http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/boston-mulls-sea-barrier-to-protect-city-against-rising-sea-levels
[If the U.S. feels it needs to build a wall at its border, this might be
the more useful location. Netherlands can likely provide expertise.]
Boston Mulls Barrier to Protect City Against Rising Sea Levels
MARK KARLIN
Thursday, 23 February 2017 06:38
Anyone who reads Truthout reporter Dahr Jamail's work on the deleterious
impacts of climate change knows that it is not a theoretical threat.
However, we live in a time when the administration of Donald Trump is
silencing talk of climate change -- and research about it -- in the
federal government. The gap between Jamail's on-site researched
reporting and current national public policy is immensely troubling and
ominous for the future of the planet and its people.
Although the Earth-altering impact of climate change could become
catastrophic, it is not immediately visible to many people. Therefore,
it remains an abstract threat to them -- not an immediate concern.
However, that has not deterred many states and local communities from
preparing for some of the destruction that will likely result from
climate change.
That's the case with Boston, which according to The Boston Globe is
considering a giant sea barrier to protect the heart of the city from
rising water:
As rising sea levels pose a growing threat to Boston’s future, city
officials are exploring the feasibility of building a vast sea barrier
from Hull to Deer Island, forming a protective arc around Boston Harbor.
The idea, raised in a recent city report on the local risks of climate
change, sounds like a pipe dream, a project that could rival the Big Dig
in complexity and cost. It’s just one of several options, but the sea
wall proposal is now under serious study by a team of some of the
region’s top scientists and engineers, who recently received a major
grant to pursue their research.
With forecasts indicating that Boston could experience routine flooding
in the coming decades, threatening some 90,000 residents and $80 billion
worth of real estate, city officials say it would be foolish not to
consider aggressive action, no matter how daunting.
One of the most frequently reported effects of global warming is the
melting of glaciers, as well as the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields.
This melting causes the level of the world's oceans and seas to rise,
posing a threat to sea-level nations and cities around the world --
including, of course, the large municipalities and towns on the east and
west coasts of the United States and bordering the Gulf of Mexico.
This threat becomes more of a reality every year. As Dahr Jamail
reported last year on Truthout:
Recently, a Norwegian Coast Guard icebreaker ship took an interesting
trip into the Arctic. The ship found no ice to break, despite the fact
that it was the dead of winter and barely 800 miles from the North Pole.
Indeed, record-low levels of Arctic sea ice are becoming normal. The ice
is disappearing before our very eyes.
Satellite data now shows we are witnessing a very rapid acceleration in
global sea level rise. In the last six years, oceans have risen by five
millimeters per year, which is a rate not seen since the ending of the
last Ice Age - and it is accelerating.
Miami is often cited as a city that is particularly vulnerable to rising
sea levels, since it is basically flat with a long shore line. In 2015,
Vanity Fair bluntly asked, "Can Miami Beach Survive Global Warming?"
Forebodingly, Jamail has further covered this trend:
Another perfect example of this is a crucial recent study led by James
Hansen, the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies. The study, authored by Hansen and more than a dozen other
scientists and published online, warns that even staying within the
internationally agreed goal of keeping the planet within the 2-degree
Celsius temperature warming limit has already caused unstoppable melting
in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The study shows that this
will raise global sea levels by as much as 10 feet by the year 2050,
inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.
That is a warning that wasn't even aggressively acted upon during the
Obama administration in terms of major policy, as The New York Times
noted in a 2016 report :
The gridlock in Washington means the United States lacks not only a
broad national policy on sea-level rise, it has something close to the
opposite: The federal government spends billions of taxpayer dollars in
ways that add to the risks, by subsidizing local governments and
homeowners who build in imperiled locations along the coast.
Even more troubling, this observation was in an article written before
the Trump administration -- which denies human-caused climate change --
came into power.
When a city as far north as Boston is beginning to plan for the sea
level rise caused by climate change, it is likely a sign that other
coastal municipalities along the East and Western seaboards will begin
to take their own action to mitigate the destructive force of global
warming. Unfortunately, all individual cities can do is "Band-Aid"
prevention in the absence of vigorous national and worldwide efforts to
halt the acceleration of climate disruption.
