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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Sea level rise, driven by climate change, is causing increased flooding during high tides along much of the U.S. coastline. Though such floods are usually minor, a new study suggests that car traffic patterns could help reveal how floods harm an area’s business revenues.
Tidal flooding events “are not one in a hundred years or one in a thousand years. They’re once a week,” says Miyuki Hino, an environmental social scientist at Stanford University.
Though increasingly frequent, such floods often last only a few hours. That can make it hard to tally the economic losses they cause. Hino and her colleagues sought to quantify those impacts by looking at parking data in the historic downtown of Annapolis, Md., located on the Chesapeake Bay.
The team first built a database of flood events using flood images posted to social media at the same times that tide gauge readings showed high water levels, in order to eliminate rain-caused flooding. Hino’s team estimates there were 44 tidal floods in 2017, classified as minor, modest or severe.
The team then looked at parking transactions in a nearby lot for changes in parking revenues. Flood events coincided with drops in visitation ranging from 37 to 89 percent, depending on the severity of the flooding, the researchers found. That contributed to about 3,000 fewer visitors, or a 1.7 percent decrease, in 2017, according to the study published online February 15 in Science Advances.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @09:56AM (27 children)
Move them to higher ground, climate change solved.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @02:42PM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @06:41PM
Buy waders.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 25 2019, @07:41PM (3 children)
Yeah, let's just move New York City, totally easy, right?
And then when we need to move all our farmland to Canada, that'll be totally easy too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @10:17PM
He's not the one to pay for it. He's just an statistician with armchair scientist pretentions, everything is easy for him (only matrices are hard).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @11:51PM
Over the time frames that climate change acts on, yes. For example, in a century, most of the property in NYC will have been condemned twice over. It's just not that hard for a business or family, which was going to move anyway, to move to higher ground as part of the move.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @02:36AM
Whose climate predictions claim that the US won't be able to grow food any more? It's certainly not the IPCC.
But having said that, if we were trying to do that for some reason, moving farmland just isn't that hard, because you aren't actually moving farmland. You're just moving some equipment and such to a different bit of property. Again, not a hard problem. Have we already forgotten just how much farmland was "moved" in the past century?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @04:55PM (20 children)
Moving is in fact the only reasonable long-term solution for most individuals and businesses affected by climate change. If the climate scientists are to be believed, any other solution will be too late, not enough, extremely expensive, and/or politically/practically unworkable. People who cannot afford to try to fight a losing battle with the environment (practically everyone) will be forced to move whether they want to or not. The smarter ones will see the writing on the wall and will move sooner rather than later. The rest will follow once there is no other choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @10:23PM (19 children)
As useful this would be, that's not a solution, that's a workaround.
For instance, this won't solve you the reduction of fertile land area, nor the repairs you need after extreme weather events
But, I suppose, all of that are A-OK with khallow: diminished supply plays well for profits, repairs keep people busy and their mind of the climate change.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:01AM (18 children)
Which is a solution. We have worked around all kinds of stuff in our environment without serious problems. For example, there's no fix to volcanoes. But the workaround is just to move back in after the volcano stops erupting. Similarly, unless you're willing to kill lots of people, there's no workaround to overpopulation. We can develop long term economic systems that lead to negative population growth rates such as developed world economies. But we can't make people magically disappear.
The complaints about climate change really are about overpopulation. And climate change mitigation is notorious incompetent about creating more poor people which increases human fertility which increases the overpopulation driving the climate change in the first place.
Notice that they haven't actually shown there's a reduction in fertile land area or that the alleged reduction in fertile land is a problem (we have after all a large food surplus at present and productivity of land keeps going up). Keep in mind that you don't have to solve or workaround non problems!
Nobody has a serious problem with repairs. Developed world societies have incredible capacity to build and repair stuff. The rest tends to have valuable real estate and infrastructure only where they have the capability to repair it.
Is climate change the only problem on Earth? I count many more important problems myself. Are profit-grubbing bastards the only people who think of the big problems of the world rather than the fads? Seems a bit peculiar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:39PM (17 children)
Take this as an example:
Cali drought 2012-2016 caused a water loss observable as the Sierras raised 1 inch from the lost mass [forbes.com] and resulted in $2.2B loses in agriculture in 2014 alone [scientificamerican.com].
The San Joaquin Valley is currently sinking due to excessive underground water extraction [phys.org].
The water loss raise questions of sustainability for the agricultural area that provides more than half of the U.S. fruit, vegetable and nut crops. [sciencedaily.com]
You mean "unsubstantiated capacity" [soylentnews.org] Or you exclude US from the developed world.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:56PM (11 children)
You can blame anything on climate, but poor water management isn't climate. California would suck that aquifer dry, climate change or not.
What's "unsubstantiated" about the massive road system the US built and maintains? Are we to suppose that a similar billing problem will destroy our already proven ability to respond to natural disasters and adapt to changing environmental and economic conditions?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:01PM (10 children)
At least you didn't go so deep down the rabbit hole to deny a 4-years drought has something to do with the climate and the lack of water in Sierras was not "poor water management".
If you look for details, you'll discover [pothole.info] that "maintains" is a blatant abuse of the term
So much so that some went rogue road crew [howstuffworks.com], Tuttle-style, going to "trying a bit harder to conceal their real identities."
