I think the OP is minimizing the human catastrophic effect of rising seas - at the coast line - and looking instead at what he long term reaction will be. So, half the situation may be minimized but does that mean the other half of the analysis is not accurate/applicable?
Me? I’m looking into farmland investment opportunities in the Northwest Territories.
The Great Hard Drive Shortage of 2012 was caused by the Thai Floods of 2011.
Concentrate makers down to 3> Have a quarter drives made in Thailand>Place factories on flood-plain = Profit !
Actually those floods don’t sound a barrel of laughs.
However I expect more of Yankee ingenuity as exemplified by the OP: the Can-Do Spirit and Communal Self-Sacrifice of New Yorkers will make them willingly relocate the City to the middle of Ohio, and San Franciscans to recreate the dear place in Utah, sans fog.
I think we will find a way to scrub the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere before anything dire happens. I agree, it should be more of a priority than it is, but once the shit starts really hitting the fan, I think we will find a way.
Here is my question, for those who know more about this than I do. Let’s say that these scrubbers, or similar, are created en mass and work really, really well. Well enough to take us back to ideal CO2 levels in, say, 1 year. What would likely happen if we brought down the CO2 levels really fast? Would that cause its own problems, or would it be all good?
The idea of capturing CO2 seems like fantasy to me. It is a gas; how do you bury it so that it cannot escape?
Anyway what will happen when world-wide famine ensues and hunger refugees are coming to our shores by the hundreds of millions? And what do we do when our bread baskets turn into desert wasteland? I’m not predicting this will happen but if it does, we are in deep shit.
I take a nap.
By making stalactites and stalagmites and other chunks of CaCO3 is the most common way nature does it (since you said “bury”, I expect you’re not counting biochemical means). MgCO3 is another popular variant, the two are often mixed.
What concievable basis is there for your unbridled optimism other than the convenience of not having to do anything to address the problem today? Even if we have some technomagical technology that can efficiently extract and segregate CO[SUB]2[/SUB] in anything like a cost effective manner, the essential problems that still remain are that this all takes substantial energy to do this even at maximum theoretical efficiency, which means developing some new source of energy to power this segregation process, and the fact that the CO[SUB]2[/SUB] that is of most concern is in the upper atmosphere which is not accessible to ground-based segregation systems, resulting in a latency period until CO[SUB]2[/SUB] migrates down to the surface.
We have been pumping exponentially increasing masses of CO[SUB]2[/SUB] into the atmosphere since the mid-'Nineteenth century. Setting aside the practicalities of whatever system of segregation may be applied and the time to bring the atmosphere to equilibrium, there is absolute fantasy to suggest that we could revert to pre-industrial CO[SUB]2[/SUB] atmospheric levels in in span of one year; the amount of energy alone to do this would be fundamentally prohibitive, not to mention the heat pollution that would be created by both the power production and the process itself. If we did try to alter the composition and distribution of the atmosphere so rapidly there would almost certainly be dramatic effects from differences in density, heat capacity, et cetera that would cause massive chaotic effects. I don’t think current atmospheric models could make any reliable predictions about the effects other than to indicate that it would probably be very bad. Regardless, it would not reverse the melting of ice sheets and the rise of ocean levels that may occur, which would be a long term change. The climate is not a simple equilibrium system, and you can’t just reverse the crank to go back to a prior condition any more than you can become younger by walking backwards.
The best way to segregate CO[SUB]2[/SUB] would be to condense it into methane clathrate, or convert it directly into a fuel like methanol or dimethyl ether. Another possibility is to separate the oxygen and convert the carbon into a stable carbonate such as calcite or vaterite (which is how a lot of early atmospheric carbon was segregated). It’s not that the carbon isn’t useful to us; as both a fuel substrate and a structural material it will be quite necessary for the foreseeable future. Liquid hydrocarbon fuels will be necessary until some energy storage medium which vastly exceeds the theoretical capabilty of electrochemical batteries, and once we master the technology of building large scale carbon macromolecules it will likely replace most metallic materials for many structural applications. We just don’t want excess carbon dioxide floating around in the atmosphere.
The plight of refugees who lack the means to just move to higher ground as the o.p. so naïvely suggests is very much a real concern, as are the impacts on agriculture and aquaculture reducing yields and increasing food costs. There are no trivial answers to this problem other than to anticipate changes and prepare to move food production en masse to new locations that will be able to support growth, which would be a massive obligatory social and economic engineering plans that the people who like to deny the evidence or impact of climate change also opposed for philosophic reasons. (I also find such efforts undesireable but for more pragmatic concerns, e.g. that our empirical evidence is that massive socioeconomic plans rarely work and often have major unintended consequences as well as providing a fertile ground for corruption and abuse.)
The longer we wait to address the problem the worse it will be, and waiting and praying for a technomagical solution to make it all go away in a year is like expeting the Easter Bunny to bring you a giant chocolate egg the size of your head that won’t make you sick when you eat it all in one sitting.
Stranger
Plants?
I ask how certain they are of their predictions, over what timelines they are likely to occur, and what is the cost-benefit analysis of various solutions. Then I start talking about nuclear power.
Regards,
Shodan
There’s a logic mistake buried in there. If ad campaigns are successful to discourage people from buying property near the coastline then the value of that property immediately drops. Perhaps not to zero, but even a 50% drop would be devastating to the community. There isn’t anything ‘stubborn’ about it. In order to sell, someone has to buy. If there are no buyers, of which their can’t be any if the plan is to relocate everyone inland, then what do the owners do? If they can’t sell they may not be able to afford to move at all.
