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The Golden Gate Barrage: New Ideas To Counter Sea Level Rise
waderoush writes "What do Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit have in common? They're just a few of the tech companies whose campuses alongside San Francisco Bay could be underwater by mid-century as sea levels rise. It's time for these organizations and other innovators to put some of their fabled brainpower into coming up with new ideas to counter the threat, Xconomy argues today. One idea: the Golden Gate Barrage, a massive system of dams, locks, and pumps located in the shadow of the iconic bridge. Taller than the Three Gorges Dam in China, it would be one of the largest and costliest projects in the history of civil engineering. But at least one Bay Area government official says might turn out to be the simplest way to save hundreds of square miles of land around the bay from inundation."
...maybe put that brainpower into solving the actual global problem, rather than finding a bandaid solution to the local symptom....
Word game?
Let's build an extremely complex system of levees in an area prone to high magnitude earthquakes.
What could possibly go wrong?
I'm sort of neutral about Google, but drowning those other three companies in salt water sounds like a net plus to me.
Keep the heat on. Lets put a whole bunch more shrimp on the barbies! (They'll probably go extinct in a couple of decades anyway).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I wonder if we wouldn't just be better off writing some laws now that say, "look, don't come crying to us when your expensive beach-front property goes underwater. Factor that into the price before you buy."
We need a carbon tax just to speed the transition to less less-polluting energy sources; if we instead use that money to repair thousands of miles of coastline and keep burning fossil fuel, we solve nothing.
That should be good for a few feet of water.
According to NOAA, the actual average sea level rise over the last 100 years has been about 2 MILLIMETERS per year, or 200mm/century, or about 8 inches per 100 years. Here's the official data http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9414290. If you look at the chart you'll see that the trend has actually dropped to about zero mm / year for the last 30 years.
So, in light of this, we need the biggest engineering project in history?
Why not just move? Sea barriers is literally pushing the problem around. That solves nothing.
Joseph Elwell.
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit have in common? They're just a few of the tech companies whose campuses alongside San Francisco Bay could be underwater by mid-century as sea levels rise
And all this time I thought Global Warming would be a bad thing. Is there any way we can speed this up, get those companies under water faster?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In the short or long term? Remember, in this world of corporate profits, the long term is absolutely fucking meaningless. Long term to the sociopaths we've put in charge of the global economy is no more six to eight quarters.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If Emperor Norton didn't come up with the idea, it's just ridiculous blue-sky dreaming.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I thought it was a statement that one of those other companies just couldn't be counted on.
Or add four feet of dirt.
The water portion of the SF Bay was once twice the size it is right now. The reason those pieces of commercial (and residential) real estate are vulnerable is they are built on areas that once were 6 inches underwater at hide tide. They are not underwater every single day because dirt was shipped in.
They shipped in four feet of dirt to create the problem. How about we solve the problem with four more feet of dirt?
As for the barrage, the ecological costs would be enormous. A few merely massive pumping stations is not going to prevent the bay water from becoming a smelly cess pool polluted by agricultural runoff and much worse from the residential areas. It is a fun idea for civil engineers, but we are wealthy enough here to employ less tricky solution that will be more reliable.
Ooops. Commenting to undo my accidental "flamebait" moderation.
Our *three* weapons are fear, and surprise, ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope
So we have to build this to protect companies. Actually, company property. OK, no, actually the property that they rent, since they probably don't own it. What about the PEOPLE that will be flooded. Why should I care about protecting companies? Is our mindset really so fucked up that companies come first? Rhetorical question.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
With cash reserves like their's, they can just move instead. There is nothing special about the land they are using... the historical reason such projects made sense in the past was they were reclaiming farmable land, which is not quite as interchangeable as corporate parks.
This article is one of the dumbest things I have read in a long time. Not only is the dam system stupid but there's no way these companies would actually do this. It's so much cheaper and easier to just move to a new location.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
So, in order to protect against a rise in sea level of no more than 1 foot in the absolute worst case, they need to build a system of dams, locks and pumps greater than 600 feet high???
From the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:
Climate Change 2007
Sea level is projected to rise between the present (1980 - 1999) and the end of this century (2090 - 2099) by 0.35 m (0.23 to 0.47 m) for the A1B scenario ...
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch11s11-9-4.html
Costly too.
Well, of course. Even if for some reason the companys elected to stay, they'd naturally expect the government to build the structures using taxpayer money.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There is only one way for ocean water to go in and out, and that’s through the Golden Gate, a 300-foot-deep gap in the Coastal Range that was originally gouged out thousands of years ago by a mighty river.
