The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas | Hacker News Reader

The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas

nytimes.com

156 pointsehudla66 comments

It's a good read but... I don't see the whole point about "From a Dutch mind-set, climate change is not a hypothetical or a drag on the economy, " is a bit weird.

Climate doesn't matter here. 1/3rd of the country is already under sea level TODAY. The billions we spend on engineering and developing water defense structures have no relation to our believes about climate change. We are ALREADY beneath sea level!

Look at this https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/5a/75/f8/5a75... Gives you a perspective.

Hell, we even have our own little Trump, denying Climate change and blaming all our faults on Moroccans in stead of Mexicans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geert_Wilders

Some more reading for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlan...

How does climate change not matter? It matters more. The country is already vulnerable to floods, which are more likely when weather gets more extreme, and the higher the sea rises, the higher and stronger the dikes and other defenses need to be. And costs of dikes go up with the square of their height, so our costs to protect against further sea level rise are going to be higher than those of other countries.

There's already a lot of effort being put in improving dikes and other coastal defenses. Of course this was already happening before rising sea levels were a serious concern, but now it seems that instead of being nearly done, we've barely started. There's no end in sight for the next couple of centuries.

Yes, it's a fight that we're used to, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

The point of the article simply seems to be that because this is a fight we have experience in, we can make money by exporting our expertise.

If you visit a place like IJmuiden you'll see that over the last couple of years the various waterworks have been heightened by several meters to account for higher seas. This is a direct response to climate change, the fact that a good part of the country is below sea level definitely adds to the sense of urgency felt to do something about this but we still have 1953 well present in our collective memory to warn us against being complacent.

I always explain NL to visitors as a machine rather than a country. The moment you stop the machine or stop maintaining it the sea will begin to reclaim it.

Climate does matter here!

We are expecting a lot more heavy rain fall and rising rivers. That's also why we spend billions on inland water management. In our area they are even discussing "garden pavement taxes".

So I don't agree with you that there is no relation to our believes about climate change.

Sorry could you explain what a "garden pavement tax" is? It sounds interesting but googling gave nothing.

Not European but I'll take a guess. Hope this helps:

In the UK (and maybe elsewhere in Europe) a "garden" is what people in the US would call a "yard"; an open space near a residence. Often, but not necessarily covered in grass or plants.

"Garden paving" would mean covering it with something impervious to rain, such as concrete or asphalt.

So a "garden pavement tax" would be a penalty for people who choose to cover up soil with an rain-blocking material, to encourage them to use an alternative which allows the ground to soak up the rain.

As an example, in my town there is a public park in a flood plain, its driveways are made with "permeable pavers"[1] which are basically thick brick tiles with holes in them. They allow the rain to go through to the ground instead of building up and flooding the parking lot.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=permeable+paver&iax=1&ia=images

We have similar drainage fees here in Houston, based on the amount of impervious ground cover on the property. We've had a lot of flash flooding in the past 20 years because of the growth of neighborhoods and commercial properties with large parking lots on what used to be prairies on the perimeter of town. New commercial construction typically has to have catchment basins, permeable concrete, or other runoff mitigation strategies. There is, however, a lot of legacy properties which don't handle their runoff, and an outdated storm sewer system, so we still have problems.

Because of urbanization, the paving of gardens, the water does not sink into the ground over large areas. The sewage systems are having difficulty coping with this. Because of this they're thinking about taxing the paving of gardens.

There's a municipality planning to do this starting January 2018.

https://www.gemeente.nu/ruimte-milieu/minder-groen-tuin-bete...

Tangential, but:

I'm wondering what the ratio of tiled-over private gardens is to tiled-over public spaces (sidewalks, streets, etc.) which are omnipresent in the NL. I'd guess that the poor drainage relating to the public spaces is much greater than the poor drainage due to private tiled gardens.

I don't know about the Netherlands specifically, but in general the amount of land area devoted to public spaces is very small, albeit intensely developed, compared to residential land, which is vast and less intensely developed.

I think residences in the US and residences in Europe are quite different, and especially the Netherlands are quite densely populated. I would say that the area that's used in the US to have a driveway would work quite well in the Netherlands to have a big garden (yard).

Yeah it is quite different in the NL. Private space is much more limited compared to public space. Cities are dense, peoples' private gardens are small if they exist at all, public spaces are abundant. This isn't the land of sprawling residential space.

Sure, but streets need to be paved. Backyards not so much.

I think pasta is talking about this:

https://radar.avrotros.nl/nieuws/detail/belastingvoordeel-vo...

Translated:

People who replace their garden tiles with grass, have to get a tax premium.

That's what Lambert Verheijen of the water board "Aa and Maas" is pleading for. This was reported thursday by BNR. Because there is too much paving, the water doesn't sink into the ground well enough and the risk on flooding increases. Verheijen got inspiration in Germany, where a comparable premium is already in place.

