Big E (cont'd) – Dept. of Irony, sea-level division

@UrbanEdm makes a good point in response to my post “Big E: Will defensive engineering determine how we adapt to climate change?

I’m not sure what you’re putting out here is really a choice between Big E and not Big E. What you’re looking at is the difference between Big E on a shoestring budget in NOLA, or Big E with more money and some architectural guidance in Hamburg.
Either way, the flood defense involves plenty of engineering, and the German way was probably more profitable for the engineers. I’ve worked for both purely engineering firms, and currently for an engineering/architecture firm. In both cases the engineers are always happy to work on the more attractive projects, because that means more complex designs, which are rewarding both financially and in terms of work satisfaction.

I’m sure he’s right, especially since there is a new generation of post-Motordom engineers, used to working in partnership with urban designers, who are moving up the food chain.  Given enough time and money, they can come up with solutions that both adapt to a changing climate and provide a more livable urban environment.  The problem, though, is that they may not have enough of either – especially time.
New York Times writer Andrew Revkin summarizes some the latest (like a few days ago) thinking on sea-level rise:

A highly relevant new analysis, “Future flood losses in major coastal cities” (Nature Climate Change, Aug. 18) has come from a team led by Stéphane Hallegatte, a senior economist at the World Bank. …
“Average global flood losses in 2005 are estimated to be approximately $6 billion per year (U.S. dollars), increasing to $52 billion by 2050 with projected socio-economic change alone. …
“For the first time, this study takes into account existing coastal defenses. And we find that because of these defenses — and the way they have been designed for the current environmental conditions — the cities are very vulnerable to even moderate changes in sea level. Cities that are very well protected today are particularly vulnerable to such a change. …
“- The cities where the risk will increase most are not the cities where the risk is particularly high today (such as around the Mediterranean basin). So, cities where flood risk is not a priority today will have to take this problem seriously. And it is a challenge: one cannot see an increase in risk; what we see is the disaster when it is too late. The challenge for these cities is to do something about the increase in risk before the disaster hit. We know that this is politically difficult.”

You have to appreciate the irony: we who are modestly vulnerable in the short term may make modest changes, thinking it will secure our future, only to be disastrously surprised when our defenses fail.  “Basically, with adaptation we’re moving to a world that is better protected, and therefore more dependent on these protections, and more vulnerability to their failing.”
And that’s when the military mindset clicks in, and the resources we should have spent, the retreats we should have made, the scale of interventions which were unacceptable then and are necessary now, are overwhelmed by the need to do something, anything, immediately and without concern for the ancillary consequences.
This stuff is so annoying complex and, yes, so “politically difficult.”  No wonder we succumb to the simple and short-term.