A few years ago I contemplated selling my Brooklyn apartment, which happens to be situated on one of the highest points in the entire city, and purchasing a whole house.

But it turned out that many of the neighborhoods that had buildings I could afford were closer to Brooklyn's marine edges. These area are well in range of even conservative predictions for intensified flooding and storm damage due to global warming.

So given that insurers are already cancelling policies for coastal homes in the Northeast due to intensified hurricane risks (they have been trying to figure out how to factor global warming into their business for the better part of the past decade), it seemed a lot more prudent in the end to just stay put.

Lucky-ish for me. (Everyone in New York City lives on the coast, after all, no matter how high one might be above it.) But what about people already living in risky areas? If they don't want to move, they'll have to plan ahead.

This is just what's happening in Florida, where three big government agencies recently issued a triple "red alert" about planning for global warming. According to the News-Press of South Myers,

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a new policy directing staff to take rising sea level into account in planning new projects, and to review existing projects to see how they will be impacted.

The South Florida Water Management District released a report that says South Florida is highly vulnerable to sea level rise. The district is investigating the effects on regional flood control and water supplies and how to offset them.

The Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, in partnership with the Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program, completed a 311-page climate change assessment that says there will be a 5-inch rise in sea level, killing some fisheries and washing out sea turtles and shore birds.

This means that any remaining debate, complacency or indecision government agencies once had about the threat of global warming has given way to urgency.

Adapting to climate change is likely to be expensive, but that's in comparison to the world Floridians live in today, not the one they can reasonably anticipate as their future home.

According to even an optimistic scenario, in which the world's nations sharply cut greenhouse gas pollution between now and 2050, Florida will see considerable damage to its coastline and coastal ecologies.

However, if emissions are not slashed by mid-century, according to the same research (aka the "business as usual" scenario), sea levels in Florida may rise 27 inches.  At high tide that would submerge 4,700 miles of the state -- 9 percent of its total area -- and affecting tens of thousands of people.  If this worst-case scenario comes to pass, the Florida Keys will disappear, and seawater will encroach upon a sizable chunk of the Everglades.

"The loss to the state would include $130 billion in real estate, half of Florida's beaches, 99 percent of mangroves, 68 hospitals, 74 airports, 140 water treatment facilities, 334 public schools, 341 hazardous-material cleanup sites, 1,362 hotels, motels and inns and 1,025 churches, synagogues and mosques," reports the News-Press.

Researchers Fred Ackerman is quoted as saying that the state's best option, while nations diplomatically duke out the future of the world's climate, is to plan ahead.

It's kind of like taking out insurance. You hope for the best but plan for the worst.

"The most likely outcome is that you will never use the fire insurance on your home, for instance, but everyone still thinks they need fire insurance," Ackerman told reporter Mary Wozniak. "We tried to estimate the worst end of the range of likely outcomes. This is fundamentally an insurance-type problem, not a precise estimate of most likely results."

Image: Tropical Storm Fay floods Florida.  Source: NASA Earth Observatory