On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 14:32 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > have been for centuries, so i don't think they're really worried about a > > rise of a few centimetres. much as some belgians support global warming > > How about a few meters?
about a quarter of the land area of nl is more than a metre below sea level. the deepest is about 7 m below sea level. and has been for 400+ years. some 15% of the land area was dredged up from the sea with manual intervention over the past few centuries and surrounded by dikes. the most recent was the entire province of flevoland, about 1500 km^2, created out of the sea in the 1960s. if the pumps that have been draining the country for centuries stopped pumping, much of it would be underwater within hours or days simply due to water table seepage. > > in the hope of drowning their northern neighbours, i don't think the > > dutch will be in any trouble. they have spent an incredible trillion > > The point is, they need to spend it again. And again. And again. > In order to match a sea level rise. Also, you need to beat the *peak* > storm flood. And guess what, the extreme-amplitude events are getting > more frequent. well, that's what they've been doing for centuries; i don't think the spending on dikes as a share of gdp has increased dramatically recently. my neighbour is a dutch water engineer who got a congressional medal of honour when he was invited to address the US congress after katrina. he noted that since the 1950s, the dutch design their dikes and water systems to protect against 1-in-10,000-year catastrophic floods as a matter of course, and that if the dikes in new orleans followed dutch regulations, they'd be 15 times as thick as they were. > > dollars in dikes and other water management systems in the past 50 years > > or so. no wonder they're the global experts in watery survival. > > Time to grow gills, or buy yellow submarines. or build houses with floating foundations for occasional floods, a typical dutch "go with the flow" water management invention [1]. i really don't believe the dutch are going to get submerged, or certainly not in a way that will make nl uninhabitable (note that it is already the most densely populated country after bangladesh, not counting statelets like malta and the vatican). indeed, global warming is a good reason to buy stock in dutch water management companies; their expertise is already on call all over the world. -rishab 1. http://www.inhabitat.com/2006/08/29/interview-koen-olthius-of-waterstudionl/ >
