huge swaths of basically free land. So more urban sprawl that can be sold as a solution to displaced survivors. Then the carcinogen thing along with birth defects in these neighborhoods. Nobody gets persecuted for it but a few are very rich.
Goddamn this sucks.
Massive exodus to other states, mainly.
But I have to wonder how climate change will affect the timetable in reality--so much of it is hard to predict (as the team already found).
capitalism no food