EnviroLink Forum

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With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Given the England spent ~$600 million pounds ($940 million USD) a year in 2005-2006 on sea-level control for 12429 km of coastline and there are 1,634,701 km of coastline in the world, there is ~132 times the coastline to control. That would be a minimum of ~$125 billion USD in cost if the numbers are extrapolated.


However, there are specific costs that would be required to protect against sea level rise as predicted. Just for the east coast surrounding the Thames the cost in 2006 was projected at 6 to 9 billion pounds, which is 10 to 15 times the yearly cost just to bring the area into the same level of protection. The cost of not providing this protection by the English insurance companies was 7.5 to 16 billion pounds for one flooding incident similar in nature to that of the 1953 flood.

This takes the lowest cost for England extrapolated over the globe to ~$1250 billion USD, which is ~1/3 of that of the Netherlands extrapolation but still ~18% of the world GDP for a year. Of course this can be spread out over a few years, but the percentage of GDP is still going to be high and the costs of maintenance is not included in this figure, just the lowest additional cost.

The highest cost would give ~2007 billion USD or ~29% of the world GDP for a year. This places the English extrapolation at ~35% to ~55% of the previous calculation, which given the rough nature of the extrapolations is not that bad. What is bad is the cost of mitigating the sea level rise, but worse is not mitigating since the costs according to the insurance companies would be much higher for just one big flood event.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Given that Antarctican spends $0.00 on sea defense and the increase in sea level will at worst case produce a less than 2 foot sea level rise by 2100 a 10% increase in sea defence budgets will cope happily with such a tiny rise the expected cost of such a rise is 1.1x $0.00 = $0.

That would be absolutly fine for Antarctica but to extend it to the rest of the world is utter drivel. A bit like taking one coastline's figures and projecting the cost of the whole world (including Antarctica) from them. That would be "typical green/commie lieing".

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

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TANG SOO!

My point is that you cannot use any single nation's cost of coastal protection and then multiply that by the world's coast line.

Just as you can organise words into sentences which have no meaning and are utter gibberish you can and have done the same with numbers.

My position on the costs of a sea level rise of less than 2 feet over a centuary is that it does not sound very catastrophic. It sounds like something that will be extreemly easy to deal with.

As has been pointed out the Dutch have very high dykes which allow them to use land which would natually be below sea level. Some of these are (I think) 10 - 15m heigh. They might have to put an extra metre on them, but since it was economic to build them in the first place it will be easy to finance the improvement.

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TANG SOO!

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TANG SOO!

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

It seems the current projections are wrong then, seeing as in every interglacial in the past 5 million years has seen sea level rise to 20m or up to 26m in the region, this must mean sea level has been a lot higher elsewhere in the world at the time, ie. approx 100,000 years ago, and then in the 90,000-120,000 steps.

This clearly means that the human induced increase in sea level rise is minute overall if it is the norm in an interglacial.

when Japan had a tsunami, some of the cities built 30 foot walls to keep out the ocean. From 20 years ago that is damn good. The earth quake dropped the wall down 3 feet and the water came in over the top and flooded the town. Our best efforts hopefully will work.

A lot of the nuclear power plants are built for around 7.5 earthquakes next to the sea also in the US. If we get soemthing like Japan had, will it be enough? Things are really stable until........................ something happens.

It seems as though we could spend 10 to 20 billion today and save 58 billion loss from happening. But do we have the will to do so? Is it just a matter of when a big storm will hit NYC?




http://www.eenews.net/public/climatewire/2012/05/22/1

The Netherlands and England have built their barriers. Italians are building one to protect Venice, and the Russians are completing a system that would protect St. Petersburg. Estimates for building a barrier or network of barriers to protect New York City and its surroundings begin at about $10 billion.

Bowman, a past member of Bloomberg's committee focused on climate change, said that, so far, city officials have resisted the idea. "It was clear they didn't really want to go there," he said. "I don't know why; too expensive, too ambitious, I guess."

According to Adam Freed, deputy director of New York's Long-Term Planning and Sustainability Office, Bloomberg has committed to completing 132 initiatives in his climate plan before he leaves office next year. So far, building storm surge barriers is not among them.