Protecting At-Risk Cities From Rising Seas 243
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that with about 10 million people in England and Wales living in flood risk areas, rising sea levels and more storms could mean that parts of at-risk cities will need to be surrendered to protect homes and businesses, and that 'radical thinking' is needed to develop sea defenses that can cope with the future threats. 'If we act now, we can adapt in such a way that will prevent mass disruption and allow coastal communities to continue to prosper,' says Ruth Reed, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 'But the key word is "now."' Changing sea levels is not a new phenomenon. In the Netherlands, for example, with 40% of its surface under sea level, water management and water defense have been practiced since time immemorial; creating mounds and dykes, windmills, canals with locks and sluices, the Delta Works and the Afsluitdijk, all to keep the water out. Similar solutions to protect British cities are based on three themes (PDF): moving 'critical infrastructure' and housing to safer ground, allowing the water into parts of the city; building city-wide sea defenses to ensure water does not enter the existing urban area; and extending the existing coastline and building out onto the water (using stilts, floating structures and/or land reclamation)."
Other news (Score:4, Funny)
In other news, Himalayas have seen a surge of new visitors and people moving in.
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Everyone was laughing at me for building a giant boat in my back yard. Who's laughing now, suckers!
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Not the unicorns, that's for damn sure.
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the ultimate solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Sleepwalking? (Score:3, Funny)
A bit dangerous if you live in a houseboat.
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I'd rather fall in the water than fall down the stairs.
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Informative? Obviously the moderator hasn't a clue why you would need water wings in a sexual situation.
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There is always a good side to things too. It's a quick way to get off the ugly fat girl you took home from bar last night.
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Unless, of course, she's a witch.
In which case...
Villagers: (enter yelling) A witch! A witch! We've found a witch! Burn her! Burn her!
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"Live in a house boat. They float. An chicks dig house boats."
Two words: "Storm surge".
The solution seems obvious (Score:2)
Re:The solution seems obvious (Score:5, Funny)
There are two types of people I can't stand:
People who are intolerant of other people's cultures.
And the Dutch.
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But most of all, most of all, I hate the DUTCH! [wfmu.org]
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Oh, Hey Guys! Wow, that's a nice rope you got there! What GLACKKkkkk
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Whats wrong with sticking your fingers in dykes? I quite enjoy it.
Very True (Score:2)
The only thing you have to stop them touching is the roads, or they will turn them all into 'langsamwegs'
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Are you in the trade of delivering organs across Western Europe ?
Re:The solution seems obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
We will earn shitloads of money in the coming decades, building dikes and other stuff for other countries. If I had to choose a study now I would go to Delft, where all the relevant education concerning that is given.
Interesting Novel idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Do anyone has thought that instead of investing resources in fighting rising levels, it may be cheaper and safer constructing in the long run on higher terrain (england has many country parts), New Orleans tried to do the same and look at the social and economic impact it had
Xirvin
Re:Interesting Novel idea (Score:4, Interesting)
People can't think in terms of replacing cities because the idea that cities are changing instead of truly permanent is completely outside what they are taught. They cling to cities they should simply abandon and bulldoze (Detroit, the below-sea-level areas of New Orleans) for no logical reason.
Cities are cheap to replace, there is plenty of room, and the way to get better cities (especially in the US) is to smash old infrastructure instead of trying to save it.
Rising sea levels could force healthy changes to current urban areas by making them untenable.
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I take it you've actually done a cost estimate on rebuilding a city from scratch?
If so, can you share the results with the rest of us?
My back of the envelope guesstimate looks like somewhere between $100K and $1M per person to recreate a city elsewhere. Which isn't within my definition of "cheap"....
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Cities are normally "replaced" in-place as decades go by, so it is fair to call the replacement process "cheap". Builders can simply build on high ground and not replace low-lying structures. Old cities are obstacles to urban improvement. Consider the modern cities of Germany and Japan that started from blank slates in 1945 vs the decaying cities of the US Rust Belt.
Slums such as most of NOLA can be removed and not replaced, which is "cheaper" than rebuilding a ghetto. The whole idea of warehousing poor peo
Re:Interesting Novel idea (Score:4, Informative)
Cities are cheap to replace, there is plenty of room, and the way to get better cities (especially in the US) is to smash old infrastructure instead of trying to save it.
That idea in the 1950s and '60s was called "urban renewal," and it led to entire neighborhoods of solid old buildings being knocked down and replaced with shoddy crap. Not to mention that, you know, people lived there, and the effects on them were pretty destructive. Ever thought about why "living in the projects" is considered to be a bad thing? There may occasionally be times when "bulldoze it all away" is the right solution -- sections of Detroit, as you mention, are largely deserted and probably unsalvageable -- but such times are very much the exception.
