Seas are rising too fast to save much of the Mississippi River Delta, scientists say

The state of Louisiana is proceeding with ambitious plans to redirect the Mississippi River and rebuild some of its rapidly vanishing wetlands — but even this massive intervention may not be enough to save the most threatened lands from fast rising seas, scientists concluded in a study published Wednesday.

This amplified color mosaic shows the Mississippi Delta in 2014. 

The study uses a methodology called “optical dating” to study how the river built an area called the Lafourche subdelta in coastal Louisiana, where the Mississippi dumped loads of sediment as much as 600 years ago, when it changed paths. The technology lets scientists identify the last time that long-buried sand was exposed to sunlight and, therefore, determine the rate at which the river naturally built up land by carrying sediment downstream.

“What we found was that, on average, it produced somewhere between 6 and 8 square kilometers of land per year, and the shoreline migrated seaward by somewhere between 100 and 150 meters per year,” said Torbjorn Tornqvist, a Tulane University geologist who was one of the study’s authors. “Those numbers in themselves I find pretty impressive.”

Read Chris Mooney’s story from The Washington Post - “Seas are rising too fast to save much of the Mississippi River Delta, scientists say.”

Off to Munich for the International Passivhaus Conference

We have to rebuild our cities to use less energy and house more people, and Passivhaus design is a useful tool for both problems.

The Passive House (Passivhaus) will be discussed
at an international conference in Munich.

Starting on Friday, the leaders of the Passive House movement around the world are meeting in Munich for the International Passive House conference. Passive House, or Passivhaus, is probably the toughest energy efficiency standard anywhere; houses that meet the standard have super insulation, minimal thermal bridging, high quality windows and controlled ventilation. They are comfortable to live in and cost almost nothing to heat and cool.

I am a huge fan of Passive House, and am attending the conference in Munich, but I am increasingly convinced that it simply isn't enough anymore. Because what is really driving our energy consumption these days is transportation, where we are going backwards. It's sprawl, and it's the form of our housing. It is how we get between our houses and where we work or shop. Passivhaus can be applied to any kind of building, but expensive single family designs out in the country are not going to move the needle on our problems.

Read the TreeHugger story by Lloyd Alter - “Off to Munich for the International Passivhaus Conference.”

The Great Flood - Chris Hedges

How many times will we rebuild Florida’s cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point, surveying the devastation and knowing more is inevitable, will we walk away, leaving behind vast coastal dead zones? Will we retreat even further into magical thinking to cope with the fury we have unleashed from the natural world? Or will we respond rationally and radically alter our relationship to this earth that gives us life?

"People walk down a flooded street as they evacuate their homes
after the area was inundated with flooding from Hurricane Harvey
 on August 28, 2017 in Houston, Texas." 

Civilizations over the past 6,000 years have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are probably not an exception. The physical ruins of these empires, including the Mesopotamian, Roman, Mayan and Indus, litter the earth. They elevated, during acute distress, inept and corrupt leaders who channeled anger, fear and dwindling resources into self-defeating wars and vast building projects. The ruling oligarchs, driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds—the Forbidden City, Versailles—and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty. The worse it got, the more the people lied to themselves and the more they wanted to be lied to. Reality was too painful to confront. They retreated into what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promised the return of the lost world through magical beliefs.

“The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present,” philosopher and psychologist William James wrote, “and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”

Read the Common Dreams story by Chris Hedges - “The Great Flood.”.”