Giant dams enclosing North Sea could protect millions from rising waters | Hacker News Reader

Giant dams enclosing North Sea could protect millions from rising waters

theguardian.com

14 pointsnfg19 comments

From the article: “A rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 is predicted, according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now. If we do nothing, this extreme dam might just be the only solution.”

Building these dams will be a lot easier than getting people to stop driving SUVs and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

Not sure if you're serious, but transportation is only 14% of emissions. Electricity, agriculture and industry are all individually bigger contributors.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Why are militaries rarely mentioned as GGG contributors?

Good question, maybe they are still included in some of the current categories?

It's hard to get data. Countries were explicitly allowed to ignore/not report military emissions by the Kyoto Accords. Without the mandatory reporting anyone trying to write about it has to gather a lot of information about the inner workings of military logistics (amount of tonnage moved by what method etc) that the government is quite reluctant to provide.

https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-greenhouse-gases-140-co...

It's too bad because it's got to be pretty horrible. If they could just get the data for the amount of diesel/jet fuel consumed, that would tell us a lot. The US military burned a ridiculous amount of diesel fuel in Afghanistan just to try to air-condition tents in the desert.

Hey, your landlord called me and he said he's going to reduce your rent by 14%. Deal, or no deal?

The environmental results of such a project would be devastating, and human civilization in Europe might just be better off with a 10m rise in sea levels.

“ The cost of building a so-called North Sea Enclosure Dyke, estimated at between €250bn and £500bn, amounts to barely 0.1% of the combined GDP of all the countries that would be protected by it, they calculate.”

That would mean those countries GDP is estimated at 250 to 500 trillion pounds or 320 to 645 trillion dollars

France 2.6 trillion, england 2.75 trillion, Scotland 202 billion, Netherlands 826 billion. Or about 6.4 trillion dollars per Wikipedia.

This seems like two examples of errors converting decimal fractions to percentages in hacker news in one day.

Very roughly it looks like they should have said 0.1 or 10%.

10% of combinded GDP is very much not an easy investment to make!

Maybe they're calculating the cost over a 100 years while keeping today's GDP as a yard stick. Though nothing in the article indicates so.

There was a similar idea for the Mediterranean sea almost 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

Edit: some grad student more recently (2014) proposed this as well: https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html

How would a complete opening be safe to traverse with a 50 cm difference between opposite sides of the dam? I'd think that'd create quite a strong current that would make it very hard to exit the Med.

Risk distribution is very bad. You have a long dam, of which a single failure at any point means flooding a lot of land. Individual dams along the coastline will, in most cases, only affect the land behind them. Plus it's easier to fix a coastline dam than one in the middle of the sea, possibly during a storm.

Actually the exact opposite is true. By picking the right places to build your dams and dikes out to see, you can reduce the total length of [all the dams and dikes], thus total risk is reduced.

An example is eg. dutch Delta Works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works , which (among other things) reduced the total length of sea defenses in Zeeland by 700 km.

Source here: https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de-noordzee-w...

I would like to see a failure analysis report.

Getting this passed by both the EU and UK governments seems at least as unlikely as 'turn the north sea into gigantic lake' plan failing.

Wow ecocide in Europe for only 500 billion. It's hard to imagine a dumber idea.

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