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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.
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?
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.
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
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.