Sea Level Rise in the SF Bay Area Just Got a Lot More Dire (wired.com) 291
An anonymous reader writes: San Francisco Bay Area residents have long been aware of the threat that sea level rise poses to their coastal existence -- but things suddenly look a lot more serious. A new study examines the simultaneous phenomena of rising sea levels and subsiding coastal land, and as Wired reports, the situation is pretty dire. Models that factor in just sea level rise predict that at least 20 square miles could be underwater by 2100. Once you add in subsiding land, that jumps to nearly 50 square miles, and could get as bad as 165 square miles. Or, put another way, by the end of the century, half of the runways and taxiways at San Francisco Airport could be submerged.
The study found that most of the Bay's coastline is sinking at a rate of less than 2 millimeters a year -- and while that may not sound like a lot, the millimeters can add up fast. "You talk to someone about, 'Oh the land is going down a millimeter a year,' and that can be kind of unimpressive," says William Hammond, a researcher at the University of Nevada Reno who studies subsidence (but was not involved in this particular project). "But we know as scientists that these motions, especially if they come from plate tectonics, that they are relentless and they will never stop, at least as long as we're alive on this planet."
The study found that most of the Bay's coastline is sinking at a rate of less than 2 millimeters a year -- and while that may not sound like a lot, the millimeters can add up fast. "You talk to someone about, 'Oh the land is going down a millimeter a year,' and that can be kind of unimpressive," says William Hammond, a researcher at the University of Nevada Reno who studies subsidence (but was not involved in this particular project). "But we know as scientists that these motions, especially if they come from plate tectonics, that they are relentless and they will never stop, at least as long as we're alive on this planet."
First! To be under water (Score:2)
For most of SF, it's not really relevant. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm just not sure that this is really news. I guess it's mildly interesting to combine both tectonic subsidence and sea level rise, but, frankly, most of San Francisco is hilly. There won't be much impact. A small amount of the waterfront may get more wet, but most of SF will remain high and dry.
SFO airport is indeed at sea level-- it's right on the bay. But you can build runways up if you need to; it's not hard.
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Re:For most of SF, it's not really relevant. (Score:4, Informative)
You always gotta know when to get out of the market and take your max profit.
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SFO airport is indeed at sea level-- it's right on the bay. But you can build runways up if you need to; it's not hard.
No, it's not hard. It's just costly.
Enjoy your $20 runway surcharge tacked on to every flight in and out of that airport. And don't think for a second that cost burden won't be shared.
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No, it's not hard. It's just costly.
It's more costly not to have an airport to serve the peninsula. (OAK serves the east bay, and SJC serves the south bay). It is possible to have OAK and SJC take over more of SFO's traffic, but SFO is a very large airport compared to either of the others.
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The runways and taxiways are pretty easy to deal with as long as it is less than about an inch per decade-- just a little extra asphalt. Even the drainage systems for an airport are fairly manageable; you will need to add more pump stations, but not rocket science.
Where it gets tricky is low-lying building structures like utility tunnels where a couple extra inches of hydrostatic pressure is enough to flood. Then, as you pump out water you add to the subsistence.
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Enjoy your $20 runway surcharge tacked on to every flight in and out of that airport. And don't think for a second that cost burden won't be shared.
There are so many fees tacked onto every flight right now that nobody's going to notice an extra $20 for runways in San Francisco.
But there's a better alternative - just let the city sink, taking its uniquely poisonous political influence with it.
Stay sane (Score:2)
Money, good wine, and nice weather is for CRAZY people.
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You won't have any of that if you live in SF!
"The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Fransisco" - Mark Twain
Re:Stay sane (Score:4, Interesting)
SF is about dressing in layers. At night it's cold and windy, in the morning it is cool and foggy, and in the afternoon it can be mild and pleasant.
I prefer the weather in San Jose-Santa Clara, and the massively lower crime rate. (well, I suppose the white collar crime rate is high in Silicon Valley)
P.S. SFO isn't even in SF. It's like 3 cities away.
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Well if you make $150k/yr you can afford to live in a mere 45 minute commute.
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Yes, especially when we're talking three or four inches over 80+ years. It's not like routine runway repairs won't deal with the problem....
