Carbon Emissions 'Will Defer Ice Age'

> What about the ones that live in areas that are going to be covered in water?

Thanks to civil engineering, building permanent structures in areas that are submerged is quite do-able (think: causeway, oil rig). In stark contrast, glaciers are a very, very BIG problem. There's really no good way to build a permanent structure in the middle of a thick glacier field. If you build on top of the glacier, pressure melts the ice & causes the structure to slowly sink into it. If you refrigerate the contact points to keep the ice from melting, the structure moves with the glacier. If you try to bore holes down to the bedrock & build concrete pilings through the glacier, the glacier's motion will snap them like twigs. It's not necessarily *impossible*, but the engineering problems involved make open water look like a neatly-cleared urban vacant lot in a big city by comparison.

I'm still somewhat amused by sea-level alarmists whose flood maps just assume that people will passively abandon hundreds of billions of dollars worth of low-lying real estate & allow it to become submerged, instead of doing more or less the same thing developers in Florida have been doing for the past century -- digging holes for fill dirt, raising the terrain, and building on pilings where appropriate. Hell, my neighborhood, and the land my house sits on, was submerged under several feet of water for thousands of years on the day I was born. ~20 years later, the area was drained, dredged, filled, and turned into nice houses on a big manmade lake. I know, because my neighborhood's HOA has been fighting with FEMA for the past 10 years to update the official flood map for my neighborhood from -2 feet to 12 feet, because nobody ever bothered to update the official county elevation map after the developer terraformed the neighborhood into dry land.

Actually, this raises another point... lots of the Global Warming flood prediction maps based on land elevation for South Florida are just plain wrong, for the same reason as the map in my own neighborhood -- developers over the past 100 years dredged, filled, and raised the land, and nobody ever bothered to update the official terrain maps. The flood models are wrong, for the same reason why hurricane storm-surge models have been wildly wrong in pretty much every hurricane since 1940 -- the surge models -- like Global Warming Flood Models -- assume the existence of a natural coastline that hasn't existed for *decades*.

Are sea levels rising? Probably. Are they going to rise more? Almost certainly. Are waterfront neighborhoods going to be abandoned to rising water? No way in hell. They'll just get rebuilt on taller foundations every 50 years or so when a major hurricane blows away whatever's there now.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/5JaCcBEolkE/carbon-emissions-will-defer-ice-age

joe torre dog the bounty hunter michele bachmann west virginia university amber rose jessica biel tim howard