It is true that this warming cycle that we are presently going through is causing massive amounts of ice in our polar ice caps to melt (think Arctic Ocean, Greenland, and Antarctica), leading to potential rises in our sea levels, an event that has the potential to flood many of our coastal cities around the world. But let’s say that in the near future that we develop the technology to keep our sea levels from rising, despite the increasing amount of water coming into them from our melting ice caps. If we could keep sea levels under control, we could arguably use this to our advantage.
If you listen to some people, they are alarmists. They say that we are now in a “climate emergency,” and that we only have a few years left to stop a global catastrophe from happening. Sea levels will rise really fast, they say, and we will basically drown all of the hundreds of cities along all of the coastlines of the world by the rising sea levels, rendering hundreds of millions of people, or even billions of people, homeless, forcing them to move inland.
They coined a term for these people: climate refugees. They say things like “Boy, we are on the cusps of a refugee crisis unlike anything in human history! We really need to get this thing under control so that we can keep sea levels from rising so fast. We need to think fast, act fast, no holds barred, with no consideration for individual freedoms and liberties, as these values need to take a back seat to human survival.” Of course, all of this is despite the fact that scientists have concluded that sea levels are not rising all that fast at all – as I talked about in another article in this series on climate change.
So, my question to you is this: if we could control our sea levels, so that they don’t rise, could we work with that? And if we get sea levels under control, the only other thing we would need to worry about is increasing global temperatures. So, another way to ask this question is: if the only thing we have to worry about is increasing global temperatures, since we no longer have to worry about rising sea levels, could we work with that?
I would argue that, yes, we could work with that. If all we have to worry about is rising temperatures, we could, in fact, work with that. We could use that to our advantage. In fact, we could use that not only to our advantage, but use it to improve plant life on the planet. I talk more about how we do these things in the article Using Carbon Dioxide to Earth’s and Our Benefits. For now, just stay tuned and keep reading.
How Do We Control Sea Levels?
Of course, all of this begs a question. “Ok, Ryan, controlling sea levels despite melting polar ice caps. Sounds like crazy talk. How would we go about doing that?”
I don’t have all the answers, but I can surmise how this would work. Perhaps we develop the technology to break down water to produce energy and use the ocean water for our energy needs on a large scale across the face of our planet. Maybe we develop the technology to efficiently extract minerals from the sea water on a large scale to use for a multitude of purposes, such as for steel production or producing the components needed for manufacturing electronics. Or perhaps we’re taking large amounts of sea water off-planet for a massive terraforming project on Mars for future colonization.
Heck, while we’re at it, maybe we can go even farther and can lower sea levels by 1 foot or 30 centimeters per year, and do that for a while, and eventually have a sea level that’s 10 feet or 50 feet lower than it is now. Or perhaps we can go even further, keeping it up for a few centuries, lowering sea levels by 350 or 400 feet, thus allowing most of the world’s continental shelves to be above sea level, which would open up large amounts of new land for settlement, population growth, and increasing land-based ecosystems. Maybe you think I’m talking crazy talk, but I honestly believe that we humans are intelligent, and we can solve any problems thrown at us, if only we put our minds to solving those problems.
So, if we could keep our sea levels from rising, or even slowly lower our sea levels over time, so that we would only have to deal with increasing global temperatures, and not have to worry about sea level rise, could we live with it and use it to our advantage? Yes, I think we could.
