Green Folly: Trying to Hold Back the Sea

---by Micheal

The last of Spencer Reiss's list of green re-thinks, is that the globe is warming, get used to it.

If the globe continues to warm, and glaciers melt, raising sea levels. Yes, this will pose a problem for cities built along the coasts. The problem is not global warming. The globe has warmed and cooled many times before. The real problem is that our civilization, out of smug hubris, opted to build large expensive cities on coastlines. Coastlines, like riverbanks, are ever-changing. So now, we've built our sandcastles near the waves and demand that everyone DO SOMETHING because the tide is coming in. Sheesh.

Many thousands of years ago, when North America was just past the peak of the last ice age, the ocean levels much were lower. The New England coastline was a hundred miles south of Nantucket. The indigenous folks back then probably dug clams along the beaches, much as the Narragansett or Massachusett indians did a few hundred years ago. They'd make up little shelter settlements near the beach. When the sea levels began to rise, they didn't gnash their teeth and rend their garments over having to build another log hut further inland. They just moved inland. They certainly didn't sit around trying to figure out how they could keep the sea from rising. Or, how they could demand that everyone else had to kick in some wampum to fund a government program that would stop the sea. Only WE are dumb enough to do that.

If the rise in global temperatures is going to raise sea levels, then folks need to plan for how they're going to deal with a higher ocean. All this talk of reducing carbon to prevent the seas from rising, is green folly talk. Instead of spending billions to reduce carbon (which really just puts the billions in certain people's hands and does little, if anything, to reduce warming), put those billions into mega-seawalls for NYC, Boston, etc. The whole carbon-management scheme will only LOOK like it's making a difference. The seas will still rise, and the coastal cities will have only pretty printed government reports with which to hold back the sea. Good luck with that.

Only bureaucrats and enviro-liberals think they're more powerful than nature.