As a result of this lucky geological accident, it would be possible in theory to control the water level in the Bay—to put a stopper in the bathtub drain—by building a massive tidal gate, more or less in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. The ideal location, based on tidal velocities and the topography of the Bay bottom, would be about half a mile east of the bridge, as shown in the graphic above.
The author overlooked the Sacramento & San Joaquin Rivers, both of which drain into the San Francisco Bay. You don't put a "stopper in the bathtub drain" when you cannot turn off the faucet flowing into that bathtub.
I forget, how does "the Space Elevator" address sea level rise? Do we just put all of the water on the elevator?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Given that the bay is 400-1600 sq. miles (depends what you count as part of the bay). 400 sq mile is 11,151,360,000 sq ft. So 650,000 cu ft/sec corresponds to a rise of 5.83e-6 ft/sec -- about 2 inches for a 24 hours period. Maybe they won't have an immediate emergency if they fall behind just a little in their rate of pumping.
That's just one inlet, don't forget to add in the square mileage from all of the cities that dump their storm drains into the bay, rain entering the bay from other, smaller waterways, as well as rain falling on the bay directly - Sandy dumped 8 - 12" of rain in many places. So if you close the gates 2 days before the surge hits you may have a few feet of water behind the gates before the surge even comes.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think maybe he's talking about getting off this mudball. We'd need a series of elevators for that, though, and then a whole lot of other hand-waving besides.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
bah! "33% change to one variable in this massive system".
Suddenly though the plot of Pacific Rim becomes a perfect metaphor for global warming. Our leaders pushing people to build giant dams to protects us from the monsters coming from the sea that are unleashed by a greedy class of beings that want only to strip our world of all its resources. None of the solutions actually working until the problem is attacked at its source.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
With cash reserves like their's, they can just move instead. There is nothing special about the land they are using... the historical reason such projects made sense in the past was they were reclaiming farmable land, which is not quite as interchangeable as corporate parks.
It is not just San Francisco that is worried. Water levels won't just rise in that one city.
Turns out people have already done research on who lives in low-lying coastal regions. About 10% of the global population will likely need to move. 2/3 of the world's largest cities would be swamped or submerged.
The United States might lose only 5% of its land. Countries like India will lose half of their land. Some island nations will be completely uninhabitable.
Even if sea walls cost quadrillions of dollars globally to delay the eventual flooding of the land, that is likely still cheaper than such a massive sudden loss of existing infrastructure. It is cheaper (for a few centuries, at least) to spend a few trillion dollars protecting major cities than it is to completely rebuild the cities elsewhere.
Yes the people will need to eventually move through both a planned migration and normal population growth. Relocating 10% of the global population in just a few short decades is a much harder problem to solve, and a much more expensive proposition, than to build the massive walls around existing large cities.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
An advantage for living in Denver has finally become perceptible.
Its hard to know if youre jabbing at companies or not. Somewhere out there, someone actually thinks its appropriate to criticize a private business for not financing a boondoogle system of locks.
Maybe lash them all together with some smaller boats, forming some kind of large Raft...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Precisely.
The "Climate Change" that threatens these companies is the economic climate of the former Golden State.
At 3.25 inches per century (the current rate of sea level rise in California), by the time those campi have been inundated some tens of thousands of years from now, all of those companies will have either moved or gone under -- not from water, but by the flood of taxes and regulations in the Golden [Fleece] State.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
It is not so sudden if you have a 50-100 year warning... so it would be cheaper to move, just not all at once. Start now by placing incentives in place. It is not in the public interest, for example, to provide government insurance for known coastal flood zones.
Like so many problems, it is not an all or nothing deal. Declare now that public funds will not be used for massive dyke projects, and publish a reasonable timetable describing tapering off of any flood coverage, such that the percentage of coverage is zero in 50 years. You can't fight nature, but there will be no end of people willing to take the money to try.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Of course they are. In fact the computers they're using are generating so much heat that... hey, wait a minute...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You act as though the ground in San Francisco could sudden shift and tear the seawall apart.
Or, instead of trying to stop the earth from moving, consider the following:
3% of earth's above-water landmass is covered in urban areas.
Counting any part of the earth's surface that has any human or agricultural footprint, 43% of the earth's land surface is "inhabited."
Instead of pouring national economy's resources into protecting a fraction of a fraction's percent of landmass, they could all just move somewhere else. 57% of the earth's land surface doesn't even have anyone on it to say otherwise.
They wouldn't even have to move around the world. You could stick the entire population of California, let alone just the Bay area into Montana, invite the ocean to sweep in and wash away the grime of the west coast, and turn Vegas and Phoenix into new port cities.