There's been debate over whether volcanic activity in the Canary Islands could cause a 150ft tidal wave that would cause enough damage on the east coast that long term sea rises would have little left to do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami#Canary_Islands
As Sandy made clear, it's not just persistent rises in sea level, but the frequency and extent of intermittent rises as a consequence of cyclonic storms or inland flooding and watershed drainage which are likely to have significant impacts.
My understanding of carbon and warming predictions is that we've trended toward the highest (most extreme and dangerous) ends of forecast ranges, which suggests that the higher seawater rises might be more appropriately used in disaster planning. And adding a few feet to storm surge, and increasing frequency of high-surge events, would be disruptive enough if not quite so much as a persistent 5-10 foot rise in sea levels.
As a Dutchman I can't help but see this as a sizable but not even truly problematic engineering challenge.
Our entire country was basically a piece of sea / swampland nobody else wanted, which we proceeded to turn into our own little kingdom through a massive cooperative effort.
Since large parts of our country are already below sea-level and we've already built massive flood barriers after severe floodings [1] half a century ago; it just means we'll have a bit more demand than usual for our engineering skills and we'll all be fine.
From what I heard we're already talking with New York ;)
Yet another bit of Dutch heritage in New Amsterdam.
I was thinking of the North Sea floods. As the linked Wikipedia article notes, this also struck England significantly, and was among the key impetuses behind the Thames Barrier. Noting the closure frequency of this structure (and the increasing frequency with time), and the projected replacement dates (it's actually moved back a bit, I'd recalled 2030, current estimates are 2050-2060) is interesting. Also with recent rain-triggered floods in the UK, London and southeastern England now face a double threat: rising sea levels from the oceans, and increased runoff from land. Absent active pumping to clear rainwater flows down the Thames, a Barrier itself is not a complete solution.
Possibly the biggest misstep in climate change's acceptance was calling it "global warming". People don't feel the warmer temperatures but rather feel its non-intuitive effects and crack jokes along the lines of "it's so cold right now ... whatever happened to global warming?"
Marketing's everything, and the crowd climate change has to be marketed to is scientifically illiterate and commonly anti-intellectual in nature. Perhaps it should have been called something more dire, alarming, and readily perceivable by the general population so as to be a more tangible phenomenon. I'm terrible at coming up with names though so I'll have to defer to others for ideas!
> If you have to "market" it, especially with a lot of ad hominem namecalling...maybe it's not science.
I'll note that you will never be wheeled into a nuclear-magnetic resonance machine for imaging, because "OMG it's nuclear!"
They were rebranded from NMR to MRI simply because of resistance to the word "nuclear". [If you don't think that NMR/MRI is "science", then perhaps you can take it up with the Nobel physics committee.]
The question is: Do you want to wait around for the state of science education to change (the US still is not metric, despite my 3rd grade teacher's assurances in 1974 that change was imminent) or do you want to choose your words carefully enough that even idiots can get past their religious programming?
For better or worse, humans are driven primarily by emotion, not rational decision-making. Much of life requires marketing, and just because something is promoted in a way that works with human nature doesn't necessarily undermine its scientific nature.
I'd love to know how naming it something emotive in order to build consensus destroys the underlying science.
Sadly, one has to combat the paid shills that dominate the punditry. Good science has to be put into soundbite form and propagated. How else would it be explained to your average citizen?
I've seen denials on several counts. That climate change is occurring, that it's anthropogenic, and that the mechanism is CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses released on account of human activities). Much of that confusion being sown by direct and deliberate disinformation campaigns by carbon-aligned interests.
The evidence to my mind is rather incontrovertible in favor of significant anthropogenic climate change.
"climate change" here is a shorthand for "climate change caused by human emissions of CO2". I don't think the OP meant that people deny that the climate changes over time due to natural causes (actually, I think it's incredibly obvious).
I have learned, though, that in a politically charged atmosphere, it is important to be very exact in choosing your words, because people are looking for opportunities to attack.
I'm still surprised by how few people have declared themselves climate change agnosts. That might be because of that course in modeling dynamic systems I took in university though.
As far as I'm concerned we have no way at all of knowing whether we can easily produce orders of magnitude more CO2 without having any significant effect, or whether we're already well beyond the point of no return for life on earth.
Think about the engineering involved. A 25ft rise would require what, a 35ft high reinforced concrete structure? It has to be capable of dissipating the wave energy from a storm like sandy. The foundations have to be pretty deep to guarantee resistance to scour. The buttressing structure will extend back at least 35/tan(45) ft back. Where and when do you decide to build it? What political process allows you to demolish all those houses without an impossible political deadlock about compensation land rights etc? What about rights of light for all the others? Re-routing subway lines, highways, utilities etc. How long is one these for New York/Jersey/Long Island? 50miles 100miles 250?
