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Sea Rise Could Force Millions In Florida To Adapt Or Flee (miamiherald.com)
mdsolar writes: For the first time, a team of researchers looked at ongoing population growth in areas where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has created flood maps that more accurately reflect local conditions. What they found was startling: projections that failed to factor in population growth in dense states like Florida hugely underestimated the number of people at risk and the cost of protecting them. Combined with the findings from a 2015 report, that means Florida can claim two titles: most property at risk, and now, most people.
I was told in 1974 by The Weekly Reader that by the year 2000 all of the beaches in North Carolina were gong to be gone.
May I suggest you start talking to the Dutch. Their language sounds like a mix of German, English and a throat infection, but I assure you, they all understand and speak English excellently. The name "Netherlands" means "lower countries". You know that the Netherlands are famous for windmills, right? Well, those aren't all mills. Many are wind pumps, which were used to drain the land, most of which is below sea level.
I had a lot of fun with this simulator that give a taste of sea rising : http://geology.com/sea-level-r...
The lack of will to fight global warming let most of the scientist baffled toward the governments of the world. It's a little understandable, the global warming is so subtle (~2mm rise and 0.13 Celcius per year) that the frog analogy of Al Gore perfectly explain our lack of action. As of now, it's not possible to make a business case that, with X billions you'll save Y billions of natural disaster.
For me, money is the key of that fight and the sonner the better. And that map (see link above) showed me something interesting. A lof of huge and rich city are at sea level (Miami, New York, Tokyo etc.). Each of those city worth in the trillion : http://www.businessinsider.com...
I wonder what the speech will look like when water will start flooding Broadway. How will the fight again global warming will look like with a budget of 10 trillions?
Elok
,quote>Where would Florida pump the water to? The ocean?
Well we (Dutch) do... if it's high tide and internal water levels are too high. But usually we let it go at low tide. That's the wonderful thing about the sea... it's dynamic. You 'just' have to have some internal basins to temporarily store fresh-water surplus and adjustable storm surge barriers in your major estuaries.
the Dutch are surrounded by mountains
Not .. quite. At the North and West we have the North Sea, of course. Our Northern flank has a shallow marshy-sea-land type of area and a string of sandy islands stretching a 100 miles or so in a west-east direction and a few dozen miles wide. The Western flank is sand dunes. And the South-west are major estuaries with river-separated islands... and those storm surge barriers, of which one major one (Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier) is adjustable so it only closes when a storm hits. Oh, and the North-western area of our country contains a (very large, used to be even a lot larger) lake, which used to be a sea in its own right. But we dammed that off and now it's a fresh-water lake with about half the area poldered in, so that's a new provice (we do not have states, but provinces) now.
At the South we have Belgium, which is an independent nation. They have less costs for their water-works because they don't have the major estuaries we Dutch have... but Belgium is still part of the 'Low countries', as is a piece of Northern France and the whole area is not much above sea-level. Then, at the South-east we have a couple of hills of which -maybe- the south-eastern tip might qualify as a mountain (its highest peak is 322 meters (1056 feet) above sea-level). East we have the German low lands, of which the Northern part looks very similar to our North-east,including the shallow marshy sea-land and more sandy islands, all the way up-to and including parts of Denmark, another nation yet again. East-south-east we have the Rhine flowing and the Rhine-Ruhr gebied, which is still quite low and one of the major population areas of Germany. It's only beyond that, there are proper mountains.
In historical times already, the Dutch started building dams that got flooded every high tide, but kept the sand in the low tide, thus increasing the land grow at their coast. If the spot was high enough, they started building a dike on it to prevent even very high tides to get onto the freshly won land. After the dikes are ready and all remaining water has been pumped out, the land is called a polder. Most of the land at the Dutch coast is polderland. What we have here is a tradition of 1500 years of winning land by creating polders on former seabeds, helped by the unique feature of the large intertidal zones.
One problem still remains: Rivers flow into the sea, and if the land level is below sea level, they will not. At every river mouth, you have to somehow get the river water into the sea water, and if the sea level rises, you have to have pumps that are able to pump all the river water up into the seawater, or the river mouth will move up until it reaches the point where the sealevel matches the river level. At the Dutch coast, this problem is migitated by another natural phenomenom: A very high difference between high and low tide. While for most of the oceans, the difference (called tidal range) is just one or two feet (and thus much lower than the expected rise in sea levels), at the Dutch coast, the difference is between 6 and 10 feet. Thus, to let the river into the sea, but not the sea water into the land, you just close big gates at the river mouths every high tide, but open it at the low tide.
Florida borders directly at the Atlantic Ocean, and thus the tidal range is very low, which means that no Floridan river will flow into the ocean anymore if the sea level rises. If you build large dikes around Florida, it will not be flooded by ocean water, but the rain water and the ground water, which no longer can flow into the ocean, will flood Florida instead.