Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm no denier, but it aggravates me when someone tries to force a connection to global warming/climate change.
[1]: https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/projection...
I think you mixed up the units, the article says
> 0.2 meters to 2.0 meters (0.66 to 6.6 feet)
Until they do in any sort of reasonable way, all such predictions are completely bogus and do not do give those promulgating such predictions any veracity.
The politically correct dogma of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) has given rise to a situation where those who believe in climate change and who believe that it is mostly natural are classified as climate change deniers by ACC dogmatists and are classified by climate change deniers as climate change freaks.
Climate change is inevitable. However, we do not know what we can mitigate and what we have to endure. We need honest research and not this current politically correct based research being undertaken today.
It is an unfortunate reality that greed is a cause of many human and social related problems and that any natural climate change the planet is undergoing only enhances those human social problems.
If we continue on the politically correct bender of trying to lower CO2 levels without understanding the long term consequences, we are going to kill ourselves. Within very specific limits there is a broad range of CO2 levels (much higher than current levels) that would be highly beneficial to the planet and to us. This is based on evidence released in the last couple of years.
There is much to recommend not polluting our planet, but focussing of the furphy that is CO2 mitigation is wrong in oh so many ways.
We need to look at a holistic methodology to agriculture and manufacturing to ensure that these areas can be highly productive without the current attendant problems. There is more than enough capacity to feed and clothe the human population of this fair planet, but as people are, on the whole, greedy and self-serving, this is not going to happen any time soon.
That amount of energy on the lower bounds would have caused all life to become extinct before we would see the oceans rise by any significant amount.
Many years ago, I gave these calculations to a senior climate scientist and he noted at the time that the results were interesting and he would get back to me after he had analysed those figures. That was what 15 or more years ago and I have never heard anything back since those discussions.
I have provided such figures in detail to various climate scientists asking for their analysis and basically no response. Not even to the extent of saying that the calculations were flawed.
So when ever any fool climate scientist or their supporters promulgate any scenario that says we should expect any significant ocean level rises inside of 100 years (significant being anything above 0.5 metre - especially those who promulgate 1 to 10 metres) due to human activity then the onus is on them to demonstrate where the energy processes are occurring. They have not done so to date and based on their dogma, I suspect that they cannot.
The problem with all of this politically correct dogma is that they (the climate scientists en bulk) are not doing any science.
I have said it in the past - there are no stupid questions. It seems to be today that funding is the driver to follow the crowd and to not do actual science.
We need to know what is happening in our climate. This is irrespective of any ideological standpoint you may hold. If you challenge the anthropogenic climate change (ACC) dogma then you are anathema. Even if you believe in climate change, if you do not follow the party line then you are an infidel that needs to be destroyed. Jihad not only occurs in extreme Islam but is alive and well in Climate Science as well.
This whole matter is simple enough for a fifth grader to solve, let alone an adult who should be able to do this in 20 minutes (including looking up the information).
Scepticism has its place and we need a few more sceptics when it comes to the lack of rigour that is being used by those who promulgate such scenarios. If you want to follow a fool where he leads without at least a cursory look at the base of what they are saying then you are free to do so. When someone says that you need to look at what they are saying, you don't need to listen, you can just follow blindly.
end rant.
First it was 5 minutes. Now it's 20 minutes. Why do you keep missing your own deadlines and changing the goalposts more often than you post any citations to scientific evidence or convincing mathematical proofs like you claim to have and everyone keeps asking you for? You keep throwing out numbers and mentioning "studies done" but never name your sources or link to any of them. Why not? You've been admittedly ranting for a lot longer than you said it would take to actually do the math, and you obviously have enough time on your hands, so get started.
You keep saying how quick and easy it would be for an adult to prove it, yet you never do that yourself. Am I correct to conclude that you're not actually an adult?
But let's say, that 20 minutes if you look up the information yourself and you are slow about it, 5 minutes if given the starting point. Of course if you cannot use a calculation device other than pencil/pen and paper (or blackboard and chalk) then it might take you longer.
