Sea level to rise faster than expected -- as much as five feet in the next 90 years.
But never fear. The tighty righties know that this won't be a problem, because they'll all be raptured by then. And good riddance to them too, I say. Their sanctimonious natterings of negativism and their stringent denials of the obvious truths of Tuxology and their refusal to worship the Great Penguin, instead worshipping that bearded sky demon who walks on clouds (WTF is with that? What kinda demon walks on clouds, anyhow?!) are a blight upon the Earth, and all of us who worship the one true God, the Great Penguin, and properly perform the Sacrament of the Herring at our ice cathedrals on Friday nights will be well rid of them.
It's just too sad that my iceberg will probably be melted because of global warming by then :-(.
-- Badtux the Aquatic Penguin
Rule 1: Always build your house on a hill top. You're less likely to get flooded.
ReplyDeleteBut, I realize that there aren't all that many hill tops in California (There are, though, in Kentucky.).
While I was living in California (Milpitas), I was about 13 feet above sea level. So, after a bit of global warming inspired sea rising, that would be about where the tides would end up.
I suppose the real question is whether they'll start building dikes/levees/sea-walls to keep out the rising sea, similar to the way parts of New Orleans were built. And, if so, the only question will be as to how long it'll be before a natural disaster will cause the faultily built dike/levee/sea-wall to fail?
Dave
All of South San Francisco Bay is protected by levees. Pretty much everything north of US 101 where it hits CA237 all the way to SFO is below sea level, yeppers, that's including East Palo Alto and the Shoreline business district and Redwood Shores and etc. Where I'm at, the Rivermark district of Santa Clara, is barely two feet above sea level, I can walk a block and look up at the levee and then climb the levee and look down at the water in the stream and that water is *above* my neighborhood, the only reason my neighborhood is dry is giant pumps that pump the water out of it over that levee. Before the levee this was a swamp that regularly flooded from the stream, and I have the USGS topo maps to prove it (that show this particular area as swamp).
ReplyDeleteOne problem is that most of the levees were built by salt companies to protect their salt ponds, and as the salt ponds have been gradually abandoned, the levees are slowly crumbling. East Palo Alto had to make an emergency repair to one of these levees recently to avoid inundation. The ownership of many of these levees is unclear, and the legal ability of cities to maintain them is equally unclear, especially for poorer cities like East Palo Alto. These levees were not built to residential protection standards in the first place, they were built to protect salt ponds, not homes, so they will likely fail if there's a significant increase in pressure on them -- such as, say, a four foot rise in ocean levels, or a category 6.7 earthquake. So it's a Katrina-like situation, even to the fact that the places to be flooded are mostly filled with poor people (e.g. East Palo Alto)...
Regarding hill tops, we have plenty of hill tops here in California, they're just a lot steeper than in Kentucky and houses built on them tend to slide off when the ground gets soggy. The few buildable ones get millionaires' mansions built on them or end up inside redwood preserves due to the difficulty of getting roads to them, leaving us plebes to slosh around in the valley below.
BTW, building on the hill top (as vs. a hill side) has one large disadvantage: Wind. Not a big deal in Kentucky. A big deal where you get sea breezes, the sea breeze tends to rouse up into nearly a gale by late afternoon as hot rising air inland sucks in cooler air off the ocean, then reverse in the wee hours of the A.M. and gives you a gale the other way. Good for windmills. Not so good for a house, unless you want it to be 55F all year 'round (thanks to the cold Alaska Current). Building on the slope rather than the hilltop tends to get you a little less wind, as long as it's either the outbound or inbound slope rather than a slope between hills (the slopes between hills get whipped pretty hard because the winds get funneled through those areas).
- Badtux the California Penguin