I remember exactly where I was on August 15, 2061. Like everyone else, I was watching the live footage: helicopters flying over Ocean Drive, families huddled on the roofs of Art Deco buildings, the murky water swallowing Collins Avenue meter by meter. The anchor spoke of a "historic event." He should have said "historic crime."

Let's be clear: Miami was not destroyed by Hurricane Valentina, nor even by rising seas. Miami was abandoned. Deliberately. Methodically. Through decades of political choices that all prioritized the short term over survival.

Today, ten years after the Final Evacuation, the federal government is organizing "commemoration and hope" ceremonies. They celebrate the 4.2 million Floridians "successfully relocated." They carefully avoid mentioning the 127,000 who didn't survive the transition, the suicides, the broken families, an erased culture.

Chronicle of an announced abandonment

Climate archives are clear: as early as 2024, all models predicted what would happen. That year's IPCC report—I reread it recently, it's available in the digital archives—described with chilling precision the scenario we lived through. Word for word.

"At this rate of emissions, coastal areas of South Florida will be uninhabitable by 2050-2060. The question is not whether Miami will be submerged, but when and how we will manage this transition." — IPCC AR6 Report, 2024

We had forty years to prepare. Forty years to build dikes, to plan gradual relocations, to develop reception infrastructure inland. What did we do instead?

We built luxury skyscrapers on condemned land. We sold $50 million apartments to buyers who were assured that "technology would find a solution." We elected governors who forbade civil servants from using the words "climate change" in official documents.

The myth of "natural disaster"

I can already hear the objections. "It was a natural disaster," some say. "No one could have predicted Valentina's violence." These arguments are not only false, they are obscene.

Hurricane Valentina merely delivered the coup de grâce to a patient already in palliative care. Since 2040, Miami Beach had been flooded an average of 180 days per year. The pumps ran 24/7. Saltwater had contaminated the aquifers. Insurance companies had stopped covering coastal properties since 2035.

The rich had already fled. The poor had nowhere to go. When Valentina struck on August 12, 2061 with its 340 km/h winds and 8-meter storm surge, it didn't destroy a city: it drowned a climate ghetto we had created ourselves.

The profiteers of apocalypse

While climate refugees crowded into the "transition" camps of Atlanta and Charlotte—some are still there—others prospered. Real estate developers who had invested in the "new coastal zones" of Tennessee and Arkansas saw their assets triple.

The construction companies that built the "relocation eco-cities"—those concrete blocks where former Floridians were parked—raked in contracts worth hundreds of billions. The same companies, incidentally, that had built Miami's towers while swearing they would withstand anything.

"We didn't fail to save Miami. We succeeded in monetizing it until the last second, then monetizing its destruction." — Dr. Angela Reyes, economist, University of Puerto Rico (exiled)

The most revolting part? Some of these profiteers now sit on "commemoration" committees. They speak of "lessons learned" and "collective resilience" from their air-conditioned penthouses, 400 meters above sea level.

What we really lost

Official figures speak of infrastructure and GDP. They say nothing about what really disappeared beneath the waves: a culture, an identity, a way of being in the world.

Little Havana no longer exists. Three generations of Cuban-Americans had built a world apart there, with its cafés, its dominoes on the sidewalks, its lilting Spanish mixed with English. All of that is now under ten meters of saltwater. The few objects saved—a coffee machine, a set of dominoes, yellowed photos—are displayed at the Museum of the Floridian Diaspora in Nashville. Relics under glass, like artifacts from an ancient civilization.

The Everglades, which we had sworn to protect, are now just a stretch of brackish water where the carcasses of the last alligators float. The Keys disappeared so fast that residents didn't even have time to say goodbye to their homes.

"Nothing could be done"

That's the lie we tell ourselves to sleep at night. But look at the Netherlands. Look at Japan. Look even at New Orleans 2.0, rebuilt behind its titanic dikes.

Other nations faced rising seas. They invested, planned, built. They sometimes failed, sometimes succeeded, but they tried. We chose not to try. We watched our own city drown live on television, then changed the channel.

The Netherlands spends 1.5% of its annual GDP on coastal defenses. In 2050, the State of Florida devoted 0.003% of its budget to "climate preparedness." The rest went to tax cuts and subsidies for fossil fuel industries.

The future beneath the waves

Today, divers organize tourist visits of old Miami. For $500, you can swim above South Beach, glimpse the skeletons of towers through the murky water, pay your respects before the rusted carcass of the Freedom Tower.

It's become an attraction. An "underwater archaeological park," say the brochures. Tourists take selfies in front of the ruins. They post on social media: "Incredible to see this in person! #MiamiSubmerged #ClimateHistory".

I don't know what disgusts me more: that we let it happen, or that we've learned to turn it into entertainment.

The real question

Houston is next on the list. Then New Orleans—again. Then New York, Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos. The same reports we ignored in 2024 describe what awaits them. The same mechanisms of denial are at work. The same developers are building the same doomed towers.

The Great Submersion is not a past event. It's an ongoing process. And every year, we make the same choice we made for Miami: look away, hope technology will save us, keep living as if nothing is wrong.

So no, I won't participate in the commemoration ceremonies. I refuse to celebrate our "resilience" when that word is just a euphemism for our collective cowardice. I refuse to mourn Miami as if its death had been inevitable.

Miami didn't die of natural causes. We killed it. And if we change nothing, we'll kill the rest.