9 ms·

Flooding of US Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Begun

89 points by gyre007 10y ago

finid 10y ago
> Local governments, under pressure from annoyed citizens, are beginning to act. Elections are being won on promises to invest money to protect against flooding. Interesting. I do recall that in 2012, North Carolina's House Bill 819 prohibited the state's Coastal Resources Commission from calculating sea-level changes using recent data.
- themartorana 10y ago
  Scary, using laws to prohibit people doing math. It's the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and humming loudly.
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  It was a sad day to be a North Carolinian...
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    Their legislature gives them many such days.
- DanBC 10y ago
  http://www.nccoast.org/uploads/documents/CRO/2012-5/SLR-bill.pdf http://www.nccoast.org/uploads/documents/CRO/2012-5/SLR-bill...
- 6502nerdface 10y ago
  Hopefully bill != law?
  - finid 10y ago
    It actually became law, because the governor, who could have vetoed it or at least put up a fight, chose to do nothing.
spodek 10y ago
As I wrote in HN's dialog about a New York Magazine article on global warming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471815: As usual, nothing about prevention. Global temperatures and the sea level are rising because of human behavior. If we want different results, we have to behave differently. Engineers and scientists know engineering and science but not so much leading people to change their behavior. It's easy to blame others: "Listen to me! If you don't you'll be sorry!" isn't effective. Also, what fraction of engineers and scientists have, say, flown in a plane or something similarly polluting in the past twelve months? If you want to change behavior, you need to learn and practice leadership skills and apply them to yourself as well as others. The science is clear. More is nice and I agree we should keep pursuing it, but the best way to decrease the effects of global warming is to change our behavior. (This is why I moved from science to leadership.) This article's writing about flood-proof architecture and other rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic behavior is necessary since it's too late to stop a lot of change, but it's not too late to stop the change that we -- you and I -- are contributing to now. As much as I wish past generations had changed their behaviors so we wouldn't see these problems today, future generations will wish we had changed our behavior today. Even if you don't have kids or grandkids, I would think caring about human society in general and empathy and compassion for future generations would be enough to focus on changing our behavior proactively, not just reactively fixing problems others bequeathed to us.
- themartorana 10y ago
  Would you like to give some examples of the leadership in behavioral change you'd like to see? I personally doubt anything save huge taxes on gasoline are going to do anything to change behavior. You can decry driving by people still need to get to work. Laws are the only drivers of change so massive. We're fighting over oil pipelines to pump more oil for use, not which green energy gets tax breaks. And even with outrageous prices caused by taxes meant to make dangerous activity prohibitive, people still smoke. Cash-for-clunkers-for-EV? "Infrastructure spending" in EV charging nationwide? Federally supported replacement of coal fired power plants? People aren't going to change behavior at all because of flooding except for maybe those people under water. But they'll just move.
throwaway1974 10y ago
Will the US see large engineering works this century to prevent flooding? Large stretches of Florida have quite alot of property right on the sea barely above sea level, would these property owners demand protection?
- DanBC 10y ago
  Florida is already seeing lots of sinkholes because of the geography - it's build on porous limestone which erodes easily. There's probably not much chance of saving florida.
  - marcusgarvey 10y ago
    >These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Is the wellwater seepage the biggest problem? Guessing the other things in the list could be fixed with lots of money and infrastructure.
- yardie 10y ago
  No, these people have their head buried so deeply in the sand I'm amazed they haven't died from asphyxiation. So far, I've heard they have 100 years to sort it out. The "engineers" will find a "solution". They'll build dikes like the dutch (never mind the dutch took 300 years). My favourite is "we'll build houses on stilts".
blondie9x 10y ago