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Historically, that was the function (intended or unintended) of fires. The great fires in Rome and London did significant amounts of damage, but also opened the way for some renewal in areas of those cities that had been falling into decay.
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We know our settlements are changing. We don't have many Roman buildings (although there are many more Roman streets). Are you really suggesting demolishing (or allowing to fall into ruin) many of the best, living examples of 2000+ years of human culture and civilisation?
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No, I believe he was suggesting that we let it happen unless you want to pony up to pay for the protection of those buildings. Believe me, I couldn't care less.
Re:Interesting Novel idea (Score:5, Interesting)
New Orleans did it badly. The Corps of Engineers had been warning for a very, very long time that the levees were in terrible shape (and in many cases poorly sited) but everyone ignored the warnings until they were illustrated in dramatic fashion.
How long a time? Well, my great-grandfather, William Elam, was one of the leading hydrological engineers of his day; he wrote "Speeding Floods to the Sea" which was pretty much the standard textbook on flood control on the Mississippi for the mid-twentieth century. And he warned about a Katrina-type scenario then, in 1946, and probably well before that. The knowledge was there to fix the problem. What was lacking, for decades, was the political will.
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Discovery channel in the 1990's ran a series of worst-case disasters like mega-earthquakes, mega-volcanoes, mega-tornadoes, mega-whatever... One of the episodes was a what-if scenario of a hurricane landing on New Orleans. Even then it was just brushed off as a one in two hundred years event.
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New Orleans didn't need to do it at all.
The idea of building in such an area was excusable when people knew no better, but the vast space available in the US means there is now no intelligent reason to have anything but a port and supporting infrastructure in NOLA.
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The Corps of Engineers had been telling the city that things were fine, and nobody had anything to worry about. Even now, after Katrina, with way more scrutiny and lots of different people pointing out various flaws and issues with how the Corps is proceeding, they continue to tell us that they've got it all under control, and that it's all going great.
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What was lacking, for decades, was the political will.
Was lacking? Pay much attention to the news, per chance?
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In 1971 the warnings were repeated, this time much, much louder.http://qurl.com/jmd7s [qurl.com]
I can explain. (Score:2)
Do anyone has thought that instead of investing resources in fighting rising levels
It's simple. The City of London (i.e. the financial district in London) is at risk. They pretty much own the government/country, so of course taxes are going to be raised to implement flood defences.
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Recommendations for visitors to London (Score:2)
2. Do not use the Tube trains around high water.
Re:Recommendations for visitors to London (Score:4, Interesting)
3. Go and visit the Thames Barrier [wikipedia.org]. It's very impressive.
Re:Recommendations for visitors to London (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, right (Score:5, Funny)
the Delta Works and the Afsluitdijk
I've heard of some crazy Scandinavian names, but come on. That's just somebody banging on the keyboard. Next you're going to tell me about the famed Swedish Lkajadsfglkn.
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Gesundheit!
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Afsluitdijk translates (if translated literally) to English as "Obstructdike".
Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Informative)
That's hardly a strange name. Not if you know that the Dutch have a seperate "vowel" which is i and j combined (ij) and sounds almost the same as "y" in "why". Do the Dutch word dijk becomes the English word "dyke". The word "afsluit" is equivalent to the English words "close down". In essence it means "a dyke that closes down" and it's a reference to the sea inlet called the Zuidersea (or South Sea) and turned into a lake. Yes, the South Sea was originally the other connected to the "North Sea" until we pacified its rough waters. It's a source of engineering pride for us.
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One of the seven wonders of the modern world even. And screw the Chinese wall: if any man-made engineering feat actully is visible from space, it has to be Flevoland.
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Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Funny)
It's How We Are (Score:2, Interesting)
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For some of us, that's a contradiction in terms. Not everyone can feel comfortable in a rat warr..err, "high density urban area".
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in a rat warr..err
The quality of life and amenities available in the urban core of a world class city make the rat warr..er lifers of the outback look like primitive mammals popping out of gapes in the broken, sparse infrastructure of some small town. But sessions of near total isolation in a wilderness area, well I'm all for that.
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We don't have to give up on inhabiting coastal areas, but we don't have to locate in flood zones and highly vulnerable areas. We can make decisions based on logic instead of emotion, and those of us who will get skinned by the taxman to pay for the stupid choices of others can fight back.
