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Monday, December 08, 2003

→ http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2003/12/07/1070732073547...

An article linked to by Drudge contains the following:

"If the warming continues, there will be about half to one metre increase in sea level by 2020 and cities like Bombay, Calcutta and Madras will be completely submerged," said Rajiv Nigam, a scientist with the Geological Oceanography Division in the western Indian state of Goa.

He said a one-metre rise in sea level could cause five trillion rupees ($A147.24 billion) worth of damage to property in Goa alone.

Assuming that the $A is Australia dollars, that's $180 billion US dollars. A lot of money, but I doubt that that much damage would take place.

→ http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa033000a.htm

27% of the Netherlands is below sea level, and it's the 27% of the country that holds 60% of the people. While building dikes to combat global warming will be expensive, it's possible, and I doubt that there would be much property damage at all. Global warming, if it's happening (and I think the evidence is very much up in the air on that point) will be a gradual thing, that will be planned for and worked around.

Global warming will not be enough to force people to abandon major cities. People build cities all the time in worse places, and simply build things to control nature. A rise in sea-level of one meter seems trivial compared to the rises of many rivers during flood season, which can be over ten times as high, and occuring over a much shorter interval.

- Tom | permalink | changelog | Last updated: 2003-12-08 02:12

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