Re:For most of SF, it's not really relevant. (Score:4, Funny)
SFO airport is indeed at sea level-- it's right on the bay.
Don't worry . . . Über Swim will still be able to service the submerged airport.
But you can build runways up if you need to; it's not hard.
Who needs runways, when you can use Ground Effect . . . ?
Russia is already prepared to service the Aqua-Airport:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I guess it makes more sense to build a small dike.
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There won't be much impact.
Try riding a bicycle in 2 feet of water. Sure you're dry when you're at the top of some hill, but unless you only stay on a single hill all your life you're doing to have to go lower, sometimes down to sea level.
If SF's government were ran by competent Dutch people instead of morons this situation would not be nearly as concerning.
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The problem can be deferred for a very long time with a tidal barrier under or near the Golden Gate Bridge.
Impending wastewater treatment facility crisis als (Score:3)
Most if not all wastewater treatment facilities are located in low-lying coastal areas. Such facilities already frequently fail whenever there is excessive storm water drainage (from heavy storms), releasing untreated sewage into the bay.
Imagine the cost of having to completely replace all these treatment facilities at a time when all these other things are already going critical.
Another sad thing will be the loss of a lot of the protected wildlife habitat zones which exist around the bay. That they were
American way of life is doomed. (Score:5, Insightful)
The American way of life is doomed. It cannot continue as it is. We've passed the tipping point of recovery.
One side here wants to do everything we can to mitigate the problems associated with the change and make as painless as possible.
The other side just ignores it, calls it a Liberal Hoax or Chinese Hoax, thinks if there is a problem but so what it's natural and Jesus will save us. In the meantime life and business as usual. The shock they will experience will devastate them.
Plan for the worst; hope for the best - Winston Churchill.
Re: American way of life is doomed. (Score:2)
The "American Way" would be, "build an artificial island between the Pacific & SF Bay" and new port facilities somewhere on the "Pacific" side.
We're a nation of pioneers who CELEBRATE our triumphs over nature & revere those who made it possible. We've reversed the course of rivers, turned ephemeral sandbars into prime urban real estate, literally sliced away mountainsides to make room for new roads, and built a pipeline through 800 miles of frozen tundra without having it melt the permafrost & s
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Nuclear? "No nukes no nukes no nublub blub blub blub".
Yeah. They'll still be chanting "no nukes" as they go under.
Sea wall! (Score:2)
Re:Sea wall! (Score:5, Funny)
And we will get the Water to Pay for it!
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And we will get the Water to Pay for it!
Don't be silly... the Kaiju will pay for it.
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Or you could get a consortium of concerned individuals to invest in making the suggested infrastructure into a tidal lagoon, albeit one that won't benefit from the full tidal range - for obvious reasons. Selling the generated electricity, green electricity at that if you ignore ecosystem changes, would cover the capital costs in about 40-50 years*.
*Numbers based partly on numbers from a suggested local scheme and partly pulled out of my arse because of peak flow restrictions based on having to cap inflows t
Nothing to worry about (Score:4, Funny)
"Subsidence is a great driver of our economy." - SF Bay Gondoliers Association
Actual images seem much less dire (Score:4, Informative)
If you look at the base data [sciencemag.org] from the study, you can find the images for projected innovation at 2100 - it's not that much, mostly down at the end of the bay. Considering we are talking about nearly a hundred years for this change to occur there is a LOT of time to adapt - either by raising the land at risk (we are talking about just a meter of sea level change at worst in the most likely scenario), or building seawalls at the end of the bay the way the Netherlands has done.
San Francisco itself, is of course quite hilly as anyone who has ever visited knows, and is hardly impacted at all.
One final flaw in this study is the reoccurring flaw, they present a doomsday scenario that is "if nothing is done". But they totally do not account for the inevitable shift to solar/electric for power and transportation that will increase dramatically in the coming decades. This shifts all of the predictions to the low end in reality as the most likely scenario, by quite a lot in fact.
Re:Actual images seem much less dire (Score:5, Funny)
Plus they are not accounting for the fact that clean coal is a game changer and will result in major reductions in greenhouse gasses.