We're talking about 300 years from now. Even 100 years from now the global economy is going to be around 1 quadrillion dollars (in today's dollar) and technology will be unimaginably advanced. As much as I think long term planning is often important, I think this is a case where it's better to leave things to our much wealthier, much more technologically advanced future selves / children.
Unimaginably advanced? I'm not so sure. What unimaginable advances have happened to the jet engine in the last 30 years?
If you spend all day focusing on silicon chips, then it looks like "technology" moves very fast. But most technologies don't advance at anything near the rate at which integrated circuits have been improving. And even that rate appears to be slowing dramatically.
We live in an age where hand-held computers which are always connected to a worldwide communications network are ubiquitous. Where genetic modifications are a tool we use for medicine (insulin is grown from genetically modified bacteria which produce human insulin, for example) and food. Where self-driving cars are real. Where remotely controlled airplanes have been making a huge impact on the battlefield. Where bionic prosthetic limbs which respond to neural impulses are becoming more and more commonplace. Where cures for AIDS, deafness, blindness, cancers, and paraplegia are advancing day by day. Where anyone with a computer and the right CAD files can have items manufactured by 3D printing or CNC machining by ordering through a website. Where machines can perform near real-time speech-to-speech language translation. And where a business man talks about putting tens of thousands of colonists on Mars in his lifetime and he's taken seriously.
What will the next few decades hold? Memristor based computing. Graphene based electronics. Nano-tube based materials. Terabit/s wireless networking. Space colonization. The ability to repair or replace nearly all defective or missing body parts and organs.
And what will the next century let alone several centuries hold?
Not sure I agree completely. We're looking at a pretty tight niche here, but I think that humanity is, on the whole, is undergoing a shift where projects that appear insurmountable will become commonplace.
Have you seen the automated quad-rotor flying machines that can assemble structures with rudimentary components?
This is in early research, but the development of automation systems like this are tightly linked to microprocessor and software advances. Automation technology has been on a steady march of improvement.
Simple tasks like moving dirt, stacking blocks, and pouring concrete are a large part of the construction of flood protection projects. These tasks are perfect targets for automation.
Even without the help of quadrocopters, a firm in China has embarked upon the task of building world's tallest building in 90 days. If they pull it off, and if the building stands, it will change a lot of expectations.
I think quadcopter construction is a joke. Very cute, but not serious.
Despite having awesome computers and software for decades, construction costs are not going down. While some technology can be very helpful (cheap walkie-talkies are a boon to constructing a large building quickly), they haven't change the cost curve dramatically.
- Cell phones were just starting to be built, no body had them, people didn't even have pagers.
- There was no internet
- Only high end cars had power windows/power locks
- Jet engines were far less efficient. I don't know what improvements were made but someone with that knowledge will hopefully chime in.
Technology advances over the past 30 years have been insane. You can pull out a "phone" which accesses all the world's information wirelessly at high speeds. 30 years ago people would have never even thought that would ever be possible. They couldn't even imagine what "the internet" would be.
If the best we've gotten out of the 30 years of technological advances in the automotive space is power locks, I think my point is well made. I never said that no advances would occur.
30 years ago jet engines were certainly less efficient and less safe, but not by as much as you'd think.
And 25+ years ago I actually used a cell phone. My mother worked for Bell Labs.
I'd say that technological progress in integrated circuit manufacturing over the last 30 years has been amazing, and that's driven a bunch of other development but (1) most fields don't progress anywhere near as fast and (2) that burst of progress is not normal even in ICs and is now slowing down.
Oh, now you're being disingenuous. The Internet existed, yes, but a total information revolution has certainly happened within the last 30 years.
> If the best we've gotten out of the 30 years of technological advances in the automotive space is power locks, I think my point is well made. I never said that no advances would occur.
Yeah, that's a bad example. How about the fact that self driving cars, while not commercially available yet, are street legal in two US states? Top of the line cars are available with lane assist and adaptive cruise control which makes them essentially self driving, if not self navigating.
> 30 years ago jet engines were certainly less efficient and less safe, but not by as much as you'd think.
As stated in another comment, I don't know what the obsession with the development of jet engines is. But you're probably right, they probably haven't come a long way.
> And 25+ years ago I actually used a cell phone. My mother worked for Bell Labs.
The explosion of use of the Internet was driven by both a regulatory change in allowed use of Arpanet / the Internet, and the ubiquitous availability of cheap personal computing devices, driven largely by Moore's Law. Not by fundamental changes in underlying communications and computing technology. In fact the direct and largely similar progenitors of both modern TCP/IP and Linux systems were well established by 1982.
Cellular communications is based on principles first established by, of all people, Heddy Lamar (the actress) during WWII.
