Why Global Warming does not bother me.

[Seth]

In bangladesh they are too fucking poor to move generally or in your dystopian vision of the world should they die because they are poor?.

Poor isn't an excuse, dumb or lazy is
They can start by building sea walls, they have invented the shovel haven't they? No matter, plenty of information is freely available on construction and even building construction equipment. All it takes is learning and labor. They should at least be able to make domestically through freely available learning the same level of technology the US had when Hoover Dam was built.

How dumb is that post? Amazing!!
Build a sea wall, and it would just fill up with fresh water from the inside.
Unless you pump it up and over the wall. It's not rocket science. Just the bleedin obvious.

Yup, but the Netherlanders have been doing it for a couple of hundred years, haven't they?

Either get with the program or move somewhere else. After all, they have a hundred years to do so.

[Seth]

Lateral pressure isn't the same as hydraulic pressure, or at least that's what the Army Corps of Engineers told me. The levies around here average one hundred feet thick at the bases.

And what I am trying to tell is that there aint no thing like "lateral pressure" that would exist apart from hydraulic pressure. The levies have to be strong to stand wave pressure, tides, erosion and stuff, but that's different.

That's right. Pressure is just pressure. Force divided by area. As simple as that.
The thickness of levies is dictated by the quality of materials used, the depth, and the wave and current forces.
Usually it's cheap materials used, so they make it thick.
With dams damming rivers, they don't anticipate much significant wave action, or tidal flows, so they basically just have to withstand the pressure. Also, they like to store as much water as possible, and a thinner dam means more storage.
But they do use thick earth-filled dams in places.

And in New Orleans, the levees were about a foot thick...concrete walls 30 feet or more high. They breached not because of the pressure, but because of sub-standard building caused the footings to wash away or they were simply overtopped.

[mistermack]

How dumb is that post? Amazing!!
Build a sea wall, and it would just fill up with fresh water from the inside.
Unless you pump it up and over the wall. It's not rocket science. Just the bleedin obvious.

Yup, but the Netherlanders have been doing it for a couple of hundred years, haven't they?

The Netherlands is a tiny country, but comparatively rich. It can afford stuff like this :

This was achieved by raising 3,000 kilometers (1,864 mi) of outer sea-dykes and 10,000 kilometers (6,214 mi) of inner, canal, and river dikes, and by closing off the sea estuaries of the Zeeland province. New risk assessments occasionally show problems requiring additional Delta project dyke reinforcements. The Delta project is one of the largest construction efforts in human history[citation needed] and is considered by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the seven wonders of the modern world.[42]

That doesn't mean that the US could scale it up, or that Bangla Desh could afford to do it on a giant scale.

Anyway, sea levels aren't going to rise. It's all bollocks.

[amused]

I'm an architect with a lot of construction management experience, and I know that people who take the built environment for granted, or think it's so easy to build stuff, are clueless when they estimate the amount of effort it takes to build things. Every part of the built environment has been ripped from the earth, subjected to a lot of transformation requiring immense expenditures of energy, and then put in place by many hands.

A seawall of the size needed to hold back a rising ocean out of the US would require massive resources, and would bankrupt the country in very short order. It would be far cheaper to just abandon the coastal cities and move inland over a period of time. I doubt the engineering could be accomplished anyway.

The fake islands they built off the coast of Dubai are already sinking back into the ocean, primarily, IMO, because they don't really understand the forces of nature at work. When they first built the palm tree shaped islands with a ring barrier, they had to come back and cut breaks in the ring to let fresh seawater in because the water inside the 'fronds' was becoming stagnant. Right there is proof that they don't understand the hydrology at all.

[Seth]

I'm an architect with a lot of construction management experience, and I know that people who take the built environment for granted, or think it's so easy to build stuff, are clueless when they estimate the amount of effort it takes to build things. Every part of the built environment has been ripped from the earth, subjected to a lot of transformation requiring immense expenditures of energy, and then put in place by many hands.

A seawall of the size needed to hold back a rising ocean out of the US would require massive resources, and would bankrupt the country in very short order. It would be far cheaper to just abandon the coastal cities and move inland over a period of time. I doubt the engineering could be accomplished anyway.