Clean coal is awful (Score:2)
Clean coal won't help one bit with man made global climate change, we need dirty coal to blot out the sun.
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Your "base data" is about global warming, the article is about: "The problem is a geological phenomenon called subsidence." A sinking continental shelf. I guess the first one you can combat with CO2 free energy, the later not.
Follow links much? (Score:2, Interesting)
My "base data" is from the study the article is based upon, brainiac.
Maybe you should try following the links and reading the actual study/data instead of thinking with your fingers?
Subsidence is a comparatively minor factor and in no way warrants the screaming doom headlines. The study is saying because of subsidence, somewhat more land may be at risk than previously thought, and tries to lay out what that might be... the data I point to and the points I make refer to the areas affected AFTER subsidence i
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The rise of solar doesn't automatically spell the decline of oil and gas. That will come down to what works cheapest in the shockingly poor rural areas of India and China. Places where today the air quality is so bad that on a bad day you can barely see across the street. Hopefully, there will be some new kind of solar that really is that cheap, and not dependent on any long-logistics-chain maintenance, but that's just hope.
Solar is cheapest in the end (Score:4, Interesting)
That will come down to what works cheapest in the shockingly poor rural areas of India and China.
I've been to really poor rural villages (like village uses a single well for water poor) in China and already see a lot of solar panels, also electric scooters. Because what ends up being really cheap is something you never have to travel to fuel.. a poor village is willing to wait a long time for chargers to charge up whatever.
In the end solar is by far the cheapest path for rural areas and electric motors are way easier to manufacture than combustion engines.
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That's promising. While industrial consumption will no doubt stay "fossil fuels" for quite some time, that's already high (especially in China). It's personal (residential/commuter) consumption that will explode in size as India and China modernize, and if that ends up going solar, so much the better.
Long term, there's little to argue about: only solar (and possibly fission if that ever stops being "20 years away") scales to 10-12 billion people consuming power at US rates. We really need a dense, therma
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Yes, until you realize that with current sea level there is a lot of damage from flooding at king tides when it rains in those areas. Raising that up 1m pushes the impacted areas inland significantly; even 10cm can have a huge impact.
Part of what people don't always realize is that when you pull water out of the ground (french drain around your foundation as an example) you are removing both water mass and dirt mass and that ultimately leads to lowering the elevation of the surrounding ground. The leaning
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No, this will have an impact, but mostly on the people who insist on building on eroding soil near the water.
Personally, I have no sympathy for those people anyway. And I just wish that our tax dollars didn't subsidize their insurance.
Plate Tectonics not Constant on Long Timescales (Score:2)
'Oh the land is going down a millimetre a year,' and that can be kind of unimpressive," says William Hammond, a researcher at the University of Nevada Reno who studies subsidence (but was not involved in this particular project). "But we know as scientists that these motions, especially if they come from plate tectonics, that they are relentless and they will never stop, at least as long as we're alive on this planet."
Actually as scientists we know that's not true provided we hang around for long enough (several hundred million years) as some other species have managed to. Plate tectonics can also uplift land and is responsible for mountain building. As new plates form and others merge the effects in one location can change....but you will need to hold your breath, literally, for a few million years or more (or, on that timescale, evolve gills) so it's not particularly helpful!
Location, Location, Location (Score:3)
Are house prices declining as a result of this?
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No. This is just nature's way of cleaning out the hipsters.
Who writes this sensationalist shit? (Score:2)
"...a lot more dire..." is that even English?
What's on from there, "totally humongously dire, dude!" ?
Is Trump editing /. now?
My lawn - you know what to do.
Correction: Stuff built on landfill is sinking (Score:2)
The article could have just as easily said "Coastal developments, including San Francisco Airport, that were build on landfill are sinking and may need remediation to prevent flooding in the future".
The study says "However, rates exceed 10 mm/year in some areas underlain by compacting artificial landfill and Holocene mud deposits.", which means it is sinking a lot faster than the water is rising.
Not all of SF (Score:2)
This is bad reporting (Score:2)
The globe is getting warmer and climates are changing and it's real.