What you are really talking about is a government buyout, but that is hugely expensive and politically difficult.
I’m visiting as many stunning South Pacific beaches as I can, before they’re gone. I’ve been visiting such beaches over a span of thirty years. I can clearly see them disappearing. Within my lifetime, I think they could all be gone. ( And if they’re not, I’m still glad I got to see each one! )
I agree it would be a very tough problem to solve. How would they convince people that an area will be underwater in a few years? That relocating is the only solution?
I doubt sea walls or berms will be of any use. The water levels they are predicting seem too high. Hurricanes and tropical storms are a concern too. They will be much worse as sea levels rise.
Thankfully there’s still several decades to plan and decide what to do. I won’t even be here then to see the outcome.
While it’s rhetorically attractive – “why do people keep rebuilding their seaside homes storm after storm?” – IMHO the coast can’t be abandoned outright; that is, everyone can’t be relocated inland.
Lots and lots of stuff is still shipped by, umm, ship across the oceans. While there are inland ports (as on the Great Lakes), it seems unduly complicated and wasteful to forbid seaports on the seacoast. :dubious: IMHO, New Orleans was rebuilt after Katrina at least as much because the people who work in the vital Port of New Orleans have to live somewhere relatively near the port as due to the city’s cultural heritage and the tourism it attracts.
Also, lots and lots of people who don’t live near the coast like to take vacations on the coast. Unless everyone’s going to drive several miles to the shore every morning through a no-development dead-zone – not only no homes but no gas stations, stores, restaurants, etc. to be destroyed by flooding – just to go to the beach, some buildings are going to be near the ocean and somebody is going to live there.
I’m not saying that states and communities shouldn’t be planning, zoning, etc. to control and limit development near threatened shores. But the idea of abandoning the coast is a bit absurd.
Modern engineering will be able to solve these problems. Hell, if Boston and Hong Kong can build out into their harbors, I’m pretty sure some engineers can figure out how to raise the ground level a few feet on coastal areas over several decades. These are the kind of challenges that man-kind loves to tackle. Setting your hair on fire and running around yelling gloom and doom is only good if you want to scare people into raising taxes for imaginary problems that the market will take care of anyway.
While it is not impossible to build up existing areas, it’s a lot more difficult than building out into a harbor because you have to figure out what to do with the existing structures and infrastructure. Nobody will appreciate you knocking down their building right now even if they acknowledge a benefit sometime later.
And some of the areas we’re talking about in this thread are not questions of raising a city by a few feet, they’re more on the scale of raising a whole county by a few meters. Unless we’re willing to abandon some pretty vital areas, we are looking at a project that’s anything we’ve done before.
I think your assertion that the markets will take care of it is not appreciating the scope of the problem or the way markets handle things. It’s like saying “Either they’ll move or they’ll drown. What’s the problem?”
On the other hand, it doesn’t have to be all government and taxes to solve it. California’s model for earthquake-proofing might work for sea level changes. Very few people were required to tear down buildings and start over, but if you want to build something new or make major renovations, then you must meet the new codes. Minimal cost to the government. It’s a substantial cost to the private sector, but not all at once, and not until an individual already spending money on construction or improvements. Simply banning people from rebuilding when they get flooded would be a useful step, but disasters like Katrina are being “solved” by setting everything back up for the next disaster.
This seems lack a conception of the scale of the problem. This isn’t remotely like building out a few square miles of harbor; it is millions of square miles of coastal regions directly impacting somewhere between a hundred million and billion people and having an overarching impact on the shipping, agriculture, aquaculture, and travel of billions of people.
The dichotomy of “Wait it out and see how it goes,” or “Setting your hair on fire and running around yelling gloom and doom” is false, as is the assertion that this is an “imaginary problem that the market will take care of anyway.” The market has no prescience and no interest in preventing harms that will come to hundreds of millions of people who lack economic influence and are politically marginalized as it is. The reality is that we could take measures, starting today, to minimize the future impact on climate (e.g. a shift to lower carbon and carbon neutral energy production) as well as taking measures to measure and address the future impact rather than just assuming that some Stark-esque genius will come up with some technomagical atmospheric manipulation machine that flies around reversing the impact of anthropogenic climate change using some undefined mechanism.
Stranger
Finally, we might get a nice ocean view here in Saskatchewan!
Why, what any rational person would do, of course: dismiss the possibility completely as a conspiracy by my political opponents, then belittle and vigorously oppose any measures taken to address it.
I live in Kansas. If the ocean reaches me then Kevin Costner will be filming Waterworld II. In other words, I don’t react to the dire predictions.
Dude.
Look, I am not a climate change denier. I think this problem is very serious. I am sorry if my optimism in human ingenuity is offensive to you. I honestly think human ingenuity is the best hope we have, and me making myself sick about the potential impending catastrophe is pointless. So, yeah, I’m hopeful. Sue me.
Did you look at my link? That company, which I know is a startup, is pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and making gasoline out of it. Right now. They’ve done it. It needs to scale up, yes, but it has been done. I feel optimism is warranted. Humans have done some seriously great shit in the past few hundred years. We barely had computers 40 years ago. Now look. So, I shall carry on with my cheerful optimism, because it has served me well, and I like it. You may rant and rave as you wish. I suspect the results of either action will be the same.