Comment by foobar__
8 years ago
Interestingly, the official website doesn't mention climate change at all, as far as I can see [1].
Instead, it claims that the purpose of the tunnels is to protect the areas surrounding some smaller rivers upstream of Tokyo, which are on flood plains and regularly used to get flooded (no climate change required, just regular rain season/typhoon does this). Now due to urban sprawl more people want to live there, exacerbating the problem and creating the need for this system.
I do not doubt that climate change is happening. I just don't like articles with such a clear agenda in the background, especially when the official sources contradict the statements.
[1] http://www.ktr.mlit.go.jp/edogawa/gaikaku/intro/01intro/inde...
(Please correct me if I'm wrong or I missed something.)
Also too, of course you should build your "prevent floods from wrecking our shit" system to handle floods "beyond anything we've seen before". Building it to handle less than what you've seen before would be stupid.
> Building it to handle less than what you've seen before would be stupid.
Let me tell a second hand anecdote of a Burmese village.
It was a rather small collection of huts raised on tall poles. But it was a village none the less.
All paths in the village were laid out with a connected mass of wood. Along the path were sticks, rising pretty high up in the air. Somewhere along the top of the sticks were a lot of cuts made out in the wood, at various heights. By a knife or so.
In the dry season, this path laid on the ground to be walked on. You didn't have to walk on it of course, since the surrounding dirt was dry.
In the wet season however, floods often came. And so, they raised the path up along the sticks so that it became a water bridge for when floods came. They raised it to the level of the highest cuts that were made in the sticks. A very reasonable thing to do, in order to connect the village in times of crisis, without using boats.
Interestingly, however was the background of the cuts. Each cut represented a water height that had some time ago been the highest the flood had become. So each season, they only raised the water bridge to the level of the worst flood they had experienced.
They did not have a margin.
While they didn't prepare for less than what they had previously seen, they only prepared for the worst flood in history, and not the worst flood in history + a margin.
Probably going over the margin would be a matter of wet feet and moving some bamboo which wouldn't be as big a deal as flooding Tokyo.
Were the flood waters raging? Or placid?
Did they have room on the uprights to tie the cross members higher? Maybe the flood water held the wood up (buoyancy) and the uprights were there as anchors.
How did they raise the wood? I imagine it weighed a lot.
Interesting story. Never knew that and I am a Burmese.
That isn't entirely true. How much is it worth to upgrade from a "once every 500 years" system to a "once every 5000 years" system? If it's more than the expected damages...
Well if my country floods its all over, considering we're under sea level the water may never leave.
And I can imagine Japan doesn't want to risk Tokio.
When you start talking truly cataclysmic events, the value of the physical infrastructure at risk will be dwarfed by the human lives. In 2016, the assessed value of all real estate in Manhattan crossed the $1 trillion threshold (which of course leaves out the bridges, the subways, the personal property...) At a value of $9.1 million / life, there are $77.7 trillion worth of humans in New York City.
If there's a natural disaster which would wipe out the population of New York once every 5000 years, we should be willing to spend $15 billion per year to prevent it.
This official interview mentions the intended purpose and use over time.
https://www.travel.co.jp/guide/article/5796/
To protect from climate change and the increased risk of flooding.
Because the reason is building codes, cutting green areas. Flooding is almost always related to changes upriver. Storms and climate change related water level rises are a danger, but not the main reason.
Isn't it an agenda to call the consensus reality an "agenda"? I'm not being facetious, but that discourse has fallen the point where simple statements of reality are politicized has dumbed the entire discourse.
I can only speak for myself, but analogously, I have no disagreement when the anti-vaccination contingent paints the rest of us as having an "agenda" when we post stories about horrible flu outbreaks. Herd immunity and total extinction of certain viruses are definitely an "agenda" I will own up to supporting.
Calling it a consensus reality is also showing an agenda - trying to make it sound more certain than it is, which is to push the agenda of saving people from possible harm of future climate change by fooling them into believing it's certain because they're not competent enough to assess the risk of uncertain things. I'm not complaining about trying to do good, but it's not science, it's belief and it might be wrong.
The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently because people don't care if the general public believes it or not. If you're interested in understanding, not politicizing, then it doesn't matter if there's a consensus or not. Look at the history of consensuses about how nature works to see how unhelpful they are at determining what reality is.
> The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently
Um what? I feel like you haven't spent 10 minutes in a physics class. As someone who spent many years studying physics, you have to get within range of the quantum level before people in that field start feeling a little shaky in their beliefs.
The history of consensuses? Yes, please, you should do that, because it has gotten us quite far given the constraints of time. There are so many crackpot ideas that are thankfully rarely explored due to consensus.
12 replies →
How uncertain should man-made global warming sound, in your opinion? You're speaking in gross generalities, perhaps getting some hard numbers. What I've read is that nearly 100% of publishing researchers in the area agree on it (high 90's).
...Actually, it's 97%. I found the paper, which describes the data set and their methodology: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048...
4 replies →
That there is a scientific consensus is not an agenda, it's a fact.
>Interestingly, the official website doesn't mention climate change at all, as far as I can see
The facts are true, the news is fake.