Edward Mendel – Chicago Historical Society
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Huffington Post has predicted a dystopian Mad Max / Hunger Games future, if we don’t mend our wicked ways – because they think nobody will be able to cope with rising seas. History says they are wrong – even if the sea does rise, flooding problems have been defeated many times, including in America.
With Global Warming the World Will Be a Much Poorer Place
Sky Garden Cities, The Dome, AquaCities: these fanciful names are attached to renderings of cities that will optimistically tower above threatening seas.
Getting to the business of climate adaptation should be on everyone’s mind. Recently German climate scientists estimated that sea levels are rising faster than the most conservative estimates. The bright fact: climate change is an uncontrolled experiment we triggered on the planetary systems on which our species depend for survival.
…
When sea level rise ramps up, who is going to pay for all the claims? Insurance companies? No. Taxpayers? Definitely not. In Florida, one federally funded taxpayer agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, is working day and night, up and down the coastline, with bulldozers, tractors, and sand from the Bahamas and Mexico to reinforce tourist-friendly beaches against sea level rise. How long will Americans fund beach protection once sea level rise infiltrates trillions of dollars of urban infrastructure in coastal cities?
Dr. Harold Wanless, chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami and respected spokesperson on sea level rise, says taxpayers should be funding, now, for a rainy day when property owners will have to abandon coastal real estate in a mass migration from the coastlines. At least in the U.S., there is no indication that such common sense measures will materialize any time soon: nearly every member of the Republican controlled US Senate voted last week against acknowledging global warming is caused by humans.
I am beginning to believe that science fiction movie scenarios of the future are not so far off: some amalgam of Hunger Games, Sector 9, and Mad Max but with low-rent production values. As for gorgeous, highly-engineered futuristic cities deploying costly technologies to elevate taxpayers above rising seas? Methinks, not so much.
As WUWT reported in “Raising Chicago – how the City of Chicago defeated flooding in the 1850s”, the ancestors of today’s Americans, with 1850s technology, jacked up the entire city of Chicago to lift it out of the mud, including one building which weighed 27,000 tons.
Chicago wasn’t the only American city saved from the floods. At least one other city, the City of Seattle, the street level was raised by an entire floor to defeat flooding (h/t Harrowsceptic & commieBob).
Why does Huff Post think what Americans did in the 1800s could not be done today? Perhaps the HuffPost vision is of a future of feeble intermittent renewables and medieval deprivation. My vision is a little different.
From the first short powered flight in 1903, Americans reached the moon in 1969. Progress hasn’t stopped since that achievement – marvels like modern smart phones, which were impossible even a few years ago, are now ubiquitous. So my vision of the future contains artificial intelligence, nuclear power, vast industrial robots and an almost unimaginable capacity for engineering our world.
Of course, different regions of the world rise and fall. The HuffPost dystopia could become our reality, at least in the West, if we let it. Russia, Asia, even Africa, are ready and eager to pick up and carry the torch of progress, if we fall, if we listen to the voices of despair – if we talk ourselves into retreating, from the marvels and opportunities our ingenuity has created.
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Dr. Harold Wanless, chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami and respected spokesperson on sea level rise, says taxpayers should be funding, now, for a rainy day when property owners will have to abandon coastal real estate in a mass migration from the coastlines.
What? You mean they haven’t been abandoned already? For back in 1986, experts predicted a one foot rise in sea level (a modest amount by Hansen standards, I think).
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/doc/290910186.html?
I was sorry to learn the US is sinking. Did global warming do that?
“I was sorry to learn the US is sinking. Did global warming do that?”
Nahhh… It’s the obesity epidemic, Charlie, where all Americans are going hungry and it will require $12 billion for lunches this summer to keep all of the children from starving. (That’s how America fights obesity.)
The US would stop sinking if we all lost a couple of pounds.
” The US would stop sinking if we all lost a couple of pounds.”
.. and a few million liberals !!
Be careful with the people. We do not want nations to capsize. http://r.duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DzNZczIgVXjg
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/where-s-dad-bod-ken-men-react-to-barbie-s-new-look-with-body-demands-of-their-own-1.3424119
The dystopian Mad Max / Hunger Games future is what Progressives (like those at Huffpo) are building because their goals run counter to human nature, so they must remove individual rights and liberties, subjugating everyone to the collectivist state. And no matter how many times such schemes fail and end in mass destruction and death, such people always try again.
