Slashdot Mirror
Protecting At-Risk Cities From Rising Seas
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that with about 10 million people in England and Wales living in flood risk areas, rising sea levels and more storms could mean that parts of at-risk cities will need to be surrendered to protect homes and businesses, and that 'radical thinking' is needed to develop sea defenses that can cope with the future threats. 'If we act now, we can adapt in such a way that will prevent mass disruption and allow coastal communities to continue to prosper,' says Ruth Reed, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 'But the key word is "now."' Changing sea levels is not a new phenomenon. In the Netherlands, for example, with 40% of its surface under sea level, water management and water defense have been practiced since time immemorial; creating mounds and dykes, windmills, canals with locks and sluices, the Delta Works and the Afsluitdijk, all to keep the water out. Similar solutions to protect British cities are based on three themes (PDF): moving 'critical infrastructure' and housing to safer ground, allowing the water into parts of the city; building city-wide sea defenses to ensure water does not enter the existing urban area; and extending the existing coastline and building out onto the water (using stilts, floating structures and/or land reclamation)."
In other news, Himalayas have seen a surge of new visitors and people moving in.
Live in a house boat. They float. An chicks dig house boats.
A bit dangerous if you live in a houseboat.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Hire some Dutchmen to fix it.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
So they're saying that sea levels are, in fact, rising around the planet enough to endanger mass cities? Beachfront property in Leicester FTW! Woot!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Do anyone has thought that instead of investing resources in fighting rising levels, it may be cheaper and safer constructing in the long run on higher terrain (england has many country parts), New Orleans tried to do the same and look at the social and economic impact it had
Xirvin
1. Get yourself a current tide table.
2. Do not use the Tube trains around high water.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
the Delta Works and the Afsluitdijk
I've heard of some crazy Scandinavian names, but come on. That's just somebody banging on the keyboard. Next you're going to tell me about the famed Swedish Lkajadsfglkn.
Historically and prehistorically we've demonstrated that we have a strong preference for, and, derive much benefit from inhabiting coastal areas. The economic spin-offs in job creation, and knowledge gleaned from the engineering would be considerable and highly portable to the maintenance and development of any large urban area. Lastly the more we learn about and enable our long term habitation of coastal areas, the more we'll learn about our impact on the environment and the costs to ourselves. We can now landscape and engineer high density urban areas that are liveable and interesting but there is a need to cost externalities and recognize emergent economic activity incurred in terms of environmental impact and degradation.
ideopath @ play
Ok, so the scenario is based on 90 years in the future assuming a continuing sea level increase. So by 90 years in the future there will need to be either a movement of cities, or a man made defense for floods in place. Yup, this is front page material worthy of a panic. Thanks BBC.
Ah yes, another attempt to sell the big lie that CO2-induced global warming is causing sea levels to rise.
Even though they are clearly marked on the maps, and (presumably) are discovered in property searches, people still buy these places. Yet when the inevitable happens - for rain is a fact of life in England, they whine and moan about "our house has flooded ... you gotta HELP us!" Better still, a lot of river-side properties are very desirable and attract huge premiums. The buyers seem not to associate having a large body of moving water, passing by the bottom of the gardens to their million-pound houses, with any sort of risk, at all.
All I would suggest is huge .... massive .... crippling ... increases in home insurance premiums to both alert buyers to the dangers and also to make them pay the going rate for repairs and renovations - rather than being subsidised by all the sensible people. Just like happens with car insurance.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
They think it'll prove politically impossible to change course and stop the rise in sea level?
What are their plans for handling starving refugees? Or, merely feeding themselves? Living with tropical diseases? I think a little more thought on the disruptions would encourage a redoubling of efforts to stop the warming. It is not yet too late for that.
This kind of planning smacks of Cold War futility and madness, when quite a few nuclear bomb shelters were built and plans made to retreat to mine shafts with the pitiful surviving remnants of humanity (but, hey, ten hot women for every man!) knowing that if they ever had to be used for their ostensive purpose, humanity was already screwed. Well, interstate loops around large cities were meant to encourage development that might help contain a nuclear blast, maybe the same idea can help hold back the water!
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Whomever labeled this "pork" should think of New Orleans and reconsider. Protecting vulnerable coastal areas with levees and such is a valuable investment in human life.
If people actually start taking this nonsense seriously, it might be that we get some serious drop in beachfront property prices. Great to live within walking distance of the sea.
Shouldn't global warming make the sea retreat?
London the first underwater capital!
It might be wiser for the UK to invest in more snowplows and salt.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Prevention.
Having liver in the Netherlands for 3 years on and off, yes, they could fix it and the trains so they worked in snow.
