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Comment by soVeryTired | Hacker News Reader

A metre of sea-level rise is painful for a rural cottage by the sea. But if you're in a city - particularly a wealthy city - it's something that can be engineered around.

An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.

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And how will these engineered workarounds be paid for ? It is known workarounds will cost trillions today, NYC alone could cost $1T+. And these workarounds should have been started 5 years ago when it became very clear we will never get off fossil fuels.

I fully expect no workarounds will be done just like Climate Change Mitigations. Getting off fossil fuels should have been seriously started 30 years ago, and maybe even 50 years ago. Instead the politicians have been adding hot air talking and fighting instead of doing real work.

We are now seeing this repeat with "engineered workarounds", no one wants to pay for it, so yes I call BS on the article.

All I can say is I feel real bad the past generations did nothing to really reverse CC, people being born now are looking at a very bleak future.

$1 trillion is one year of Manhattan's GDP. Painfully expensive? Absolutely, but it's absolutely affordable over the course of a few decades.

The sooner we start, the cheaper it will be, so we shouldn't put it off, but it's not going to kill everyone or even convince everyone to leave NYC in the foreseeable future.

Yes, but NYC is nor the only city that need climate change mitigations :)

Factor in all other cities, how will that get paid and by how ?

Or do we chose which cites to save ? Other cities, tough to be you.

besides the fact that 40% of the world's population lives near the coast - and that 2-3 feet of sea level rise is not a uniform "the tide used to be 8 feet, now it's 11 feet" - Entire islands in the pacific will disappear - How do you think global trade works? What do you think happens to ports? AMOC collapsing (a byproduct of sea level rise) will have profound effects on climate, despite this author claiming without any evidence whatsoever that "actually it isn't a big deal."

Ports get retrofitted, redesigned, and rebuilt. The AMOC collapsing is a serious thing, but I'm not saying climate change isn't real or isn't a threat. My original point is that three feet of sea level rise is manageable, if expensive. Simply that, nothing else.

If you draw the line at the year 2100, things are uncomfortable but maneagable. If your horizon is 2300 or 2500, you get a different story. But you would hope that in tha sort of time frame, we have time to adapt.

Anyone with a bit of common sense can understand that that "massively retrofitting cities in a way unseen in centuries due to climate risk" is just an off-the-charts level of reconditioning of society that I don't understand how that doesn't fall into "extremely alarming" levels of concern.

I didn't say it wasn't alarming, I said it wasn't civilization- or nation-ending. Unless you're a tiny island nation, in which case I'll happily retract what I'm saying.

There are degrees of awfulness between "the end of all mankind" and "nothing to see here", but it seems like there's a taboo on calling those shades of grey out when it comes to climate change.

So after many decades of wildly under estimating the rate of climate change, the same people in the same institutions, answering to the same money, have it sussed out? This simple fact that ALL global shipping happens at sea level, and ALL shipping infrastructue is designed and built to operate in a rarrow range, and that this whole edifice, minutly complicated, can be adjusted continiously along with the million miles of coastal roads and bridges. ?Londan just walled off, all of NYC's wharfs jacked up a bit, sure, sure, whats a few dozen cubic miles of equipment refit worth anyway, phffff

Canada, this year committed to spending $3.9 billion dollars to hopefully have just completed plans for a high-speed train line in six years [1]! The number of years and dollars to actually build the line are unknown at the moment. This is a project that has humongous potential economic upside.

Would Canada be able to build a seawall to protect Vancouver? I am not sure.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announces-high-spee...

Fun fact - sea level rose 120m since 20,000 years ago but people seem to have largely not noticed. If you don't have large buildings and planning laws you could just move your shack a few yards inland.

That's more than 10k years before the start of recorded history, so we definitely can't say that people didn't notice.

0.006 m/year, we can definitely work with that /s

It's 0.0046 m/year at the moment so more relaxed.

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