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Comment by nekzn | Hacker News Reader

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You can take your tinfoil hat off. In common parlance, ”rising seas” is about relative sea level (RSL), which is what actually matters regardless of the mix of underlying causes. This is how it’s used by e.g NOAA https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/faq.html#q1

Do you think the average CNN reader has a good grasp on the distinction of relative and eustatic sea levels? I considered it a pretty nuanced topic, I’m surprised CNN treats it as table stakes.

Yes, but it’s not the topic of the article though. The article is about relocation. It describes the general problem and why New Orleans is particularly vulnerable. It would be nice to mention sinking land explicitly, but the idea that there’s some ”agenda” behind why they aren’t mentioning it is ridiculous.

Relative sea level (RSL): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_sea_level

NOLA land sinking is also (in large part) due to human activity in draining the wetlands and swamps, so the dry soil starts compressing.

Common thinking is that one of these things you can influence, and the other you cannot. You don’t often read articles that mention the sunrise or seasons because they just are, and everybody is already aware of their contribution.

Which can we actually influence?

Possibly the soil subsidence can be stopped or at least reduced.

In urban areas, there is no true solution for soil subsidence; it is not feasible to “reinflate” soils with water while urban life continues above.

It is beneficial, however, to restore a certain level of water content to the soil in the interest of slowing future sinkage. The key is to absorb or retain as much stormwater runoff as possible through porous surfaces, retention ponds, bioswales, rain gardens and widened and landscaped grade-level outfall canals.

https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/new-orleans-was-once-...

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/summary-for-policymakers/

Every 24hr news org has an agenda to maximize clicks/views from their ideologically captured herd.

This isn't a left/right thing either.

I generally agree with your point about it being simply emergent behavior.

But on the other hand, the timing (having seen over the past week or so several articles about the most disastrous IPCC model now having become implausible) makes me wonder if some individual actors are thinking they need something to shore up their disaster prophesying.

> I wonder why CNN have decided to highlight oceans rising and not mention land sinking anywhere in the entire article? Is it possible they have an agenda?

Because water incursion is a much more difficult thing to deal with, in terms of infrastructure and prevention.

Also, let me know when the rest of coastal land has the same sinking as N.O.

This doesn't make sense. Both land sinking and water rising contribute together to 11mm/y ground level going closer to sea level. And the sinking has >2x effect.

Isn't land sinking something to address locally where it happens, compared to water rising which we're gonna need some sort of global solution for, as it's not just because of one country? If so, one would seem more difficult than the other.

Also, in some places land is actually rising.

Problem is the sinking isn't really something you can address in this particular case. It's a river delta that is compressing itself. But it's not only this, its land loss due to oil and natural gas practices, oh and its rising sea levels too.

Tl;dr they are screwed.

> This doesn't make sense

It doesn’t make sense if you think that water incursion has the same solution space as sinking land

It doesn’t make sense if you think New Orleans is the only city with this problem

So of course, it doesn’t make sense, if you’re unaligned from reality.

You work for cnn?

funny, i had the same thought but for "common sense" and not CNN

I wish that there were a Corps of Engineers in the Army, whose job it was to build and maintain water retention structures. I think that such an organization might be our best hope for half an inch of rising water every year. Given that much of the state is already below sea level, that they have not suffered the wrath of climate change could only be a miracle. It must be the work of a merciful God who has forgiven their sins of owning Ford F150s.

This approach has already failed miserably for the city. They just need to move to where it isn't so obviously a risk, regardless the reason of the day, rather than have all of us pay to try to keep them there and then continually fail anyways.

Why would this need to be a miltary organization? Are the sinking lands/rising seas a plot from some enemy? This is a civil engineering thing if ever I saw one. Might want to look at how the Dutch deal with this. I don't think it involves any armies.

The way the Dutch deal with this is changing. The predominant view now is depolderization. Environmental concerns indicate that they should return the land to the sea.

In case you missed it, that was a joke. There is infact an Army Corps of Engineers that is responsible for exactly what the comment suggested (amongst a lot of other things).

The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.

The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.

Congressional Research Service report: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48322

It includes a section about discussions on transferring civil works responsibility out of DoD.

Because if it were civil and paid for for centrally, it'd be Big C Communism marching in. Let the army do it and it's eagle-riding patriotism.

But also if you do declare some sort of emergency that allows this, otherwise frustrating checks and committees can be bypassed. Probably not a bad thing.

That was my reaction to the headline. New Orleans is already below sea level. Has been for as long as I can remember. They have adapted to it, you can argue the wisdom of trying to fight the ocean but I'm not sure why they will fail now.

