Bad News For Holland

It’s deja vu all over again to see Holland and East Anglia in the same paragraph when the subject is sea level..
Like many of the posters here, I spent an interesting few years in the fens of East Anglia; at Feltwell. Since I never missed my shout at the local and evinced some interest in the peculiar lay of the land, where the river bottoms are higher than the surrounding terrain, the facts of the draining of the fens were explained to me by both the learned and the unwashed and the roles of the royals and the revolutionaries made clear. Tours were undertaken and ditches, dikes, gates, pumps and washes were examined and explained.
Quite a history, from the initial efforts of Vermuyden at the behest of Charles I (or the Earl of Bedford, depending on your historian), through the reign of William III (of Orange) and Mary , the construction of thousands of pump windmills, the conversion to steam, then electricity, then the floods of the mid 1950’s and the uneasy truce with nature which existed in the 1970s.
Now, the bright lights in charge of ol’ Blighty talk of abandoning coastal land because of a projected sea level rise of indeterminate height. Natural forces will have their way with the coastlines, but Vermuyden would probably say that using today’s windmills, useless on the grid, to defend selected areas by pumping water is a viable way to keep up the fight against the sea.

It’s “The Netherlands”, not “Holland”. Holland is to the Netherlands, as England is to the UK.
I’ve been irritating people with that for the last few days.

The situation in FL is that FL is really, really short on “dirt” (average surface elevation across the state is about 6 feet above ocean level, and the land surface there it is very “flat”), all over the state, and the water table is very close to the land surface. What “dirt” there is is mostly ancient beach sand, whch is rounded and thus highly permeable. There is little, if any, clay in that sand. Subsurface drains (conduits) won’t function, so water runoff from paved surfaces can only be drained, slowly, by large area and shallow impound/seepage basins adjacent to the paved areas. For unpaved surfaces, precipitation simply seeps quickly into the sand. (I lived in Jacksonville for 6 years, 1998-2004, and I am a retired civil engineer, very experienced in highway engineering and drainage).
The freshwater in the water table is a relatively shallow layer over underlying salt ocean water.
So forget about constructing dikes or levees to protect against rising ocean levels, as was done in The Netherlands. Not at all feasible in Florida. If ocean level increase around Florida becomes significant, invest in suitcases.

Ecotretas says: July 12, 2010 at 1:55 am
“It does seem that the image from Greenland, in the last page of the report, is photoshopped. Can someone confirm?”
Nope, those pretty deep blue melt lakes in Greenland are real,
Here are some photo’s I took myself on a fly-over in summer 2009 (scroll down):
http://www.vkblog.nl/bericht/268863/Over_Groenland

Dr. Hansen says : “I find it almost inconceivable that ‘business as usual’ climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century.”
But not to worry, the good doctor says: “Humans will adapt by growing gills and webbed feet. I know, because I saw it in a Kevin Kostner movie.”

It is interesting that my parents and their ancestors had in reality more to suffer from flooding in the past (remember 1953 – and until 1927 in almost every winter season people were confronted with flooding disasters), the time before global warming.

Whilst Hansen is OTT as usual, it is a serious problem in the long term for many places, and we can expect 150mm of sea level rise in the next 100 years. The Somerset levels in the UK are already experiancing problems. People will have to adapt, the question is when, now or in 200 years?
A thousand years ago the area where East Anglia is now was a big salt marsh (fens) with islands. This is what kept William of Orange from capturing that area from the Anglish.
My ancestors are from the fenlands north of Cambridge.

Well which is more famous; Holland (Netherlands) or Atlantis ?
So pretty soon, Holland will be just as famous as Atlantis.
Atlantis was an earlier victim of MMGWCC. Must be true.