Sounds like a disincentive for paving with impenetrable ground cover. Rainfall is not absorbed when the ground is paved. Instead, it collects and increases flash flood risk. To compensate for this, the rainfall collection and pumping infrastructure must be more robust. Perhaps this tax will be spent on such improvements?

Here's an English article.

http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/07/brabant-villag...

The more you seal off your land with buildings, or pavement, or even patio tiles, the more the rain will wash off your land and flood people who live downhill from you. So the Dutch pay closer attention to the issue than other nations.

Don't forget the sewers.

Current investments in the river and coastline protection ("Ruimte voor de Rivier" and "Zwakke Schakels") are done not only to protect for the current conditions, but also for the anticipated climate change.

As an example, the second large expansion for the port of Rotterdam, Maasvlakte2, is at 6m above sea level. The previous one is at 5m. That added one meter has cost a few hundred million euro's extra, but money well spent in my opinion. The foundation of the Maasland Barrier is designed for a storm surge of 6m above mean sea level, even though the gate is currently at 5m above. Thats why it can easily be upgraded.

So even though not much is changing in the general publics perspective, for large infrastructure that takes 10 years to prepare and design, and is built to work for 50-100 years, taking into account (expected) climate change has been a necessity for many decades now.

On another note, here is a nice point cloud visualization of the entire country: http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/

Interesting visualization, but I don't understand it.

I went to Ede, Gelderland (where I live), and while the city itself is mostly blue, the Hoge Veluwe just NE of the city is suddenly yellow (or is it green? I'm color blind), indicating that it's ~45m above sea level. That can't be right, the Hoge Veluwe is on the same level as Ede. What am I misreading?

Edit: I think I understand what's happening: the land immediately east and north of Ede is forest, so I guess the increased elevation in the point cloud is trees.

No, the Hoge Veluwe actually is that far above sea level.

http://elevationmap.net/hoge-veluwe-national-park-netherland...

Definitely not the tree tops. That's also why it is called 'Hoge Veluwe' to begin with. (Hoge being Dutch for 'high').

The highest point is 110 m above sea level.

That's funny, I also went to Ede on the map (I have family that lives there.) The Hoge Veluwe is actually a mix of yellow and green, but the actual trees are yellow.

If you put the quality on Ultra the trees are suddenly visible as trees.

Also, looking at the scale: Ede is around 20-25m above sea level, the ground of the trees is around 30m above sea level, and the trees are around 45m above sea level. So the trees are around 10-15 meters tall, fairly consistently.

you can zoom in to individual tree level. I just did, and can confirm this data includes trees. Also make sure to adjust the colormap min and max to your area of interest. This dataset is the official height measurement of the Netherlands (of a few years ago), made with LIDAR. So it should be accurate to within a few cm.

And about half of the country is less than 1m above sea level. The 1953 storm created a surge of 5.6m above mean sea level, about 3.6 above highest tide. Delta Works protects only to about 4m above highest tide. Katrina created a storm surge of up to 8.5m. Luckily tropical hurricanes don't get to the North Sea. Yet.

Well, you do have a barrier island named Great Britain to protect against cyclone surges.

Yes, but the channel being funnel shaped actually causes the water to be substantially higher at times than it would have been otherwise.

>It's a good read but... I don't see the whole point about "From a Dutch mind-set, climate change is not a hypothetical or a drag on the economy, " is a bit weird. Climate doesn't matter here. 1/3rd of the country is already under sea level TODAY. The billions we spend on engineering and developing water defense structures have no relation to our believes about climate change. We are ALREADY beneath sea level!

It's quite simple.

The argument is not that the Dutch believe more on climate change because they have already dealt with it in the past.

Rather it is that for the Dutch the climate change is not a hypothetical, but a very real danger, being as they are already under sea level, that they are more inclined to believe in it and see precautions taken against it as necessary and not as a "drag on the economy".

I think he means the Dutch mindset is more: We don't care whether climate change is happening or not* . We are already below sea level and have been building solutions for our situation for decades. We are not "living" climate change already, we are living in a country below sea level.

*We (I am also Dutch) might care about climate change, but that is independent of this infrastructure we already need anyway. Why is this article talking about what we think about climate change only to go into the infrastructure we need regardless of climate change. Article is great but the title is way too clickbait, the content of this article are unrelated of what the Dutch think about climate change..

>Why is this article talking about what we think about climate change only to go into the infrastructure we need regardless of climate change.

Because the infrastructure you "need regardless of climate change" is needed because of reasons that make your country much more sensitive to ocean levels rising from climate change.

As thus, the (not related to climate change) need for such infrastructure that you had, makes climate change all the more real and dangerous for you than for someone in Montana.

It's like a driver with unstable breaking mechanism in their car (due to it having sustained some previous damage) is much more sensitive to the alert of a snow storm coming.

