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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

I’m gonna guess that sea level rise will end up being one of the lesser problems introduced by climate change

I'm not so sure, ground water will turn salty and make large swaths of land unlivable and river mouths will change stream upwards so all dike infrastructure as it is now will be unusable.

This is already happening along the internal Eastern Shore exposed to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland were I live and it is documented in recent publications by those accredited in such topics. The low lying wet forests that have lived just above the salt line are now all dying from the rising salt water intrusion. I have one of those low lying forests right behind my property and in the last 10 years I have witnessed all the trees within this area die. As an avid walker of these shores near daily in the last 15 years I have also witnessed unprecedented erosion of the shoreline of at least two vertical feet thus extending the beaches however these are not those types of beaches.

As a collector of things lost in time, such as Native American artifacts of which I have found thousands immediately around me in the last 15 years, I can say that erosion does have its benefits. Just as we are now reading from those exploring glaciers finding previous human tools and more. The word "benefit" here is clearly subjective.

A very large fraction of humanity lives in zones that will end up being flooded, this is already happening in some parts of the world.

For instance, Vanatu:

https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/sites/default/f...

There is nuisance flooding, which is definitely up already in many parts of the world, and then there is the kind of flooding that essentially makes it impossible to live in certain places. My own country (NL) has been working since a bad flood in 1953 to raise the various flood protection systems to account for rarer events and the mechanisms put in place have already been triggered several times. Right now they're working on raising the whole protection level another meter (three feet), and if necessary they'll do more than that but there are some complicating factors. At some point the rivers won't empty any more and you end up with either reverse flow or internal flooding simply because that river water has nowhere to go to.

Do you know the populations of the world that will be displaces, and the amount of real esate that will be affected by this?

Sea rise is not just about flooding, but it affects sewers and infrastructure well before affecting properties.

You need to have extreme weather into account. Global sea rise is a slow process, it won't happen overnight, and even with an accelerated, but not catastrophic, melting of some of the fragile glaciers in Antarctica it will take years.

Extreme weather, in the other hand can affect big areas for extended amount of time, right now. In 2022 a third of Pakistan ended flooded, in 2024 there were big floods in parts of Europe and South America. Droughts, extended forest fires, tornadoes and similar has been changing in area patterns and strength in the last years. And things may get extremer in the coming years

Something like 2 billion people rely on glacier melt for their fresh water supply and these supplies will end abruptly before catastrophic sea level rise.

It will be a big one for people living near the coast. Basically all port infrastructure will need to be moved. Of course there a things like extreme heat waves, cold snaps, lack of rain or floods that will make a lot of land unlivable too. Lack of food will be another thing. But land being under water is not a lesser thing at all, as it makes the land unavailable.

As long as you don't live on an island or have coastal property...

I suspect most islanders and coastal property dwellers will be wrecked by volatile weather first

I think the point was more that even if you're on a coast a lot of other problems are more likely to impact you first: higher energy and more frequent hurricanes, insurance, costs, etc.

It's not as a-vs-b as this. Rising sea levels will increase the damage of those more frequent hurricanes long before one's house falls into the sea. And that increases insurance costs, and so on. The whole thing is a single system with a giant feedback loop.

It could be an a vs b thing if a effectively finishes the conversation before b gets going.

A lot of areas won’t make sense to insure due to storm risk well before they’re at risk from literal sea level risk.

Or say, a country bordering Bangladesh. Sea rise of 1 meter would inundate 10% of Bangladesh, a country of 170M in 150,000 sq miles. I suspect a refugee crisis in Bangladesh would end in genocide…

There's a sweet spot where i will eventually have coastal property.

Temporarily...

nerviosly coughs in Dutch

I wonder if the dutch have a plan to evacuate the whole country in say, a year time, in case walling the seas no longer feasible?

Not in an emergency scenario but more like "it doesn't make sense to stay here anymore".

Why would it no longer be feasible?

I mean, I can tell you why. It's not feasible if it costs too much. If it makes sense (i.e. the land is worth X and cost of a wall is some fraction of X that people can afford) people will do it.

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