I hope you won't assert "rogue road crews" are part of that "incredible capacity to ... repair stuff"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:06PM (2 children)
Draining the aquifer aggravates drought BTW because there is less soil and consequently air moisture as a result. And there's always poor years for rainfall (and even poor centuries in California!). Blaming it on climate is a convenient scapegoat when the problem would happen anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:50PM (1 child)
Citation needed about the noticeable impact of water level in deep aquifers (San Joaquin is 6 to 9.5 mi deep) on the severity of the droughts in the area.
Otherwise it's just hand-waving BS, a thing that we are suppose to despise in climate scientists, no matte how hard they are trying to come with good models.
And I expect you can prove the inevitability of the problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 28 2019, @02:31AM
"Deep aquifer" doesn't mean "near the surface". I think first it is necessary to understand how much water tables have fallen (here, in California's Central Valley). From this article [usgs.gov]:
Note the transition from "shallow ground water" in 1880 which flowed under its own pressure, to 400 feet of water table drop in the 1970s. One obvious effect is that the further away the water table is from the surface the less moisture makes its way from water table to surface. Plants can readily tap shallow ground water and greatly expedite the movement of water to the atmosphere. There's only a few plants that can grow hundreds of feet of roots. That is one way that moisture can get from ground water into the atmosphere (and mitigate the effects of drought). Here's another observation [usgs.gov]:
In other words, pulling ground water often results in less surface water, evaporation from which is also a contributor to atmospheric moisture. The article had remarks on specific regions and how groundwater depletion affected them. For example:
While there are a number of irrelevant adverse effects like subsidence of the land, a final problem is that lowering the water table also permanently harms the ground's ability to retain water by compacting the material. So even if in the future, water is returned to present levels, there will be less ground water available for plants to use and to contribute to atmospheric moisture for weather systems. All this contributes to the frequency and severity of droughts.
Finally, let's consider some real world examples of aquifer depletion. In addition to Central Valley and the Arizona examples above, there's substantial depletion of the Ogallala aquifer (runs under part of the midwest from South Dakota to northern Texas). Internationally, there's the Syrian drought [huffingtonpost.com] of 2006-2011 which triggered the civil war there.
While there were other factors for the drought, like Turkey's sequestering of a considerable amount of river water that would have otherwise flowed into Syria, it remains that the area has epic water management issues.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:16PM (6 children)
That's a red herring. Just because it's politically sexier to build new roadways than maintain existing ones doesn't mean we don't have the capacity to maintain roads. Let us recall that the argument was that maintenance capability existed, which it does, not that the US doesn't presently have the political will in some areas to maintain roads.
So what? The US economy grows. $185 billion, assuming it actually is that much, is not going to be hard to achieve in 50 years (unless, of course, we sabotage our economic growth with dumb approaches to climate change mitigation and other ideologically similar bad ideas). And the US spends much more than $68 billion on roads.
Back at you on that one. Why bring it up in the first place? They aren't an example of anything relevant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:37PM (5 children)
You are doing a great job of hiding it, then.
If not tested by the very use of it, do you have any guarantee that this capacity exists at all?
I don't see the expected effects, the Occam's-razor simplest explanation is the capacity doesn't exist.
Since you stated it exists, it should be you to demonstrate the existence.
Citation needed. Mind you, the context is road maintenance.
Just in case you'd be temped to go there. If you say you aren't, we can close this one.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:53PM (4 children)
Hiding what? Are you claiming that the US with collective government budgets somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 trillion dollars (state and local was $2.8 trillion, federal was around $3.9 trillion [wikipedia.org]) can't spend 2-3% of that on one of the most important tasks they have (particularly when they actually are doing so)?
Which let us note passed the test.
I provided the road system as an example. Sorry, I don't care that you can't accept that particular valid example for some reason. There's also rapid disaster recovery which is particularly relevant to a discussion of repairs from climate-induced disaster.
You're the one who went there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:27PM (3 children)
A system made of 50% of roads rated as "poor" in areas with over 500,000 population, yes. And this somehow demonstrates the capability to maintain them.
Lol, "valid".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:32PM (2 children)
Then we're good.
Yes. They wouldn't be "poor", they wouldn't exist at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @02:15PM (1 child)
If you like gravel roads in and around large cities, who am I to object to your fetish?
Don't expect me to like it too
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 28 2019, @02:31AM
They're paved roads, just not to your standard.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:03PM (4 children)
Here, while this was once again blamed on climate change, the real culprit is below-cost public flood insurance which encourages people to build stuff that will get swept away in the next hurricane. But it definitely shows we can and do rebuild from natural disasters quite rapidly, as I indicated earlier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:09PM (3 children)
A quarter of a century ago. Show it today, will you?
12 years after Katrina and the pumps still malfunction [theguardian.com] (how the Dutch manage to keep theirs working? Maybe they have a super-human capacity. Or maybe the US does a lousy job because its capacity is stretched and can't cope with the maintenance needed in all the places)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:34PM (2 children)
And? It funny how this conversation has devolved from demonstrating the ability to repair damage from disasters to meeting some arbitrary standard of quality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @02:09PM (1 child)
Set this way puts into light that while you may have for now the ability to repair damage from disaster, it drains from the ablility to maintain the rest of "una-disastered" ones. A fact that indicates you may lose the ability to recover from disasters in the future.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 28 2019, @02:47AM
No, the goalposts have shifted from demonstrating that developed world disaster recovery and repair is a thing to criticizing the quality of a cherry-picked fix.