Coastal towns doomed by rising sea [UK Environment Agency]

The Times ^ | 8/18/2008 | Sarah Knapton

[bruinbirdman]

People living on some stretches of coastline will be forced to abandon their homes and move inland as sea levels rise, the new head of the Environment Agency has warned.

Lord Smith of Finsbury said plans need to be drawn up to evacuate people from large stretches which are threatened by erosion.

Work is already under way to identify parts of the south and east coast which are most threatened and Lord Smith said there would be hard decisions to be made about which areas to defend and which to allow the sea to reclaim.

"This is the most difficult issue we are going to face as an agency," he said, "We know the sea is eating away at the coast in quite a number of places, primarily on the east and south coasts.

"We are almost certainly not going to be able to defend absolutely every bit of coast – it would be simply and impossible task both in financial and engineering terms."

The coastlines of Norfolk and Suffolk have been identified as facing the most immediate danger.

But Lord Smith promised to do his "level best" to defend communities if engineering solutions could be found to save significant numbers of properties.

He said the Government could no longer rely on insurance companies to cover families who have lost their homes and said they should be rehoused at taxpayer's expense.

Lord Smith also criticised the building a third runway at Heathrow and plans for more coal-fuelled power stations.

[Aliska]

However, we never seem to hear about all those earth-shattering predictions of his that never came about.

So very true. So many of us just using our intellect and intuition given certain trends could make 10 predictions, based on global events as we observe them now, and it is likely that some of them would come true.

Even assuming that GW warming has some truth to it, would that necessarily all be a bad thing? What if whole new territories opened up in the Arctic, Greenland, Siberia and Antarctica, other places in the world currently uninhabitable?

There would be huge power grabs over it shutting ordinary people out. Of that I am reasonably certain.

[bpjam]

That’s funny. Like we have the ability to actually change the temperature of the planet. That’s a good one.

But what the hell does 70s LA smog and old fish in Ohio have to do with religion?

(Boulder City - an great example of local gov being the best gov)

[Edit35]

You convinced me. I have changed my mind. Rising oceans is bogus propaganda.

Are there any coastal towns currently under water right now due to rising oceans?

Has the ocean risen at all the past few years?

I don't mean the past 300 years, or 3000 years. I mean the past few years when "man-made" global warming supposedly went into affect.