This TED Talk features meteorologist David Titley, recorded live at TED 2017.

So I'd like to tell you a story about climate and change, but it's really a story about people and not polar bears.

So this is our house that we lived in in the mid-2000s. I was the chief operating officer for the

Navy's Weather and Ocean Service. They happened to be down at a place called Stennis Space Center

right on the Gulf Coast, so we lived in a little town called Waveland, Mississippi. Nice, modest house,

and as you can see, it's up against a storm surge. Now, if you ever wonder what a 30-foot or nine-meter storm surge does

coming up your street, let me show you. Same house. That's me, kind of wondering what's next.

But when we say we lost our house, this is like right after Katrina. So the house is either all the way up there in the railway tracks,

or it's somewhere down there in the Gulf of Mexico.

And to this day, we really lost our house.

We don't know where it is.

You know, it's gone.

So I don't show this for pity,

because in many ways, we were the luckiest people on the Gulf Coast.

One of the things is we had insurance,

and kind of that idea of insurance is probably pretty important there.

But does this scale up, you know, of what happened here?

And I think it kind of does, because as you've heard, that as the sea levels scale up, you know, of what happened here? And I think it kind of does,

because as you've heard,

that as the sea levels come up,

it takes weaker and weaker storms to do something like this.

So let's just step back for a second and kind of look at this.

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