I have the calculations sitting in spreadsheet on my machine and I have emails to various people with those calculations, but as you are unable to spend 5 minutes doing, I can't expect you to spend 5 minutes reading.
earth surface area: 510072000 sq km
ocean surface area: 361132000 sq km
latent heat of melting (ice to water): 334 kJ/kg
From these you can calculate the amount (volume) of land based ice required for whatever ocean level rise you need and the amount of energy required to melt said ice.
Note that since only a portion of energy will enter ice, the total energy that would be needed to get the required energy transfer in the ice would be approximately 20 times required energy. This is based on studies done that indicate that it is about 5% of energy absorbed by the planetary system that transfers into the ice portion of the planet.
Since the planet is an oblate sphere with a non-uniform land distribution and we have a large moon orbiting the planet, any prediction of what we would expect to see as an ocean level rise will depend critically on where on the planet you are stationed as well as the effects of tides.
In addition, any rises of the magnitudes predicted will require more ice to be melted not less as there will be inundation effects that will, in effect, increase the amount of surface area attributed to the oceans.
Hence, all calculations are a minimum not a maximum. If you want to seriously model tidal and inundation effects, then the amount of energy will greater and hence more unexplained by these very climate scientists.
If they cannot give an explanation of the energy requirements for a minimum then they will most certainly be unable to explain for any situation requiring tidal and inundation effects to be accounted for.
So mean ocean level is irrelevant.
And your theory on tidal effects of the moon falls flat because mean sea level takes all those factors into consideration! How? The name itself suggests that it's a "mean" over all variations in the sea levels due to tidal or inundation effects. Unless the gravitational pull of the moon dramatically increased or the moon got closer to the Earth your theory makes some sense. But the effects are pretty uniform. So mean sea level is the only meaningful statistic here. It's real and measurable. Everything else is bogus claims by climate change deniers!
Obviously this breaks down if you want a more accurate figure, but in that case you also have to account for water shrinking with increasing temperature between 0 °C and 4 °C and so on.
In any case, melting a bunch of ice is a much more energy-efficient way of increasing the volume of liquid water than heating already molten water. The energy required for melting ice is roughly the same as that for heating the water to 80 °C, and 80 °C is not twice as voluminous as 0 °C water.
from sympy.physics.units import *
import sympy
pi = float(sympy.pi)
earth_surface_area = 510072000 * kilometer**2
ocean_surface_area = 361132000 * kilometer**2
latent_heat_of_melting = 334 *(kilo*joule)/kilogram
volume_for_1_meter_rise = (1*meter) * ocean_surface_area
# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_(data_page)
density_of_water_at_0_deg_celsius = 0.9998395 * gram / centimeter**3
mass_of_ice = density_of_water_at_0_deg_celsius * volume_for_1_meter_rise
energy_for_melting = latent_heat_of_melting*mass_of_ice
convert_to(energy_for_melting, joule) # 1.20598728796876e+23*joule
# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Total_solar_irradiance_(TSI)_and_spectral_solar_irradiance_(SSI)_upon_Earth
solar_irradiance = 1.361 * (kilo*watt)/(meter**2)
# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
earth_radius = 6371 * kilometer
earth_cross_section = pi * earth_radius**2
total_solar_irradiance = solar_irradiance * earth_cross_section
time_for_melting = energy_for_melting / total_solar_irradiance
convert_to(time_for_melting, years) # 0.0220203816289806*tropical_year
So no, I won’t be doing any simple calculations.
“Do the math yourself. QED.”
How about instead of throwing the term "politically correct" around three times in the same post, you show us something "mathematically correct"?
"Politically Correct" describes the Trump Administration's politically motivated denial of science. "Scientifically Correct" describes the vast body of consistent peer reviewed evidence that you and the Trump Administration are denying, on which an overwhelming majority of scientists agree.
The burden of proof and obligation to take at least five minutes citing evidence and crunching the numbers lies in your court, since you're the one calling everyone a liar then changing the goalposts. So start responding to people's questions and stop stonewalling and deflecting.
