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Which U.S. coastal areas could disappear due to sea level rise
- randall 14y agoBrought to you by jashkenas no doubt.
- charonn0 14y agoNote to self: move to higher ground/buy a canoe.
- chao- 14y agoAnd rather than pass it down to your children, consider selling any property in Galveston, New Orleans or Miami Beach. Even on the lower-end estimates, those areas are thoroughly deluged. Or pass it on and let them sell it, whichever is smarter from a tax perspective.
- charonn0 14y agoThanks, but I rent :)
- mturmon 14y agoI had no idea how low-lying some cities are. Especially in the southeast US.
- brianchu 14y agoLong-term real-estate play: buy land near urban areas that will be soon submerged (100 year time frame) and near the "new" coast.
- ams6110 14y agoWhy, so your grave can be on the beach?
- flexie 14y agoI find it implausible that some of the richest and most densely populated cities in America would just passively await submersion for decades when this could be averted with good old levees. What I do believe is that a major UN climate conference is starting today in Doha and that their PR people yet again managed to sell the idea of disaster to the newspapers.
- jarek 14y agoJust have the levees built and maintained by private enterprise rather than U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and you should be all golden with no unexpected problems or failures
- simondlr 14y agoIn terms of this, I've thought of a joke to get people more aware of global warming. Sell a piece of land a few kilometres in for a lot of money, citing it's major benefit as future beachfront property (put ads in local paper, etc). If anyone actually decides to buy it at that price, cover your losses and donate the rest to WWF or Charity:Water.
- mseebach 14y ago100-300 years is a long time to build some dikes and flood barriers.
- teeja 14y agoThe flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars. Spread that out along the coastline and the taxes needed gets into REAL money. Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there.
- potatolicious 14y agoYou don't need to protect the entire coastline, just already-developed parts of it that would present an extreme disruption to let flood. $6-10bn in the grand scheme of New York City is nothing (well, assuming anybody gives a shit about NYC in 300 years).
- mseebach 14y ago> The flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars. Which is several orders of magnitude less that fixing global warming will cost. The GDP of NYC is $1280bln. Even at twice the cost for the barriers ($20bln), it's 1.5% of GDP to permanently "fix" global warming for NYC. Also, it's fairly deterministic. The tools and methods to build such barriers are readily available. The same can't be said of a political solution. > Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there. Well, the region is already more or less uninhabitable without air conditioning, so the solution to that problem is pretty obvious.
- joonix 14y agoOr for the economics of fossil fuels to change drastically, figure out ways to reverse warming, enter a natural cooling period, or any black swan event.
- mayneack 14y agoLook back a few hundred years at Boston. Half of the land is "new" anyway. Granted, I would imagine that it's hard/impossible to do this for a city that already exists and has lots of large, expensive, heavy objects in the way. http://www.iboston.org/rg/backbayImap.htm http://www.iboston.org/rg/backbayImap.htm
- rdl 14y agoInteresting just how little this matters to San Francisco (they'd need to put a wall around SFO, OAK, and maybe SJC, and not sure about the parts of Mountain View and Menlo Park where tech offices are). Unfortunate that DC doesn't have more flooding planned.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoAt 25 feet, it looks like the shoreline moves up (at least) to highway 101, but that map doesn't go far enough south to really be sure. Look at this and you can really see the impact: http://cal-adapt.org/sealevel/ http://cal-adapt.org/sealevel/ Just at a glance, I'd write off Oracle, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Moffett, Alviso, the new 49ers stadium, lots of Cisco buildings around Tasman, and that industrial park up in Fremont where they shot the T2 Cyberdyne office scenes. The inundation of the SJ/SC water treatment plant would also make things even worse, I imagine. Plus, you know, everything else in between.
- mseebach 14y agoUnless you spend a few billion dollars on a flood barrier across the bay mouth next to Golden Gate bridge.
- rdl 14y agoThat might be complex, at least without killing the #4 port in the US. I guess maybe you could build a lock or something?
- daniel-cussen 14y agoMove the port out past the seawall, move the hipsters in to the abandoned industrial flats.
- dredmorbius 14y agoFor SF proper, most neighborhoods would be relatively little affected on account of hills, though there are significant amounts of the city built on bay fill or low-lying land, particularly the Marina, parts of downtown, SOMA, and Hunters Point. Around the rest of the bay, communities/developments on the bay itself (especially on the bay side of major highways) are more likely to be on fill and subject to rising sea levels. This includes major office parks in various parts of the bay, including much of the North First Street area of San Jose, the GooglePlex, Oyster Point, Emeryville, Hayward, and Fremont. As the maps make clear, the real hazard is in the Delta and Central Valley. Prior to modern flood control (dams and levees), much of the Central Valley was effectively an inland sea through the winter and spring. Rising sea levels would put much of the existing (and already threatened) levee system at risk. Sacramento, Stockton, and other communities would be substantially affected.
- brador 14y agoAnything similar out there for Europe or Asia?
- daniel-cussen 14y agoVenice, Holland, and Bangladesh are soaked unless they find a solution. Venice more than any other city.