Well, telling them doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though they are clearly marked on the maps, and (presumably) are discovered in property searches, people still buy these places. Yet when the inevitable happens - for rain is a fact of life in England, they whine and moan about "our house has flooded ... you gotta HELP us!" Better still, a lot of river-side properties are very desirable and attract huge premiums. The buyers seem not to associate having a large body of moving water, passing by the bottom of the gardens to their million-pound houses, with any sort of risk, at all.
All I would suggest is huge .... massive .... crippling ... increases in home insurance premiums to both alert buyers to the dangers and also to make them pay the going rate for repairs and renovations - rather than being subsidised by all the sensible people. Just like happens with car insurance.
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This must be universal because the same thing happens annually in Canada. How difficult can it be to protect yourself from flooding? Page one of my brief manual reads "Don't buy a house that was built _in_ a fricken river, or _on_ the beach in the first place."
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Not really. My manual considers the flood plain as part of the river. Just like the beach up to the high tide mark (and beyond) is part of the sea. If my house ever floods, then a couple of nearby cities will be under 100 feet of water and I'll need scuba gear to do my shopping there.
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It completely astonishes me to read every
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I dont want to foot the bill for people in flood regions when the river misbehaves, just like I don't want to foot the bill for people on the coast when the ocean misbehaves.
Next up: People living next to an active volcano situated on a fault line on a river basin that is somehow under sea level on a hill where mudslides are common, want help.
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Property searches used to only include checking title, open planning applications and mining. Only last month [vic.gov.au] did the land registry link up with the Environment Agency to provide flood risk information. It is still quite basic, apparently doing no more than linking a postcode to a situation on this map [environmen...ncy.gov.uk]. Few people read (or are even given) the results of searches, they just rely on their lawyer pointing things out.
Many of the major floods seen in the news here in recent years have been extraordinary stuff,
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Actually, it's not just in winter. I've seen a one-foot wide trickle go to a twenty-foot wide raging torrent after a summer thunderstorm.
They're preparing for defeat? (Score:2)
They think it'll prove politically impossible to change course and stop the rise in sea level?
What are their plans for handling starving refugees? Or, merely feeding themselves? Living with tropical diseases? I think a little more thought on the disruptions would encourage a redoubling of efforts to stop the warming. It is not yet too late for that.
This kind of planning smacks of Cold War futility and madness, when quite a few nuclear bomb shelters were built and plans made to retreat to mine shafts
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Moving cities isn't "defeat". Let's remember that coastal cities are where they are because that's where the "coast" is, and when the coastline changes construction can adapt to that.
"What are their plans for handling starving refugees? Or, merely feeding themselves? Living with tropical diseases? I think a little more thought on the disruptions would encourage a redoubling of efforts to stop the warming. It is not yet too late for that."
Why should there be any such problems from a _gradual_ rise in sea lev
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Not pork (Score:2, Interesting)
Whomever labeled this "pork" should think of New Orleans and reconsider. Protecting vulnerable coastal areas with levees and such is a valuable investment in human life.
Re:Not pork (Score:4, Insightful)
The US Eastern Seaboard has major problems with beach erosion. The real problem is that sand beaches have never been static; they erode, move, and build up in different spots depending on vagaries of currents and storms.
Of course idiots still want beachfront property as close to the ocean as they can get, so the obvious solution is to have Congress subsidize rebuilding the beaches and paying for flood insurance [spislandbreeze.com]. If the government would just get out and let the property owners bear the real cost the problem would solve itself.
New Orleans? I'm not convinced it's all that special. Move it inland about 50 miles and the problem goes away
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Things Change? (Score:2, Funny)
Ever!
Harvey Cedars Beach Replenishment project (Score:2)
Of course idiots still want beachfront property as close to the ocean as they can get, so the obvious solution is to have Congress subsidize rebuilding the beaches and paying for flood insurance.
They want to be close to the water and have a great view. In Harvey Cedars, NJ, there was a beach replenishment project that resulted in an interesting twist -- a couple who were unhappy that beachfront replenishment was going to ruin their house's first-floor view of the ocean sued (and won) $480,000.
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I agree completely on both counts. Coastlines simply are not static, and as time passes the money to preserve any strip of coastline, regardless of whether its rocky, sandy, cliffs, whatever, is simply going to increase. It's one thing to dredge out ports, where at least you can make an economic argument for the resources and cash required, but for beach front property?
As to government flood insurance, it encourages insane behavior. I'm in British Columbia, and here, ever six or seven years, the Fraser R
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New Orleans happened in a large part because of human intervention. Levees and canals magnified the impact of Katrina enormously.
And there is the basic lesson, don't build your city below sea level next to the ocean.
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You forgot a few, below sea level, next to an ocean, between a river draining half the continent and a lake 30+ miles wide, and in a swamp.