Gail Combs says:
July 12, 2010 at 7:43 am
We are now witnessing the Chinese buying uranium in excess of immediate requirements. In my view this is a deliberate smack in the face of the Cultists who would, in their debilitated mental state, have us believe that solar and wind work better in cold, calm, cloudy conditions. The Chinese know the next 2 or 3 decades are going to be bloody cold. As a large proportion of their massive population will require heating they see nuclear as one of the safest bets on national surviveability. Coal & nuclear, who would have thought.
Rational nations, those who reject Eco-cultism, will survive and thrive. Marxist- hippie trash led nations will suffer.
regards

tallbloke says:
July 12, 2010 at 12:23 am
stumpy says:
July 12, 2010 at 12:15 am (Edit)
it is a serious problem in the long term for many places, and we can expect 150mm of sea level rise in the next 100 years.
Oh Noes! SIX INCHES.
To the hills!
That may be 150 mm to us, but that’s 150,000 micrometers to the Hansen gang of climate thugs.

I notice that the gently sloping beaches in the UK at Southend, Weston-Super-Mare, Brean sands and elsewhere are still miles from the sea when the tide goes out. I presume that either the sea level rise claimed for the south of England is not as much as some have suggested, or that the river estuaries have merely dumped more sand in the sea to compensate. However, if the latter was the case, then all that sand would need to come from somewhere, and at a rate that would seriously undermine a belief that southern England could ever have existed at all. The only conclusion I can come to that makes sense is that the sea level is not rising at all. Where is the real proof that sea level in Southern England is rising? My guess would be that the tide gauges attached to stone dock walls have a tendency to sink into the mud due to the weight of the stone and concrete. Most of our long-term information on sea levels comes from old fashioned tide gauges that were used to indicate the depth of water in the dock for shipping purposes and never intended for monitoring climate change.
Get some old navigation maps from the British Museum library and lets test the theory that Britain is sinking under the waves by checking for the % of land that is actually being lost.

Stephen Skinner says:
July 12, 2010 at 8:40 am
“Schiphol Airport is currently 4m below sea level. So by 2107 it will be 5m below sea level!”
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Schiphol airport is 7 metres below sea level and increasing. (meaning more below)
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Hans Erren says:
July 12, 2010 at 2:03 pm
The guestimate of Hansen of 2007 is grossly outdated. Rahmstorf did a worst case estimate calculation for the Dutch government and his worst case estimate for 2100 was 1.3 meters.
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Even 1.3 metres is bad enough. The river delta’s will expand. Storm surges may well breach the increased dykes if the storm comes from the NW.
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Axel Sjöqvist says:
July 12, 2010 at 12:12 pm
“I’m always surprised by the logic of rising sea level being a problem for the Netherlands. A significant portion of the Netherlands is already below sea level, yet we’re not flooded. Apparently we can deal with being below sea level very well, and have done so for centuries.”
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Perhaps not today but did in 1953 and that was a combination of a king tide and NW storm.
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” A few years ago I heard a report that the Netherlands can cope with 6 meters of sea level rise without spending more money annually on the dykes (for clarification: the ones standing at the coast) than we do today. It’s already a major investment, because, hey, we’re below sea level.”
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Please find me the source of that “report”. I’ve spoken to Dutch engineers working on possible action that can be taken with different sea level rise scenarios. I’ll guarantee you that the Dutch most certainly cannot cope with a 6 metre rise. In fact, with a 2 metre rise, combined with the conditions of 1953, The Netherlands would flood again.
A 6 metre sea level rise would involve co-operation between The Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, because The Netherlands would flood via the back door. A six metre sea level rise would mean an enormous river bank-up (the nation is a river delta) causing vast amounts of flooding behind the “enormous” dykes; perhaps we should call them dam walls. In order to raise the height of dykes, the base must be widened proportionally. They’d probably need all the above sea level soil of the remaining nation, to build the dykes. Now that would be diabolical!
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“The Netherlands is going to be the last coastal country on Earth which is going to have trouble with rising sea level.”
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Considering the increasing violent Atlantic storms with wind speeds approaching that of hurricanes, I think that The Netherlands will be one of the first ones to suffer.
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In general, to some of all comments, I am disappointed with the amount of ridicule and Ad Hominem attacks. I find it demeaning. I spent the first 18 years of my life in The Netherlands and the prospect of its possible demise is saddening. I question some of the graphs and calculations thereupon. Sea level rises will not be liniar at x-mm per year, we may be rudily surprised.