[EARTH] Pollution begins to mark its toil on Earth

Sinking Cities.

Mohamed McAstor, IGBC.

Humanity’s centuries-long history of industrial pollution is catching up to it. Recent environmental reports indicate that the sea level along world coastlines has risen two terran meters since the records we last taken before the Reaper conflict.

Due to this rise, many historical coastal cities and regions have found themselves in danger. The implementation of state-of-the-art engineering solutions in cities like Venice, New York, Amsterdam and New Orleans have avoided imminent flooding in the recent past, but a great deal of this industrial infrastructure was heavily damaged during the Reaper conflict; the extensive dam networks and drainage systems of many of these cities have been either severely damaged or completely destroyed. Kinetic barriers have been keeping the water levels relatively stable but they consume immense amounts of energy and it not feasible to keep them running for much longer. Due to the old and outdated technology used in the dams, a complete replacement of the entire system was deemed necessary, something that has slowed down the reconstruction significantly.

"The geth and other alien work teams are helping us a lot." Says one of the reconstruction workers in Bangkok "But still this is very difficult. We are making progress but weather or not we'll win the race against time is still uncertain."

Officials deny the rumors of imminent barrier failures and state that the evacuation drill are only part of the protocol.

Despite the reassurance, though, the citizens of these sinking cities live with a constant fear of drowning and are always on edge.

...guess the Reapers liked to burn the ice caps then, but two meters? Really? Did the journalist pull up a statistic from 21st century and compare it to today? I thought we had that sea rise under control by 2050's!

Sensationalist much? I was in Venice not more than a year ago when half the systems were still down and it was still mostly fine.

Not "always on edge."

Correction: Due to a calculation error in our projection software, the actual rise in water is 60 centimeters, not two meters.

...I'm sorry, I was temporarily distracted by my brain attempting to escape my skull and flee as far, far away from this article as possible.

Please.

Continue.

Oh hey, I aught to be swimming to my dockside apartment as I go back to Mombasa.
The fish are really going to stink up the foyer.

I call BS.

First, what ever the reapers burned, it would not cause a rise of temperature, the fact is with so many people killed it should be getting colder not warmer.

Second, if there was a rise of 2 meters in ~2 year time we would not be able to keep up.

Third, even if we had these innovative engineering solutions handy and could deploy them in time, we would not use them to save cities like Venice that is sparsely populated or New York which was an polluted urban hellhole before the war, then shot-up by reapers and is now little more than cadaver of an urban sprawl.

From what I can pull from the galactic codex, the 2 meter rise was a result of 21st century pollution. Drainage systems and dams well put in vulnerable populated areas to shield them off. So the problem existed for a long time before the war. The source of the danger is the extensive damage that was done to those systems and the rather difficult process of reconstructing them.

Al, they are not talking about the slow rise of water that happened during a period of decades, because that would not be news. They would not say;


But something more in line of;

Because it would hardly be a beginning, unless they believe and claim that the pollution we made back in the 21st century was completely harmless up until a few years ago. That would not make any sense. Additionally they opened with;

While they do not outright say it but there is a strong implication (in part by using the word ‘begins’ in the title) that the difference in water level is a sudden thing that happened over the course of the last couple of years, (and not over decades,) that they just noticed now (if they did notice it earlier it would once again not be news.) They would hopefully also make it clearer they were talking about the measuring that happening over a century ago, because frankly the idea that they would not measure and/or record global water levels over the course of over one century until after the war is preposterous.

I see. I suppose it does make little sense. But then again, the IGBC is know of it's sub-standard editors so I'd put the blame for the bad wording there.

On an unrelated note though, Hello Albert! :)