Regarding technology, it’s a blessing if people have rights and liberties but a curse in the Utopia they’re building. People are seriously dreaming of a world in which the human race are forcibly engineered into beings that are small, nocturnal creatures with larger brains, the idea being that such alien-like creatures would have less impact on the Earth goddess. WUWT reported on this last year.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/01/bizarre-idea-turning-us-into-dwarves-with-night-vision-will-save-us-from-climate-change/
Others are seriously proposing the extinction of the human race to stop Global Warming. They’re mad.
http://youtu.be/ir5RhjnSRF0
” Others are seriously proposing the extinction of the human race to stop Global Warming. They’re mad.”…..
Yes, we use to put liberals in the nut house house, NOW we have to live beside them !
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
The true silliness in all of this is the idea that if it is happening then we can do anything to stop it.
Correct, because the “we” the alarmists imagine doesn’t exist worldwide–not remotely.
“Huffpost thinks a few inches of sea will cause Civilization to Collapse”
I, on the other hand, think that Huffpost may well cause civilization to collapse!
I’m more inclined to regard the Huffpost as evidence that civilization has already collapsed.
Good point. 🙂
“When sea level rise ramps up, …”
Sea level shows no sign of ramping up. The only ramping up is done by “scientists” manipulating and rewriting the historical data:
http://oi67.tinypic.com/ojdn6h.jpg
Precisely – all 20th-21st century “ramping up” depicted in memes shared on the web and in MSM overlooks the simple fact that two very different methodologies are conjoined in order to produce an apparent acceleration.
The second is usually an interpretation of GRACE data which is heavily influenced by Glacial Isostatic Adjustment.
And the adjustment is not intended to tell us how much the sea has risen but to give an indication of sea volume expansion – which is not necessarily sea level rise.
In truth it’s not really a sea level rise measurement at all.
Something which most Huff readers and Facebook users will never possibly understand.
In fact they don’t want to understand this – because they like to be served daily bullshit.
And they like their bullshit kept simple and alarming.
It’s a con-trick, pure and simple.
As far as I can discern.
I can’t think of a better name for it.
Lex Luthor had an affinity for BeachfrontProperty and told General Zod he wanted Australia
Melting ice caps rising sea levels blah blah
So a good story to scare off the locals and the Property Sharks move in.
@Marcus
…..Jumping off a cliff while flapping your arms DOES NOT count as a powered, controlled flight !!..
Quite true. if it did, I would have been saying “First powered controlled flight – Eilmer of Malmesbury 1005 (English) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury
@RogerKnights
I think the Wrights’ defenders have claimed that the NZ flight wasn’t as controlled as the Wrights’ sophisticated wing warping technique.
Indeed. Pearse’s flight is not well documented anyway, and never led to the development of further aircraft, so it is reasonable to celebrate the Wright’s achievement. The point I was trying to make is that flight was not a thing that the Wrights ‘invented’ – they simply made one further step on a path that was already well-trodden. If anyone can be said to have ‘invented’ flight, it was probably Sir George Cayley, who was the first to quantify the forces scientifically and then develop a working machine from theory.
The Wrights had the advantage that they were working as improved petrol engine technology dropped the weight of the motors to a practical level – many other inventors shortly before them had developed flying machines which worked, but not well, due to the engine weights. They did not invent the idea of lateral control – Matthew Boulton, for example, patented ailerons in 1868, and many other inventors were working with similar ideas between then and 1903. What the Wrights did was put existing ideas together with the latest technology, at the time when the technology was just beginning to be able to achieve sustained level flight.
That was one achievement. They also publicised the idea of flight strongly, which was another achievement. The design of their aircraft was actually a poor one for aviation development – neither wing warping nor canard tails were widely practical, and Santos Dumont’s designs in Europe were the way ahead – in particular the Demoiselle, which was the world’s first series production aircraft.
Their other achievement was negative – it consisted of suppressing the early US aviation industry with a patent war as the Wrights tried to make their fortune by requiring royalties from every American developer – quite the opposite of Santos-Dumont, who provided his discoveries to the world for free. The result of this was that the Americans entered WW1 with no practical military aircraft, and had to use French or British designs…
Prime Minister Diefenbaker was under pressure from the US to join their defence plan by acquiring the American Bomarc missiles. Faced with the skyrocketing costs, and the inability to sell the Arrow to Europe or the US, Diefenbaker cancelled the project on February 20,1959. An angry A.V. Roe immediately fired his 14,000 employees, and the government ordered all plans and prototypes destroyed. The CF-105, or Avro Arrow as it was known, was a supersonic jet interceptor developed by A.V. Roe of Canada. Faster and more advanced than any other comparable aircraft, the Arrow was designed to carry air-to-air nuclear-tipped missiles to destroy Soviet bomb attacks over the Canadian North.
