Welp I guess this is what the pivot from "it's not gonna be that bad" to "oh gosh we're fucked" looks like in the popular press
one imagines the pitch for Detroit and Buffalo are different flavors of "we already fucked the place up real bad, how much worse could it get?"
of course, the answer is always much worse.
anyway, the Transition Town movement has been around for almost 20 years. this seems more like real estate speculation and typical american city boosterism.
i once tried to explain to a friend of mine that, while his specific home may be spared direct damage during an inundating event due to its height above sea level, his coastal community and region were all at high risk and that means he was also at risk because what happens to the people in your community happens to you. but property line brain has a stranglehold on ameroids. they literally think they are all self-contained islands in a cluster of self-sufficient archipelagos. rather than being, of course, a fragile interdependent network maintained by constant streams of reliable electricity and diesel filled tractor-trailers full of calories, fruits and vegetables & medications invariably extracted, packaged and processed way the fuck elsewhere.
All good points. For me it was disappointing but not unexpected to see the astroturfed optimism "here's why 1.5 C isn't all that bad" press that greeted the IPCC report about 6 months ago get replaced with "here's where you can Masque of the Red Death climate change." People are going to have to relocate, ideally sooner rather than later, and there are places that are going to be better to relocate than others, but nowhere will be untouched and people who think that's going to be the case are dangerous.