Climate change enters the chat...
Some buildings buy the coast (especially in port cities) and have steep rises anyway.
There is a huge threat of cultural loss - e.g. Venice.
But if you look in places like Florida, the ground conditions there are substantially more porous. If you try to keep the sea back there with a simple wall, it’ll just flow under the wall through the soil. You would have to dig all the way to bedrock and install some kind of impermeable barrier to prevent most of Florida from flooding due to sea level rise. Something that’s unbelievably cost prohibitive to do.
The Netherlands only exists below sea level because their ground conditions meant it was possible to pump out the country using technology available in the 1740s. If the ground conditions weren’t basically perfect for this kind of geo-engineering, the Netherlands simply wouldn’t exist as it does today.
You’re using an example that exists purely as a result of survivorship bias, as an argument that it’s practical to apply the same techniques or achieve the same outcomes anywhere else. Completely ignoring the fact that your example only exists because a unique set of geologic conditions made it possible, and those conditions are far from universal, and not in anyway correlated with places we humans would like to protect.
Of course they’re insurable at some premium. The question is whether there is any premium someone is willing to pay that can also cover the risk.
Floods, storms, droughts, fire? They appear to be getting worse.
More restrictive codes designed for better fireproofing buildings, for instance, can solve a number of problems in California in fire prone areas. Another thing that has a political solution is forest management. Lack of water can be solved by desalination, which becomes an energy problem rather than a water one. Very dry areas can benefit from solar panels because they reduce water loss from evaporation, thus reducing the pressure on water supplies.
It is expensive, but that's another problem.
What are you trying to say?
That said, there are literally hundreds of historic pre WGS84 ellipsoid|datum pairings, each with a somewhat different "survey map pole".
Historically geodectic poles have shifted as a function of datums.
The main point here, such as it is, was to poke at the infomation free aspect of "polar drift" as a comment .. which pole and what does that have to do with climate change? etc.
I'm not old enough to have seen Great Britain and relate isles pressed down by the weight of kilometres of ice though .. that'd be a great great great grand something that saw that.
Plate tectonics can result in some parts of the world moving at up 10cm a year, which over 10s to 100s of years can add up to something pretty significant. Funnily enough an OSM April Fools joke is a good place to learn more[1].
Talking of the UK. Ordinance survey still maintain their own master geodesics, and geographic references, which allows them to tie the OS grid (which what the land registry uses to locate property) back to WGS84, as both WGS84 and the UK slowly drift around due to various reasons (such as improved tech to refine the definition of WGS84, tectonic drift etc). You joke about the ice age and glaciers, but the UK is still “recovering” from all that ice, resulting in vertical movement of about 1m every 100 years. Which given how long property rights can last (Oxford University is almost 1000 years old), can actually turn into a material difference, and real land disputes, over time, if not properly corrected for.
Each of these adjustments may seem insignificant on their own, but they accumulate over time, and it gets complicated when these adjustments are forced to interact with humans, our somewhat fuzzy perception of reality, and general disregard for well defined coordinate systems which don’t align well with our “intuitive” understanding of the world.
None of this is any different to how we deal with issues that are thrown up by our increasing ability to measure time accurately. We track International Atomic Time (IAT), which is time as tracked by a set of atomic clocks, but then we apply various adjustments to get UTC, which is human time. Those adjustments exists purely to keep UTC aligned to what humans expect, because the earths orbit wobbles enough that the absolute time produced by IAT doesn’t match up perfectly with how we’ve historically measured time. All of this seems a little silly, but we now live in a world where everyday systems depend on measures accurate enough that all this minor drift becomes important.
Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...
Climate risks are greater and more immediate than either comets or poles shifting.