Which U.S. coastal areas could disappear due to sea level rise

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/24/opinion/sunday/what-could-disappear.html

by selamattidur • 14 years ago

76 76 14 years ago

nytimes.com

randall• 14 years ago

Brought to you by jashkenas no doubt.

charonn02• 14 years ago

Note to self: move to higher ground/buy a canoe.

chao-• 14 years ago

And rather than pass it down to your children, consider selling any property in Galveston, New Orleans or Miami Beach. Even on the lower-end estimates, those areas are thoroughly deluged. Or pass it on and let them sell it, whichever is smarter from a tax perspective.

charonn02• 14 years ago

Thanks, but I rent :)

mturmon• 14 years ago

I had no idea how low-lying some cities are. Especially in the southeast US.

brianchu• 14 years ago

Long-term real-estate play: buy land near urban areas that will be soon submerged (100 year time frame) and near the "new" coast.

ams6110• 14 years ago

Why, so your grave can be on the beach?

flexie• 14 years ago

I find it implausible that some of the richest and most densely populated cities in America would just passively await submersion for decades when this could be averted with good old levees.

What I do believe is that a major UN climate conference is starting today in Doha and that their PR people yet again managed to sell the idea of disaster to the newspapers.

jarek• 14 years ago

Just have the levees built and maintained by private enterprise rather than U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and you should be all golden with no unexpected problems or failures

simondlr• 14 years ago

In terms of this, I've thought of a joke to get people more aware of global warming.

Sell a piece of land a few kilometres in for a lot of money, citing it's major benefit as future beachfront property (put ads in local paper, etc). If anyone actually decides to buy it at that price, cover your losses and donate the rest to WWF or Charity:Water.

mseebach7• 14 years ago

100-300 years is a long time to build some dikes and flood barriers.

teeja• 14 years ago

The flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars.

Spread that out along the coastline and the taxes needed gets into REAL money. Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

You don't need to protect the entire coastline, just already-developed parts of it that would present an extreme disruption to let flood. $6-10bn in the grand scheme of New York City is nothing (well, assuming anybody gives a shit about NYC in 300 years).

mseebach7• 14 years ago

> The flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars.

Which is several orders of magnitude less that fixing global warming will cost. The GDP of NYC is $1280bln. Even at twice the cost for the barriers ($20bln), it's 1.5% of GDP to permanently "fix" global warming for NYC. Also, it's fairly deterministic. The tools and methods to build such barriers are readily available. The same can't be said of a political solution.

> Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there.

Well, the region is already more or less uninhabitable without air conditioning, so the solution to that problem is pretty obvious.

joonix• 14 years ago

Or for the economics of fossil fuels to change drastically, figure out ways to reverse warming, enter a natural cooling period, or any black swan event.

mayneack• 14 years ago

Look back a few hundred years at Boston. Half of the land is "new" anyway. Granted, I would imagine that it's hard/impossible to do this for a city that already exists and has lots of large, expensive, heavy objects in the way.

http://www.iboston.org/rg/backbayImap.htm

willyt• 14 years ago

Think about the engineering involved. A 25ft rise would require what, a 35ft high reinforced concrete structure? It has to be capable of dissipating the wave energy from a storm like sandy. The foundations have to be pretty deep to guarantee resistance to scour. The buttressing structure will extend back at least 35/tan(45) ft back. Where and when do you decide to build it? What political process allows you to demolish all those houses without an impossible political deadlock about compensation land rights etc? What about rights of light for all the others? Re-routing subway lines, highways, utilities etc. How long is one these for New York/Jersey/Long Island? 50miles 100miles 250?

Edit: tan(45)/35 to 35/tan(45), whoops.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

We're talking about 300 years from now. Even 100 years from now the global economy is going to be around 1 quadrillion dollars (in today's dollar) and technology will be unimaginably advanced. As much as I think long term planning is often important, I think this is a case where it's better to leave things to our much wealthier, much more technologically advanced future selves / children.

mseebach7• 14 years ago

First, dikes tend to be earthworks, not concrete. Second, the forecast for 100-300 year is 5, not 35 feet. The Dutch were building 5 foot dikes 1000 years ago.

To protect a built-up area like NYC and Long Island, you'd probably build a chain of artificial barrier islands some ways out to sea. That's a simple and comparably cheap earth moving operation.