But this level of fear-mongering is not helpful and diminishes our side of the argument. At this point anyone who argues that the world isn't getting warmer is seen as an idiot. Anyone who argues that it's not humanities fault is a blowhard. The current debates are how bad it's going to be and what we can do about it.
at a rate of less than 2 millimeters a year -- and while that may not sound like a lot, the millimeters can add up fast.
No. It doesn't. It adds up at a rate of 2mm/year. That is not fast. It's not compound. There is no interest.
San Fran has 10
Two birds with one stone (Score:2)
Put a dam across the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, the further West the better. Drain most of the Bay (leaving a few canals for the rivers to flow into) and reclaim the land.
This would solve SF's housing problem by providing lots of new land to build on, and it'll shorten the coastline, making it much easier to fortify against the rising sea level.
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Or go back to the other plan: fill in the Bay completely.
But seriously, this isn't so drastic. Worst case a tidal barrier (as London has on the Thames) would defer the issue for a very long time.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch (Score:2)
It's okay, San Francisco has a plan. (Score:2)
As a full-service Sanctuary City, they're simply adding an Aquatic Sanctuary.
Airport Technology (Score:2)
First Airport was in 1910 (approx) It's been 110 years. Will the SF Airport be relevant in 100 years?
Airports are already overcrowded, bottlenecked, and supposedly terrorist targets. The current model has a LOT of problems. Would you really expect the current model to still be relevant in 100 years?
As with all climate change discussions, I wonder why we're so interested in maintaining the status quo. Let's try something different. ;)
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Good point, hookers and blow it is.
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As with all climate change discussions, I wonder why we're so interested in maintaining the status quo. Let's try something different. ;)
I assume you're being facetious, but it's an interesting point.
The elusive "Northwest Passage" is becoming a reality. This would allow ships to travel from the Northeastern US and Europe to, say, Japan (or vice-versa) far more efficiently than going through the Panama canal, around South America, or around Africa. Of course, this might also mean that winters in the midwestern part of the US become much colder, which means it costs more to heat people's houses, government buildings, etc.
The "issue" with cl
6.5 inches by 2100? (Score:2)
Did I read that right? 2 mm * 82 years = 6.5 inches or so. Is that amount really going to cause runways to be flooded?
Gotta flush the toilet somehow (Score:2)
http://mochimachine.org/wastel... [mochimachine.org]
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Given that climate change is real, first make a sensible scientific and economic case that "solving" it is the best option.
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Solving it is probably the worst option as it may be unsolvable in a reasonable time frame.
Better question is mitigating it, how much effort to put into, eg keeping the sea level raise to a minimum and what would be the drawbacks/benefits to the economy and how much the government should be involved.
Think of the last time transportation was creating huge pollution problems. At the turn of the 20th century, it looked like we'd soon be buried in horse shit. The number of horses needed by the economy was fast
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It isn't that sea levels are rising, but rather why sea levels are rising. CO2 dissolved in the water is dissolving the shells of shellfish. The warm water is also driving schools of fish north and south where it is cooler. Once you whack the bottom of the food chain, you are next.
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Once you whack the bottom of the food chain, you are next.
I don't think phytoplankton are affected by minor changes in ocean CO2 levels. There's real debate about whether they're affected significantly by the warming oceans. They, like land plant life, will benefit from rising atmospheric CO2 levels.
Or were you imagining a "bottom" of the food chain several levels up from that?
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:4, Interesting)
Claiming that land plant life will benefit from rising CO2 levels isn't exactly substantiated by experiments. It's also not exactly refuted.
The plants grow more vigorously, but have a harder time producing proteins, and experience some additional trouble reproducing. This, of course, varies by species, but it's "generally true" among the particular species tested (generally important agricultural plants). And this is when other conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.) are held constant...which, of course won't happen. So the results don't exactly reflect what should be expected, because they only investigated variation in one variable.