The only thing you have to stop them touching is the roads, or they will turn them all into 'langsamwegs'
Do anyone has thought that instead of investing resources in fighting rising levels
It's simple. The City of London (i.e. the financial district in London) is at risk. They pretty much own the government/country, so of course taxes are going to be raised to implement flood defences.
Deleted
We can rid ourselves of the stain on the face of England that is London! I'm all for it.
The things we build with the longest planning horizon are nuclear power stations. They need that horizon because decommissioning can take such a long time. This makes nuclear power stations the projects most affected by sea level rise of all our current undertakings when sited in tidal regions. In the UK most stations are by the sea owing to lack of suitable rivers to provide cooling. Many current sites appear to have serious geological problems in the face of sea level rise detailed in this report: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/reports/the-impacts-of-climate-change-on-nuclear-power-station-sites At least the UK is looking at this issue. In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission refuses to consider the problem at all yet the US has many more inland sites than the UK and could simply defer consideration of licenses in tidal areas until sea level rise is better understood.
The policy in the UK has been Managed Retreat for several years now.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Did you just say that things change naturally? That's crazy talk! It's a fact that nothing on this planet ever changes unless it's caused by mankind!
Ever!
If you happen to live in these flood prone locations there are two choices:
a) Fix the entire world to stop rising waters ---- not likely.
b) MOVE to higher ground.
How long can you tread water? Perhaps you should ask the people of New Orleans?
Seriously. This is a Darwin test. Fail if you must, the human race will be better off.
Of course idiots still want beachfront property as close to the ocean as they can get, so the obvious solution is to have Congress subsidize rebuilding the beaches and paying for flood insurance.
They want to be close to the water and have a great view. In Harvey Cedars, NJ, there was a beach replenishment project that resulted in an interesting twist -- a couple who were unhappy that beachfront replenishment was going to ruin their house's first-floor view of the ocean sued (and won) $480,000.
In space. Really big lasers, boiling away enough ocean to keep the sea level from rising.
Not so sure on tearing them down, I agree it is better most times to rebuild, retrofit, make better. I think a lot of bad cities could be saved with two steps, the first, with the federal level as a guide, end the war on some drugs. 40* years is enough, it is a failed experiment just like liquid drugs prohibition was. It's just stupid, costs way too much, doesn't work, actually creates more crime. The illegal drug trade and the huge profits are the major impetus for organized violent gangs and crime, etc, plus official corruption,which is much higher than the suits want to admit. You can't tell me there's not a major involvement in the global drugs trade with banks, paramilitary enforcement services, etc, the legal "system" people, etc. Huge money, especially black market money, leads to massive official corruption, it isn't just street level crime, although they really like to emphasize that. So anyway, end that stupid war.
The second step, is to repurpose abandoned factories and make new stuff (like where are the millions of "really cheap and good enough" model A small windchargers out there, or solar thermal collection panels, and hot water heaters?), or they can keep manufacturing what they were making, the old stuff *with* the exception of the employees being majority owners, or the complete owners, which I think is an even better idea.
Go from unprofitable to being profitable by eliminating bloat and excessive costs. The wall street way is to screw over the actual workers who make the stuff. Well, that's a dumb way to cut costs,if you look at the company as a whole rather than just a short term cash cow for the Cxx crowd. How about start at the top instead of the bottom and cut out *those* jobs instead?
Detroit auto industry semi collapsed from the three existing established factors involved being at economic war with each other, meaning there never was a coordinated business, the unions versus the management versus the outside shareholders, all trying to run a company together. Nuts. A house divided will not stand.
The result of this internal economic warfare was too much management who thought all their ideas were just infallible, no checks on business megalomania there at all, just out to lunch (stuff like the expensive private jets bringing in the bosses to beg for bailout loans..those people are *clueless*, can't even spot hideously bad PR), short term profits mentality with shareholders, and unions demanding way more than what was reasonable for factory work, so they had to charge way more than what vehicles should go for to pay for all those salaries and profits and way too high union costs, etc. Just plain dumb.
Bad designs, always a decade or two behind the curve on what was really needed in the market, putzing around with stupid million dollar hydrogen boondoggle "concept" cars, blah, just lame, lack of focus, internecine destruction, etc. Just bad mojo, and if something like that is your dominant local employment scene like it is in Detroit..inevitable it would collapse. Detroit also suffered from some really bad racial tensions in the 60s, including riots (it was bad, saw them) leading to what they called "white flight" to the burbs, a massive shift, leaving downtown properties not worth as much, etc. Abandonedville to the gangs and junkies and the incredibly poor for the most part.
