“Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater” (nytimes) is interesting from an engineering point of view. The city of 30 million people has been sinking, leading to a New Orleans-style situation where large parts of the city are below sea level and protected by a wall. How can this work in a typhoon-prone region of the world? Should the bitcoin billionaires be trying to make their next $billion by shorting something Indonesian?
[Separately, the article is interesting for what it reveals about bias in American journalism. The New York Times stresses global problems:
[Jakarta] has to deal with mounting threats from climate change.
With climate change, the Java Sea is rising and weather here is becoming more extreme.
Climate change acts here as it does elsewhere, exacerbating scores of other ills.
all the mounting threats from climate change.
The effect on the countryside has been disastrous, with the burning of rain forests to make way for palm oil producers and textile factories causing fires so smoky they have caused air pollution to spike as far away as Malaysia, contributing to climate change.
In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise
The article says that parts of Jakarta “have sunk as much as 14 feet in recent years.” Since the phrase “climate change” appears at least 13 times in the article, global sea level rise must be pretty close to this local rate of “14 feet in a couple of decades”, right? The Times doesn’t cite any comparative data, but NASA shows a sea level rise of roughly 0.65 feet over a 130-year period.]
I am so tired of this “Climate Change” hogwash and carbon emissions bullshit. The Earth is not warmer than it has ever been. The Earth was WARMER than it is today ~800 years ago when the Norsemen settled in Greenland and Genghis Khan united Mongolia. It was warmer 3000 years ago when the Minoans flourished in the Aegean. In fact the temperatures we are seeing and the fluctuations that are occurring is NOT outside of typical interglacial norms. For context, the Earth has no problems being warmer than today such as during the aforementioned periods with half the CO2 in the air. The Earth also has no problems being frozen to the equator with 8 to 10x the CO2 in the air such as during the late Ordovician.
The fact is that CO2 is a trace gas at 0.02~0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere and the overwhelming majority of the greenhouse effect is from water vapor. If you look at ice core samples you’ll see that temperature peaks (shortest winters) did not follow CO2 peaks, in fact CO2 peaks follow temperature peaks (due to increase microbial activity in the oceans). Kinda make it hard to argue cause and effect doesn’t it?
If we can’t show that the Earth’s climate is in ANY way abnormal, if we can’t show that global temperatures track CO2 concentrations in the air in any statistically meaningful manner, how the hell is “man made” Climate Change anything other than utter complete rubbish?
Jarkata will be as fine as it historically had been and in the future can be.
Your mention of New Orleans has me wondering if Jakarta’s problems are, like Puerto Rico’s, more specifically caused by civic corruption, mismanagement, overpopulation, and overbuilding on marginal land.
Singapore should be facing similar problems. Much of its growth has been on landfill. No worries there. I have a Dutch friend who is utterly unconcerned about global warming and his country has been sinking for millennia.
Maybe Jakarta would have less problems if the Dutch were still in charge
One word: groundwater-pumping! See: http://www.circleofblue.org/2016/world/83463/
California’s Central Valley is sinking rapidly, too.
Stop Global Aquifer Depleting!
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/08/this-picture-shows-how-much-california-is-sinking.html
As might be expected, the largest degree of subsidence occurred in southern California where the drought struck the hardest. In some places, the land sunk by nearly 30 feet.
California’s Department of Water Resources commissioned NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to collect and analyze satellite data during the state’s most recent drought, resulting in an initial report in 2015, and subsequent updates. The most recent shows land continued to sink since 2015, at a rate of as much as 2 feet per year in the worst spots.