But it is unfair and short-sighted to have each stakeholder operating in their own best interests. The River Suir which flows through Waterford City is flanked for much its upstream length by callows = meadows which flood whenever there is too much rain for the river bed&banks to take away. Having 1m of water sitting on your meadow is bad for the farmer because that's a tonne weight per sq.m. which compacts the soil, suffocates the earthworms and changes the microbial flora of the soil to anaerobic. It takes years to recover. Accordingly farmers have pushed up berms along the river bank which protects their grassland from these adverse effects.
Q. Where does the water go?
A. It backs up and floods the streets, home and businesses of Clonmel.
If we lived in Padraig Pearse's socialist paradise, the property rights of farmers would not trump those of town-dwellers who buy their beef and potatoes from said farmers. Clonmel floods pretty much every winter.
In this week's Nature, John Moore and three other glaciologists describe a few cunning plans to solve all the problems of future sea-level rise by stopping sea-level rise. To a hammer everything looks like a nail, and glaciologists know how glaciers move. If you really understand a system, then you can start to imagine interventions. The knowledge which two generations of government-funded academic scientists have discovered about the pattern and process of inflammation have allowed MegaPharm Inc. to develop profitable anti-inflammatories. Moore&3more propose to Geoengineer polar glaciers to slow sea-level rise: stalling the fastest flows of ice into the oceans would buy us a few centuries to deal with climate change and protect coasts. Here is the executive summary:
- Protect the leading edge of the biggest glaciers from contact with warmer ocean water by dumping millions of tonnes of rock on top of existing sea-bed undulations to prevent or minimise melt and keep the ice-bergs uncalved. The Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland accounts for 4% of 20thC sea-level rise. It could be insulated by shifting 0.1 cu.km of to create a berm across the 'estuary'. That's 10% of the volume shifted to dig the Suez Canal and that was done by fellaheen with baskets and shovels . . . with a bit of help from steam-power.
- Pin the leading edge of glaciers with immovable [ya hope] concrete pillars built up from suitable rises in the bed rock and/or creating new or extending existing islands. Some of these sub-projects will require a LOT more material to be moved, and stabilised. Not forgetting, as I say above, that the weather is rougher out at sea and moving water has tremendous destructive power.
- Dry up the lubricating sub-glacial streams. Glaciers slip along nicely when they experience summer surface melting which cascades liquid water down the cracks and crevasses. Even without that, the action of grinding thousands of tonnes of ice against an immovable rocky base generates enough frictional heat to lube up the under-surface. Moore&3more concentrate on the feasibility to getting access to the flowing water through 1km of frozen over-burden but seem short on ideas of what to do once they get there. Me, I'd pump down wood-chips to increase the viscosity. Twigs and brambles have been very effective at preventing water-flow in the drains at home so that water blurfs out into the road-bed to sweep the whole thing downhill in a heap.