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With nowhere to hide from rising seas, Boston prepares for a wetter future
Boston dodged a disaster in 2012. After Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New Jersey and New York, the superstorm hit Boston near low tide, causing minimal damage. If Sandy had arrived four hours earlier, many Bostonians would have been ankle to hip deep in seawater.
Across the globe, sea levels are rising, delivering bigger storm surges and higher tides to coastal cities. In Boston, the most persistent reminder comes in the form of regular "nuisance" flooding — when seawater spills onto roads and sidewalks during high tides. Those nuisance events are harbingers of a wetter future, when extreme high tides are predicted to become a daily occurrence.
"The East Coast has been riding a post-Sandy mentality of preparing and responding before the next big one," says Robert Freudenberg, an environmental planner at the Regional Plan Association, an urban research and advocacy firm based in New York City. But a more enduring kind of threat looms. "Sea level rise is the flooding that doesn't go away," he says. "Not that far in the future, some of our most developed places may be permanently inundated."
And Boston, for one, is not waiting to get disastrously wet to act. In the seven years since Hurricane Sandy's close call, the city-run Climate Ready Boston initiative has devised a comprehensive, science-driven master plan to protect infrastructure, property and people from the increasingly inevitable future of storm surges and rising seas. The famously feisty city intends to be ready for the next Sandy as well as the nuisance tides that promise to become the new normal, while other U.S. coastal cities are trying to keep up.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:04PM (16 children)
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I certainly hope they are spending just as much or MORE on making Boston a green city.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:30PM (1 child)
Great, now California are going to have to absorb even more Massholes fleeing their state.
Yeah, that's right, Americans so douchey that even Californians don't like them. Hopefully California will be full Aztlan by the time they flee and they will be beheaded by savage hostile Mexicans when they arrive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:05PM
Yeah right? We've already got on giant pimple on our ass. Mexico kept the legs so that puts the pimple right around the San Diego area. Know of anything that might be irritating the pimple and making it worse?
That was a rhetorical question, no need to respond XOXO
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:34PM (6 children)
Are you planning to pay for it? The problem is that even if they went heavy 100% green... it wouldn't slow down the oncoming flooding noticeably, they're just not responsible for a big enough slice of ongoing emissions to make a difference.
Meanwhile, they're facing ever-increasing flooding of the city today. Going green is optional, staying above water an urgent necessity.
That's the tragedy of the commons in action - no one person's actions are enough to make a noticeable difference to the problem one way or the other, and so every person has individual incentive to make the problem worse.
(Score: 2, Informative) by bradley13 on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:46PM (5 children)
All fine, but allow me to remind everyone that sea level has been rising at roughly the same rate for millenia. Two to three mm per year. AGW may have pushed it towards the higher end of that range, but that is all.
If Boston is wet, it might be due to being subject to around 350 years of steady sea level rise. Take 2mm as a conservative average, and that's more than half-a-meter. The AGW influence is noise in comparison.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:08PM (2 children)
I know simple math can be difficult for you brainwashed types, but giant frozen slabs of water on land melting into the ocean probably has some effect. I'll leave the rest up to your apparently ample imagination. You could try using logic, but I think that might hurt too much.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Captival on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:48PM
You're totally right! That unwashed heathen doesn't subscribe to whatever doomsday scenario we're peddling today! He must be stupid and we'll show how much better we are than him by
being extremely tolerant and helpfulcalling him names and stroking our vaginas in moral superiority. Is it global cooling this week? Or global warming, or climate chaos, or space meteors, or ozone? Who knows!? One thing for certain, the solution is giving money to socialists who will spend it keeping themselves in power by spreading it around to their professional full time victim groups. It's the only answer!(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:06AM
Which part of "interglacial period" did you fail to understand? Those huge chunks of ice have been melting for about 20,000 years. The Younger Dryas flood preceded our first oil well by millenia.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 12 2019, @01:08AM (1 child)
Over the past 20k years, sea level rise has not been "roughly the same rate". It has varied greatly. Rose approximately 100m between 20k and 7k years ago. From 5000 B.C to about 1850, sea level rise has been very little. After 1850, it has picked up speed.
What I find especially scary is the relentless political pressure on scientists to lowball their estimates. All this effort to downplay and minimize the problem is making it much more difficult to prepare sensibly.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 12 2019, @04:23AM
Or is it highball those estimates? What I find remarkable is the lack of support for claimed levels of future climate change. But I suppose we'll find out who is more right in a few decades.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 12 2019, @03:29AM (6 children)
Not always.
Actually there are enough cases in which the "ounce" of prevention is much more expensive that the pound of "cure". First thing that springs in mind: "the war on drugs" vs "harm reduction".
See also the law of diminishing returns [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 12 2019, @04:00AM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:13AM (3 children)
The "gram of apathy" is something that you are acutely aware, isn't it khallow?
Like your "do nothing now about those emission, just move the cities upwards when flooded" solution.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 12 2019, @04:18AM (2 children)
Indeed. I think you're starting to get my arguments. There's still a bunch of misplaced negativity there, but maybe you'll figure it out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:55AM (1 child)
Let us remember and then keep in mind that "get it != agree".
Perhaps you'll stop the misplaced whining about "misplaced negativity" once you figure out the two above.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 12 2019, @02:05PM
Didn't say otherwise. I'm not expecting agreement right now. But I think a few decades from now when fire didn't follow that smoke, we may find that we have better things to concern ourselves with than some old, hysterical fad. Hopefully, that will mean that you learn something from this episode and won't find a new, hysterical fad to latch to. The terrorists will win if you do that.
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Monday August 12 2019, @04:34AM
A gramme is better than a damn. [gradesaver.com]