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Comment by delinka | Hacker News Reader

"The state has a plan to implement more than 100 restoration and protection projects — like rebuilding marshes and barrier islands..."

Sounds like a terrible plan to me. Treating symptoms instead of the disease won't solve the problem. Just because we humans are "determined" doesn't mean fighting nature like this will be successful. I'm sure the locals will feel better about their politicians for a few years and probably just long enough to 'forget' until the next time this exact problem needs to be solved.

The true options in this case are: 1) prevent rising sea levels, 2) move away from the coast. Wasting money "rebuilding" barrier islands is just folly.

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Why not both? Half of my country (NL) exists due to smart protection against water and we're doing pretty good. Doesn't mean global warming isn't an important consideration.

If someone has a broken bone, you want to fix that, but you'll also want to give them some painkillers if they're in a lot of pain.

Actually when you consider the global implications of climate and the local effects of shore, a local area using local money to protect local shore in the face of global inaction they are powerless to change makes perfect sense.

It is actually your position which makes no sense. "Hey 4.6 million Louisianans, sure you're only 0.00063% of world population, but protecting yourself and your land from what the other 99.9994% do is futile, you must instead convince the other ~7.1 billion humans to change so your land will be safe!"

You need to move the decimal a couple places on your perecentages.

And what about moving industry and residences away from the current coastline over the next 50 years? Make a plan to prevent new real estate development within a certain distance of the current coast; plan the obsolescence of currently developed areas and over time reclaim them for the environment.

That's a problem when the coastline is the reason for those industries and residences being there. It's not exactly feasible to relocate the oil refining and shipbuilding industries of New Orleans and Baton Rouge to central Mississippi.

Can you explain why it's silly to rebuild barrier islands, which prevent beach erosion? Is it your view that people should experience the consequences of rising sea levels as catastrophically as possible?

If beach erosion were the problem, maintaining barrier islands makes sense. But when the ocean levels are rising and simply crawling up the beach, putting everything underwater?

Sure, we could probably engineer building up the coastline with higher land to maintain the current coastline, but at what expense? At what point do we just decide that the coastline is moving inland and we should just follow suit?

Erosion is the difference between being able to live in a home on stilts, and having the land beneath collapse into the ocean. There is land below sea level and it experiences erosion too. Rising sea levels accelerate erosion, which clearly doesn't make it less of an issue.

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