Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday August 11 2019, @10:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the clam-soup dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by bradley13 on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:46PM (5 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:46PM (#878932) Homepage Journal

    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.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   0  
       Troll=1, Informative=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:08PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:08PM (#878957)

    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

      by Captival (6866) on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:48PM (#878974)

      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 helpful calling 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

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:06AM (#879071)

      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)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday August 12 2019, @01:08AM (#879013) Journal

    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

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 12 2019, @04:23AM (#879081) Journal

      What I find especially scary is the relentless political pressure on scientists to lowball their estimates.

      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.