Why rebuild New Orleans?

Kind of depends. The irony is, some of the people making that argument (though not the writer) are ones who would deny that Global Warming is even happening in the first place.

As for fighting nature, well, that's what we do. All the time. Just depends on why and how.

We can move the refinery facilities well inland and let the damned city wash out to sea.

Its a 400 year old city. It is unique in history, culture.. People manage to rebuild places in the Outer Banks, it seems, almost every single year, and this one gets it this bad once in 400 and suddenly hands are thrown up and the city is going to be abandoned?

So, are they going to rebuild those cities in Texas and Mississippi?

The issue wasn't the city sinking. It was neglect of the levies. It was the desire to build further in the swamp and it was the draining of the bayou, and the diversion and channeling of the Mississippi which destroyed both those bayous (new term, Ghost Bayou, due to it). Which eliminated the natural barrier and protection against the worst of the storm surge. Which is how New Orleans had survived those other 4 centuries.

And those things are fairly new situations, and they can be reversed. And should be even if it weren't for New Orleans.

New Orleans is the major port city on the Mississippi which makes it the oil supply pipeline to the heart of the country, the Midwest. Do you need another reason to preserve New Orleans? We will adapt to Mother Nature as we always have.

That sounds nice, but how do you propose to do that? Did you look at the map? How does one a) make the case for sustaining a major city existing offshore, below sea level, and b) pull that off technologically? Economically, how does a city living so precariously sustain itself?

Beyond the practical logistical failings and nincompoop bumblings rears the interesting, ugly question "Why bother?", one that would never occur to, for example, the Dutch.

We rebuild New Orleans because it was ours, and we will keep it that way.

That's romantic, but disconnected from the facts (if you accept the scientists' projections as fact). Did you see the map? Even the Dutch are today making plans to sustain their population in a time of sea level rise. The Dutch, being the Dutch, are making practical plans in the face of the inevitable. We Americans, being American, seem dead-set to believe that we can turn back nature with the force of our will.

Oh, and if we're going to start to abandon cities due to the predicted rise of the oceans (which I agree with, btw) due to global warming, we can't stop with New Orleans. We're going to have to take a look at quite a few of our coastal cities. Starting with Manhattan, and.. heck, pretty much the entire southern tip of Florida, which is pretty much one giant New Orleans without a Mississippi, including what we're doing to it.

According to the projections, parts of lower Manhattan would be gone, and most of south Florida would be gone. Miami proper would survive, but South Beach would no longer exist. The Outer Banks would cease to exist. Anguish over this does not stop the water from rising. If the scientists are correct, this country is going to have a lot of very hard thinking to do over the coming decades, and some painful decisions to make.

"We rebuild New Orleans because it was ours, and we will keep it that way.

That's romantic, but disconnected from the facts (if you accept the scientists' projections as fact)."

Isn't accepting projections as fact really where the rose of romance begins to bloom, Rod? :-)

"The Dutch, being the Dutch, are making practical plans in the face of the inevitable. We Americans, being American, seem dead-set to believe that we can turn back nature with the force of our will."

How the Dutch could make practical plans without the will, romantic as it might appear to you to be, to do so escapes me.

All I asserted was that the easy acquiescence to let go of quintessential chunks of America like New Orleans, which has been the national response to date to the city and its now-diasporal peoples is symptomatic of the rise of a far larger and more deadly pathological problem than the ocean.

Yes. We have lots (even most, I'd daresay) of our cities that survive quite in spite of natural conditions. Most of our cities, in one way or another, couldn't survive with quite a lot of human assistance. Unnaturally, you could say.

The 'romance' can be, as noted, replaced with will. All the plans and pragmatism in the world won't work unless people actually WANT to do it. And all the 'wanting' in the world won't work unless people actually figure out HOW to do something, and what to do.

It really takes both.

Well, depends. Are we saying the same thing about rebuilding those OTHER two cities demolished by Katrina? You know, the ones in Mississippi, and Texas?

Mr. Dreher,
Your "scientific consensus" is factually incorrect. A cursory Google search, with the terms, "sea levels rising", returned results from NOAA, National Geographic, various other gov't organizations, and independent studies from university professors.

These "hard fact" studies have all reached the same conclusion:
At best, sea levels are rising from 1.5 to 3mm per year, according to charted satellite measurements. Translated into inches, the worst case
scenario (3 mm/year) would amount to 6 inches over the next 100 years -not the "three feet" you cite. (Hard fact sources for your assertion - where are they, please?)

In addition, scientists attribute the 3mm rise on several contributing factors, including: tectonic plate shifts, warm water requires more space, and finally, melting ice caps.

I do not believe you are serious!

Yes things are happening thruout our world but we are rebuilding many places including New Orleans.

We have a lot of high tech knowledge these days about ways to circumvent "mother nature". We try to save animals who are endangered, we build all types of levees and dams.

We are not at the victim stages of mother nature as long as we have brains that can think of ideas of how to do things and the brains to get them done.

Feel free to sit on your hands and do nothing including figuring out what to possibly do to save the land your family is on or move the house.

Laura

Holland was below sea level before the 1-foot rise of the 20th century. It is still around because of massive engineering projects. Go read up on the Zuiderzee Works and Delta Works projects. The Dutch have build dykes, sea walls (even moving ones), canals, drainage basins, and even floating buildings. They've adapted to rising seas. I was in the Netherlands last year and it is really impressive.

These projects are expensive and they are complex, but they can be done. We can save southern Louisiana over the next century through massive public engineering in the same way. If we can spend two decades and $15 billion to build traffic tunnels under Boston then saving New Orleans is a no-brainer. It will happen, and probably much like in the Netherlands. It will likely be piecemeal, incrementally building or recovering different parts of the coast over the next century.