New Orleans would be a lot safer if the USACE hadn't taken on the herculean effort of keeping the Mississippi river running through the city. Rivers naturally change course, and the Mississippi was in the process of shifting westward (IIRC it would have been headed close to due south from from Baton Rouge) before it was "tamed" through massive geological engineering. Wit
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"And there is the basic lesson, don't build your city below sea level next to the ocean."
Tell that to the slum dwellers who want their slum replaced where they were.
New Orleans was basically a giant ghetto with the French Quarter as tourist bait. Too bad more of it didn't get destroyed sufficient to prohibit rebuilding. There was nothing of value there.
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"Protecting vulnerable coastal areas with levees and such is a valuable investment in human life."
You don't need a levee if you don't build in an area that require a levee. The US is vast, no one requires to live below sea level or in areas inevitably subject to storm surge.
The intelligent and ethical way to protect people from the consequences of living below sea level or in other extremely vulnerable areas where no one would build a city now is to prohibit them from doing it.
Let's remember that NOLA is a
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You don't need a levee if you don't build in an area that require a levee. The US is vast, no one requires to live below sea level or in areas inevitably subject to storm surge.
New Orleans was just an example, we can't compress the entire world population to only live in the most habitable areas. You'd still need settlements in the less habitable ones due to available natural resources and (naval) trade routes. There are cases where the benefits outweigh the costs, especially when you consider we also need vast amounts of land for crops.
(Living in the Netherlands, I might be biased, but in many cases managing risks will be more feasible economically and logistically than simply av
Nice to get some bargain beachfront property (Score:2, Funny)
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You can always buy in Galveston. The sea periodically rises to meet you.
On the other hand (Score:2, Insightful)
It might be wiser for the UK to invest in more snowplows and salt.
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"more", or "some"? :-P
Finally... (Score:3, Funny)
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Nuclear power station highest priority (Score:2)
Managed Retreat (Score:2)
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Run Away! Run Away!
water towers (Score:2)
Why can't we build huge water towers to lower the sea level ?, there really isn't that much water on the earth its just very thinly spread out.
We could build them at the poles and the water would freeze making it much safer (from terrorism, quakes, etc).
Any reason why this wouldn't work ?.
The Right Wing Can't Float (Score:2)
Perhaps we should take the right wing loonies who have denied that global warming is a reality or raised voices against taking action until absolute agreement of every nut jog maverick scientist in the world agrees that it is real and stake them out in the low spots on the English coast. They can then repeat over and over again "I am not drowning".
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From this article (by a unabashed pro-global warming person), the estimate is 3 feet by 2100.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0323_060323_global_warming.html [nationalgeographic.com]
"By the end of this century the seas may be three feet (one meter) higher than they are today, according to a pair of studies that appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science."
This other pro global warming site has a different figure (backed up by several other sites)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11049-major-climate-change-r [newscientist.com]
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Found this after I posted...
It has some nice graphs of actual sea level change vs various IPCC predictions and says in part...
"... I conclude that the ongoing debate about future sea level rise is entirely appropriate. The fact that the IPCC has been unsuccessful in predicting sea level rise, does not mean that things are worse or better, but simply that scientists clearly do not have a handle on this issue and are unable to predict sea level changes on a decadal scale. The lack of predictive accuracy does
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"by a unabashed pro-global warming person"
He (she) lives somewhere cold too, hey?
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That New Scientist article is from 2007. Here is one from July 2009: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.300-sea-level-rise-its-worse-than-we-thought.html?page=1 [newscientist.com] .
In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a sea level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100, but this excluded "future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow".
If this trend continues, Rignot thinks sea level rise will exceed 1 metre by 2100. So understanding why Greenland and Ant
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When you're talking about coastal areas as densely populated as much of England's are, 90 years is about the right amount of time to plan. Short-sighted, "ahhh, we'll worry about it when it happens" thinking is responsible for most of the death and destruction from natural disasters of any sort.
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Bah! If we are talking about England, all the current buildings will have been bulldozed and replaced by shittier buildings at least twice. It seems to be accelerating, there are shabby 15 years old buildings that replaced the 60's high rises that replaced the Victorian terraced housing. I blame air pollution, all that lead poisoning has increased the numbers of architects.
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No current structure need last 90 years for other than sentimental reasons because their design will be obsolete. Urban renewal require infrastructure replacement, and 90 years is plenty of time.
Re:90 years in the future... (Score:4, Interesting)
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You mean like how it was killing the coral reefs but then it wasn't, and it was warming the top of Kilimanjaro but then it wasn't, like it had caused the glaciers in the Himalayas to retreat massively but then they weren't, like ....