Not because it was some prior snow storm that caused their issue, but because their issue makes it much more dangerous to drive on a snowy road.

Yep, thing that's often overlooked is that the Waddenzee is pretty much a lost cause though, with all the one-of-a-kind flora and fauna that lives there. If the sea rises a couple more centimeters the area will no longer be dry during ebb tide. Go "Wadlopen" while you still can!

On the one hand it's a shame to lose the interesting fauna, on the other hand, the area has been in constant flux over the ages. On December 14th, 1287 the entire area changed in a single day, for example [0]. So there is no reason to expect the current layout to be permanent. Perhaps what we will get next is pretty too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucia%27s_flood

Whenever flood control in The Netherlands is discussed, it's worth looking at this detailed elevation map:

http://www.floodmap.net/Elevation/CountryElevationMap/?ct=NL

The elevation profile of the entire country is one where the coast is much higher than sealevel, and then gradually slopes downwards to bits of the interior that are entirely landlocked, but are say 1 meter below sealevel. In other words we have pockets of land that are below sealevel, but they're surrounded by and protected by land that's not.

The facts on the ground are very different from claims being made by a sibling comment that "we are ALREADY beneath sea level!". This is why the NYT article is talking about "reservoirs for when the seas and rivers spill over" and "to let water in, where possible". Managing the water is largely about protecting these pockets that are below sealevel.

Actually looking at this map, I'm still seeing significant flooding without anything holding water back. When I read your comment I assumed you somehow provided evidence that worrying about the water/coast is nonsensical, reading the map I see the opposite.

Worrying about the water & coast is a very real concern in The Netherlands. I didn't mean to give the opposite impression.

The intent of my comment is to explain that the mental image many have of The Netherlands (even some natives are guilty of this) that it's all effectively under sealevel held up by some above-sealevel walls facing the ocean is false.

Most big population centers are above sealevel, those that aren't are usually "landlocked" below-sealevel areas, i.e. surrounded by land that's not below sealevel.

Flooding's still a major concern, but it's as much about ensuring that these landlocked areas don't turn into big puddles whenever it rains as it is about holding storm surges from the ocean back.

This is why the top comment in this thread stating that "we are ALREADY beneath sea level!" is BS. The nominal state of The Netherlands is not to be under sea level, but just barely above it.

This means that it's vulnerable to heavy rains, storm surges etc. But it also means that it's no more prepared than most other countries if the ocean were to rapidly rise and start overflowing & eroding the above-sealevel costal areas that protect the under-sealevel inland areas from being permanently flooded.

One thing I'm thinking about is about much is how money the Dutch (and their southern neighbors, the Belgians) are going to make once the rise in sea levels will have a direct impact on wealthy regions.

In the world top 5 of dredging firms 4 are either Dutch or Belgian firms. And once prime real estate, in for example Florida or the Hamptons, is in direct danger large amounts of money will change hands to reinforce the coastline. And those top 5 dredging firms have all the engineering expertise needed.

Moving extremely large amounts of rock & sand like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Jumeirah and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Suez_Canal are just warmup exercises for the amount of work that needs to be done in the next 50 years.

The Netherlands has had to deal with flooding for many hundreds of years[1]; it's been a problem long before the industrial revolution that so many point to as a primary trigger of AGW, so acting like this is a matter of climate change is just politically-motivated BS, to be honest.

The thing we should learn from this is the fact that whether or not you subscribe to AGW, the solutions are found in technologies that protect us from the harsh effects of climate (however they may be caused) rather than naive attempts to proactively change the course of the climate itself.

Think about it: even the strongest proponents of AGW seem to agree that at this point, there's very little we can actually do in terms of suppressing or reversing the trends (people argue that any improvement or slowing is worthwhile, but that completely ignores economic principles like the law of diminishing [marginal] returns and opportunity cost).

The truth is, we have fewer climate-related deaths per year now than ever before. Why is that? It's not a result of cutting down carbon emissions, that's for sure. Instead, we are simply more adept at living safely in a variety of climate conditions thanks to technology and industrialization. Developing countries have seen the greatest improvements as a result of technology, but we all benefit.

Can we count on people to dramatically change their lifestyles in response to economically-inferior proposals based on politicized science? Absolutely not (how has that track record been globally?). What kinds of incentives can we rely on for changing people's behavior? Answer: clear economic interests[2]. If and when it makes economic sense to deal with climate-related challenges, the market will incentivize the most practical solutions via innovation. The Dutch have proven that point (and not just recently).

If you don't believe we need technology to keep us safe from the climate, I encourage you to pick a random spot on earth and try living there on your own without any form of modern technology or any of the products of industrialization. Your struggle - and increased risk of death - would have been the same (at least in scale) at any point in the earth's history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands#Floods

[2] Referring to natural market-based incentives rather than artificial government-imposed incentives.

