I linked a couple doom and gloom stories. The press is having a ball sensationalizing this event. Like the GEICO commercials say, its what they do.
I’m having trouble getting excited about such a slow moving event. Humans have always relocated to other areas when drought or crop failure required it. Archaeologists have found many abandoned settlements. Some very large. Humans have adapted and relocated since ancient times.
So the water levels rise. Well duh, pack up and move inland. It’s a given that people need to start thinking about where they will live. If I was a 19 year old in college. Would I eventually locate on a coastline after graduating? Start a professional career, buy a home, and start a family on the coast? Probably not. Because I wouldn’t count on living in that location for the next 50 years. Why tie up my future assets? But older people have plenty of time to live out the remainder of their lives before the coasts might flood. They can enjoy their homes for decades to come.
I see this really as an opportunity. The coastlines will eventually shift inward. Requiring populations to gradually relocate. That means new cities. New growth. Certainly new jobs in construction and infrastructure. Eventually there will be a new, stable coastline and a whole lot of very lucky beach front property owners. A whole new class of people with valuable land to sell. New vacation resorts and beach houses get built.
So why the doom and gloom? This isn’t Pompeii where people get wiped out in a few hours. There are many decades for people to relocate inward.
Ignore them, as I doubt any of them will ever occur. The multiple dire predictions of climate change have not panned out ever, going back to the for certain coming ice age of the late 1970’s.
Basically they are all of the boy crying wolf syndrome, and since they are being ignored the ones making the claims are constantly raising them up in their desperation to be heard. Dire predictions are made and everyone yawns, so the next time they make even more outlandish claims.
and btw…i live in a place where a 3 foot rise in sea level would have quite a bit of consequence to me.
A 3 meter sea level rise is likely to cause both the SF and Oakland international airports to go underwater, as well as a large portion of the south bay. The Sacramento River Delta will become Sacramento Bay, and about a third of the arable land in the San Joaquin valley (the parts that, ironically enough, aren’t getting enough water now…) will be the new delta. The fresh water supply for most of the SF Bay Area, including San Francisco, will be compromised with salt water and new aqueducts & pipelines would need to be run, either on pylons above the projected long-term water rise or south, past the expected southern reaches of the Sacramento Sea.
As the link you quoted says, 150 million people will be affected by this. It’s not just a matter of moving a bit farther inland; entire metropolitan areas are going to be impacted. And let’s not even talk about Netherlands or New Orleans…
Yes they do, meaning the tides and storm surge are 3 feet or more. What the claims are saying is the 3 foot rise would be the new starting point of the in and out of the tides and storm surges.
You know it has happened before and humanity survived. Why just back 10,000 years ago the seas rose 600 feet or so, if I recall my geography correctly.
Sea levels have risen dramatically over the past several thousand years, and some of the episodes were surely disastrous to those affected. (Has any more evidence come to light about an advanced culture that may have lived where today’s Black Sea is?)
With today’s population and dependence on infrastructure, sea level rise would be devastating. As just one example, Bangkok and much of Central Thailand would be completely lost in a 4-meter rise. Do you think it’s cheap or easy to relocate one of the world’s largest cities?
And while the sea level rise will on average be gradual, the effects would be felt in spurts. Imagine Hurricane Sandy or Katrina if the sea had started from a base half a meter higher.
(Investing many $billions repairing New Orleans was perhaps misguided.)
How do I react? I remind myself why I’m glad I don’t have any offspring who have to live through the outcome. For myself, I expect to be dead before it gets too serious. I’ll be getting a reverse mortgage on my home before the property values go down due to rising ocean levels. That will make it the bank’s problem instead of mine.
On the other hand, if it happens slowly enough I expect that Major Steps will be taken to protect expensive urban real estate like San Francisco, not only the land itself but the water supply and so on.
One solution is to abandon current oceanfront property and rebuild farther inland. This is pretty disruptive, especially when you consider the losses are from some of the most expensive real estate anywhere. On the other hand, people are always tearing down and rebuilding all sorts of things. If you make it an ongoing expense over the course of decades, the extra cost at any one time is smallish.
The other solution is to dig in our heels and start building dams and dikes, and this approach will only work to the extent that we can predict the amount of rise and the likelihood of extreme events like the next storm of the century or tsunamis. Any failure in prediction or maintenance is Hurricane Katrina all over again. Both the building projects and the occasional failures are likely to be huge expenses incurred over a relatively short period of time.
I know that people can handle this - in fact, we have handled worse, such as the recoveries from the two World Wars. The question is whether we’ll handle it in an orderly, systematic manner, or whether we handle it as one catastrophe at a time.
Very, very long range government planning seems key. Start by offering tax incentives for people to relocate inland. Ad campaigns to discourage people from buying property near the coastline. It will take decades to gradually shift people inland. Some will stubbornly stay until there property value drops to nothing. Losing everything.
But, we still don’t have proof ocean levels will rise significantly or when it will happen. Nothing will get done until governments are convinced there’s a long range crises. They need more specific details before they can make long range plans.
I couldn’t get the crap CNN website to complete loading on my iPhone. Here is a story I read on cbsnews website.
In the study reported on, it talks about a coastal city’s lock-in date. This is the date by which carbon emissions would eventually cause sea level rise to an extent such that it would eventually submerge land containing more than half their population. For example, Hollywood, FL has a lock-in date of 2025. NYC - 2095.
This should be taken with at least several grains of salt, though. For one, it was reported on CBS News, a well-known fomenter of media hysteria. For another, the study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a rag which does its damndest to match the Daily Mail story for bullshit story, all designed solely to upset citizens, raise their blood pressure and send them screaming and crying to their acquaintances (online or otherwise), all in the service of increasing their enormous circulations and keeping their owners’ pockets, Studebakers and Pierce Arrows lined with gold and platinum bullion.
Oh.
Yeah.
The lock-in date for Miami and New Orleans?
Already past.
Archaeology has major problems with researching early human presence in, for instance, northwestern Europe, due to the fact that much of the coastline territory that was populated by early settlers is now underwater.
You would think people would pack up and relocate when the ocean floods the coastline . Not out here, millions of dollars been wasted trying to save people’s homes . One woman lost her house in a storm , you would think she would had moved inland . No way she had a new house build right where she last house was . Five houses been washed away and the city and state are still dumping money in the ocean . The reason for this the houses worth a millions $$$ each and the city doesn’t want to lose the taxes they collect on them.
I grew up along Lake Michigan and saw the same thing in the '70s. There was a stretch of years when a good portion of the lake shore eroded and people who had owned houses along the lake found themselves with houses IN the lake. But they rebuilt, same spot, just a few feet back.
Because governments are good at making and following long term plans?
Currently about 40% of the world population lives within 100 km of the ocean. A significant portion of those people are in low lying areas that would be impacted by rising ocean levels and periodic flooding from storm activity, many of whom are living in marginal economic circumstances and cannot afford to migrate inland to higher ground. Many will die whether they remain in place, or even if they move because of famine. Sea walls are going to be of little use in the case of rising sea levels because of the scale of the problem and the amount of land that is near current mean sea level.