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Comment by kempbellt | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea is to look at the actual problem causing climate change.

Unless your post was satire. Putting seawalls up everywhere that might be affected seems like the wrong message to take away from the article.

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No, I'm serious. I assume the problem won't be fixed globally, so we have to look at it locally. For the Western US, it's not that bad. Southeastern US, not so much. The northeastern US has populated low-lying areas; the low-value ones need to be evacuated and the high-value ones, like Manhattan, protected. Even Manhattan isn't very flat; seawalls only need to go up to 30th St or so.

The US as a whole is in good shape; much of the US is way above sea level. Russia, which has almost no useful coastline, will be fine.

I appreciate your observations. I may be defeatist it seems too late to stop climate change. The last time political gridlock at the federal level was this bad, the U.S. had a Civil War, so I find it hard to envision a federal solution that happens soon enough. So instead, I'd like to know, "What comes next?"

You can't fix it "locally". Without global solution the sea level will just go higher and higher, and you will have to relocate all major coastal cities in a matter of centuries. Seawalls by themselves can only delay the inevitable.

NYC alone has real estate price of ~$1 trillion.

In light of how hard of a problem the global solution is (stopping greenhouse gas emissions), which one do you think is cheaper and easier? The global solution costs trillions of dollars as well, and has much more difficult coordination problems.

The local solution in this context at least has the benefit of having well defined goals where individual agents act out of there own easy to understand best interest. i.e: My house in Florida is flooding- I'm going to move to a different state. i.e: New York City is flooding and I'm a property developer- I'm going to build high rises somewhere close to NYC but at +30 m elevation.

Well, as they say, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. That is, the "local solutions" are at best interim measures to give us more time (while we hopefully tackle the root cause). They don't "solve" anything.

If your house in Florida is flooded and you move to Montana, you merely avoided the problem. I'm not saying it's wrong of you; it's the rational action for an individual. But it didn't solve anything any more than refugees fleeing Syria have solved the problem of war in Syria. And, just like Syria, some people will have to foot the bill this way or that.

I think this understates the magnitude of the problem. Humanity has had pretty constant coastlines for our entire history. If we get accelerating sea level rise we'll have to keep rebuilding our urban infrastructure every decade or three.

The cost of maintaining sea walls will affect the value of land protected by the walls, and if levels continue to rise it will make land elsewhere more competitive. So I think local solutions will have global effects - effects of moving people and stuff around. It's not like sea level rises are going to be sudden and unexpected; they will be priced in if and when they have economically measurable effects.

I don't think there are any real problems directly caused by global warming in rich countries. Price information, including insurance costs, will be enough.

Second order effects like changes in the viability of crops may affect food security (but I expect climate change to make crops more viable elsewhere, or a different production mix), and economic (but warming related) migration will be a continuing and increasing challenge. International migration of farmers is probably the biggest problem I see.

International coordination of action is not going to happen or make any real difference without threat of military force, and I don't buy the idea that the problems will be acute and obvious enough to justify that. You can't fight tragedy of the commons without an overarching authority which we don't have. Countries will cheat for local gain. Global climate change politics is mostly a waste of time unless people are willing to start wars over failures to curb emmissions, and I just don't see it. People are much more willing to start wars over migration pressures, so I think that's what we'll see.

You forget - the ones who get displaced, the poor, the third world - they are going to blame the west squarely.

That negative sentiment will take on a life of its own.

The poor and those in the third-world already blame the west for many of their problems. This changes nothing.

Yes you most definitely can fix it locally, at least for some locales. Point in case: Netherlands.

So, we finance seawalls with money no one has, but what happens when most of those buildings can withstand hurricane winds. What then? Rebuild all of them?

The assumption underlying a lot of the recommendations for actions in response to climate change is that the overwhelmingly dominant factor is CO2 emissions, and that reducing CO2 emissions is the only and/or best way to walk back from the consequences. Neither is true. For one, CO2 emissions reductions may not be realistically possible with our current technology and geopolitical situation. More importantly, there are other factors at play (such as soot changing the albedo on snow/ice covered arctic areas) and it's likely that there are dynamic effects at play which cannot simply be walked back by reducing CO2 atmospheric concentrations.

It's very likely that we're already locked into a certain level of sea level rise over the next few hundred years due to the breakup of antarctic ice sheets. This may not be something we can stop even if we could reduce atmospheric CO2 to whatever level we chose tomorrow. We need to look at ways of mitigating the impact of climate change and environmental change (whatever the cause) in the future even as we look at ways to try to reduce the negative impact of human activity on the climate and biosphere in general.

There are far too many people who look at pollution and climate change through an essentially religious lens. As though CO2 emissions are sin, and the only thing to do when caught sinning is to stop sinning, or at least sin less. This is an incredibly immature way to handle the complex relationship between mankind and Earth's environment.

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