We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem. What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html We are being lied to, often mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar and wind energy are starting to become incredibly efficient and cheap but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. Even if you chose not to have kids, it still makes our work and lives meaningless if our species and other species on this planet go extinct because we allow dumping in our atmosphere to go on unfettered. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves. What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  Deforestation is so serious, I visited Indonesia last year and all I could see from the plane was smoke from illegal burning of forests for palm oil plantations and cheap mass animal agriculture. It was the worst fire in known history and a really, really sad thing to witness, the baron charred fields left behind are really a terrible thing to see. I wonder why on earth more wealthy Governments don't send in the "defense forces" to help stop this illegal activity, instead of going to Syria, it's such a no brainier. Countries like Brazil and Indonesia shouldn't be required to protect everything on their own, nor should activists, murders of activists are a reality because they're just getting in the way of business. It would also be easy and relatively cheap to start replanting and re-generating damage forests, I know it won't bounce back immediately, but it does regenerate eventually if assisted (apparently). For those that are unaware, palm oil is in pretty much in all packaged foods sold in super markets, often hidden as vegetable oil, the WWF has information about identifying products that use it http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-contain-palm-oil http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-c... After the destruction I saw, if one wants to continue living and has any loved ones, I would cross it off your shopping list now, along with any imported animal products. Also, be highly skeptical about any "certified products", having spent time in Indonesia and seeing corruption first hand, I doubt such things truly exist, better to just get off the palm for good.
meeper16 10y ago
The end is near! The sky has fallen!
tomohawk 10y ago
For a more geologic view: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter10/Ency_Oceans/Sea_Level_Variations.pdf http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter10/Ency...
greenleafjacob 10y ago
Maybe after SF is underwater rents will come down.
mhb 10y ago
This problem can't be solved. No politician who advocates the sort of changes required will be reelected. There is no way to enforce international agreements. Probably the best idea is to start thinking about risky geoengineering remediation techniques.
- vlehto 10y ago
  If U.S. leads the way, EU, Canada and Japan will follow. Then you have over 50% of world GDP behind ecological embargo. So the rest are not too much of a problem. If U.S. does nothing, then each individual EU country and Japan and Canada will all be individually too small to do it. EU won't take orders from non-NATO countries. And EU can't risk it's credibility on something that expensive that's not backed by USA. It would fuel exit-populist propaganda too much. Meanwhile USA is not breaking apart in similar fashion. Looking from a Nordic country, this is the only reason why electing Trump would be a sad mistake. Otherwise Trump is just funny.
- super-serial 10y ago
  Politicians won't solve it... but Global warming is already solved by nature. Rocks pull CO2 out of the atmosphere by weathering. All humanity needs to do is spend about $200 billion per year on mining and crushing olivine rocks and spreading it in the ocean. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/olivine/ https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/olivine/
- kaybe 10y ago
  We are considering them. The current verdict is: Too risky, and eventually far more expensive than the path of avoidance. In general, most methods that try to manipulate the planet's radiation budget (eg giant sunscreen in space, white paint, SO2 in the stratosphere) are either prohibitively expensive and risky or require constant upkeep, allowing a full-blown catastrophe to happen should any short- to medium-term problem occur with the upkeep. At least those could be reversed if needed though. The methods that try to remove carbon are a safer bet, but safely storing CO2 is hard and might not be safe (volcanic lakes have killed thousands by releasing CO2), especially longterm. And storing it in different form such as coal.. well, it's kind of pointless to first burn the coal just to remake it, especially from an energy and thus financial point of view. Storing it in the ocean's biomatter is again risky as we don't have a proper picture of what might happen. IMHO, the risky geoengineering techniques should be tried on Venus for a few millenia+, before we need them to stabilize the climate against natural variations (an ice age would majorly suck as well, probably far more that global warming. Even if the timescale is different.) ( http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/Climate_Engineering http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/Clim... for material on this)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aswanson 10y ago
Liberal propaganda. We still have snowballs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3koOUFp4crU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3koOUFp4crU
kbutler 10y ago
NY Times: "Caused by Global Warming" USGS: "More than half caused by land subsidence" "Land subsidence causes more than half the relative sea level rise in Norfolk, largely explained by groundwater extraction." http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1392/pdf/circ1392.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1392/pdf/circ1392.pdf The article at least mentions the subsidence issue by saying it will be "worse than average" in areas where the land is "sinking at a brisk clip", but gives a distorted view of the relative contribution.
- NotSammyHagar 10y ago
  So you are saying there is some kind of scam to overestimate the rise in sea levels caused by global warming?

