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Giant dams enclosing North Sea could protect millions from rising waters
- nfg 7y agoSource here: https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de-noordzee-waarschuwscenario-voor-klimaatverandering https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de-noordzee-w...
- java-man 7y agoI would like to see a failure analysis report.
- thedudeabides5 7y agoGetting this passed by both the EU and UK governments seems at least as unlikely as 'turn the north sea into gigantic lake' plan failing.
- magduf 7y agoThere was a similar idea for the Mediterranean sea almost 100 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa Edit: some grad student more recently (2014) proposed this as well: https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html
- rtkwe 7y agoHow would a complete opening be safe to traverse with a 50 cm difference between opposite sides of the dam? I'd think that'd create quite a strong current that would make it very hard to exit the Med.
- magduf 7y agoFrom the article: “A rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 is predicted, according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now. If we do nothing, this extreme dam might just be the only solution.” Building these dams will be a lot easier than getting people to stop driving SUVs and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
- amrox 7y agoNot sure if you're serious, but transportation is only 14% of emissions. Electricity, agriculture and industry are all individually bigger contributors. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
- kyuudou 7y agoWhy are militaries rarely mentioned as GGG contributors?
- vondur 7y agoGood question, maybe they are still included in some of the current categories?
- rtkwe 7y agoIt's hard to get data. Countries were explicitly allowed to ignore/not report military emissions by the Kyoto Accords. Without the mandatory reporting anyone trying to write about it has to gather a lot of information about the inner workings of military logistics (amount of tonnage moved by what method etc) that the government is quite reluctant to provide. https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-greenhouse-gases-140-countries-1445674 https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-greenhouse-gases-140-co...
- magduf 7y agoIt's too bad because it's got to be pretty horrible. If they could just get the data for the amount of diesel/jet fuel consumed, that would tell us a lot. The US military burned a ridiculous amount of diesel fuel in Afghanistan just to try to air-condition tents in the desert.
- netsharc 7y agoHey, your landlord called me and he said he's going to reduce your rent by 14%. Deal, or no deal?
- eschulz 7y agoThe environmental results of such a project would be devastating, and human civilization in Europe might just be better off with a 10m rise in sea levels.
- radu_floricica 7y agoRisk distribution is very bad. You have a long dam, of which a single failure at any point means flooding a lot of land. Individual dams along the coastline will, in most cases, only affect the land behind them. Plus it's easier to fix a coastline dam than one in the middle of the sea, possibly during a storm.
- Kim_Bruning 7y agoActually the exact opposite is true. By picking the right places to build your dams and dikes out to see, you can reduce the total length of [all the dams and dikes], thus total risk is reduced. An example is eg. dutch Delta Works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works , which (among other things) reduced the total length of sea defenses in Zeeland by 700 km.
- jdkee 7y ago“ The cost of building a so-called North Sea Enclosure Dyke, estimated at between €250bn and £500bn, amounts to barely 0.1% of the combined GDP of all the countries that would be protected by it, they calculate.” That would mean those countries GDP is estimated at 250 to 500 trillion pounds or 320 to 645 trillion dollars France 2.6 trillion, england 2.75 trillion, Scotland 202 billion, Netherlands 826 billion. Or about 6.4 trillion dollars per Wikipedia.
- alex_stoddard 7y agoThis seems like two examples of errors converting decimal fractions to percentages in hacker news in one day. Very roughly it looks like they should have said 0.1 or 10%. 10% of combinded GDP is very much not an easy investment to make!
- aargh_aargh 7y agoMaybe they're calculating the cost over a 100 years while keeping today's GDP as a yard stick. Though nothing in the article indicates so.
- corinroyal 7y agoWow ecocide in Europe for only 500 billion. It's hard to imagine a dumber idea.