Not a dry eye eye in the house

Does building on a temporary sandbar make sense? Who cares?

California’s wealthiest global warmists flock to pay millions for doomed weekend beach houses

Prices for beach houses in Stinson Beach - an enclave in Marin County along Bolinas Bay - have increased five-fold from $688,000 in 2000 to $3.7million in May this year, figures from Zillow show. In the past year alone home values have risen 40 percent.

It comes despite the fact county officials have repeatedly warned rising sea levels could swallow the community's beaches and damage properties. 

Forget, for a moment, the hypothetical threat of rising sea levels, and look at the picture of Stinson Beach, above. That’s nothing but a sandbar between Stinson and Bolinas, and sandbars shift and erode, regardless of sea level, because the ocean’s waves carry incredible force when they smash into the shore, and move sandbars about in entirely predictable ways: currents sweep along the shore, picking up sand in one location, and when their energy/capacity for carrying that load dissipates, they drop drop it — further down the beach or back in deeper water — and move on down the beach, hungry for more. (A clear explantation of how barrier islands are formed and destroyed can be found here, at “The Conversation”.)

If fools and tech-angels want to rush onto vulnerable seashores and spend their pocket money on temporary beach houses, that should be their business, but when they use their political power to force middle-class taxpayers to bail them out, that’s everybody’s business, or it should be.

Taxpayer-funded relief programs for these poor stars, politicians and cyber-billionaires take many forms, but here’s how one operates at Stinson Beach:

In an effort to prevent flooding from taking over the area, officials have implemented a series of measures, including building sea walls, elevating homes above the ground, expanding sand dunes, and moving buildings out of dangerous areas. 

Although rising sea levels have taken over the beach, homebuyers are still keen to take the risk, Bird said. 

These buyers aren’t “taking the the risk” for themselves; they are shifting it into the wallets of people who could never afford to join the cottagers as homeowners, or even expect an invitation to one of their whine and cheese parties. So brave, so courageous, so hypocritical.

UPDATE: I saw a headline just now referring to “Eco-Hypocrites”, and it occurred to me that “Ecocrites” would work very nicely as a label for these horrible people. So I think I’ll use it going forward. (Ooops! I just went looking, and found a reference to the term dating back to 2007, per the Urban Dictionary. Oh, well, it does sum up the character of these people, so if I can’t take pride of coinership, I can still use it.)