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

What political process allows you to demolish all those houses without an impossible political deadlock about compensation land rights etc?

Eminent domain. See, for example, Kelo vs New London, which held that the government can even take property and give it to another private party if they feel like it.

Dikes/etc, or simply landfill to raise ground level can handle the valuable high density areas. This was already done in Seattle 100 years ago, for example [1].

Migration is also a pretty easy solution to the less densely populated areas. NYC's population declined 10% between 1970 and 1980. Newark NJ's population went down 40% between 1930 and 2010. You think we can't depopulate Long Beach house by house over the next 300 years?

Please recall that 300 years ago, the United States and India were part of the British Empire, the cowpox vaccine was new technology, and the empire of Comancheria [2] was just getting started.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground

[2] Comancheria was an empire spanning Texas, Kansas and New Mexico, and was the major power in that part of the world until the 1870's. Rose and fell in less than 300 years.

rdl2• 14 years ago

Interesting just how little this matters to San Francisco (they'd need to put a wall around SFO, OAK, and maybe SJC, and not sure about the parts of Mountain View and Menlo Park where tech offices are).

Unfortunate that DC doesn't have more flooding planned.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

At 25 feet, it looks like the shoreline moves up (at least) to highway 101, but that map doesn't go far enough south to really be sure. Look at this and you can really see the impact: http://cal-adapt.org/sealevel/

Just at a glance, I'd write off Oracle, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Moffett, Alviso, the new 49ers stadium, lots of Cisco buildings around Tasman, and that industrial park up in Fremont where they shot the T2 Cyberdyne office scenes. The inundation of the SJ/SC water treatment plant would also make things even worse, I imagine.

Plus, you know, everything else in between.

mseebach7• 14 years ago

Unless you spend a few billion dollars on a flood barrier across the bay mouth next to Golden Gate bridge.

dredmorbius6• 14 years ago

For SF proper, most neighborhoods would be relatively little affected on account of hills, though there are significant amounts of the city built on bay fill or low-lying land, particularly the Marina, parts of downtown, SOMA, and Hunters Point. Around the rest of the bay, communities/developments on the bay itself (especially on the bay side of major highways) are more likely to be on fill and subject to rising sea levels. This includes major office parks in various parts of the bay, including much of the North First Street area of San Jose, the GooglePlex, Oyster Point, Emeryville, Hayward, and Fremont.

As the maps make clear, the real hazard is in the Delta and Central Valley. Prior to modern flood control (dams and levees), much of the Central Valley was effectively an inland sea through the winter and spring. Rising sea levels would put much of the existing (and already threatened) levee system at risk. Sacramento, Stockton, and other communities would be substantially affected.

brador2• 14 years ago

Anything similar out there for Europe or Asia?

daniel-cussen4• 14 years ago

Venice, Holland, and Bangladesh are soaked unless they find a solution.

Venice more than any other city.

ack• 14 years ago

this: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Special:SeaLevel and: http://www.elstel.com/SeaLevelRise.html#Maps

brador2• 14 years ago

That first link is exactly what I hoped existed. Thanks.

tsotha• 14 years ago

By then we won't care

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/03/sea_level_rise_barel...

ximeng• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_sea_level#Potential_to_E...

Unless we got our sums wrong and the ice melts quicker than we thought.

arethuza• 14 years ago

That looks about roughly 50cm per century - which is actually about the same leven as post-glacial rebound here in Scotland:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PGR_Paulson2007_Rate_of_Li...

So the land is rising at the same level as sea levels!

petercooper• 14 years ago

There's been debate over whether volcanic activity in the Canary Islands could cause a 150ft tidal wave that would cause enough damage on the east coast that long term sea rises would have little left to do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami#Canary_Islands

nhebb• 14 years ago

1. Set up a booth outside Yankee Stadium, display the Boston map, and sell coal-powered anything.

2. Repeat at Fenway Park with the NY map.

3. Profit!

dawidw• 14 years ago

could = may or may not

what's the aim of the article which claims that something may or may not happen? Of course besides to scary people of 'global warming' or how it is nowadays called, because scientists are not sure if the temperature is going up or down, 'global changes'? And of course, when people are scared, they'll pay whatever money to ecoterrorists to save 'the environment'

dredmorbius6• 14 years ago

As Sandy made clear, it's not just persistent rises in sea level, but the frequency and extent of intermittent rises as a consequence of cyclonic storms or inland flooding and watershed drainage which are likely to have significant impacts.