- ack 14y agothis: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:SeaLevel http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:SeaLevel and: http://www.elstel.com/SeaLevelRise.html#Maps http://www.elstel.com/SeaLevelRise.html#Maps
- brador 14y agoThat first link is exactly what I hoped existed. Thanks.
- tsotha 14y agoBy then we won't care http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/03/sea_level_rise_barely_30cm_by_2100/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/03/sea_level_rise_barel...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ximeng 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_sea_level#Potential_to_Exceed_1_m http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_sea_level#Potential_to_E... Unless we got our sums wrong and the ice melts quicker than we thought.
- arethuza 14y agoThat looks about roughly 50cm per century - which is actually about the same leven as post-glacial rebound here in Scotland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PGR_Paulson2007_Rate_of_Lithospheric_Uplift_due_to_PGR.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PGR_Paulson2007_Rate_of_Li... So the land is rising at the same level as sea levels!
- petercooper 14y agoThere's been debate over whether volcanic activity in the Canary Islands could cause a 150ft tidal wave that would cause enough damage on the east coast that long term sea rises would have little left to do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami#Canary_Islands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami#Canary_Islands
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nhebb 14y ago1. Set up a booth outside Yankee Stadium, display the Boston map, and sell coal-powered anything. 2. Repeat at Fenway Park with the NY map. 3. Profit!
- dawidw 14y agocould = may or may not what's the aim of the article which claims that something may or may not happen? Of course besides to scary people of 'global warming' or how it is nowadays called, because scientists are not sure if the temperature is going up or down, 'global changes'? And of course, when people are scared, they'll pay whatever money to ecoterrorists to save 'the environment'
- dredmorbius 14y agoAs Sandy made clear, it's not just persistent rises in sea level, but the frequency and extent of intermittent rises as a consequence of cyclonic storms or inland flooding and watershed drainage which are likely to have significant impacts. My understanding of carbon and warming predictions is that we've trended toward the highest (most extreme and dangerous) ends of forecast ranges, which suggests that the higher seawater rises might be more appropriately used in disaster planning. And adding a few feet to storm surge, and increasing frequency of high-surge events, would be disruptive enough if not quite so much as a persistent 5-10 foot rise in sea levels.
- rwmj 14y agoAs is also happening right now in the UK ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20490999 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20490999 (And to think of all the people still denying that climate change is a real thing).
- kintamanimatt 14y agoPossibly the biggest misstep in climate change's acceptance was calling it "global warming". People don't feel the warmer temperatures but rather feel its non-intuitive effects and crack jokes along the lines of "it's so cold right now ... whatever happened to global warming?" Marketing's everything, and the crowd climate change has to be marketed to is scientifically illiterate and commonly anti-intellectual in nature. Perhaps it should have been called something more dire, alarming, and readily perceivable by the general population so as to be a more tangible phenomenon. I'm terrible at coming up with names though so I'll have to defer to others for ideas!
- MaggieL 14y agoIf you have to "market" it, especially with a lot of ad hominem namecalling...maybe it's not science. Maybe it's propaganda.
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
- frozenport 14y agoAre the great lakes effected by global warming.
- altcognito 14y agoWinter ice helps to protect lake water from evaporation and keep water levels high. In recent years ice hasn't been as plentiful: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/31/455612/great-lakes-ice-cover-down-71-since-1973/ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/31/455612/great-lak... Keep in mind that 2012 was an very, very warm winter even compared to the years leading up to it.
- gadders 14y agoI can't remember the exact figures, but Bjorn Lomborg has argued that during the 19th century sea levels around New York rose by tens of feet, to no great impact.
- adaml_623 14y agoWould it be too much to provide a reference for those claims. And tell us if you think it's relevant to the future. For those of us who are only passingly familiar with New York it doesn't really seem like a new increase of 10 feet would not be a disaster.
- gadders 14y agoMy google-fu was weak today :-(
- rm999 14y agoHow is that possible when sea levels elsewhere didn't rise by 10s of feet? Even if you count tides it defies common sense; a lot of NYC is below 10 feet from sea level. Anyway, Lomborg is a controversial figure with an anti-global-warming agenda. I tend to trust more objective sources for stuff like this.
- gadders 14y agoHe unequivocally says that global warming is real, and man-made. How is that an anti-global warming agenda? What he does say, is that the proposed solutions would make little differnce, and the proposed effects of global warming are exaggerated.
- rm999 14y agoHe seriously downplays potential risks of global warming, and he's built his career on this single argument. I know objective science, and he doesn't practice it (most people who write editorial books don't). To be clear, I don't have a strong opinion on how global warming will play out due to a lack of data, and I think he may very well be correct. But I don't trust him either. Anyway, do you have a citation? I didn't mean to start an argument about his character, but I'm skeptical of the claim about New York.
- sjs382 14y agoThe New Orleans projections assume a levee breach. "If levees breach, almost all of the city would flood. The surrounding region is also mostly flooded."
- dredmorbius 14y agoNo precedent there .... New Orleans is already almost completely below mean sea level. In many places, the highest geographic point is the Mississippi River. Building levees and flood-control structures directly contributes to the further erosion and loss of delta lands in the Gulf. The very structures that would save New Orleans also doom it. John McPhee's writing on the Atchafalya Old River Control Structure is fascinating. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_TNY_CARDS_000347146 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_T...