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ah. The telegraph. A beacon of science in a medieval world? And an article from Dr Mörner? you say ? this person perhaps ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils-Axel_M%C3%B6rner#Views_on_dowsing [wikipedia.org] ?
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there are climate scientists trying to disprove global warming, but they fail,... what does THAT tell you?
That it's not a real, honest-to-goodness, falsifiable scientific theory, but rather just a bunch of "best guesses" based on computer models? But don't worry. Just send all your money to Al Gore and he will personally guarantee that these here carbon dioxide molecules leave you and your family alone. (Alternate metaphor: "The end is near! It is imminent! Send Al Gore your money now to ensure your salvation from the Carbon Beast!")
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http://frankbi.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/falsifiability-falsification-and-conspiracy-theories/ [wordpress.com]
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there are climate scientists trying to disprove global warming, but they fail,... what does THAT tell you?
Come on. There are climate scientists trying to prove global warming, but they fail too. There just isn't enough evidence to show that CO2 is having a significant effect on global temperature.
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I strongly agree.
The truth is controversial because people have an emotional buy-in to obsolete ways of thinking.
The ocean shares no such outlook.
Re:This is a Darwin test people (Score:4, Insightful)
> If you happen to live in these flood prone locations there are two choices:
> a) Fix the entire world to stop rising waters ---- not likely.
> b) MOVE to higher ground.
You forgot option 'c' --
c) Make the ground you already own a foot or two higher.
A hundred years ago, the land my house sits on (western Pembroke Pines, Florida) was theoretically (if not actually) underwater a few months per year. It wasn't swamp... it was outright, honest-to-god 'Everglades'. Yet, talking to my neighbors, the neighborhood has never flooded -- or even came close to it -- in ~30 years.
Why?
The big dike a few miles west, and the huge drainage canals everywhere obviously help... but there's another factor: the developer turned the low-lying areas into deep lakes, and used the debris to raise the surrounding area. So... when we have a really bad (read: daily) summer downpour, the water runs into the storm drains, then gets dumped a few hundred feet away in those same lakes.
The work quite well. Last month, large parts of South Florida were flooded for a day or two after massive downpours that dumped more than a foot of rain. We barely even had puddles on the roads.
Media propaganda to the contrary, FEMA doesn't just dump money into low-lying areas. If you build a house in a floodplain and it gets flooded, FEMA (as a condition of making flood insurance available to an area) requires that the local government pass laws requiring rebuilt homes to have their lowest habitable floor a couple of feet above the "500 year" water level. You can buy landfill to raise your lot's height, you can build on pilings, or you can take the insurance money and head for the hills. What you *can't* do is put yourself in the exact same situation you were in beforehand.
Over time, economically valuable parts of low-lying cities will get rebuilt on pilings. Over the next 25-50 years, the roads get rebuilt higher, with better storm drains and stormwater retention ponds.
The controversy in New Orleans is that people in the flooded areas wanted special treatment & exemption from the rules -- to which FEMA firmly said, "No. You'll rebuild on pilings, or you won't rebuild. This isn't oppression by The Man... it's common sense."
My prediction: the poorest, lowest-lying, most destroyed parts of New Orleans that aren't likely to be rebuilt anytime soon will sit vacant for a few years, until property values rise high enough for large corporate developers (Toll Brothers, Lennar, etc) to start quietly buying up large tracts of low-lying land. Once they own enough, they'll do the same thing there that they've done in Florida: dig a deep lake and/or surround the new community with a moat^h^h^h^h linear retention pond, build new concrete storm drains and streets above the historical flood level, then backfill the remaining area & turn it into expensive waterfront suburbia.
Want to know what future coastlines in areas supposedly vulnerable to rising sea levels will look like? Go to South Beach. Most people don't even REALIZE it until you point it out to them, but it's actually surrounded by a huge dike -- the artificial dunes built as part of the beach renourishment program in the 80s and 90s, and the streets along the island's perimeter that have been progressively raised during widening and reconstruction to form de-facto dikes. Ditto, for Miami's bayfront neighborhoods.
The strategy is simple: raise the roads, and let the wealthy property owners on the lower waterfront side worry about raising their own property level when they end up rebuilding -- possibly due to storm damage, more likely due to bulldozing away the older single-family homes and replacing them with skyscrapers. Any time a road in Florida gets widened, it almost always gets rebuilt a foot or two higher than it used to be. Stir, rinse, repeat for a hundred years, and by the time the sea level rises enough to flood areas that are dry today, hardly anyone will even notice. The areas that flood will have been floodin