[Vision2020] Sea-level rise threatens 1,400 towns

[Paul Rumelhart]

OK, a few thoughts.

First, while the majority of CO2 dissolves in the ocean within 200 years 
or so, what's left can stick around in the atmosphere for hundreds of 
years.  So getting everybody to stop producing CO2 is really a 
non-starter in the cost/benefit analysis arena.  Cutting back on our 
civilization's progress would be hampered greatly if we all got religion 
and turned off all the coal plants and stopped burning fossil fuels or 
using natural gas or plastics while we waited for renewables to take up 
the slack.  I kind of like staying warm in winter, refrigerating my 
food, running fans when it's hot, and so forth.

They suggest removing it from the air.  Since we're not going to turn 
off all the coal plants anytime soon and start riding bicycles, these 
magic carbon removal technologies would have to scale up to where they 
were removing more CO2 from the air than mankind was putting in.  I 
don't see that happening any time soon.

These cities that are threatened by sea level rise have hundreds of 
years to figure something out about it.  It happens continually; it's 
not like on one random day 300+ years from now the sea level rises 4 ft 
in a few hours.  It happens slowly enough that simple natural building 
abandonment will take care of much of the problem.  How many buildings 
do we have that are 300 years old?  When they tear down the old building 
and rebuild, they will move it back a few feet.  We're talking a few 
millimeters a year in sea level rise.  The ones that get slowly flooded 
will be abandoned and new ones built farther back.  If you watched it in 
some kind of simulator, you'd see the city slowly creep back from the 
water line and move farther inland, one building at a time.

But, if we're worried about it, we should move to a nuclear supplemented 
by renewables energy scheme right now on a global scale.  Start building 
new nuclear reactors with the newer designs, and start researching ones 
that use thorium or current nuclear waste products as fuel.  Then 
everybody buys a Tesla, and we just have wait as the CO2 is naturally 
scrubbed from the atmosphere and the world cools down until it's a 
blessed paradise.  A blessed paradise without plastics or lubricants, 
but I'm sure we could solve those problems.

Paul

On 07/29/2013 07:33 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:
> Check out this article from USA TODAY:
>
> Sea-level rise threatens 1,400 towns
>
> http://usat.ly/1chGyVt
>
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