The fact that you agree with Donald Trump and parrot his blustering insincere persuasion techniques instead of citing scientific evidence should be a clue that you're wrong.
What else do you agree with him on? Do you also agree with Donald Trump that teaching evolution and allowing gay marriage is "political correctness", too? And what about all those women who accused him and Roy Moore of sexual assault, is each and every one of them a liar too, just like all of those scientists?
IT is obvious that you are thinking that when someone supplies you with the starting point and then encourages you to take the next step that you consider that they are unable to do so themselves.
"Politically correct" is no less a label to be applied to any of the political arena's (such as the Trump administration or the failed attempt by the Clinton Team) than it is to be applied to many areas in Science, Medicine and other supposedly logical disciplines. When dogma takes over and fights against systematic investigation of a subject then "political correctness" is on the march.
If you fail to see this happening, mayhaps, you should do a systematic study of history with regards to science and technology. People are people and all of us have biases. It takes work to not allow those biases to get in the road of systematic investigation.
If the Emperor's New Clothes are unseen then one has the opportunity to say such. In this particular case, the Emperor's New Clothes are the 1 to 10 metre ocean level rise scenarios.
You have the opportunity to call me any thing you like. I don't agree with Mr Trump. The US had a choice between two disagreeable teams, Trump who is an Isolationist and Clinton who is a Globalist. Neither was going to be useful to the future of the US.
The "burden of proof" lies with the anthropogenic climate change (ACC) community. Answering simple questions like "where the energy processes are" in a forthright manner instead of the essentially sensationalist manner that has been their habit for decades, would go a long way to be credible.
If someone says to you that it is storming outside, do you just believe them or do you actually look outside and do your own investigation? I have given you the base information and if you cannot be proactive enough to spend five minutes doing your calculations then what expectation should I have of you actually spending five minutes looking at any detailed figures I give you?
Since you bring up evolution, no I don't believe in the evolutionary theory (or theories) being promulgated. My reason is because I spent a lot of time reading the experimental evidence that was done and noting that the conclusions derived by those experimenters was different to the evidence that they found. Since, at that time, I was a believer in evolution, this made no sense to me and challenged me to look at it further. My considered opinion is that evolution as promulgated is dogma and has no basis in reality. I consider the various theories of evolution and the attendant alternatives in intelligent design to be philosophical and religious in nature and not science.
It is unfortunate that all sorts of people engage in the sexual harassment and sexual domination of others. This is inappropriate at any time, no matter whether it is a man doing it to a woman or to another man or a woman doing it to a man or another woman. The interesting thing is that some of those victims will be liars and others will be deeply hurt victims. The question is determining the truth of the matter.
However, that is a social matter that is not relevant to the discussion of whether or not climate science is full of dogma. Bringing up such is simply saying that you are so caught up in your dogma that you cannot afford to listen and discuss with someone else an idea that is opposed to your world view and that you are willing to attack the man instead of the statement.
I have robust discussions with various people and those of us who partake are expected to defend our stand points, with the expectation that those disagreeing will also actively contribute.
The emperor is naked and it is time for people to stand and say so.
The figures given where? What's this energy equation or calculation you talk about as if it's common knowledge?
You sure about that? https://xkcd.com/1732/
1) No duh. Who was that statement for? Nobody is debating that GW is terrible. But we're not talking about global warming.
2) You're doing exactly what he's talking about. Shoehorning in global warming where it's not needed.
You can discuss murder rates of a single city without shoehorning in murder rates of the "highest murder rate city in the world" every time.
You can discuss diseases without having to shoehorn in that "cancer is the worst disease" into every conversation.
The only connection to global warming in this case... is water. "Well, Atlantic City is experiencing low tourism rates." "THAT WON'T MATTER WHEN GLOBAL WARMING WASHES IT INTO THE OCEAN!" (etc)
That said, while a spurious connection need not be drawn I. The article, it is relevant to compare and Co Trasylol the rate of change with global sea level rise (while pointibg out the distinction). Similarly to if we were talking about the murder capital of the world it would be relevant to compare and contrast to worldwide averages, and possibly less unique causes for that city.
