This is a city that has pretty much been at barely above sea level to below sea level, right? The one that needed all those dikes and such?
‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds
The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.
Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.
Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.
So much BS
Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.
This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground. (snip)
Keenan said the timeframe available to plan a retreat isn’t certain but “it’s most likely decades rather than centuries”.
“Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered,” he added. “It will be surrounded by open water, and you can’t keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There’s no amount of money that can do that.”
That part of the Gulf has serious apparent sea rise because of land subsidence. Florida is not seeing anywhere close to the sea rise Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama are. If you look at the elevation map for New Orleans and the whole area south of it, it’s not pretty, and hasn’t pretty for probably at least 1,000 years, if not going back to the beginning of the Holocene. Just more scaremongering. When is this 3-7 meters (9.84 to 22.96 feet) going to happen? Especially when the 20th Century saw a completely average 7 inches of sea rise?
Read: Study Says New Orleans Must Start Relocating Now Or Something »
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