This is your fault, you know. That fossil fueled trip to the burger shop? For shame
As sea levels rise, are we ready to live behind giant walls?
Climate change, it’s fair to say, is complicated. And it’s big. One of the main challenges of responding effectively is simply getting your head around the scale of the problem.
Well, it’s easy when climate cultists simply just scaremonger and say we’re doomed. Unless Everyone Else is taxed and has their freedom taken by Government.
A new study by European Commission scientists, now published in the journal Nature Communications, is a classic of this type. It looks at the costs of protecting coastal communities from climate change. The authors underline that our coasts will suffer from sea levels that are predicted to rise as much as one metre by the end of the century, as well as from more intense storms.
Of all the many varied impacts in a warming planet, sea level rise is one of the most straightforward to predict, although it will not affect everywhere the same and so some communities will be more at risk than others. We can be quite confident that the sea level is rising due to climate change, because sea water expands as it warms and because extra water is flowing from melting glaciers and ice sheets.
As the oceans warm, the sea levels rise bit by bit – and if ice sheets on Antarctica or Greenland collapse and water currently locked up is released, then sea levels will rise very suddenly, and by a lot. It will be expensive to deal with these impacts, and this new research shows by quite how much in Europe. Given the costs of flooded coastal cities, the European Commission scientists suggest that it would save money in the long run to build improved sea defences around 70% of the continent’s coastline.
Do we really want to live in a world in which we all live behind huge walls? Is this the only way to adapt? Many of us have trapped ourselves in places that will no longer be safe, and in some places building large defences is the only option. Certainly London will not survive without the next-generation Thames barrier.
Sea level rise is completely usual during the Holocene, which is the end of the last glacial age. There doesn’t have to be any anthropogenic causation involved….you know what? Y’all know all this stuff.
But there are other options in other places, and we can “defend†in different ways. Nature-based solutions such as recreating dunes or marshland or retreating from coastal zones are possibilities that we should consider wherever we can.
And you know what else?
The preferable alternative is to take a more nuanced approach. We know the climate is changing, and we will need a combination of more concrete, clever natural solutions, and better flood forecasts to prepare for what’s ahead. But by showing the sheer scale of the “hard†defences that would be needed on their own to keep Europeans safe, this new paper represents more scientific evidence that cutting emissions now, and mitigating the worst impacts, is the best future we can hope for.
If we tax you and lock you down we can stop the sea walls.
Read: Climate Hysteria Today: Who’s Up For Living Behind Sea Walls? »
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