But here are examples of where something like this collapse of the local economy leading to blight, etc were remedied by the workers themselves running their own shops, eliminating a lot of expensive overhead, plus it makes them focus on doing a good job, no "us versus them versus them" thing like typical US business, it is only "us".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_self-management
In particular, scroll down that link to read about more recent "recovered factory movement" efforts in South America.
And here is another interesting way that people
Why can't we build huge water towers to lower the sea level ?, there really isn't that much water on the earth its just very thinly spread out.
We could build them at the poles and the water would freeze making it much safer (from terrorism, quakes, etc).
Any reason why this wouldn't work ?.
Perhaps we should take the right wing loonies who have denied that global warming is a reality or raised voices against taking action until absolute agreement of every nut jog maverick scientist in the world agrees that it is real and stake them out in the low spots on the English coast. They can then repeat over and over again "I am not drowning".
This problem is only partially caused by rising sea levels, England is also sinking.
the letter "ij" is not pronounced like in dyke, it is like in "weight"
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Undersea cities. Just build a roof if you already have walls.
For sunlight, optic fiber -- already been used to light inner rooms.
Or a treat: big floating/submersible platforms for amusement/sports, reachable by some kind of elevator/wirecar (underwater).
is full of shit.
If you havn't noticed it has been one of the Coldest winters in recent years, due to the un-predicted Arctic Oscillation. This goes to the climate models can't predict 3 months ahead, let alone 20 years. Add to that the data Cherry Picking that went into HAD-CRU and IPCC reports, and the incredibly course mesh that the Heat & Gas equations are run on. And the 0.6dC fall in average temperature over the last 8 years ... "hide the decline" (Jones).
Having now looked at both the Statistics and the setup of the Climate Models, I can tell you these guys are as innumerate as the econometric modelers used to be so: add AGW/sea-level-rise to H1N1 and the Great US Finance Debacle (repeal Glass-Steigel, Naked Shorts, Mark-2-Market & CDOs). This is all due to incompatant US administrations, a corrupt and grand standing Congress, a broken Court System so SCOTUS no longer upholds the Constitution, rather twists itself into a pretzel to pander.
All this amplified by the ignorant and biased reporting of the 24/7 lie-news cycle.
Finally I would point out that US policy, in every area is to mis-understand or lie about the threat analysis and then spend billions of dollars on the wrong thing, you guys need first to get an education, not just teach Chinease PhD's to hack Google and 35 other corporations, and get your completely corrupt government under control. That is what the RIGHT to bear arms is all about.
Every time I am in the Netherlands I simply marvel at the energy and efficiency of the water management. Amsterdam airport Schipol is 7m (23 feet) below sea level.
I was once asked by a colleague coming from Brussels (Belgium) to Amsterdam (NL) how he could tell when he crossed the frontier, and I said, "It's simple, when you see the sleepy cows in a wet field replaced by bright yellow earth moving machines, then you are in the Netherlands".
Gaag gedaan!
Only if you use Google/Yahoo
In Australia there are 2 VAST lakes that are below sea level.
It would require:
70km of canal digging to Lake Torrens from Port Augusta.
50km of canal digging to Lake Eyre From Lake Torrens.
A couple of Km of wier with an osmosis membrane at Port Augusta to filter the salt out of the inward flowing 'river' created.
That will ensure the salt levels inland remain no more salty than the Sea.
Voila!
Billions of litres removed from the Ocean.
An entirely new chemical-free salt water fishing industry.
More evaporation in Australia's centre, which would hopefully lead to more rain over the south-eastern food bowl.
It really is very, very, very simple; if the predictions were NEAR term, they will either be proved wrong, or massively toned down;
So the solution is to make them very long term and continue the flow of FUD and hand waving. Then go look at the models 2 degree equatorial latitude cells, thats 44 miles (70 k) on side, and they think they might get accurate results ( hint the tetrahedron tessalation for aeronautical design is circa 1 mm on side), give me a break! and that is without Chaos theory applied to the entire differentiable manifold.
Another hint, in temperate latitudes, on land, entire weather systems are ~ 20-100 miles, and tornados < 0.5 miles wide. This is just a huge joke and the Emperor really is naked.
If you followed the first link and did some more research, in particular to the Argentinian examples, you will see that they have become successful after the bosses and investors had just given up and closed the factories down, walking away, leaving the rest of the workers high and dry with no jobs, even when they had taken pay cut after pay cut all the way to the point that they couldn't even afford to get to work.. These allegedly "professionally well managed" factories, etc were NOT successful with the strict capitalist model of paying the big bucks to some "executive" decision makers and order givers, plus funding outside shareholder investors, they failed or where darn close to it. After this turns out to be unnecessary overhead bloat and expense was removed, the workers, and the factory, or other businesses, were able to go back to being profitable.
