Matthew Henty

In Edge 298, an outline by Stewart Brand of his, “Egopragmatist Manifesto”. A good read, and some interesting points. Nuclear is green, greener than gas and coal certainly, and perhaps greener than leveling square kilometers of virgin desert in the name of energy production or building huge numbers of windmills. And cities are green, very green:

We now have over half the world living in cities. In terms of footprint this uses about 2.8 percent of the ice-free land area of the world. Pretty soon you will have 70-80 percent of the world living in cities. By then we might be up to three percent of the land area, which means that all the places that people move out of and they stop burning the wood for firewood and stoves and heating and so on. The woods come back. They stop killing the animals for bush meat. The animals come back. They stop drawing out of the ground and the aquifers come back. All of this happens as a byproduct of moving away from the country and moving into the city. So cities are pretty green.

A good story, but where are these cities going to be? The list of the biggest current cities on Wikipedia is here, and the ones that are likely to grow are in East Asia, Central and South America and Africa.

I have also just read Flood by Stephen Baxter (a good, quick, read, generally nicely plotted, but drags a bit too much at the end and not too sure about many of the characters) and it got me thinking about the predicted sea level rise resulting from climate change (rather than huge undersea resorvoirs!). The central IPCC estimate seems to be 18-59cm by the end of the 21st century. But beyond that, Wikipedia has this list of possible big sea level events:

If small glaciers and polar ice caps on the margins of Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula melt, the projected rise in sea level will be around 0.5 m. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise, and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise.^[12] The collapse of the grounded interior reservoir of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level by 5-6 m.^[13]

Clearly the big one would be the Antarctic ice sheet, leading to a big, big rise. What would that do to the geography of the world? What would that do to the 70-80 per cent of the worlds population, many of them in these big, big cities? Well, Mumbai is 14m above sea level, Shanghai 4m, Karachi 8m, Delhi 239m, Istanbul 100m, Sao Paulo 760m.

Some of the biggest cities will be first in the flooding line (incidentally, London is 24m above sea level) and some should be immune from anything but the most catstrophic science fiction scenario. That is still many people a bit too close to the sea for comfort.

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• Via Henry Porter, bouncers and security guards in Norfolk have been given the power to issue on the spot fines: http://bit.ly/sk1J5 #
• RT @harrym: Ernest Marples needs your help to free the postcodes! http://is.gd/1RsZj (Please RT!) (via @brianhoadley) #
• Are you ready for the Hide & Seek weekend at the Royal Festival Hall http://bit.ly/tyuON (via @LDN) #
• Wells Fargo Bank sues itself- http://is.gd/1SNz4 (Catching up on some old Charlie Stross blogging- http://is.gd/1SNCd) #
• Boring, boring non-story about the met office "BBQ summer" forecast is taking up way too much of the BBC six o'clock news. #
• @babsmarsh is that a tweet I spy there? Welcome… #
• RT: @SHARECommunity is looking for a volunteer fundraising intern – check it out http://bit.ly/LMdTc #
• The opticians has got a lot higher tech since the last time I was here: cameras and computers. Very cutting edge circa 2002. #
• But the dentist never, ever changes. #
• I'm really enjoying the serialisation of @doctorow new novel Makers – Index: http://tinyurl.com/lbrdzf #
• RT @neillyneil: In spite of comments my Twitter strategy is overlong, nobody has suggested what to cut. Ideas welcome. (me: gd Q, cut none) #
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