As climate change increases, floating cities look like less of a dream

An artist's impression of a floating island
 project in French Polynesia.

Hong Kong: You might call it a Noah's Ark for an era of melting polar ice sheets.

An audacious plan to respond to climate change by building a city of floating islands in the South Pacific is moving forward, with the government of French Polynesia agreeing to consider hosting the islands in a tropical lagoon.

The project is being put forward by a California non-profit, the Seasteading Institute, which has raised about $US2.5 million from more than 1000 interested donors. Randolph Hencken, the group's executive director, said work on the project could start in French Polynesia as early as next year, pending the results of some environmental and economic feasibility studies.

"We have a vision that we're going to create an industry that provides floating islands to people who are threatened by rising sea levels," Hencken said.

Read the story in today’s Melbourne Age by Mike Ives - “As climate change increases, floating cities look like less of a dream.”

(The idea of floating cities probably warrants applause, but it is about treating the symptoms rather than focussing on the cause of climate change. The human intuition, initiative and resources should be expended attending to the human behaviour that worsens climate change and not addressing to the damage caused by our inappropriate actions. Floating cities are about us acquiescing to our failures – that is, admitting that the implications and complications of climate change is a problem outside our control and creating floating cities might answer on aspect of this wicked problem, but pay no heed to any other – Robert McLean)

Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries

A massive boulder on a coastal ridge in North
 Eleuthera, the Bahamas. A new research
 paper claims it was most likely moved there by
 powerful storms during the last warm period of
Earth history, 120,000 years ago, and warns
that such stormy conditions could recur
 because of human emissions of greenhouse gases

The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.

The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world’s coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.

“We’re in danger of handing young people a situation that’s out of their control,” said James E. Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who led the new research. The findings were released Tuesday morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Read The New York Times story by Justin Grillis - “Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries.”