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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The meme now being pushed is that the rise will greatly accelerate over the next 10 – 15 years. Totttttttal disasterrrrrrrrrr by 2030!
The meme is unchanging.
Nuclear fusion and global climate catastrophe…
Only ten years away.
And always ten years away.
So keep tipping in the public funding and by 2050, they will be only ten years away.
Don’t you wish that everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen?
Those diabolical and wily Dutch. Having built their nation already one-third below sea level, they will rule the world with another couple of inches sea-level rise. Bwahahahaha.
What Alan Farago has achieved is being a self-proclaimed environmental activist who emulates the White Queen,
John
Historically civilizations have fallen mostly because the political elite have, in their greed, overtaxed the masses – simply because they could.
“Huffpost thinks a few inches of sea will cause Civilisation to Collapse”, but it is more likely that the eventual realisation by people in general, that sea level rise is a non-problem will cause the Puffington Host itself to collapse.
I laughed, too. You can’t get a federal employee to work at night.
psssst, I’m “working” right now.
Beach replenishment of tourist beaches in Florida and elsewhere has (almost) nothing to do with sea level rise. It is a cure for the destruction of the natural beach environment consisting of dunes, sea oats, brush, and other vegetation that helped the beaches resist storm damage and rebuild themselves. On the barrier island that is now Cape Canaveral south to Melbourne Beach, the dunes have been covered with condo-high-rise apartment buildings and hotels. Tourists trample the sea oats that hold the few remaining (pitifully few) dunes in place.
Barrier islands, which are temporary and ephemeral, have been covered with modern cities as if they were bedrock and resides at the top of 50 foot bluffs, when in reality, entire cities exist on a sand bars just feet above normal high tides. Stupid? Yes. Caused by sea level rise? No. Will they be affected if the seas rise on the Florida Coast by ten feet? Of course. As the sea rises, will it push more sand up on those beaches, yes, as it has in the past (that’s how the barrier islands got there in the first place.)
You’re dead on of course Kip. And subsidence problems aren’t due to sea level rise either. They are due either to cutting off the flow of new sediment by upstream flood control (New Orleans) or to pumping fluids out from under the coast (Norfolk-Newport News — and in their case the fluid is water).
On the other hand, the PATH transit tunnels between Manhattan and New Jersey have flooded twice since 1990 and will probably flood again and again and again as sea levels creep up. Eventually, the low elevation stations (Hoboken, Jersey City) will probably need to be hardened or abandoned. Unfortunately PATH is only one example of infrastructure built too close to sea level. There seems to be a lot of it. People like living and working by the sea. But they don’t seem to have a lot of sense about where the water’s edge is going to be on REALLY bad days.
Reply to Don K ==> The flooding of NY City’s PATH tunnels has been the result of storm surge, not the few inches of realized sea level rise in New York. see my essay on Hurricane Sandy .
The reduction in access to New York Harbor’s traditional historic flood relief valve — the Meadowlands — is mostly responsible for the height of recent storm surges (1980-present). Before this time, there were adequate paths for rising storm surge to spread out over those thousands of acres of marshland — but now there are few paths for the water which then must pile up at the mouth of the Hudson and overflow the sea walls of NY and NJ.
With modern GPS, the city and state officials can know the exact altitude of possible water intrusion points into all the tunnels and subways….a few truckloads of National Guard and a ready supply of sand bags at the appropriate spots, just a few courses high, would have avoided almost all the tunnel flooding. Poor judgement, for the most part.
“nearly every member of the Republican controlled US Senate voted last week against acknowledging global warming is caused by humans.”
I’ve seen this repeated in several other places, that the Senate voted last week on climate change, but every link for this claim goes to an article from January 2015. If progressives are so bad at math that they can’t even figure out what year it is, why should I trust anything they have to say about something as complex as the global climate?
Another reminder: The most dramatic effort to protect the city was its raising. Dredged sand was used to raise the city of Galveston by as much as 17 feet (5.2 m) above its previous elevation. Over 2,100 buildings were raised in the process,[16] including the 3,000-ton St. Patrick’s Church. The seawall and raising of the island were jointly named a National Historical Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2001.
And yes. It’s a wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane
No one takes this stuff any more seriously than they do the periodic ‘rapture’. The man in the street has been living with shrill proclamations of doom from the climate chumps for as long as he can remember while nothing much of anything changes and all it does is cause a small chuckle as yet another “tipping point” or whatever zips on by. I don’t think even the loopy left believe it anymore but swing along with it because it’s part of the dogma portfolio and works well with the general mission of western democratic destruction.
Maybe HuffPo thinks there will be 200 feet of sea level rise?
The city of Atlanta downtown was raised 1 story merely for convenience to get over all the railroad tracks (they didn’t raise the buildings, just added a street level).
25% (or so) of the Netherlands is below sea level.
This kind of claim simply shows that the writer is a big chicken with no concept of engineering or human determination.
HuffPo Thinks. Stop right there. No one who writes or contributes to HuffPo is capable of rational thought; therefore the words, “HuffPo Thinks,” should not be strung together in the same sentence.
I had a couple of replies to one of my posts, but there was no “reply” link for them so I have to post my reply at the end of this post. Don’t know if those I’m replying to will see it, since it has been a few days since I posted, but here goes:
Tom in Florida
January 29, 2016 at 1:10 pm replied:
“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?”
Well, Tom, I *am* sick of presidents abusing the U.S. Constitution. I did say in my post that I did not think Trump would do such things. If he does, I would be one of the first to criticize him for it, I assure you.
“Remember, a benevolent dictator is still a dictator, and Trump is certainly not benevolent.”
I actually think Trump is benevolent. If you’ll notice, he only gets nasty when someone attacks him personally. Then he gets real nasty. I would prefer he be more moderate in his words, but one can’t have everything.
“Gary Pearse
January 31, 2016 at 8:22 am replied:
“You don’t have to be an expert, you have to seek to find the experts you need.”
I think that is exactly what Trump will do: Get the best people for the job. That’s what he is good at, and that’s what the United States needs. The U.S. needs a lot of genuine experts, in all fields, working on our behalf. Who better to organize such a thing than Trump?
Don’t get me wrong, I could vote for any of the Republican candidates over any of the Democrat candidates, but I do have my favorites.
TA
“TA
January 31, 2016 at 11:27 am
I would prefer he be more moderate in his words, but one can’t have everything.”
I always say to people in discussions that “I may not be tactful but what I do say is the truth. I also may not always be factual but willing to be corrected.”
Wasn’t this mainly due to sewage flooding from the lake because the outlet was not placed well enough?