Now among sea life there will be problems among those with enzymes that depend on, e.g., calcium ions reacting in a particular way. In general, any enzyme that is sensitive to a change in pH will experience a change in activity, and this is almost always to the detriment of the organism that has evolved to use it. So far it looks like jellyfish will do well, and some fish will do well, but others will experience problems. And, of course, any animal that depends on precipitating Calcium will experience problems, including all shell-fish. I haven't heard of many detailed studies, but the basis of the problem generally is at the molecular level, so expect generalized difficulties in survival, with occasional species benefiting. (All animals evolved to fit the circumstances experienced by their ancestors...plants too.) The basic problem can be expressed as "it's going to take more energy to drive the reactions in the way the bodies expect them to go...or, occasionally, the current reaction will overdrive in the changed environment.)
P.S.: About plants on land: The grow faster, but they are weaker, and more likely to break under environmental stresses, say rain or a heavy wind. And, as I said, they are lower in protein. So every herbivore is going to be switching to a diet high in carbohydrates. So they'll need to eat more to get sufficient protein. People have already demonstrated that this is survivable is you can get enough food, but they've also demonstrated that it's rather unhealthy.
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:4, Informative)
What's going to be affected are corals and species that use calcium exoskeletons, like shrimp. Corals are also badly affected by rising sea water temperature, causing coral reef collapses and the associated loss of habitat. This will propagate up the food chain, so there's going to be less fish and sea mammals.
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Sure, but the guy I was responding too was talking about "the bottom of the food chain". The bottom 4 layers of the aquatic food chain are
* plankton
* plankton that eats plankton
* plankton that eats plankton that eats plankton
* Things other than plankton that eat plankton
So, copepods and krill might be interesting here, if they're seriously affected (they compete for the title of largest animal biomass on Earth), though they seem to just trade off as dominant phytoplankton consumers in a given area as the e
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Yeah, but think about the Slugs, you insensitive clod!
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What we're seeing is that folks who overpaid for property are willing to leave half the planet in unimaginable poverty lest their property values decrease.
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you believe sea levels will rise, sell now. Problem solved. But I expect you want someone else to solve the problem for you by imposing tyrannical restrictions on those people.
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Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:5, Insightful)
How will rising sea levels kill millions? These changes don't happen overnight and can be countered with dykes and pumps. However, increased temperatures increase storm frequency and intensity and these may lead to much larger storm surges. This is what may kill millions. Rising sea level change is just a drop in the bucket in comparison.
Also, how will you 'solve' climate change? Do you really think reducing CO2 output will be enough? I live in the Netherlands, we have been building massive fortifications against storm surges for the past 50 years. I suggest other countries that are at risk will do the same. Betting on magically solving climate change (which may or may not be possible) might work, but increased water barriers will definitely work.
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:4, Insightful)
How will rising sea levels kill millions? ... However, increased temperatures increase storm frequency and intensity and these may lead to much larger storm surges. This is what may kill millions.
I think you answered your own question.
Do you really think reducing CO2 output will be enough?
No I do not. 30 year ago it could have been enough, but there is too much CO2/Methane/etc in the atmosphere already. We are going to have to cut greenhouse gasses significantly, and we will have to build fortifications at every costal city. Even that will not be enough.
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Yeah sorry, I liked your contrarian point so I thought It'd be a good thread to post another contrarian comment. It wasn't really targeted at your comment in particular even though it hooks into the things you mention. I was rather just trying to target conventional wisdom.
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It is really a two fold problem.
You need to protect your cities for the short term (a few hundred years) while working to slowdown to stop the real problem asap.
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OK, so where are all the people posting that they should have known better and not built so close to the water levels...?
I sure heard a lot about that from folks after Katrina....and New Orleans predates SF about a 100 years.
Where's the complaints about SF and other coastal cities that will surely suck federal tax dollars from you????
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Nobody bitches that the Netherlands is at sea level. Because the swamp Germans pay their own costs.
But we're not building people a brand new slum, right where the last one 'fell over and sank into the swamp'. Slums are the leftover housing.
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What about Houston?
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:4, Insightful)
How will rising sea levels kill millions?
Displacement of people, mostly. Refugees tend to die at a much higher rate than the overall population.
Also, how will you 'solve' climate change? Do you really think reducing CO2 output will be enough?
It will reduce the total sea rise, thus making the problem smaller.
Betting on magically solving climate change (which may or may not be possible) might work, but increased water barriers will definitely work.