Isn't that the very argument though, that the article wasn't just making reference to global warming endangering Jakarta, but was leading the article with saying Jakarta was primarily in trouble because of global warming, when the biggest immediate issue is sinking due to use of groundwater?
After the talk about global warming in the first couple of paragraphs, it says this:
But global warming turned out not to be the only culprit behind the historic floods that overran Rasdiono’s bodega and much of the rest of Jakarta in 2007. The problem, it turned out, was that the city itself is sinking.
In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise — so surreally fast that rivers sometimes flow upstream, ordinary rains regularly swamp neighborhoods and buildings slowly disappear underground, swallowed by the earth. The main cause: Jakartans are digging illegal wells, drip by drip draining the underground aquifers on which the city rests — like deflating a giant cushion underneath it. About 40 percent of Jakarta now lies below sea level.
Cities have to adapt to changing sea/river locations. They have throughout history. The only reason New Orleans is still a river port city is because the Army Corps of Engineers has kept the river from naturally diverting to another channel.
But the rising sea level is obviously occuring at the same time as the sinking ground which makes the sitution worse.
>In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise
> "...And it has to deal with mounting threats from climate change."
Paragraphs 4,5,6:
One local climate researcher, Irvan Pulungan, an adviser to the city’s governor, fears that temperatures may rise several degrees Fahrenheit, and the sea level as much as three feet in the region, over the coming century.
That, alone, spells potential disaster for this teeming metropolis.
But global warming turned out not to be the only culprit behind the historic floods that overran Rasdiono’s bodega and much of the rest of Jakarta in 2007. The problem, it turned out, was that the city itself is sinking.
A fear of a 3ft rise over 100 years, and global warming, is related to Jakarta's current problems in the manner that a scent candle burning in your house is "not the only culprit" in the worlds CO2 problems.
If you feel like its worth mentioning household candles are a problem, when having serious discussions on the causes of global warming/climate change, then I guess the reporter's inclusion of it makes sense.
edit: still wish HN had a preview button.
Say for example there is a terrible disease outbreak in your community. The first people that die will probably be people that have weakened health because of health problems other than the particular outbreak. But that does not mean that the disease does not exist and the ones that survive should not be trying to address it.
Quite sad.. Such a beautiful, diverse country and nice people.
[1] https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/idn/#Exports
Of course in a country of almost 300 million people there is huge bias in my observation.
What countries don't have nice people you run into on the street? Who would be rude or surly to foreign visitors? I can think of several large western cities with stereotypes along these lines.
But I take your point. It even seems a little patronising.
depends on what time period you lived there, and what ethnicity/religion you belong to.
The multiple racially motivated riots around the turn of century are still fresh in many people's memory.
They are not very organised with their city planning and development though - nearby low lying Singapore has reclaimed loads of land at the same time Jakarta has been sinking. Nyt article on that one https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/magazine/how-singapore-is...
Not realistic with one of the worst education systems on the planet [1], non-existing manufacturing sector, human-made environmental disasters[2] and export based mostly on resources mining which is underinvested due to hostility [3][4] to foreign capital.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-Indonesia.pdf
[2] https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/making-indonesian-rivers-gre...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-14/whatever-...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/former-op...
Sea level rise is global, but it seems wherever we can find sinking cities we get stories about climate change and its relation to rising sea levels.
Climate change is going to hurt the poorer countries the most.
Also, the problem here mostly seems to be not money, but government. As the article states “Nobody here believes in the greater good […] There is no trust”. Short-term, how much more expensive would it be to get clean water from the rivers flowing into Jakarta, instead of from those illegal wells?
Less cheap to transport (e.g. bricks) or less durable (e.g. fruit) goods move less easily, and labor moves least easily.