My understanding of carbon and warming predictions is that we've trended toward the highest (most extreme and dangerous) ends of forecast ranges, which suggests that the higher seawater rises might be more appropriately used in disaster planning. And adding a few feet to storm surge, and increasing frequency of high-surge events, would be disruptive enough if not quite so much as a persistent 5-10 foot rise in sea levels.

rwmj• 14 years ago

As is also happening right now in the UK ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20490999

(And to think of all the people still denying that climate change is a real thing).

kintamanimatt2• 14 years ago

Possibly the biggest misstep in climate change's acceptance was calling it "global warming". People don't feel the warmer temperatures but rather feel its non-intuitive effects and crack jokes along the lines of "it's so cold right now ... whatever happened to global warming?"

Marketing's everything, and the crowd climate change has to be marketed to is scientifically illiterate and commonly anti-intellectual in nature. Perhaps it should have been called something more dire, alarming, and readily perceivable by the general population so as to be a more tangible phenomenon. I'm terrible at coming up with names though so I'll have to defer to others for ideas!

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

And to think of all the people still denying that climate change is a real thing

This is a straw man.The dispute is over how much of climate change is caused by human emissions of CO2, not whether climate change occurs.

mtrimpe2• 14 years ago

As a Dutchman I can't help but see this as a sizable but not even truly problematic engineering challenge.

Our entire country was basically a piece of sea / swampland nobody else wanted, which we proceeded to turn into our own little kingdom through a massive cooperative effort.

Since large parts of our country are already below sea-level and we've already built massive flood barriers after severe floodings [1] half a century ago; it just means we'll have a bit more demand than usual for our engineering skills and we'll all be fine.

From what I heard we're already talking with New York ;)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Flood_of_1953

dredmorbius6• 14 years ago

Yet another bit of Dutch heritage in New Amsterdam.

I was thinking of the North Sea floods. As the linked Wikipedia article notes, this also struck England significantly, and was among the key impetuses behind the Thames Barrier. Noting the closure frequency of this structure (and the increasing frequency with time), and the projected replacement dates (it's actually moved back a bit, I'd recalled 2030, current estimates are 2050-2060) is interesting. Also with recent rain-triggered floods in the UK, London and southeastern England now face a double threat: rising sea levels from the oceans, and increased runoff from land. Absent active pumping to clear rainwater flows down the Thames, a Barrier itself is not a complete solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Barrier

frozenport• 14 years ago

Are the great lakes effected by global warming.

altcognito• 14 years ago

Winter ice helps to protect lake water from evaporation and keep water levels high. In recent years ice hasn't been as plentiful: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/31/455612/great-lak...

Keep in mind that 2012 was an very, very warm winter even compared to the years leading up to it.

gadders3• 14 years ago

I can't remember the exact figures, but Bjorn Lomborg has argued that during the 19th century sea levels around New York rose by tens of feet, to no great impact.

adaml_623• 14 years ago

Would it be too much to provide a reference for those claims. And tell us if you think it's relevant to the future.

For those of us who are only passingly familiar with New York it doesn't really seem like a new increase of 10 feet would not be a disaster.

gadders3• 14 years ago

My google-fu was weak today :-(

rm9992• 14 years ago

How is that possible when sea levels elsewhere didn't rise by 10s of feet? Even if you count tides it defies common sense; a lot of NYC is below 10 feet from sea level.

Anyway, Lomborg is a controversial figure with an anti-global-warming agenda. I tend to trust more objective sources for stuff like this.

gadders3• 14 years ago

He unequivocally says that global warming is real, and man-made. How is that an anti-global warming agenda?

What he does say, is that the proposed solutions would make little differnce, and the proposed effects of global warming are exaggerated.

sjs382• 14 years ago

The New Orleans projections assume a levee breach.

"If levees breach, almost all of the city would flood. The surrounding region is also mostly flooded."

dredmorbius6• 14 years ago

No precedent there ....

New Orleans is already almost completely below mean sea level. In many places, the highest geographic point is the Mississippi River. Building levees and flood-control structures directly contributes to the further erosion and loss of delta lands in the Gulf. The very structures that would save New Orleans also doom it. John McPhee's writing on the Atchafalya Old River Control Structure is fascinating.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_T...

Which U.S. coastal areas could disappear due to sea level rise

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