I don't think you quite grasp the scale of this issue for larger countries, and the inability to buy dykes and pumps for poor countries. The US would need more concrete than has ever been produced. Making concrete produces a lot of CO2, so producing the unprecedented quantities of concrete will help ensure those structures are ineffective.
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You are missing the whole point of my post. Sea level rise is maybe 40cm by 2100. A strong storm can have a 400cm surge. A strong storm can easily cause an extra meter or two of storm surge over that which makes the sea level rise irrelevant. The storms will kill people well before the sea level rise will if better barriers aren't built or people don't leave the area. I also mentioned sea level rise doesn't happen overnight. You have plenty of time (think decades) to evacuate a couple of miles down the road
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm going to have to side with the GP here, on a number of points:
Netherlands
Length of Coastline - 1,914 km
GDP - $770 billion
GDP / km of Coastline - $402 million / km
USA
Length of Coastline - 133,312 km
GDP - $18.57 trillion
GDP / km of Coastline - $139 million / km
So, firstly, the cost to build dykes around the coast of the US would be, proportionally, about 3 times as expensive for them as it is for the Netherlands. Secondly, close to 2 orders of magnitude (well 70 times) more dykes would be required. Thirdly, you keep going on about storm surge being more pertinent than sea level rise, and while technically you're correct here the effects happen to be cumulative.
In fact, in addition to being cumulative, since storm surge is driven by storms (duh) and storms derive their strength from sea temperatures as sea level rises due to warming so to does the size of the storm surge.
I can't really be bothered to go deeply into the topic of materials, as I'm hungry, but again, unless you want to incur unsustainable upkeep costs for those dykes concrete is pretty much the only long term option available - and even then the upkeep will be merely astronomical. And, like the GP says, producing that quantity of concrete, if there's even enough of the right type of sand to make it all, would only exacerbate the problem.
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Why on earth would you build dykes across the entire shoreline in the US? I'm certainly not suggesting it. Perhaps do the areas that are actually vulnerable and have (non-trivial amounts of) people living there - like you know, the bay area. For less populated areas with risk, in many cases relocating a couple miles down the road should be fairly feasible. The US has a lot of elevation, the areas where you cannot do that (along the coast) are pretty limited.
As for you believing that an extra 10% water diffe
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It's a drop in the bucket. Yeah that drop might cause your bucket to overflow a little bit earlier, but the main problem is something else, and it's a drop you can see coming miles down the road.
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The Netherlands build dikes and other water works since a few centuries, probably more than 500 years (to lazy to google).
The investments since the 1950s (Germany does the same btw) are mainly a response to some massive winter storms (storm floods).
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:4, Informative)
[Scientific illiteracy] 1 molecule of CO2 [...] is somehow generating 2500c of heat [More scientific illiteracy]
Well, the CO2 is generating, to a very good approximation, no heat at all. The heat is coming from the sun (that hot ball of hydrogen doing nuclear fusion 150 million kilometres away). The CO2 is just slowing down the re-radiation of heat from the Earth surface into space.
What is "c"? Probably not the speed of light in this context?
Re:Climate Change is real. (Score:4, Insightful)
His question is legitimate.
I don't see any question in the AC's comment, just a lot of statements that make no scientific sense at all.
CO2 absorption of IR comes no where close to explaining global warming, as is well known.
Your statement is unspecific enough to have no clear semantics. No, the direct effect off the CO2 increase does not fully explain the observed global warming. But then nobody except maybe some builders of straw men claims that. Arrhenius had identified the major feedbacks more than a century ago. We do have good explanations for the temperature increase, and anthropogenic influences, primary CO2 emissions, are indeed the root cause of the observed warming, and our best estimate is that they explain all the warming.
Perhaps you don't know enough to answer his questions
Maybe I don't know enough. We can all fall prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect [wikipedia.org]. But in this case, again, there were no questions.
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http://nov79.com/gbwm/ntyg.html
Everybody can buy a domain and publish whatever he or she wants there. In this case, the author seems to be one "Gary Novak, Independent Scientist". Google Scholar finds nothing relevant [google.com] someone with that name has published in the scientific literature, and it is extremely inclusive. So why would you believe a random guy off the internet, but not well-known experts who have published books and peer-reviewed papers on this for more than 100 years?