Whenever this topic comes up in social media – then please send the target libtard alarmist dimwit this link/jpg. I’m pretty sure that they must be oblivious to the information here depicted.
And perhaps point out to the target lib-tard that 16,000 years ago was not the age of the dinosaurs.
It was the beginning of the age of the emergence of civilization.
Honestly, I thought that libtards read the Nat Geo. But recent interaction have convinced me that they only subscribed out of social obligation…
http://i.imgur.com/TqD24c3.jpg
[When were the last Neandertals living? .mod]
[When were the last Neandertals living? .mod]
We’re still here!
A large chunk of our DNA is derived from “Neanderthals”. Basically “we”, as in the bible, we went about begetting pretty much everything!
Yeah, the Neanderthals still walk amonst us. Has nobody watched French versus Welsh rugby?
That’s a very good map. Where do you think the English, or the “Angles”, came from? What is now northern Germany.
Perhaps the HuffPost vision is of a future of feeble intermittent renewables and medieval deprivation. My vision is a little different.It’s worse than that, there’s a genuine disconnect from reality.
The Huffpost vision is a future of massive, muscular and graceful, lovingly tended fields of renewables that reach beyond the horizon built on lands seized in the common interest from Kulaks that are intermittent but have been augmented with Beefy Batteries Of Uncertain Nature. It is imagined that if a rock star can crowd-surf without injury supported by a few hands and fingers, energy will obey the law of My Own Special Needs and there will always by a wind turbine spinning somewhere that will keep it all going.
If they are pressed to admit that the lone wind turbine might not be able to keep it all going, they change tactics midstream and begin to vilify what they consider to be ‘wasteful’ industrial users of energy, such as large factories that make wind turbines.
Energy intensive infrastructure essential to modern survival is Simply Not Mentioned, such as 24/7 municipal water and sewage treatment, pressurized water distribution, street and highway lighting, pharmaceuticals, concrete and gravel, Every discussion on grid energy is drawn down a deep well into the bogus and trite, where everyone can let city-wide tap water disinfection and treatment go to hell while they discuss My Little Solar House and how we take solar showers and can spend a part of the day slightly off the grid after investing $30k which we’ll get back some day from the Bad Power Company because the lease-to-own company says we will.
These are the people who think that other peoples’ idle Teslas plugged into the garages are going to keep the power grid energized overnight. But not mine, they think coyly, it has to draw off the grid because I have to get to work in the morning. But I’m just one person… so it will work anyway.
AND OF COURSE they’d believe that an inch of sea level rise would destroy civilization, because everything has been dumbed down to contrived opressor-victim scenarios, where Big Something-or-other has done this to us. Poor us! Pity us! Never mind that we are descended from intelligent peoples who took a few steps back from the flood zone or built walls or raised buildings or accepted the consequences.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4600963&cid=45805629
But if there’s one thing I really hate it’s generalizing about people. So I hate these people all the more for forcing my hand.
Huffpoo has pulled a fast one and is telling porkies. Again. The entire piece is based on the lie of CAGW. Whether or not we have the ingenuity, the money, or willpower to “overcome” something which is a total fiction is a big fat juicy red herring.
Who writes this drivel? The most conservative estimate is the smallest one. Zero. And I’m sure someone somewhere estimates that sea levels will actually fall. So German scientists estimated sea levels will fall less quickly than the most extreme, absurd claim about falling sea levels. Well WHAT a SURPRISE!
They just write word soup and feed it to morons.
“faster than the most conservative estimates”
That’s practically a truism. Reality will almost always fall somewhere between the lowest and the highest estimate.
‘Recently German climate scientists estimated that sea levels are rising faster than the most conservative estimates.’
Clever phrase. Are sea levels rising faster than average estimates?
‘Respected spokesperson on sea level rise’
SLR has a spokesperson? Respected by whom?
‘taxpayers should be funding, now, for a rainy day when property owners will have to abandon coastal real estate in a mass migration from the coastlines.’
We should be borrowing more from the Chinese? The good doctor is unaware of finance, and net-present-value. Additionally, the taxpayers have no duty to owners of coastal real estate.
‘there is no indication that such common sense measures will materialize any time soon’
It’s not common sense. It is wrong on multiple levels. Huffpo says their ideas are smart; your ideas are dumb. Playground stuff.