The fake islands they built off the coast of Dubai are already sinking back into the ocean, primarily, IMO, because they don't really understand the forces of nature at work. When they first built the palm tree shaped islands with a ring barrier, they had to come back and cut breaks in the ring to let fresh seawater in because the water inside the 'fronds' was becoming stagnant. Right there is proof that they don't understand the hydrology at all.

Meh. They've got a hundred years or more to move inland. No big huhu, just pass an ordinance saying no new buildings below the flood line and no restoration of decaying buildings and infrastructure as they wear out. In a hundred years, the cities will have moved themselves out of the danger zone at no cost to the public.

Or not. If they don't, who gives a fuck what happens to them anyway.

Adapt or die.

[Jason]

What do architects do again? Oh yeah, draw pretty concept pictures.. Where's an engineer when you need one?


J/K..


I'm sure you draw lovely pictures

[amused]

LOL

Never went on the drawing boards, it was too much fun building stuff with other people's money!

Fucking engineers are like computers, go from A to B and then stop for further instructions.

[Tyrannical]

I bet a giant sea wall could generate electricity too by taking advantage of tidal movements.
Could probably power half the US too
Prime location for aquaculture too, could probably feed half the US too
Potential for mineral wealth by filtering gold or uranium from sea water
Possible could filter for natural deuterium or tritium for future hot fusion technology

[rasetsu]

It's an interesting question, but the fysiks is too big for my wee brain. The fetch of the ocean is enormous, but the waves wouldn't break, so that may not matter.

Because the gravitational field created by the Moon weakens with distance from the Moon, it exerts a slightly stronger force on the side of the Earth facing the Moon than average, and a slightly weaker force on the opposite side. The Moon thus tends to "stretch" the Earth slightly along the line connecting the two bodies. The solid Earth deforms a bit, but ocean water, being fluid, is free to move much more in response to the tidal force, particularly horizontally. As the Earth rotates, the magnitude and direction of the tidal force at any particular point on the Earth's surface change constantly; although the ocean never reaches equilibrium — there is never time for the fluid to "catch up" to the state it would eventually reach if the tidal force were constant — the changing tidal force nonetheless causes rhythmic changes in sea surface height.

(Though the real question is, whether the various chains of interdependence among plant and animal species could withstand multiple extinction events at multiple levels because these species couldn't build a wall around their ecosystems. Stock up now. Food gonna get real scarce when that happens.)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Lateral pressure isn't the same as hydraulic pressure, or at least that's what the Army Corps of Engineers told me. The levies around here average one hundred feet thick at the bases.

And what I am trying to tell is that there aint no thing like "lateral pressure" that would exist apart from hydraulic pressure. The levies have to be strong to stand wave pressure, tides, erosion and stuff, but that's different.

So, a thin wall will hold back the Mississippi? I didn't know that.

[rasetsu]

Fun fact: Systematic increases in sea water temperature have been implicated as a contributing factor in red tides.

[rasetsu]

More fun!

Only the first few tens or so meters of water is able to absorb solar radiation causing different temperature at different surface. This is called the photic zone. The temperature here usually varies with latitude. In the Persian Gulf which is located near the equator, water can be as warm as 36 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Water temperatures can be low as -2 degrees Celsius (28.4 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Arctic and Antarctic Seas. The average temperature of the entire ocean surfaces usually ranges from 15 to 17 degrees Celsius (59 to 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit).

There is a barrier between the surface water and deeper layers of the ocean that are not mixed. The barrier begins around 100 meters and can extend another few hundred meters downwards. There is a thermo cline meaning there is a quick change in temperature when entering the deeper surface of water. A CTD (Conductivity, Temperature and Depth) instrument (usually placed in the water from a ship or a platform) measures temperature in the deep ocean. Recordings have shown that the average temperature of water ranges from 0-3 degrees Celsius (32–37.5 degrees Fahrenheit).

Back in 1899 it was estimated that 92% of the ocean floor had a temperature of lower than 40 degrees Fahrenheit. However, as time progressed global warming (phenomenon where the average annual temperature of the Earth increases) is changing the ocean's average temperature. In places such as the tropical seas, surface temperatures have increased as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) between the 1990s and the mid-1960s. As a result, there were serve hurricane increases, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Arctic and Antarctic Sea ice are also melting due to warmer temperatures of water. This leads to an increase in water levels of the ocean, further increasing global heating. Alpine glaciers are also melting, which results in an increase in the freshwater runoff to local human populations. It also decreases the water in salinity.

