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After smoke kept him stuck inside for several weeks last year, he was done. The culture of the Bay Area was shifting with the growth of the tech industry, and the rising costs of property taxes and insurance threatened to make the house that he and his wife owned unaffordable. For Smith, an artist and writer, the 2020 fire season was a breaking point.
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When Steve Smith moved from Oakland to Bellingham, Washington last year, he made sure his neighbors knew he was a Coloradan by birth, even though he had spent the last three decades in California. And while an analysis from the California Policy Lab found “no evidence of a pronounced exodus from the state,” reports abound of Californians relocating to Idaho, Texas, Oregon and Washington in droves – much to the dismay of their new neighbors. California’s population continued to grow because of new births, but it grew more slowly than at any point since 1900. Last year, for the second straight year, more people left the Golden State than moved to it. Many Californians are already migrating elsewhere.
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In a more recent survey, conducted in early 2021, around half of people who plan to move in the next year said that the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters was a factor in their decision. And California has endured five of the biggest fires in its recorded history - to name just a few of the billion-dollar climate disasters to hit the United States in the last few years. Texas has been battered by floods from Hurricane Harvey and deadly freezing from an epic winter storm. Since then, historic levels of flooding have inundated the Midwest. Kim cautioned that the recent study is based on survey data from 2016. And the Midwest is facing more intense heat waves, heavy rainstorms and the spread of disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes and ticks. Sea level rise is leading to more flooding along the East Coast. The Northwest is seeing wetter winters, but drier, more fire-prone summers. The entire Southwest is getting hotter and more arid. “But recently, we’ve been through a lot here in the United States.” Because climate-induced migration has always been discussed in the context of the global south,” said Byungdoo Kim, a doctoral candidate in environmental communication at Cornell University and lead author of the study.
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“We’ve never asked this kind of question before in the context of the United States. At least 57% of Americans believe that weather- or climate-related events will influence their future moving decisions, according to a recent study published in Climatic Change. It was first published in Covering Climate Now and The Nation. This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. “And you’re thinking to yourself, well where are you going to go with this flight response?”īy November, Kornblatt and his wife, who both grew up in the Bay Area, had left California for Oregon. “It hit at the lizard brain part of your noggin, trying to tell you to just run,” Kornblatt said. Andrew Kornblatt woke up one morning at his home in Berkeley to find that the air had grown cool and still, and the sky was an eerie orange. The hot and dry conditions fueled fires all over the state, and smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away hung over the Bay Area for weeks. In September of 2020, California was in the midst of a record-setting heat wave.