Yes, a union is needed at HuffPo to protect the workers from daily exposure to the toil of extremist messaging and other dangers of manufactured stories.
If mankind and our infrastructure adapted to this…
Figure 2. Northern Hemisphere temperature, atmospheric CO2 and sea level since 1700 AD.
We can adapt to this without breaking a sweat…
Figure 3. Projected sea level rise through 2100 AD.
Particularly since sea level rose just as fast from 1931-1960 as it has risen since 1985…
Figure 4. Paracyclical sea level rise since 1931.
Anyone threatened by 6-12 inches of sea level rise over the next 85 years is already being flooded by high tides and/or storm surges. The red areas on this EPA map would be threatened by 1.5 meters of sea level rise.
Figure 5. Coastal areas threatened by 1.5 meters of sea level rise along US Gulf Coast (US EPA).
Bear in mind the fact that it would take an average rate of sea level rise nearly twice that of the Holocene Transgression for sea level to rise more than 1.5 meters (~5 feet) over the remainder of this century. This caused sea level.to rise by ~10 mm/yr for about10,000 years…
Figure 6. Animatiion of Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene deglaciation (Illinois State Museum).
Approximately 52 million cubic kilometers of ice melted during that 10,000 year period.
The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were recently estimated to be losing ~213 gigatonnes of ice mass per year (Shepherd et al., 2012).. This is equivalent to 213 km^3/yr.
Polar ice sheets are currently melting at about 1/24th the rate of the Holocene Transgression, if they are actually melting.
We not only “adapted” to rise, we laughed at it in the past – http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/boston/sequ_ani.gif
I LOVE the estimates that prior worst case estimates aren’t bad enough concept here. It’s a tacit admission that their scare tactics were ignored so they have to amp them up.
They are becoming apoplectic at HuffPo as it is anyway so I enjoy throwing grenades like this at them http://www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com/data/
.. now that they are circling their broken wagons – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-toth/were-moving-the-conversation_b_5423675.html “This is far from an an end to conversation; it’s the start of conversation where you want to have it …”
I predict that Huffpo will be gone in under 2 years.
No doubt they will get govt to fund it. Much like Planned Parenthood.
“I am beginning to believe that science fiction movie scenarios of the future are not so far off:”
In this case the movie “Idiocracy” comes to mind.
Yes, we need to create an alarmist global stupidification scare and an urgent call to action.
The current rise in stupidity is “unprecedented” or for many people, “unpresidented”.
And for others, “it’s totally like sum shit what we’ve not seen before”.
All that we need to do to demonstrate this is to erase the Medieval Stupidification Period.
For those who think they couldn’t live under a ‘loopy’ Trump administration, I would say with the world gone this crazy, he is probably absolutely essential to put in there. These unbelievable useful fools in academia and the enabling institutions need a big adjustment! I like Cruz okay, but with Trump, nothing is too big to fail, nothing that’s done can’t be undone. That has been America’s way and America’s gift to the world.
To keep the stuff that has been done to the country and the world because it’s too big to fail, means another miserable step in the footsteps of a Europe gone insanely into a permanent, ever-darkening twilight using the same thinking that has been inoculated into US elitists. This gradualism is part of the New World Order – give them the medicine in small, incremental doses.
I remember the condescending attitude and shock among the ‘people that matter’ when Reagan ran for the presidency. This untamed upstart gave pride and self esteem back to a dispirited nation. And if that wasn’t enough, he took down the iron curtain as an encore! Oh revisionists point out that the USSR was going to fail anyway, but that was true for the previous 75 years. A system like that and the one the EU has built have failure built into the foundation. Reagan scared the hell out of them and they believed him….like they would have believed a guy like Trump.
I just hope Cruz will be Trumps VP.
If you really like Cruz, don’t you think we would be better off if he were the Senate Majority Leader working to get things passed in the Senate and on to the President’s desk for signing?
The big, huge difference between Reagan and Trump is that first of all Reagan had been a Governor. Second and more importantly is that Reagan was a true conservative Republican who respected the Constitution. Donald Trump is none of the above and nothing more that a narcissist supreme who has no regard for the constitutional process or anyone that disagrees with him. Trump is at heart a liberal. Isn’t bad enough that we have had that type of President for the last 7 years. We do not need another.
Reagan had spent years honing his conservative philosophy.
Trump has spent years honing his ability to use other people’s money and his own political influence, to make himself rich.
I think one thing Reagan and Trump have in common is they are both optimistic about the future, and they project that optimism, and a can-do spirit, to the people they are speaking to, and make them feel it.
