I wonder if it’s more economical to tear down buildings and clean up the ground or retrofit existing buildings’ foundations and turn certain areas into Venice-like areas?
I used to live in Sacramento so it’s interesting what the implications are for the Delta and the Sacramento deepwater ship channel. On a map, it looks like Sacramento is a safe distance from the coast, but it really isn’t, is it?
Most of our cities look very different today from how they did 300 years ago, and in many cases occupy land that did not exist then. Manhattan is 6-15 feet higher now than it originally was; Seattle 15-30 feet. Of course we don’t plan for the future of 300 years from now; how would colonial Boston have planned effectively for the construction of the Ted Williams Tunnel? It seems reasonable to me that these cities will similarly look almost unrecognizably different 300 years from now, regardless of the effects of climate change.
We will do nothing. No one would pay for it if we are abandoning the land. It will be hard enough to pay for relocation. Bye bye, Manhattan. Some of Brooklyn, above the escarpment, might survive for a while longer.
Easy enough solution—just redirect a few modest asteroids into some place we don’t care about, dumping enough dust and ash into the atmosphere to cause a few generations of global cooling, freezing enough of the oceans to offset the ice melt.
Plus, the attendant famine from crop failures will kill millions, reducing humanity’s carbon footprint and (eventually) driving up the value of labor during the (eventual) recovery period. Everybody wins!
It’s not just the buildings, it’s all the services underground.
Sea level rises and the lower half of a coastal city is now underwater (first at high tide only, then all the time) - the other half of the city, further up the hill, is the new waterfront.
Great, but the whole thing was joined up underground by sewers and street drains, water and gas mains, power, telephone and data cabling, You can’t just abandon the wet half of that and expect the dry half to keep working.
Right, and a lot of that is toxic too. I wonder if it would threaten coastal fishing? Seems like the EPA would require at least some remediation of that.
Any coastal city that’s half underwater will be dead broke. Individual property owners are unlikely to be able to afford marine excavation. Having all of our coastal cities half underwater is going to overwhelm any superfund.
By “escarpment” do you mean the Palisades along the Hudson River? Somehow I doubt we will ever see sea levels rise that high. Bad news for Weehawken though.