89 points by gyre007 10y ago

finid 10y ago

> Local governments, under pressure from annoyed citizens, are beginning to act. Elections are being won on promises to invest money to protect against flooding. Interesting. I do recall that in 2012, North Carolina's House Bill 819 prohibited the state's Coastal Resources Commission from calculating sea-level changes using recent data.

themartorana 10y ago
Scary, using laws to prohibit people doing math. It's the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and humming loudly.
noobiemcfoob 10y ago
It was a sad day to be a North Carolinian...
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  Their legislature gives them many such days.
DanBC 10y ago
http://www.nccoast.org/uploads/documents/CRO/2012-5/SLR-bill.pdf http://www.nccoast.org/uploads/documents/CRO/2012-5/SLR-bill...
6502nerdface 10y ago
Hopefully bill != law?
- finid 10y ago
  It actually became law, because the governor, who could have vetoed it or at least put up a fight, chose to do nothing.

spodek 10y ago

As I wrote in HN's dialog about a New York Magazine article on global warming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471815: As usual, nothing about prevention. Global temperatures and the sea level are rising because of human behavior. If we want different results, we have to behave differently. Engineers and scientists know engineering and science but not so much leading people to change their behavior. It's easy to blame others: "Listen to me! If you don't you'll be sorry!" isn't effective. Also, what fraction of engineers and scientists have, say, flown in a plane or something similarly polluting in the past twelve months? If you want to change behavior, you need to learn and practice leadership skills and apply them to yourself as well as others. The science is clear. More is nice and I agree we should keep pursuing it, but the best way to decrease the effects of global warming is to change our behavior. (This is why I moved from science to leadership.) This article's writing about flood-proof architecture and other rearranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic behavior is necessary since it's too late to stop a lot of change, but it's not too late to stop the change that we -- you and I -- are contributing to now. As much as I wish past generations had changed their behaviors so we wouldn't see these problems today, future generations will wish we had changed our behavior today. Even if you don't have kids or grandkids, I would think caring about human society in general and empathy and compassion for future generations would be enough to focus on changing our behavior proactively, not just reactively fixing problems others bequeathed to us.

themartorana 10y ago
Would you like to give some examples of the leadership in behavioral change you'd like to see? I personally doubt anything save huge taxes on gasoline are going to do anything to change behavior. You can decry driving by people still need to get to work. Laws are the only drivers of change so massive. We're fighting over oil pipelines to pump more oil for use, not which green energy gets tax breaks. And even with outrageous prices caused by taxes meant to make dangerous activity prohibitive, people still smoke. Cash-for-clunkers-for-EV? "Infrastructure spending" in EV charging nationwide? Federally supported replacement of coal fired power plants? People aren't going to change behavior at all because of flooding except for maybe those people under water. But they'll just move.

throwaway1974 10y ago

Will the US see large engineering works this century to prevent flooding? Large stretches of Florida have quite alot of property right on the sea barely above sea level, would these property owners demand protection?

DanBC 10y ago
Florida is already seeing lots of sinkholes because of the geography - it's build on porous limestone which erodes easily. There's probably not much chance of saving florida.
- marcusgarvey 10y ago
  >These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Is the wellwater seepage the biggest problem? Guessing the other things in the list could be fixed with lots of money and infrastructure.
yardie 10y ago
No, these people have their head buried so deeply in the sand I'm amazed they haven't died from asphyxiation. So far, I've heard they have 100 years to sort it out. The "engineers" will find a "solution". They'll build dikes like the dutch (never mind the dutch took 300 years). My favourite is "we'll build houses on stilts".

blondie9x 10y ago

We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem. What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html We are being lied to, often mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar and wind energy are starting to become incredibly efficient and cheap but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. Even if you chose not to have kids, it still makes our work and lives meaningless if our species and other species on this planet go extinct because we allow dumping in our atmosphere to go on unfettered. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves. What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.

