Quote Originally Posted by ThisYouWillDo View Post
Mind you, Holland managed to reclaim hundreds of square miles from the sea. They could afford to do that. They decided it was a good idea, allocated funds to the project(s) and went ahead and did it. Now they stand to lose it because a small but vocal group of people are in denial. What concern are Holland's problems to them?
Nope - at most, they stand to need to build an extra foot (OK, in the worst case scenario, it could be nearly two feet) or so of wall over the course of the next century. If they ask nicely, I'll even donate them a brick to help. Do you really think they'll abandon the entire country rather than raise the wall a foot?!

Global warming IS happening, and it IS possible to mitigate the effects. I can't say if we can do enough, but if we do nothing they'll be worse than they have to be.
The question is how much to do - how much to spend for how much gain. Supposing I had a device which would cut the rise by 10% (i.e. around an inch) - how much money would that be worth? A billion? A hundred billion? More?

But we don't have to build sea walls everywhere, we can - and will have to - move inland. Massive population shifts will have far-reaching consequences and no matter how deep you bury your head in the sand, everyone, everywhere will be affected to some degree or other. So a good plan would be to work out where displaced people should go and how to get them there without wars and without causing greater hardship.

Sounds like a job for a good politician with lots of money to me.

TYWD
Just how much "massive population" do you think lives within a foot of sea level at present, in circumstances which somehow preclude any option other than abandoning that location - over a timescale in which most current houses will be replaced anyway? I know my own house is well above sea level, and hardly alone in that - and even if 10% of the population will have to escape the extra foot of water, spread over that century it's a trivial 0.1% annual shift - completely dwarfed by routing population shifts anyway!