— Temperature Of The Ocean


"Photosynthesis in the oceans creates approximately 90% of the Earth's gaseous oxygen. Most of the oxygen is produced by phytoplankton in the euphotic zone [~0-200m]."

Primary Producers (Algae, Phytoplankton, Plants): In the euphotic zone, photosynthesizers (autotrophs) include:

Free-floating algae -- often called seaweed
Red algae ( Rhodophyta) -- Porphyra (from which edible nori is made), dulse, Ceramium and maerl
Green algae (Chlorophyta) --thongweed, sea lettuce (Ulva)
Brown algae (Phaeophyta) -- like fast-growing kelp, Sargassum, Turbinaria, Dictyota, and wrack
Phytoplankton -- tiny, one-celled photosynthetic plankton like diatoms, dinoflagellates, and coccolithophorids
Plants
Flowering plants (angiosperms)
Submerged: Seagrasses -- flowering plants like eelgrass and thalassia
Not Entirely Submerged: Mangroves -- trees that root in the shallow seafloor but grow above water.

— Sunlit Ocean (euphotic zone)

Ocean currents

Ocean currents play a major role in moving heat over the surface of the earth and thereby influence the climates of the continents.

The microbial loop

Studies the last decades have shown the food web to be a bit more complex. New techniques and better microscopes, led to the discovery that the open water of oceans contain vast numbers of both autotrophic and heterotrophic picoplankton, the latter made up largely by bacteria. New investigations also revealed that as much as 70 % of the carbon fixation in oligotrophic systems is the result of activities of algal picoplankton , and that up to 50 % of the carbon fixed by phytoplankton is released into the water as dissolved organic matter (DOM) and is thus not retained as producer biomass. Over one-half of this organic material is than assimilated by heterotrophic picoplankton (bacteria). Because of there minute size, most zooplankton are unable to capture and consume these very small picoplankton. The heterotrophic picoplankton-sized bacteria are instead grazed by small, nanoplankton-sized, heterotrophic flagellates and ciliated protozoans, which are in turn eaten by microzooplankton that are large enough to be utilized by macrozooplankton. Small invertebrates and fish than consume these macroplankton.

— Topical Marine Biology: The Oceans




But don't you fret, now. Seth and Tyrannical have a plan.

[Tyrannical]

"Photosynthesis in the oceans creates approximately 90% of the Earth's gaseous oxygen. Most of the oxygen is produced by phytoplankton in the euphotic zone [~0-200m]."

Nobody believes that anymore. The rain forests produce all of our oxygen and we'll die if they don't stop burning it down in Brazil.

But a nice sea wall would be a great anchor for feeding the ocean oxygen and nutrients to support plankton and fish.

Prevents flooding, produces power, and cultivates seafood. What could be better?

[mistermack]

Lateral pressure isn't the same as hydraulic pressure, or at least that's what the Army Corps of Engineers told me. The levies around here average one hundred feet thick at the bases.

And what I am trying to tell is that there aint no thing like "lateral pressure" that would exist apart from hydraulic pressure. The levies have to be strong to stand wave pressure, tides, erosion and stuff, but that's different.

So, a thin wall will hold back the Mississippi? I didn't know that.

The Mississippi is fuck-all.
A thin steel wall (2.5") will hold back the pressure of the Marianas Trench, which is under nearly eleven kilometers of water.
It's not just about thickness, it's about design and materials.

It's not just a matter of pressure. The FORCE on a dam is pressure times area. The bigger the area, the bigger the force. A thin wall could withstand the PRESSURE of the Mississippi, over small areas, but the overall structure has to withstand the resultant force.

A thin wall might hold back the pressure of the Mississippi, but the overall force would just topple the wall over. So you would have to build supporting buttresses at 90 deg to the wall, at regular intervals to support it.
The easiest and cheapest way to support a wall is to pile up earth behind it. And that's basically what a levee is.

[macdoc]

about that severe weather thing....

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le4382853/

more extreme events more often....fancy that.....sea level is a long term unstoppable issue..not near term
..increasing severe weather events is now. Just love the reality denying from the repuglies.