The Golden Gate Barrage: New Ideas To Counter Sea Level Rise 341
waderoush writes "What do Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit have in common? They're just a few of the tech companies whose campuses alongside San Francisco Bay could be underwater by mid-century as sea levels rise. It's time for these organizations and other innovators to put some of their fabled brainpower into coming up with new ideas to counter the threat, Xconomy argues today. One idea: the Golden Gate Barrage, a massive system of dams, locks, and pumps located in the shadow of the iconic bridge. Taller than the Three Gorges Dam in China, it would be one of the largest and costliest projects in the history of civil engineering. But at least one Bay Area government official says might turn out to be the simplest way to save hundreds of square miles of land around the bay from inundation."
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
...maybe put that brainpower into solving the actual global problem, rather than finding a bandaid solution to the local symptom....
SanFran would be the new NOLA. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's build an extremely complex system of levees in an area prone to high magnitude earthquakes.
What could possibly go wrong?
Re:Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm, yeah, not going to happen. The powers that be in the US have pretty much decided they don't care about global warming, because it would cut into the profits of major industries like coal and oil and be expensive and unpleasant for everyone else.
Re:Or... (Score:2, Insightful)
...maybe put that brainpower into solving the actual global problem, rather than finding a bandaid solution to the local symptom....
A phenomally expensive band-aid that will likely tear apart in an earthquake, adding an inrushing wall of water to the rest of the problems.
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
I can save them a few trillion dollars: move to higher ground.
Re:Those places must suck to work in today... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or add four feet of dirt.
The water portion of the SF Bay was once twice the size it is right now. The reason those pieces of commercial (and residential) real estate are vulnerable is they are built on areas that once were 6 inches underwater at hide tide. They are not underwater every single day because dirt was shipped in.
They shipped in four feet of dirt to create the problem. How about we solve the problem with four more feet of dirt?
As for the barrage, the ecological costs would be enormous. A few merely massive pumping stations is not going to prevent the bay water from becoming a smelly cess pool polluted by agricultural runoff and much worse from the residential areas. It is a fun idea for civil engineers, but we are wealthy enough here to employ less tricky solution that will be more reliable.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
when and if sea level actually starts to rise... we'll talk.
Human activity does not just raise temperatures. It also raises the rate of increase. If you have taken calculus, and know what a derivative is, then it is not "h" that is increasing but dh/dt. So if we wait till sealevel rises, it will be too late. It is like refusing to get off the railroad tracks until you can actually see the train hit you.
The denialists made the same "show me the evidence" remark about the ice caps a decade ago. Today there is a million square miles of open water where there was previously ice for more than ten thousand years.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
this makes no sense at all (Score:4, Insightful)
So, in order to protect against a rise in sea level of no more than 1 foot in the absolute worst case, they need to build a system of dams, locks and pumps greater than 600 feet high???
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, of course. Even if for some reason the companys elected to stay, they'd naturally expect the government to build the structures using taxpayer money.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
With cash reserves like their's, they can just move instead. There is nothing special about the land they are using... the historical reason such projects made sense in the past was they were reclaiming farmable land, which is not quite as interchangeable as corporate parks.
It is not just San Francisco that is worried. Water levels won't just rise in that one city.
Turns out people have already done research on who lives in low-lying coastal regions. About 10% of the global population will likely need to move. 2/3 of the world's largest cities would be swamped or submerged. [npr.org]
The United States might lose only 5% of its land. Countries like India will lose half of their land. Some island nations will be completely uninhabitable.
Even if sea walls cost quadrillions of dollars globally to delay the eventual flooding of the land, that is likely still cheaper than such a massive sudden loss of existing infrastructure. It is cheaper (for a few centuries, at least) to spend a few trillion dollars protecting major cities than it is to completely rebuild the cities elsewhere.
Yes the people will need to eventually move through both a planned migration and normal population growth. Relocating 10% of the global population in just a few short decades is a much harder problem to solve, and a much more expensive proposition, than to build the massive walls around existing large cities.
Re:Corporations (Score:2, Insightful)
"Or they could just move and leave it to the city"
Better yet, they could just stay where they are, and forget about it.
The IPCC's worst projection was about a 1m rise in 100 years. That means about a foot and a half in 50 years.
Hell, even the artificial island of Alameda is higher above water level that that. And San Francisco is STEEP. You can be a city block away from the water and already several meters above it.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely.
The "Climate Change" that threatens these companies is the economic climate of the former Golden State.
At 3.25 inches per century (the current rate of sea level rise in California), by the time those campi have been inundated some tens of thousands of years from now, all of those companies will have either moved or gone under -- not from water, but by the flood of taxes and regulations in the Golden [Fleece] State.
sudden loss of existing infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
Like so many problems, it is not an all or nothing deal. Declare now that public funds will not be used for massive dyke projects, and publish a reasonable timetable describing tapering off of any flood coverage, such that the percentage of coverage is zero in 50 years. You can't fight nature, but there will be no end of people willing to take the money to try.