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Re:Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years by ravenstine on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:44PM (#21527039)
I don't think it's in jest, and I actually agree with that statement to an extent.

If humans weren't polluting the atmosphere, the climate would still be changing. The only difference is time scale and possibly the temperature delta.

This is why building cities right up against the shoreline isn't a very good idea in the long term. And, no, you can have ports without building metropolises right next to the water. Someone's going to say that I'm a "climate denier" which is totally false because I believe in anthropogenic global warming.

Re:Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years by _carl_jung on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:52PM (#21527122)
Cities evolve organically. There is no "Mr City" who mistakenly places cities too close to the shoreline. Businesses naturally accrete around ports until the mass of buildings and workforce forms a city.
Re:Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years by throwaway5752 on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:46PM (#21527063)
Ports are critical infrastructure, and cities evolve around ports. The world's great natural harbors/ports almost always have large cities built around them (NY, SF, Sydney, PRD, etc).
Re:Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years by fooblitzky on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @01:02PM (#21527262)
The difference in time scale is crucial though. For the past 2000 years, sea level hadn't changed much at all[1]. If the city has to move to adapt to changing coastlines, it can probably manage the move over millennia.

With climate change, we're looking at drastic coastline changes over the next 100 years. 100 years is extremely short for cities - it probably takes about that to go from being a town to being a city, if you have excellent growth rates.

To move a city in 100 years is probably flat-out impossible, just for cost reasons alone. Most cities are hard-pressed to pay for maintenance of roads and essential services, and service their already crushing debt levels. City governments are not going to manage it, which means the citizens of the cities are going to shoulder the costs. We're going to see large-scale financial hardship in coastal cities going forward, and multiple cities going bankrupt and into decline.

[1] https://ocean.si.edu/through-time/ancient-seas/sea-level-ris...

Re:Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years by yellowapple on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @02:47PM (#21528636)
See also: Sacramento, which dealt with frequent winter/spring flooding back when it was first founded because the founders built the city right up against the river. The city adapted by effectively converting all the first floors into basements and raising the city's "ground" (most of it all got filled in with dirt or otherwise lost with time, but some of it's still preserved in the so-called "Old Sacramento Underground").

Venice will likely have to take similarly-drastic measures, and they're a lot harder to take given that modern-day Venice is much bigger than 1850's-1860's Sacramento.

Re:Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years by smacktoward on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @01:57PM (#21527947)
Scale is also the only difference between a beautiful snowflake and a terrifying avalanche. It's the difference between drinking a refreshing glass of water and being waterboarded.

Scale matters a lot.

Re:Venice Battles Flooding Amid Highest Tide in 50 Years by michaelmrose on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @02:06PM (#21528088)
I really like these analogies. You are so right.