Maybe they can get some investors to fund some big pumped hydro energy storage projects.

Because land sinking makes only New Orleans unlivable?

Is it possible the land is sinking because of the rising water level?

Sure do. People don't click on land sinking titles.

Because we can't do anything about land subsidence.

we can though? NOLA is sinking in large part because human activity has lowered the groundwater level by draining the swamps and wetlands, so the soil starts compressing.

I don’t think we have direct control over sea levels either.

This humors me: people still think CNN has a “liberal bias” especially as it transitions into ownership by David Ellison.

They probably should have mentioned it, yeah. But if you’re on a sinking ship in the ocean that does mean that the water level is rising relative to you and that is most of your problem.

And are we supposed to not be prepared and informed about the ocean rising at over 3mm per year? I wouldn’t exactly jump to being dismissive of sea level rise that is so dramatic. Every 10 years you’re gaining over an inch, every 100 you’re gaining about a foot. And then you’ve got the ice caps melting which is an impending climate disaster.

In reality, the right-wing criticism of the “mainstream media” has been a form of projection and justification for legitimizing its own propaganda network. Meanwhile, the right denies their own mainstream status: the “mainstream media lies” but the #1 cable news network is a right wing network, the Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast that hosts political guests but isn’t part of the “lying press,” and this is all justification for the FCC to send threatening letters to terrestrial networks for their choice of jokes on late night talk shows or their daytime talk shows not being conservative enough.

CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda, Fox News trots out an employee in a mask pretending to be antifa and nobody bats an eye.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t scrutinize all media, but this particular dynamic is something that has been noticeable.

> CNN misses one detail in a highly scientific story and they get accused of having an agenda

If it's as the earlier poster said that sinking is 8mm per year, versus 3.2mm and they point out the 3.2, don't you think this news organisation has missed the main detail?

The article didn’t actually discuss the specific quantity of millimeters of sea level rise, either.

The headline is literally "Rising seas will swallow New Orleans", not "New Orleans is sinking below the seas", this would be an issue regardless if sea levels were raised or not, it would still sink down into the sea.

And conversely, if New Orleans was not sinking it would still face the same issues as the sea level is still rising. It would just be a little slower.

It’s not just the one detail. They also racialized the discussion of the impact and, egads, a cardinal sin, they mentioned the “Gulf of Mexico” and made their mention of the governor’s decision a partisan jab by not including the “one detail.”

It would be more confusing to call it the Gulf of America, everyone still knows it as the Gulf of Mexico.

The white supremacists, descendants of the defeated confederacy, and their sympathizers would love for everyone to stop “racializing” issues.

I guess they don’t want to talk about how black people didn’t even get protection against housing discrimination until the current president of the United States was already a teenager.

This is why the impact is “racialized:” because non-white races often live in less desirable geographic regions of metropolitan areas.

Look at a lot of American cities and demographics of people that live near flood plains and other hazards like pollution and noise and you’ll often notice racial patterns. These are objectively real, not “racialized.”

The people who want us to stop talking about it like yourself, intentionally or not, want us all to bury our head in the sand and pretend like the discrimination has been resolved despite the fact that non-white races are still feeling these impacts.

If you’d like to expand your mind on a related subject, this is a great story:

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/02/983897990/how-jacob-louds-lan...

Beverly Wright has done yeoman's work for years on a number of good causes and quoting her is not merely racializng the discussion.

Agreed. Also, as every media organization is free to make editorial decisions on both what they cover and how they cover it, left/right is often far too simplistic and vague to actually reverse engineer a media orgs bias.

>In reality, the right-wing criticism of the “mainstream media” has been a form of projection and justification for legitimizing its own propaganda network. Meanwhile, the right denies their own mainstream status: the “mainstream media lies” but the #1 cable news network is a right wing network, the Joe Rogan Experience is the #1 podcast that hosts political guests but isn’t part of the “lying press,”

Joe Rogan isn't "right," he openly supports recreational drug use, gay rights, women's right to abortion, universal healthcare, has endorsed Bernie Sanders and James Talarico, etc.

He's not a leftist, but that doesn't make him "right wing."

See level rise is not the relevant measure.

A single catastrophic event that causes a temporal rise of several meters can permanently alter the coastline and storms are worsening.

> storms are worsening

I mean hard to say. "Climate change" means that weather patterns will change on a location by location basis, it's not all for the "worse" (climate doesn't care one way or another about what humans in particular value), and so far the 2000s have had more storms hit Louisiana than the 2010s and the 2020s have been milder than the 2010s. It's entirely possible that climate change reduces the number of storms that hit new orleans

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