Giant dams enclosing North Sea could protect millions from rising waters (opens in new tab)

From the article: “A rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 is predicted, according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now. If we do nothing, this extreme dam might just be the only solution.”

Building these dams will be a lot easier than getting people to stop driving SUVs and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

“ The cost of building a so-called North Sea Enclosure Dyke, estimated at between €250bn and £500bn, amounts to barely 0.1% of the combined GDP of all the countries that would be protected by it, they calculate.”

That would mean those countries GDP is estimated at 250 to 500 trillion pounds or 320 to 645 trillion dollars

France 2.6 trillion, england 2.75 trillion, Scotland 202 billion, Netherlands 826 billion. Or about 6.4 trillion dollars per Wikipedia.

There was a similar idea for the Mediterranean sea almost 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

Edit: some grad student more recently (2014) proposed this as well: https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html

Risk distribution is very bad. You have a long dam, of which a single failure at any point means flooding a lot of land. Individual dams along the coastline will, in most cases, only affect the land behind them. Plus it's easier to fix a coastline dam than one in the middle of the sea, possibly during a storm.

I would like to see a failure analysis report.

The environmental results of such a project would be devastating, and human civilization in Europe might just be better off with a 10m rise in sea levels.

Source here: https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de-noordzee-w...

Wow ecocide in Europe for only 500 billion. It's hard to imagine a dumber idea.