Protecting rich people's expensive waterfront investments has always been the government's job. Witness Fed-subsidized flood insurance, expensive water control infrastructure, and in my back yard, pointless short-term beach restoration and erosion control efforts. My tax dollars protect beaches I am not allowed to swim in or walk on.

The vision of skyscrapers inundated by rising seas is a deliberately exaggerated one. The environmentalist Cassandras use it for effect, the denialists promote it to discredit the Cassandras. But even modest increases in sea level rise will result in an increase in the severity and frequency of storm damage, especially in those areas already subsiding for unrelated geological reasons and coastlines already stripped of their natural defenses, such as barrier islands and coastal vegetation, by development.

The buffalo vanished in less than a generation, this disaster will be in slow motion.