This headline is misleading. The Dutch don't have solutions, they have workarounds.

separate from the content, can we all take a moment to appreciate the NYT visuals? Definitely a pro to non-paper journalism is the ability to use complex graphics. Not saying this is their best work but its subtlety great.

bunch of nonsense. people dont cause climate change and they can certainly not stop it. This means, that you can either try to live under sea level like a stuborn fool, or relocate to a safer place once the danger increases too much. Building higher walls will just end up with higher and higher walls... just piling up shit on shit. a solution to a problem is something that makes it go away, not hide it behind a wall, wtf.

On another note, all this awsome dutch flood control, totally destroyed the environment here for a lot of bird types (migratory ones mostly) and a lot of other animals, so its destroying nature by combating it, like ignorant people have been doing for centuries now. lets combat nature, good fucking idea. >.> work with nature ffs, cause you are nature.

tl;dr: 1) a work around is not a solution 2) dont fight what you care about... take care of it and respect it!

I wonder when the rise will begin to affect ocean-side property prices?

Actually it won't, as there is relatively little ocean-side property to affect in the first place. With the exceptions of a few coastal towns like Scheveningen, property development is illegal along the coast as it would hinder future coastal protection. Consequently private ownership of coastal area is also unheard of here. Because there are no buildings on them, the most cost effective way of improving our coastal defences is relatively easy and low-tech: just add more sand to the dunes and beaches.

And as a side-benefit, we have a beautiful coastline for taking walks or bike rides.

Michaël Dudok de Witt's Father and Daughter[0] shows this beautifully (and, incidentally, depicts a polder being reclaimed from the sea over the years)

[0] https://vimeo.com/48076471

I think their value will increase at first as they will be closer to the water, right before plunging, no pun intended.

Prevention costs far less than remediation. But the future business opportunities; can no longer sell you big cars, big homes, large tracts of land, but we can sell you clean air, clean water, and keeping the water out of your domicile. Here's your air filtration/water desal/water pumping bill, so go to your job.

their solution only makes the sea levels higher for everyone else.

how about seasteading instead (sic)?

Anyone know how much water is 1cm sea rise? Mars needs water and Musk is interested in footing the bill, even if a mass driver is probably more apt to the issue than rockets.

I'd like to start a "Don't bring water out of our gravity well" association.

yes we probably shouldn't remove our own water, we could take only up to the amount the earth has gained over the last 1m years (let's say) through meteor showers, but I think that would be low.

we could also start living in pods and tunnels on earth separate from the other animals, then we wouldn't need as much water and could spare some for when we do the same thing on mars.

The surface of the earth is 510,082,000 sq. km. The oceans cover ~70.9% of that, so 510082000 * 0.709 * 0.00001 = 3616.48138 cubic km.?

That's what I got.

And then 1 cubic km of water is ~1 trillion kg.

So rockets aren't going to work. Maybe instead of a space elevator, we need a space fountain. Pump water up until centrifugal force takes over.

I bet it's going to be spectacular.

That won't work. You'll need to accelerate each individual molecule of water to orbital velocity or you'll just be making a lot of rain. Water molecules are not connected tension wise the same way a space elevators' tether is. Even ice has a tensile strength that is way too low so the fact that it is going to be below zero still won't help (might turn your rain into hail or snow though).

My comment was in jest, but if you want to take it seriously, it's not the tensile strength of water that matters, but that of the tube it's being pumped through. That would need to be the magically stronger than nanotubes material that we also need for a space elevator.

If you make the tube narrow enough, you might even take advantage of capillary action in some way.

Ah, I imagined you were going to run a pipe up the side of a mountain and shoot it out at very high velocity. (Never mind that most of it would flash to steam instantly on escaping the nozzle, and that the whole thing would have to be ridiculously strong.) Fun project though!

Instead of using the Hyperloop for transportation, let's point it at the sky and fire water from it.

Call it the Hyperloo. Say "have one on me!" with each flush.

What happens to water in vacuum?

boils than when the heat energy is lost collapse into comets, assuming no gravity wells near

That already exists but with a different meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain

Interesting shape...

It would be cheaper to build giant fridges to freeze the excess water and store it in the north.

It would be even more cheaper not to let the ice melt, which still is in the north.

Wind and Solar and others are now mature technologies which are price-competetive. The Model 3 shows, electrical cars are a thing. We have all the technology to slow down and eventually reverse climate change. In the great scheme of things it is not even very expensive, we just have to put all these technologies to use.

The waste heat from throwing the oceans into space would have to be dealt with.

Could we store it in a giant container instead?

That somewhat reminded me of XKCD's https://what-if.xkcd.com/53 and https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/ :)

Long Live the New Netherlands

Be prepared: we will impose our reasonable policies on you!

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