Gas turbine jet engines date to 1928. Recent technology has largely focused around noise abatement, though efficiency has also increased by roughly 50% since 1950. That's hardly the Moore's Law doubling-every-three-years experienced in ICs, and isn't too dissimilar from improvements in reciprocating internal combustion engine efficiency gains.
And it turns out that jets are not more efficient than propeller-driven aircraft. The benefits instead are greater speed and higher-altitude flight, as propellers are limited by tip speeds and must operate well under the speed of sound, and perform better at lower altitudes and greater air density.
In two cases, enablers were principally electronics (Moore's Law) developments enabling latent technologies. In the case of jet aircraft propulsion, the story is more complex, and includes IC-enabled computers in design, manufacture, and avionics systems, but involves incremental improvements on a number of engineering fronts. On an efficiency basis, it's simply returned us to where we were using alternate technologies in the 1950s.
What's the significance of jet engines? I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I'm pretty sure the 787 Dreamliner would be rather impressive to a 1982 aircraft designer.
But more relevant to the issue at hand, structural engineering: The height of the tallest building in the world has doubled over just the past decade. I don't know if it's downright unimaginable, but it's very real and significant progress.
The significance is that I have friends in the aerospace industry and from talking to them, I've learned that technological progress in this area has been much much slower than in IC fabrication. Would a 1982 aircraft designer be impressed with a 787? Sure. There have been a bunch of incremental improvements. But those improvements are on the order of 1%/year rather than Moore's law.
My point is that if you're spending all your time dealing with Moore's law, it may not occur to you that Moore's law doesn't apply anywhere else.
The height of the tallest building in the world has doubled over just the past decade. I don't know if it's downright unimaginable, but it's very real and significant progress.
Really? What technological innovations in structural engineering were needed? It seems to me that construction costs are not falling very significantly and that a handful of very tall buildings has more to do with the infusion of cash to isolated areas where land is (relatively) cheap than it does with major advances in structural engineering.
1%/year over 300 years is nearly a 20-fold improvement.
Also, while the construction improvements in the past 30 years may not be major, framed-tube and trussed-tube construction will be 50 years old next year.
You may be right that we have currently reached the pinnacle of technology, and that nothing else is possible except in the fields of iPhone games and social dating sites. The dead end in robotics may be approaching, even though it has resulting in a 150% improvement in manufacturing productivity since 1985 (we currently produce 70% more with 30% fewer people).
1%/year over 300 years is nearly a 20-fold improvement.
I'm not sure it makes sense to assume steady incremental growth over such long time frames. I mentioned 1%/yr when considering improvements over the last 3 decades.
You may be right that we have currently reached the pinnacle of technology
Yeah, but 100 years is also plenty of time for wars to brew and erupt, for instance. I, ah, wouldn't blindly put a dollar in your local bank and act like you just paid for your great-great-grandchild's college education. On second thought, that might not be a bad idea, as a conversation piece.
First, dikes tend to be earthworks, not concrete. Second, the forecast for 100-300 year is 5, not 35 feet. The Dutch were building 5 foot dikes 1000 years ago.
To protect a built-up area like NYC and Long Island, you'd probably build a chain of artificial barrier islands some ways out to sea. That's a simple and comparably cheap earth moving operation.
With current insufficient political will to stop global warming, both the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet will melt. When Greenland goes, sea levels will rise 20 feet globally. When Antarctica goes, sea levels will rise 200 feet. We need more than an adaptation strategy. We need to curb emissions. Additionally, we will face massive species extinctions, increased ocean acidification, food disruptions and stress on water supplies. Earth moving isn't going to cut it, with all due respect. A focus on adaptation ignores the magnitude of the problem, which in the long term is beyond the power of short-term adaptation to mitigate.
So you're suggesting that The New York Times, hardly a climate-change-denier, got the numbers on their already quite alarmist page wrong by an order of magnitude? I'm pretty sure none of the worst case IPCC scenarios consider the total melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
What political process allows you to demolish all those houses without an impossible political deadlock about compensation land rights etc?
Eminent domain. See, for example, Kelo vs New London, which held that the government can even take property and give it to another private party if they feel like it.
Dikes/etc, or simply landfill to raise ground level can handle the valuable high density areas. This was already done in Seattle 100 years ago, for example [1].
Migration is also a pretty easy solution to the less densely populated areas. NYC's population declined 10% between 1970 and 1980. Newark NJ's population went down 40% between 1930 and 2010. You think we can't depopulate Long Beach house by house over the next 300 years?
Please recall that 300 years ago, the United States and India were part of the British Empire, the cowpox vaccine was new technology, and the empire of Comancheria [2] was just getting started.
[2] Comancheria was an empire spanning Texas, Kansas and New Mexico, and was the major power in that part of the world until the 1870's. Rose and fell in less than 300 years.
