OT: Scientific American on sea level rise.

Actually, it's so far currently mostly due to thermal expansion of sea wate r due to anthropogenic global warming. Anthony Watts has a bee in his bonne t about Stevenson boxes and I can imagine he'd be equally silly about tide gauges.

Sea level rise varies from place to place, sometimes due to something as si mple as ocean currents.

Nobody is going to panic about a sea level rise that is going to be spread over a century. Shuddering is even less likely.

People with a capacity to anticipate the future can do constructive things, but people with a capacity to see that doing these constructive things now might cost them money now will spend generously on deceptive propaganda to persuade the gullible that the constructive activity is a misguided over-r eaction.

Not really. Most of us are aware that Cursitor Doom gets his fake news from the Daily Mail and Russia Today, and believes every last bit of the misinf ormation he's given. CNN is a more reliable source but Cursitor Doom prefer s unreliable nonsense that fits his bizarre prejudices.

It wasn't so much mass murder, as the spreading of infectious diseases that were epidemic in Europe (and Asia) but new to the local populations, so th ey killed a lot of them. Much the same way that the Black Plague had spread from Asia to Europe a century or two earlier, and killed 30% of the Europe an population.

If the Europeans had deliberately spread their diseases, it could well have been ethnic cleansing. There's no suggestion than any of the people involv ed had enough grasp of how infectious diseases work to have done it deliber ately.

Actually, that is fake news, and Cursitor Doom is busy spreading it.

The kinds of false "facts" that John Larkin and Cursitor Doom come up with aren't in the least confusing, and while one might be angry if they were deliberately lying, one has to accept that the idiots don't know any better.

Yes. The "Population Bomb" folks argued for cutting food aid to India. They recommended "triage", killing a billion doomed dark-skinned people to Save The Planet for themselves.

How repulsive, and how wrong.

Sloman was downright chummy until I declined to hire him.

Fred was talking about the support piers, not the bridge deck. If the support piers rusted out where they were submerged in sea water, the bridge deck wouldn't stay 270 feet (or 82 metres) above the water.

And ever ready to respond with denialist nonsense and hysterical irrelevance.

After copying the proposition (that I might do some remote consulting for you) to Jim Thompson, who seemed to think that he had been able to influence your thinking on the subject.

That did adjust my view of the way John Larkin behaved, making it obvious that he didn't think for himself, and wasn't wise about the places he sought advice.

There are several flaws with current third generation reactors.

First of all , they need an active emergency cooling system that _must_ work at least one week after the reactor is shut down (remember Fukushima). This requires multiple different redundant emergency cooling systems which costs a lot and requires a lot of paper work. Due to the risk of emergency cooling issues, it is not usually possible to build smaller units closer to the loads (large cities). Once some remote sites are cleared for nuclear power plants, companies build only a few huge stations on these sites. These plants are essentially one off installations (no serial production to keep costs down).

One option would be to use current reactor types only for district heating and district cooling, not for electricity production. This would mean much lower temperatures (120 C) and low pressures (a few bars) and much lower power densities required. Even after reactor shutdown the latent heat can be removed with simple passive system, no need for active emergency cooling system. This will allow building such smaller plants closer or into cities.

Secondly, current 3G reactors use too low temperature for effective electricity production and hence bad Carnot efficiency. 4G reactors allow much higher temperatures and hence good Carnot efficiency for electricity production. 4G reactors use a very small amount (a few kilograms) of highly enriched fuel at time, so no active emergency cooling is required after shutdown..

Thus, current 3G reactors are not going to replace fossil fuel in a large scale. Much product development is needed to develop usable 4G power plants.

Filling all that back in to a new higher elevation above the new sea level, and dismantling and rebuilding or just razing and rebuilding everything on fill from "truckloads of dirt" would easily be the largest and most expensive engineering project in human history, my estimate for a budget to do that project would be one trillion dollars. For one city

True, *historically*.

But in the future, neither true nor necessary.

If you can't understand that then your critical thinking ability would have precluded you being an engineer at the better companies I have worked for. But not necessarily the worse companies :(

Damn. Beat me to it!

But he won't be exposed to these cogent points, because he's chosen to wear his Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.

?Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.? ? Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Cursitor Doom = FAKE CRITICAL THINKING. Surely everyone knows that by now

Do they lose ownership when their land is underwater?

Famously they don't have subsoil rights, so presumably they don't have subsea rights.

I kind of like your reasoning here. So, to avoid offending God we should buy massive gas-guzzling cars and set fire to all the hybrids and electrics we come across. And beat up their owners for good measure. Sounds like a plan!

Wise decision! I can just picture how much work he'd get done, in between reading masses of Marx's s**te and lecturing decent people about how selfish and racist they are.

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Yes, but on the plus side, they acquire valuable fishing rights. ;-)

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I scanned it with Google Earth and it didn't look too bad.

I grew up below sea level in New Orleans. We'd look up at ships on the river a few blocks away. They never spent a trillion, or a billion, on their levees.

The river and lake levees held fine in Katrina. It was the stupid man-made canals that flooded the place.

In lots of places, the mean high tide line defines government-owned sea and beach. In California, the public is guaranteed access and use of that beach, which annoys a lot of movie stars who have estates in Malibu.

Back east, in some places, you need a license to even be on the beach. Whole towns are basically off limits, no parking or beachgoing allowed to anyone except residents.