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No, the question show absolutely no literacy of even the most basic of science. The "question" shows that the querent didn't even bother to look up how greenhouse gasses even work on a basic level, ala Wikipedia, and was just spouting off some pseudo science crap they read somewhere once.
And Stephan answered the question. It is not his fault that you appear to be too illiterate to even read the post. The only thing he posted that was questionable was deliberately confusing the "c" used here to denote Centig
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CO2 forcing the water vapor concentration increase most certainly does explain the current warming with statistically significant precision. Here's a nice summary: https://www.skepticalscience.c... [skepticalscience.com]
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CO2 effects warming of the atmosphere by slowing down radiative flux out to space. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water without precipitating it. Water vapor is a very potent greenhouse gas. This ignores negative forces, but really everyone should have that basic knowledge, and should be able to understand that CO2 levels will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and really basic processe
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The temperature of a gas is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the gas. Kinetic theory of gases [wikipedia.org]. This is old school stuff that I shouldn't need to cite for you. The rate of collisions is a function of the density of the gas. So we know that the CO2 in the atmosphere is colliding with other molecules. In fact the collisions are far more common than the CO2 molecule emitting a photon.
I found this response in a post at Real Climate [realclimate.org] that explains what is going on with greenhouse ga
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Hyperbole doesn't help inspire change.
Rising sea levels will not kill millions of people. It may displace Millions of people but not kill them.
Climate change isn't the fault of any one group, but a collective issue of the world. Nuclear isn't without its trade offs as well. And requires a long term commitment in managing Radioactive waste. Such as commitment that we as a society may not be able to keep, a few generations of politicians looking the other way. War, Natural disaster. Can easily cause the po
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I see what you did there. :-) Fight fire with fire!
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Wait, why will rising sea levels kill millions? Its not like the levels are rising all at once like a Tsunami. It will be a more gradual thing that will allow people to move to higher ground.
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Because the people on the higher ground will defend their turf with guns ... perhaps?
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I'm not sure how many people it's actually going to "kill" in the SF area. If it's really only going up 2 millimeters a year on average, I'm sure that San Francisco can build flood walls fast enough to mitigate that for decades if not centuries. Sure, you'll need a scuba license to visit Alcatraz and the city is eventually going to look like a walled fortress a few centuries from now, but they'll likely be OK.
Considering the property taxes they must be raking in from their 2 million dollar 3 bedroom houses
Re: Climate Change is real. (Score:2)
Every acre of solar is one less acre of greenhouse gas-consuming plant life.
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OMG! I didn't realize the big mistake I made.
I need to take those solar panels off my roof and plant corn there!
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When solar goes "bad", it doesn't turn an area into an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland for the next century. And that's IF things go fairly well when nuclear decides to shit itself.
Even so, California also shut down a baseline power solar thermal plant over environmental concerns some years back. So the OP's point is still valid. The Hoover Dam can only make so much power California - whatcha gonna do for the rest if you won't build nukes or solar? Heck, PG&E even studied orbital power stations to get around the NIMBYism, but even that was shut down due to the need for some small plot of land to receive the power, and thus back to NIMBY.
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The only solar thermal power plant in CA is struggling because it's badly designed and is not cost-competitive. It also for quite some time was failing to deliver the required contracted amount of power. Fortunately, they fixed some stuff and it finally is in compliance as of this week: https://www.the-american-inter... [the-americ...terest.com]
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You fuckers can mod me down, but you know it's the truth. There is actually a map so people know where to avoid human shit and there are syringes everywhere because there are homeless and druggies everywhere. Democrats have driven that beautiful city into the shit covered ground.
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"The study found that most of the Bay's coastline is sinking at a rate of less than 2 millimeters a year -- and while that may not sound like a lot, the millimeters can add up fast."
So, in 100 years the coastline will have sunk less than 8 inches. Not quite the runaway train they make it out to be.
Your math skills suck.
2mm / year is less than 2 inches per century. Over 50 years, it is about the width of your thumb.