pmyjavec 10y ago
Deforestation is so serious, I visited Indonesia last year and all I could see from the plane was smoke from illegal burning of forests for palm oil plantations and cheap mass animal agriculture. It was the worst fire in known history and a really, really sad thing to witness, the baron charred fields left behind are really a terrible thing to see. I wonder why on earth more wealthy Governments don't send in the "defense forces" to help stop this illegal activity, instead of going to Syria, it's such a no brainier. Countries like Brazil and Indonesia shouldn't be required to protect everything on their own, nor should activists, murders of activists are a reality because they're just getting in the way of business. It would also be easy and relatively cheap to start replanting and re-generating damage forests, I know it won't bounce back immediately, but it does regenerate eventually if assisted (apparently). For those that are unaware, palm oil is in pretty much in all packaged foods sold in super markets, often hidden as vegetable oil, the WWF has information about identifying products that use it http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-contain-palm-oil http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-c... After the destruction I saw, if one wants to continue living and has any loved ones, I would cross it off your shopping list now, along with any imported animal products. Also, be highly skeptical about any "certified products", having spent time in Indonesia and seeing corruption first hand, I doubt such things truly exist, better to just get off the palm for good.

meeper16 10y ago

The end is near! The sky has fallen!

tomohawk 10y ago

For a more geologic view: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter10/Ency_Oceans/Sea_Level_Variations.pdf http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter10/Ency...

greenleafjacob 10y ago

Maybe after SF is underwater rents will come down.

mhb 10y ago

This problem can't be solved. No politician who advocates the sort of changes required will be reelected. There is no way to enforce international agreements. Probably the best idea is to start thinking about risky geoengineering remediation techniques.

vlehto 10y ago
If U.S. leads the way, EU, Canada and Japan will follow. Then you have over 50% of world GDP behind ecological embargo. So the rest are not too much of a problem. If U.S. does nothing, then each individual EU country and Japan and Canada will all be individually too small to do it. EU won't take orders from non-NATO countries. And EU can't risk it's credibility on something that expensive that's not backed by USA. It would fuel exit-populist propaganda too much. Meanwhile USA is not breaking apart in similar fashion. Looking from a Nordic country, this is the only reason why electing Trump would be a sad mistake. Otherwise Trump is just funny.
super-serial 10y ago
Politicians won't solve it... but Global warming is already solved by nature. Rocks pull CO2 out of the atmosphere by weathering. All humanity needs to do is spend about $200 billion per year on mining and crushing olivine rocks and spreading it in the ocean. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/olivine/ https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/olivine/
kaybe 10y ago
We are considering them. The current verdict is: Too risky, and eventually far more expensive than the path of avoidance. In general, most methods that try to manipulate the planet's radiation budget (eg giant sunscreen in space, white paint, SO2 in the stratosphere) are either prohibitively expensive and risky or require constant upkeep, allowing a full-blown catastrophe to happen should any short- to medium-term problem occur with the upkeep. At least those could be reversed if needed though. The methods that try to remove carbon are a safer bet, but safely storing CO2 is hard and might not be safe (volcanic lakes have killed thousands by releasing CO2), especially longterm. And storing it in different form such as coal.. well, it's kind of pointless to first burn the coal just to remake it, especially from an energy and thus financial point of view. Storing it in the ocean's biomatter is again risky as we don't have a proper picture of what might happen. IMHO, the risky geoengineering techniques should be tried on Venus for a few millenia+, before we need them to stabilize the climate against natural variations (an ice age would majorly suck as well, probably far more that global warming. Even if the timescale is different.) ( http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/Climate_Engineering http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/Clim... for material on this)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

aswanson 10y ago

Liberal propaganda. We still have snowballs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3koOUFp4crU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3koOUFp4crU

kbutler 10y ago

NY Times: "Caused by Global Warming" USGS: "More than half caused by land subsidence" "Land subsidence causes more than half the relative sea level rise in Norfolk, largely explained by groundwater extraction." http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1392/pdf/circ1392.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1392/pdf/circ1392.pdf The article at least mentions the subsidence issue by saying it will be "worse than average" in areas where the land is "sinking at a brisk clip", but gives a distorted view of the relative contribution.

NotSammyHagar 10y ago
So you are saying there is some kind of scam to overestimate the rise in sea levels caused by global warming?