As for:
“Donald Trump is none of the above and nothing more that a narcissist supreme who has no regard for the constitutional process or anyone that disagrees with him.”
One positive thing about electing Trump to the presidency is, if he violates the U.S. Constitution, the way Obama has done (I don’t think he will), it will be very easy to impeach and remove Trump from Office. All the Democrats will be eager to vote him out, and if Trump gets enough Republicans mad at him, they will join in.
It’s not like President Obama. President Obama is immune from removal from Office because not enough Democrats would vote against him, and no Republican would push such an impeachment move for fear of being called a racist. So Obama gets a blank check from the political opposition. That wouldn’t be the case with Trump.
One thing about Trump: I think his ego is such, that if he promises to do something, he will give his all, to get it done, rather than have to suffer the humiliation of failing. And Trump’s *all* is quite formidable.
Trump is focused on the right problem: Our wide open borders and millions of people we don’t know, pouring across them. That’s why, IMO, Trump is going to win the election for president. I think a lot of Americans, of all stripes, are worried about this problem and are going to get onboard his bandwagon. Especially after watching the horror stories coming out of Europe over the Muslim refugee crisis. We don’t want that stuff going on here.
TA
TA January 29, 2016 at 12:31 pm
So it’s damn the Constitution, full speed ahead? Aren’t you sick of that approach yet?
Remember, a benevolent dictator is still a dictator, and Trump is certainly not benevolent.
Tom in Florida – this is the campaign time. When Trump gets into office, he will seek the advice of wiser people on the details. I recall that Central Park had a dysfunctional ice rink that had been gerry-rigged from time to time by New York to work for a little while and then fail. He said he would fix it properly and he was hated by the snival slurvants for succeeding. How did this guy do it? The answer should put you at ease regarding Trump as president. He asked NHL guys who the best rink builder in the world was and they replied that it was a fellow who designed and managed the rink for the Toronto Maple Leafs. He got the guy down to look at CP rink and immediately saw the lousiness of the design. He was engaged to rebuild it and it is perhaps one of the finest outdoor rinks in the world – You don’t have to be an expert, you have to seek to find the experts you need.
At 1.5mm per year, it will be quite some time before my property in Pittsburgh will be expensive coastal waterfront. I figure the next ice age will be upon us before that, so maybe I should hold out for selling my property as a luxurious local near the ski slopes instead.
Kevin Costner can teach us how to sprout gills!
Downtown Sacramento was raised one story in 1868 due to seasonal flooding of the Sacramento and American Rivers,which join near downtown.
Thanks, Eric Worrall,
I’ll keep watching the local tide gauge for any sign of sea level rise, I’ll keep watching the beach at high and low tides. I’ll keep watching the garage in our building, built at mean high tide level in 1971; it has always flooded less than 1/2 inches at New Moon or Full Moon when the Moon is near perigee.
The have been supporting the cleaning of drains and repairing the drain pipes.
No reason for panic, not even concern, if you don’t believe the doomsday forecasts.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html looks like a good tool.
[“They have been ..” or “The ___ have been..” ? .mod]
I should have written: “The neighbors have been supporting”.
“In Florida, one federally funded taxpayer agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, is working day and night, up and down the coastline, with bulldozers, tractors, and sand from the Bahamas and Mexico to reinforce tourist-friendly beaches against sea level rise. ”
That’s hogwash. Every replenishment effort if have witnessed was done with sand pumped from the bottom just off shore or from nearby shoals. Notice the word “replenishment”. Moving sand back onto beaches has nothing to do with sea level rise, it has to do with putting sand back that was eroded by storms. The use of bulldozers is to smooth out and grade the beach after the sand has been pumped onto it.
I suggest you check some of your local papers, sand is being brought in from other sources as the local sand from offshore is running out and/or is the wrong color. Sand from mines in central Florida is being used for example.
Phil, don’t know where you are in FL, I am in Venice on the Gulf side. Plenty of off shore sand here and I have never seen it being brought in, it is always pumped.
But again, it is replenishment because of erosion from storms not protection from sea level rise.
On the atlantic coast there are cases of local supplies running out and using mined sand is one of the options used. There is talk about using Bahamian sand, offshore sand is often darker, whereas the local beaches want white sand.
This has happened many times since. Currently, Swedish town of Kiruna is on the move. And there’s no natural disaster behind it. Mining company just needs more space to operate. People find ways.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/kiruna-the-swedish-town-which-must-move-or-disappear-into-the-ground-10163607.html