
Giant dams enclosing North Sea could protect millions from rising waters - nfg
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/giant-dams-could-protect-millions-from-rising-north-sea
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magduf
From the article: “A rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 is predicted,
according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do
something about climate change now. If we do nothing, this extreme dam might
just be the only solution.”

Building these dams will be a lot easier than getting people to stop driving
SUVs and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

~~~
amrox
Not sure if you're serious, but transportation is only 14% of emissions.
Electricity, agriculture and industry are all individually bigger
contributors.

[https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-
emiss...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-
data)

~~~
kyuudou
Why are militaries rarely mentioned as GGG contributors?

~~~
rtkwe
It's hard to get data. Countries were explicitly allowed to ignore/not report
military emissions by the Kyoto Accords. Without the mandatory reporting
anyone trying to write about it has to gather a lot of information about the
inner workings of military logistics (amount of tonnage moved by what method
etc) that the government is quite reluctant to provide.

[https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-greenhouse-
gases-140-co...](https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-greenhouse-
gases-140-countries-1445674)

~~~
magduf
It's too bad because it's got to be pretty horrible. If they could just get
the data for the amount of diesel/jet fuel consumed, that would tell us a lot.
The US military burned a ridiculous amount of diesel fuel in Afghanistan just
to try to air-condition _tents_ in the desert.

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eschulz
The environmental results of such a project would be devastating, and human
civilization in Europe might just be better off with a 10m rise in sea levels.

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jdkee
“ The cost of building a so-called North Sea Enclosure Dyke, estimated at
between €250bn and £500bn, amounts to barely 0.1% of the combined GDP of all
the countries that would be protected by it, they calculate.”

That would mean those countries GDP is estimated at 250 to 500 trillion pounds
or 320 to 645 trillion dollars

France 2.6 trillion, england 2.75 trillion, Scotland 202 billion, Netherlands
826 billion. Or about 6.4 trillion dollars per Wikipedia.

~~~
alex_stoddard
This seems like two examples of errors converting decimal fractions to
percentages in hacker news in one day.

Very roughly it looks like they should have said 0.1 or 10%.

10% of combinded GDP is very much not an easy investment to make!

~~~
aargh_aargh
Maybe they're calculating the cost over a 100 years while keeping today's GDP
as a yard stick. Though nothing in the article indicates so.

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magduf
There was a similar idea for the Mediterranean sea almost 100 years ago:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa)

Edit: some grad student more recently (2014) proposed this as well:
[https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-
sea.html](https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html)

~~~
rtkwe
How would a complete opening be safe to traverse with a 50 cm difference
between opposite sides of the dam? I'd think that'd create quite a strong
current that would make it very hard to exit the Med.

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radu_floricica
Risk distribution is very bad. You have a long dam, of which a single failure
at any point means flooding a lot of land. Individual dams along the coastline
will, in most cases, only affect the land behind them. Plus it's easier to fix
a coastline dam than one in the middle of the sea, possibly during a storm.

~~~
Kim_Bruning
Actually the exact opposite is true. By picking the right places to build your
dams and dikes out to see, you can reduce the total length of [all the dams
and dikes], thus total risk is reduced.

An example is eg. dutch Delta Works:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works)
, which (among other things) reduced the total length of sea defenses in
Zeeland by 700 km.

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nfg
Source here: [https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de-
noordzee-w...](https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de-noordzee-
waarschuwscenario-voor-klimaatverandering)

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java-man
I would like to see a failure analysis report.

~~~
thedudeabides5
Getting this passed by both the EU and UK governments seems at least as
unlikely as 'turn the north sea into gigantic lake' plan failing.

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corinroyal
Wow ecocide in Europe for only 500 billion. It's hard to imagine a dumber
idea.