Rich, the difference is that Holland is worth preserving. New Orleans, however...
I have a feeling that if some natural disaster hit Holland, the people would have been a tad bit more gracious and resourceful than the ones who used Katrina as an excuse to loot and rob people.

I lived for a time in New Orleans, and, I'd have to say, it shouldn't be rebuilt. NOLA lost its original rationale for being built in the first place a long time ago -- as a major port at the mouth of the Mississippi.

It had become, and remains today, merely a place where one may get great food, do things around Mardi Gras time that one wouldn't do back home, and see the biggest cockroaches this side of a nuclear war. We used to joke that the cockroaches used to prey on alley cats...

These things may (or may not be, depending on your tolerance for dirt and sleaze) good things, but they are not sufficient things to justify Federal and state expenditures in the tens-to-hundreds of billions to rectify.

Seriously, NOLA is an example of low expectations placed on its citizens; expectations that have been fully met.

STILTS!

...and MIMES!

(Marcel RIP)

Since when do Americans think it is acceptable to desert their own citizens. Is this what our country has become? I am a New Orleanian. I thought I was an American also, but I see I was mistaken.

That city is in an incredibly dangerous position, so I can see the arguments. There's a difference between merely being on the coast and being on the coast next to a huge river that's above the town and pinned in by a swamp that's not working right. Manhattan is defendable with walls, New Orleans is not.

But if we're going to abandon New Orleans, we need to officially abandon it.

We need to annex a new city area, we need to buy people's old property or exchange for new, we need to move historical buildings, lay out equivalent districts, etc. We, basically, would have to construct an entire city for people to move into to get the moral right to give up on their existing one.

That's not to say we'd have to build all the buildings, of course. Some sort of compensation should be given to existing landowners in the old New Orleans, but, frankly, a lot of those buildings there are crap, because, duh, the city flooded. (Mild sarcasm alert.) For some of the homeowners, an empty lot would literally be a step up from a house they can't live in and have to be demolished.

But we'd need a sewer system, water, electrity, roads, government buildings, zoning, etc. And some sort of legal 'change of address' for a city that's never really been done before, but shouldn't be impossible. (Cities are just fictional entities that exist under state laws. Might take an LA constitutional amendment, but it's not impossible.) And a city of NO's size really should have a subway system, while we're at it. (It probably already would have had one, except it was literally impossible.)

Frankly, I can think of only two times in American history that we've built a real planned city...Washington DC and Las Vegas. But it might, indeed, save money in the long run.

"Mr Dreher,
Your original post was not about the Arctic icecaps melting faster. Your post, was a (retold) "prediction" of catastrophically rising sea levels not supportable by the straight-line graphs over the last fifty years - which is - the rate of change in sea level has remained constant.

Why exactly, should I believe that the numbers are suddenly going to surge, exponentially?"

While I lean more toward Rod on the notion that we are likely producing a superadditive effect on natural climate cycles that should concern us, Ms. mm, the apocalyptic 3 meter rise in the ocean levels projected has gnawed at me , and it finally struck me why.

That much freshwater ice melt that rapidly as depicted in the projections Rod is assuming as future history would have, at least as I understand it, already disrupted the thermo-haline cycle of the Gulf Stream, triggering increasing cooling, longer and colder winters farther south, greater snowfall, increasing glaciation and ice pack buildup, and consequent lowering of sea levels.

So if this post is not really about solely whether to rebuild NOLA after Katrina, because, well, we're really talking about equal threat to all coastal cities worldwide, and if this post is really not about credible marginal arguments about climate change, pro and con, what's it really about?

Apocalypticism and how we should respond to it? The inevitability of retreating from coastal cities into CrunchyCon monasteries?

It's simply hard to make the elements of the post add up the way they were originally laid out, although that itself speaks to the value of this blog as a test bed and workbench for a pundit's thinking.

Indeed, y'all. [Occasionally, one should toss an "indeed" for added gravitas.]

Mostly, though, I'm just busting chops ala Mr. Dreher.

"No, it doesn't work that way."

You mean hypothetically dumping the proportional amount of freshwater melt required to jack sea levels 3 meters in a century would not produce a desalinating effect on the Gulf Stream, and thus its relative density, as well as that of the global THC of which it's a part?

Or that sufficient oceanic/atmospheric cooling in the Laurentine latitudes and elsewhere as a result of the Gulf Stream (and other segments of the THC) shutting down or becoming sufficiently morbid would not increase snowfall over eastern Canada, the Greenland ice sheet, and Northern Europe, as well as the Arctic, (and elsewhere) locking up water and thus making it unavailable for sea level rise in the closed system?

Maybe I was wrong; I did think that's the way it supposedly worked.

"For the record, Rod was using scientific predictions for New Orleans that relied on a slightly more than three FOOT sea level rise (ONE meter), NOT three meters."

Correct; my bad. Three feet remains quite extraordinary itself without my grotesque misquote.

There are 2 formulas for this decision:
1. You (USA) built it (Flood Protection "System" (ahem) of New Orleans), you own it; if it breaks, you fix it; if you build it badly and it breaks, you fix it AND you fix (make whole) the people harmed by your bad levees. It's not charity, it's duty.

2. You're looking at a 100-year term for your investment in New Orleans. Can you get a better return anywhere else? Don't confine your imagination to merely government expenditures - I know there are a lot of poor people there. Think about how much commerce moves through New Orleans. You can't get the same kind of maritime traffic anywhere else. The infrastructure is already there: wharves, warehouses, rails, roads, locks, canals, the intracoastal waterway, the river, the gulf. Put a little money into the levees and the housing, and New Orleans is back on line. It will take decades to establish Baton Rouge or Gonzales or somewhere else to replace New Orleans, if - IF - the predictions of 1 meter sea level rise come to pass.