Consequently, it is way cheaper in poorer countries to have personnel, to pay people for repairing stuff, etc.
(I think I misread your comment and others might too, so I'm leaving this here)
But if your point is that Indonesia is not to be overlooked, then that is quite true.
>"Sadly Indonesia doesn't have the near limitless resources of its old colonial owner that keeps Amsterdam/Holland from sinking"
When in fact fact it does have the resources to build a Delta Works-like system similar to the Netherlands.
California is a much more arid region with dry/wet years. Jakarta is tropical, gets roughly 3x the rainfall as San Francisco and has much more consistent/predictable weather, though with climate change, the storms they're seeing are becoming more intense. I'm not sure you can compare the two because California is legitimately a situation of using more water each year than we get in rainfall. In Jakarta, is likely funneling rainfall into the ocean and then draining the aquifers. And while both situations are cases of taking out more water than is being put in, the root causes are very different.
Is being poor really more desirable for anything? Perhaps instead of worrying about global warming, we should solve poverty, then they won't be affected so badly.
The fact that the Netherlands was a former colonial power doesn't give them any "colony juice" that they can squeeze onto the ground and dams rise up like apple trees. They still have to design and build the thing given their smarts and labor, and Indonesia has to design the thing given their smarts and labor. The only difference is in the pool of available talent and the organizational abilities of the government to marshall that talent. Given Indonesia's much larger population and greater abundance of natural resources, it's a joke to suggest that it has no resources to build a dam whereas a tiny nation with fewer resources is able to do it. Indonesia's problem is that they are more corrupt and disorganized, and can't marshall their resources effectively.
Otherwise just Rand-ian codswallop.
1) that relative advantage doesn't correspond to an absolute advantage that can be compared across nations. A nation with ten times the market cap of another nation doesn't have 10 times the real resources. It may just have a more developed stock market, or a more financialized economy, or a lower discount rate, or more optimism for future earnings.
2) Neither does market cap mean anything for the nation as a whole. If I have 10 times the wealth of you, I can buy 10 times as many real resources as you can, but together we can still buy only all the real resources available -- when market cap goes up, that doesn't mean more labor is available to purchase, or the nation has more skills or more equipment. It could just mean that there is more optimism about future profits, or a lower discount rate. Market cap doesn't measure the real resources of a nation anyway -- it's a measure of the discounted flow of earnings, but not of the gross value add of the economy. For example, if labor costs go up, profits fall and market cap shrinks. But the real resources do not change -- the labor supply does not shrink. Just the relative price of labor and capital changes. These relative prices can fix the market cap at any point between zero and infinity (exclusive). All by tweaking the risk free borrowing rate, risk premium, and relative prices of labor and capital. You get zero information about the total size of real resources by looking at market cap, all the information is about relative prices for a given set of real resources. The same is true for the total amount of paper claims in an economy -- they give no information on the size of real resources available. They are dominated by relative prices. The proof of this is exactly the fact that the Dutch had such huge market cap when their real resources were so small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
And that enabled big projects like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeslantkering
You can draw your own conclusions about what the Dutch think of people who don't believe in global warming, then lie about the Netherlands, then call reports with video evidence of their lies fake news, then deny they used the term fake news less than 60 seconds later. It's not consensus decision making if you can't even agree with your own words.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/us-ambassador-...
Historical background
Somewhat ironically, there is no consensus about the exact historical background of the polder model. In general there are three views on this subject.
One explanation points to the rebuilding of the Netherlands after World War II. Corporatism was an important feature of Christian Democratic, and particularly Catholic, political thought. During the postwar period, the Catholic, Protestant, Christian, social-democratic, and liberal parties decided to work together to reconstruct the Netherlands, as did unions and employers' organizations. Important institutions of the polder model, like the SER, were founded in this period. No single political party has ever had anything approaching an overall majority in parliament, so coalition government is inevitable. This makes parties extremely cautious, since today's enemy may be tomorrow's ally, all the more so in present times when the "death of ideology" has made it possible for almost all the parties to work together.