Look back a few hundred years at Boston. Half of the land is "new" anyway. Granted, I would imagine that it's hard/impossible to do this for a city that already exists and has lots of large, expensive, heavy objects in the way.
Or for the economics of fossil fuels to change drastically, figure out ways to reverse warming, enter a natural cooling period, or any black swan event.
The flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars.
Spread that out along the coastline and the taxes needed gets into REAL money. Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there.
> The flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars.
Which is several orders of magnitude less that fixing global warming will cost. The GDP of NYC is $1280bln. Even at twice the cost for the barriers ($20bln), it's 1.5% of GDP to permanently "fix" global warming for NYC. Also, it's fairly deterministic. The tools and methods to build such barriers are readily available. The same can't be said of a political solution.
> Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there.
Well, the region is already more or less uninhabitable without air conditioning, so the solution to that problem is pretty obvious.
You don't need to protect the entire coastline, just already-developed parts of it that would present an extreme disruption to let flood. $6-10bn in the grand scheme of New York City is nothing (well, assuming anybody gives a shit about NYC in 300 years).
I find it implausible that some of the richest and most densely populated cities in America would just passively await submersion for decades when this could be averted with good old levees.
What I do believe is that a major UN climate conference is starting today in Doha and that their PR people yet again managed to sell the idea of disaster to the newspapers.
Just have the levees built and maintained by private enterprise rather than U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and you should be all golden with no unexpected problems or failures
In terms of this, I've thought of a joke to get people more aware of global warming.
Sell a piece of land a few kilometres in for a lot of money, citing it's major benefit as future beachfront property (put ads in local paper, etc). If anyone actually decides to buy it at that price, cover your losses and donate the rest to WWF or Charity:Water.
what's the aim of the article which claims that something may or may not happen? Of course besides to scary people of 'global warming' or how it is nowadays called, because scientists are not sure if the temperature is going up or down, 'global changes'? And of course, when people are scared, they'll pay whatever money to ecoterrorists to save 'the environment'
Interesting just how little this matters to San Francisco (they'd need to put a wall around SFO, OAK, and maybe SJC, and not sure about the parts of Mountain View and Menlo Park where tech offices are).
Unfortunate that DC doesn't have more flooding planned.
At 25 feet, it looks like the shoreline moves up (at least) to highway 101, but that map doesn't go far enough south to really be sure. Look at this and you can really see the impact: http://cal-adapt.org/sealevel/
Just at a glance, I'd write off Oracle, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Moffett, Alviso, the new 49ers stadium, lots of Cisco buildings around Tasman, and that industrial park up in Fremont where they shot the T2 Cyberdyne office scenes. The inundation of the SJ/SC water treatment plant would also make things even worse, I imagine.
For SF proper, most neighborhoods would be relatively little affected on account of hills, though there are significant amounts of the city built on bay fill or low-lying land, particularly the Marina, parts of downtown, SOMA, and Hunters Point. Around the rest of the bay, communities/developments on the bay itself (especially on the bay side of major highways) are more likely to be on fill and subject to rising sea levels. This includes major office parks in various parts of the bay, including much of the North First Street area of San Jose, the GooglePlex, Oyster Point, Emeryville, Hayward, and Fremont.
As the maps make clear, the real hazard is in the Delta and Central Valley. Prior to modern flood control (dams and levees), much of the Central Valley was effectively an inland sea through the winter and spring. Rising sea levels would put much of the existing (and already threatened) levee system at risk. Sacramento, Stockton, and other communities would be substantially affected.
I can't remember the exact figures, but Bjorn Lomborg has argued that during the 19th century sea levels around New York rose by tens of feet, to no great impact.
How is that possible when sea levels elsewhere didn't rise by 10s of feet? Even if you count tides it defies common sense; a lot of NYC is below 10 feet from sea level.
Anyway, Lomborg is a controversial figure with an anti-global-warming agenda. I tend to trust more objective sources for stuff like this.
He seriously downplays potential risks of global warming, and he's built his career on this single argument. I know objective science, and he doesn't practice it (most people who write editorial books don't). To be clear, I don't have a strong opinion on how global warming will play out due to a lack of data, and I think he may very well be correct. But I don't trust him either.
Anyway, do you have a citation? I didn't mean to start an argument about his character, but I'm skeptical of the claim about New York.
New Orleans is already almost completely below mean sea level. In many places, the highest geographic point is the Mississippi River. Building levees and flood-control structures directly contributes to the further erosion and loss of delta lands in the Gulf. The very structures that would save New Orleans also doom it. John McPhee's writing on the Atchafalya Old River Control Structure is fascinating.
And rather than pass it down to your children, consider selling any property in Galveston, New Orleans or Miami Beach. Even on the lower-end estimates, those areas are thoroughly deluged. Or pass it on and let them sell it, whichever is smarter from a tax perspective.
