How High Can You Build a Seawall?

First of all, this headline that a city in America is going underwater and there's nothing we can do, every fiber of me resists that.

Plus, some solutions seem obvious to defy that projection.

Before we do anything else, let's test those.

Obvious solution one: do less climate change.

Stop the sea level rise, so we don't have to build at all.

Jesse Keenan at Tulane says yes, but we're too late to simply stop it.

You know, we could cut off all carbon emissions today, and we have hundreds of years of sea level rise baked in, uh, no doubt.

[laughs] For some time on sea level rise, yeah, we're baked in.

The world's water reacts to heat in the atmosphere on delay, which makes sense.

A pot on a stove doesn't boil immediately when you turn on the burner.

Ice cubes don't just melt when they're plopped into a drink.

It takes time.

So Jesse says the total amount things will heat up does depend on what people do in the future.

But what's currently on the stove is already enough for the coast to retreat back miles and miles past where New Orleans is.

The situation is really quite dire.

This is some of the fastest rates of sea level rise anywhere in the world.

I mean, it's, it's, it's arguably the highest or most vulnerable place in the world for sea level rise, point blank.

The paper described it as, quote, "past the point of no return." But if there's no stopping the water, then obvious solution two, build a seawall.

With great respect to what New Orleans already has, over 100 miles of levees and surge barriers to the tune of 14 billion dollars, as the seas rise, the walls will need to tower far higher and draw tighter.

And everyone I've talked to tells me the masters of that are the Dutch.

Soar over the Netherlands, where the North Sea looms hungrily over a quarter of the nation.

Holding it back, you'll spot ramparts, seawalls, sluices, dams, dikes, drainage fields, and every type of fortification you can imagine, dwarfing anything we have in the US.

They started building in ancient history.

Medieval denizens walled off the water for free land.

But floods routinely caused mass disaster.