A proposal to dam the North Sea and English Channel to cut northern Europe off from the Atlantic and avoid the consequences of sea level rise. They claim it’ll be cheaper than any other way to adapt to global warming. Well, except severely reducing GHG emissions.
Of course, there’s lots of negative effects of such a project, which they cover in the article. The sea behind the dams will start to become fresh water as all the rivers will continue to flow into it. That’ll cause all kinds of negative environmental effects. And there’s apparently no plan for locks on these dams, so cargo ships will have to transfer cargos to ships inside. There’s other stuff, read the article for more.
A hell of a lot. They talked about the requrement for sand, but didn’t note all the cement it would require. Cement is made of lime, among other things, and producing lime releases lots and lots of CO2. Also all the steel rebar it would require. Again, lots of CO2 released to make that.
Why will it be closed off all the time? Couldn’t it be opened at low tide? This would allow shipping to go on. Locks would also seem to make sense. IThere will be water entering it as indicated, so water level inside should rise over time if it is sealed up. They state they will pump it out, but again why not use low tide and open a door and let it flow out?
Not a fan of bigthink.com. Some of the founders/early investors include Peter Thiel, Gary David Goldberg, and Lawrence Summers. All with “problematic” issues regarding wealth, various biases, etc. The company also does videos for the Koch brothers.
Reading the article and seeing the headlines of the others, it seems to be a glurge site. This NEED thing is one of those “Look at stupid the liberals are!” inventions. Trying to create guilt by association with wingnut stuff.
It reminds me back when a single guy “invented” a coin to replace the Peso, US and Canadian dollars. Made a mock up of it, etc. Right wingers went crazy over it. Tried to make it like the Democrats were all behind. It was one goofy guy.
That’s not the tone of the article that I get. Nor is it the tone of other articles in this particular blog. I think your bias made you read something that was not there. It may be there in other blogs at that site, but I think you need to judge each of them separately rather than assume they all share it.
Why am I imagining a bunch of Dutch civil engineers rubbing their hands together and licking their lips when I read about proposals to basically turn the North Sea into a larger scale Ijsselmeer?
Ha! I just remember seeing articles/TV stories about Dutch engineers visiting the Texas gulf coast after Ike when there was a lot of talk about an “Ike Dike” that would basically be able to close off Galveston Bay from the Gulf in case of a major hurricane. I figured those guys stood to make a LOT of money helping engineer those things, and this NEED thing is like an order of magnitude (or two) bigger than that.
At least the flow there is from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Judicially letting flow in would manage to keep levels within an acceptable range. You wouldn’t even have to wait for the right tides or anything. Just keep a cap on flow.
Note that right now there is an outflow of briny water as well as a larger inflow of ocean water. It would be really tricky to keep this outflow going to keep the sea from becoming too salty.
This NEED thing doesn’t seem to take into account the massive amount of inflow the North Sea receives directly or indirectly from some pretty good size rivers without any compensating evaporation. Trying to dump the excess water to the Atlantic at low tides in sufficient quantity would require gear of ridiculous cost. Have you seen the Thames Barrier? And the Thames isn’t all that big of a river.
I know it’s a joke, but to have this happen would require a lot of pumping. Doggerland is still underwater at low tide. To get it to appear would require non-stop pumping. But to the people yakking about NEED, I’m sure this would be a snap and they would tout the benefits of Doggerland: more land for agriculture, etc.
