Pirate's Cove

Because every weather event is now your fault

Buffalo Tests its Status as a Climate Refuge

At a Puerto Rican cultural center on Buffalo’s West Side, young dancers in bright skirts swayed to the sound of drums in an Afro-Carribean tradition carried across generations.

Eighteen-year-old Darnel Davila maintained a steady beat, striking his drum in time with each snap of the skirts.

Davila and his family came to Buffalo in 2017 after Hurricane Maria, one of the deadliest disasters in Puerto Rico’s history. It ripped through his hometown of Loiza, tearing the roofs off of buildings, and caused the longest blackout in U.S. history. (snip)

They chose to move to Buffalo, where an aunt had already settled. When he first arrived, Davila, then 10 years old, spoke no English, and the harsh, snowy winters were unlike anything he’d seen before.

Little did the family know, Buffalo’s leaders would soon start branding the city as a climate refuge after a Harvard study revealed that Buffalo and Duluth, Minnesota, were the most suitable cities in the U.S. for people looking to resettle away from the risks of the warming globe, such as sea level rise, hotter temperatures, fiercer storms and wildfires.

Um, it snows a lot in those two cities – though the wackadoodles did call the last few massive blizzards in Buffalo as proof of ‘climate change.’

Over the years, Buffalo’s leaders advertised the city as a place where people could be spared the worst outcomes of climate change, pointing to its fresh water supply from the Great Lakes and relative insulation from heat waves and wildfires.

The label gained widespread traction in 2019, when Buffalo mayor Byron Brown declared Buffalo to be a “climate refuge city for centuries to come,” in his State of the City address.

Six years later, the claim remains contested, with critics questioning whether Buffalo has the climate and infrastructure to still call itself a refuge.

They’re serious. No, really. They are seriously discussing this claptrap. Loony tunes. Buffalo could not survive without fossil fuels.