So I agree with you, layoffs might be necessary, just WHO gets laid off is at issue. It doesn't always have to be the guys down on the shop floor that are costing the company too much money to be profitable, it well could be too many heavy layers of quite expensive management is where the true waste is, and what needs to be "laid off" as a sane cost cutting move.
As to you "investing" in one of those places, that's the point in many of these sorts of situations, you would have to actually work, as in physical labor of some sort "work", there to be a part owner for your "share", you would have to "invest" labor in getting up and going there for your shift work if you wanted any of the profits.
There's nothing all that exotic to this model, it is a co-op, just for employment, which also seeks to be more efficient and profitable by eliminating waste, even "jobs and wages" waste, something all sorts of companies do now, they look around for labor arbitrage advantages. Just in this case they found their best advantage was eliminating a lot of jobs at the top, not at the bottom. They found out it isn't necessarily carved in stone that you have to have an all managerial class separate from the blue collar workers, that in some instances, they were quite able to self manage themselves, and by eliminating this false necessity of paying for all the managerial overhead and outside investors demands, the rest of the employees there found out they could make a living and return the company itself to profitability.
The workers are the owners, there is no distinction there.
Co-ops to save money for all the members are not a new idea at all, say look at food co-ops, or a local co-op for telco or power instead of having an all privately owned utility or telco. Another example might be a local member owned credit union as opposed to a traditional bank.
This worker co-op model just runs it even closer to an effective share and share alike model, realizing it takes all the parts to make the whole, and as they are all in it together, there is no internal war between the traditional "job" and income classifications and barriers, the white collar versus the blue collar versus shareholder demands.
There's a really big variation of a "workers co-op" we are familiar with here on slashdot, and it is very successful to "boot", pun intended, on a global scale, able to compete quite well "in the market", and this is the Linux kernel, as is also the entire FOSS movement. It is a global workers co-op.
All the contributors or "workers" get paid, at a minimum, this is the basest "minimum wage" pay and it goes up from there, with an "in kind" currency model, which is equal access to the code, and given that said code can then be used in OTHER business, A to Z, as most business today relies on computers and code, then you can "make money to pay the rent" etc, using the first "in kind" currency, as an economic force multiplier and cost saving measure to make additional national currencies of desire. It's a very successful variation on a workers' co-op model that is expanding daily, and it makes a lot of people stay employed, doing us
That is not scientific modeling, or Mathematics, it is like numerology, The Chinese think 8 is lucky, is it? How can 2 billion people be wrong?
At the risk of re-iterating:
(a) this scam is based on faulty data which does NOT prove, imply or suggest what the real data predicts, see the ClimateGate CODE, and then read the e-mails, Jones has been suspended at CRU, and,
(b) Real temperature is falling, and,
(c) the models have to use the real Physics equations (i) Gas Equation, (ii) Heat Equation, (iii) Navier-Stokes not some piece of linearised shit you or they dreamed up to make the sums easy.
and then you need to understand Chaos Theory which, to simplify, has theorems that prove that stepwise integration of differentiable manifolds, are in general unstable with respect of small variation in initial or matching boundery conditions, this is the absolute killer, and is why the mesh is all.
Finally, don't be stupid, much of your argument is "ignore the details, the end result has to be this blind ass guess", well no it dosnt.
This boils down to the fact that Math and Science is no longer taught in most US schools, and many college undergraduate classes are just as inane; for a laugh I put your argument to a 16 year old Swiss Berufschuler, and in spite of reading it in English, his response was immediate "sheiskopf".
Sea levels rose an estimated 12-18 inches during the 20th century. Didn't you hear about it? It was bigger news than the two world wars, putting men on the moon, and all those other lesser stories.
Well, the sea levels are NOT rising, East Anglia et al is SINKING, just as Holland has been and still is. If the sea is rising in England, it must be coming from parts of Scotland where the sea levels are "falling" or the land is rising. Obviously the folk who "believe" in sea levels tising haven't hear of Archimedes.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) H.L. Menc
Look people, use your fucking brains and don't buy property that doesn't have at least 10m of freeboard between it and the nearest drainage route. In a small number of areas, use a figure of 20m instead of 10m. As for people who've already been stupid enough to buy such property, which now has zero resale value : tough shit.
I've got 80m freeboard between my cellar and the nearest river, and this was not an accident. I simply rejected housing adverts from areas of the city that didn't have sufficient freeboard. It's not rocket surgery. Or brain science.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
He's coming back to rain on earth... any day now... honest.......... really he is.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.