[Vision2020] Sea-level rise threatens 1,400 towns

[Joe Campbell]

No one is trying to get everyone to stop emitting CO2. That is a hopeless
endeavor. The idea is to limit production, to conserve energy ("conserve"
as in "be conservative"). You are thrashing at a person made of straw, not
a view that policy makers hold. Suppose we rephrase your first point with
this in mind:

"... while the majority of CO2 dissolves in the ocean within 200 years or
so, what's left can stick around in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
 So getting everybody to [limit production of] CO2 is really a non-starter
in the cost/benefit analysis arena."

That sounds like a pretty bad set of reasoning.

That's it for now!


On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>wrote:

> OK, a few thoughts.
>
> First, while the majority of CO2 dissolves in the ocean within 200 years
> or so, what's left can stick around in the atmosphere for hundreds of
> years.  So getting everybody to stop producing CO2 is really a non-starter
> in the cost/benefit analysis arena.  Cutting back on our civilization's
> progress would be hampered greatly if we all got religion and turned off
> all the coal plants and stopped burning fossil fuels or using natural gas
> or plastics while we waited for renewables to take up the slack.  I kind of
> like staying warm in winter, refrigerating my food, running fans when it's
> hot, and so forth.
>
> They suggest removing it from the air.  Since we're not going to turn off
> all the coal plants anytime soon and start riding bicycles, these magic
> carbon removal technologies would have to scale up to where they were
> removing more CO2 from the air than mankind was putting in.  I don't see
> that happening any time soon.
>
> These cities that are threatened by sea level rise have hundreds of years
> to figure something out about it.  It happens continually; it's not like on
> one random day 300+ years from now the sea level rises 4 ft in a few hours.
>  It happens slowly enough that simple natural building abandonment will
> take care of much of the problem.  How many buildings do we have that are
> 300 years old?  When they tear down the old building and rebuild, they will
> move it back a few feet.  We're talking a few millimeters a year in sea
> level rise.  The ones that get slowly flooded will be abandoned and new
> ones built farther back.  If you watched it in some kind of simulator,
> you'd see the city slowly creep back from the water line and move farther
> inland, one building at a time.
>
> But, if we're worried about it, we should move to a nuclear supplemented
> by renewables energy scheme right now on a global scale.  Start building
> new nuclear reactors with the newer designs, and start researching ones
> that use thorium or current nuclear waste products as fuel.  Then everybody
> buys a Tesla, and we just have wait as the CO2 is naturally scrubbed from
> the atmosphere and the world cools down until it's a blessed paradise.  A
> blessed paradise without plastics or lubricants, but I'm sure we could
> solve those problems.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On 07/29/2013 07:33 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:
>
>> Check out this article from USA TODAY:
>>
>> Sea-level rise threatens 1,400 towns
>>
>> http://usat.ly/1chGyVt
>>
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