Sea level rise:a modest proposal

[nickbarnes]

Global sea-level is forecast to rise a metre or so over the next century. In the spirit of dumb-ass geo-engineering proposals to combat global warming, we should consider the most obvious geo-engineering approach to sea-level: pump sea-water into endorheic basins (that is, areas which don't drain into the global ocean), such as the basins of the

Comments

[gareth_rees]

Problem number 1: ecological devastation. (But on the other hand, it's not clear that anything can now be done to the Aral Sea that's worse that what's already been done to it. Here's an article on the likely cost of refilling the Aral Sea with water from the Arctic basin

[nickbarnes]

This is a geoengineering proposal: obviously the ecological damage of the scheme would be negligible beside the enormous ecological side-benefits. Such as, um, increased rainfall in nearby deserts, and industries such as fishing and watersports tourism. And ponies.

[deborah_c]

Some might see ponies falling in deserts, or indeed anywhere, really, as a bad thing...

[nickbarnes]

Ha! No pony for you!

[jwburton]

The long troubled history of the Med-Dead and Red-Dead canal projects in Israel/Jordan is probably relevant. Reefs and resorts at the source, aquifers at the destination, ecosystems along the route if it's an open canal rather than a pipeline, energy costs throughout. The Israeli case is highly favorable on energy balance, and most of the plans would get partial desalination and agricultural water "free" for the Arava kibbutzim out of the potential energy drop. Most of the big basins you cite are far uphill.

The Aral is already so thoroughly wrecked from an ecological standpoint that it's hard to imagine making things worse, although we always seem to regret that handwave.

[nickbarnes]

Caspian and Eyre are downhill. Aral is about +40m. Chad is +300m. Tarim is +900m. There are others, of course. Presumably one would pick the cheapest, which is going to be some combination of altitude, distance from the sea, and land value.

[jwburton]

Also, the carbon impact of several "virtuous" hydraulic macroengineering projects would be more than offset by the only such project that has a chance of self-funding: pumping the whole of Lake Superior into Alberta to slurry out the tar sands. Any preliminary work that makes the former more feasible will also be applicable to the latter.

Cf.: All we hear about from agribusiness is how they will save the third world with GM crops that are insect- and disease-resistant, whereas in fact nearly all the research money goes into herbicide resistance. Follow the money.

[fanf]

One wacky idea I have heard of is to dig a tunnel from the Mediterranean to one of the North Sahara depressions, and use the water flow to generate electricity. If the end of the tunnel is a salt pan then I guess the ecological consequences wouldn't be too bad.

[yea_mon]

Just off the top of my head

[nickbarnes]

Salinity: endorheic basins are already really salty places. We're going to destroy their ecosystems because we're flooding them, not especially because we're flooding them with salt water

[yea_mon]

I got an area of 400,000 km2 for Tarim on Wiki, which is 400 billion square meters - so we're dealing with a factor of 3 difference.

On the subject of salinity - I was not aware of that fact. I wonder if pipe-leakage will result in salinity changes to the water tables in the areas around them?

As an aside - have you reached your 5-insurmountable items yet?

[nickbarnes]

Wiki can't decide on the area of the Tarim basin: it has two pages which disagree. Possibly the 1.2 Mkm^2 figure is the overall drainage basin, whereas the 400k figure is the central plain within the basin. I suppose we could follow the citation links, but nah