Another explanation points to the dependency of the Netherlands on the international economy. The Dutch cannot afford protectionism against the unpredictable tides of the international economy, because the Netherlands is not an autarkic economy. Therefore, to cushion against the international economy, they set up a tri-partite council which oversaw an extensive welfare state.
A third explanation refers to a unique aspect of the Netherlands, that it consists in large part of polders, land reclaimed from the sea, which requires constant pumping and maintenance of the dykes. So ever since the Middle Ages, when the process of land reclamation began, different societies living in the same polder have been forced to cooperate because without unanimous agreement on shared responsibility for maintenance of the dykes and pumping stations, the polders would have flooded and everyone would have suffered. Crucially, even when different cities in the same polder were at war, they still had to cooperate in this respect. This is thought to have taught the Dutch to set aside differences for a greater purpose.
Remember that time in western history that we learned of the benefits of washing hands for disease control? I have witnessed people in Jakarta regularly urinating into little drainage ditches just a few meters away from people who were washing their dishes. You could assume they do this because there are not better places to wash dishes (but if you've ever camped you know you can "clean" all the surface with dirt/sand and then use a small amount of less contaminated water to finish the job). You wouldn't assume the guy peeing had no other options, as there are plenty of corners of garages and sheds available. So that's one big problem.
From my admittedly limited experiences in Indonesia, I would characterize the people as positive, reasonably industrious, and friendly. When managed and directed, they can build massive structures. Jakarta has so many high rise buildings you would be shocked. But the parts that are not managed are kind of left unfinished or are poorly finished. Fittings in buildings are irregular or worse, and spaces just a hand's reach beyond one's property boundary are left full of trash or even excrement as if it didn't exist. This I cannot understand. Perhaps it's something to do with a lack of pride (which can be a positive attribute when compared to societies too full of pride, but which can also be detrimental at this low extreme).
Some other fascinating examples of strange (and collectively detrimental) behaviors... there was a stretch of major freeway that had a minimum occupancy requirement during rush hours. As I understood, you were not allowed to drive on that stretch at that time with just a single occupant. And during those times, there were (presumably poorer) people who would stand dangerously close to traffic, casually waiting for someone to stop and pick them up. They would be driven to the other end of the zone, paid a small tip, and then deposited back onto the road. Then they would somehow cross the road and ride back the other direction. Some women would do this with their small children in tow. This suggests the level of poverty and (potentially) the lack of opportunity for some people, but it also demonstrates how plans designed to improve situations can be hijacked for individual gain. And traffic was so horrendous that you really can't blame the city for trying that occupancy approach.
I was at a talk given by an engineer who was doing volunteer work to help communities be aware of floods as they were developing. It was fascinating - basically analyzing Twitter activity to determine very localized details of flooding. But during his time there, he observed layers of flood walls built that should have prevented many floods. He also observed that along these stone walls, locals had cut openings through them to facilitate easy foot passage. In case it's not clear from my description, they had cut openings in flood walls so it would be easier for them to walk. Predictably, during flash floods, the water would be a meter higher on one side and just POURING through the man-made openings here and there. Eventually it would equalize, leaving the entire area flooded. boggle
Finally, driving in the higher end shopping areas, it was not too uncommon to see $140,000 Mercedes AMG G wagons and the occasional Rolls Royce driving around. My driver explained that some of these people were government employees, and that it was well-known that government employees would receive extra payments and lavish gifts for providing beneficial opportunities to wealthy individuals or businesses. Fortunately that sort of thing doesn't happen in our developed countries.
There is no clean end to this wall of text.
I think a big problem is that since a lot of the institutions are at the national level with offices locally (very different from having institutions organized/with jurisdiction locally and having one or more overarching above/beside them), such that there's no "competition" over local governance which would naturally attract/repel people to regions over others based on how things are run. Which incidentally, seems in line with the pervasiveness of the corruption.
You just wont get the local office for the national police to care about people cutting holes in the flood walls, or pretty much anything unless you pay them.