What Ian did:

Hurricane Ian has shown just what Florida is up against in a world where global warming is, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe described recently, “putting hurricanes on steroids.” Ian blew ashore with winds of 150 miles per hour, and pushed storm surges of 12 to 18 feet before moving across central Florida, where it caused extensive inland flooding. 

Ian splintered and washed away homes, broke bridges, toppled trees, tossed boats, submerged roads and fell power lines in communities like Fort Myers, Sanibel Island, Naples and the Orlando area. It caused $45 billion to $55 billion in property damage, according to a preliminary estimate from Moody’s Analytics. There are now fears that Ian will make the state’s insurance industry, already pushed to the brink by previous hurricanes, tip further toward collapse.

And it’s not as if there’s any reason to think another such hurricane won’t come along.

A core problem, experts said, is that too many people are living in high-risk areas in a state with the highest risk from hurricanes.

Or to put it more bluntly, people should be getting out of Florida.

Florida’s new spending on resilience is important, said Richard S. Olson, professor and director of the Extreme Events Institute and the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University. “I am not going to say it’s a Band-Aid; it is helping, of course,” said Olson, who researches the political fallout from disasters. “But is it enough when you consider we have had 70-plus years of coastal and barrier island development?” In the 1950s, Florida’s population was less than 3 million. Now, there are 22 million Floridians.

“A lot of those people wanted to live near the water,” Olson said. “Florida is a peninsula surrounded on three sides by warm water, in a hurricane zone. What could possibly go wrong? You have to question the development model.”

They wanted to live near the water, but not like that.