They did purposefully built the city in an existing coastal wetland. But that’s not a uniquely Venetian thing
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They did actually. Way back in the fifth century the Huns were razing what is now northern Italy, destroying several cities in the area. Refugees fled into the swampy lagoon to escape being murdered or worse, and built the beginnings of Venice on some swampy islands where a large army couldn’t reach them. It worked very well for them until we started fucking with the climate.
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Right, which is what made it the best location, not the worst.
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Not really. Safety is nice but it came at the cost of flooding, disease (malaria) and lack of space to build.
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Sure, blame my ancestors. What about all the good things the Huns did? Fake News! Eleventy!
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What about all the good things the Huns did?
You mean besides the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health, and peace?
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The Huns are a people that seem to fill only one role in history, that of destroyers. They appear from the eastern steppe, pushing the inhabitants ahead of them into Europe. They defeat a bunch of Romans, barbarians and generally everyone that they meet. Attila comes along, plunders most of Europe again, gets bought off by a pope to avoid (another) sack of Rome. They wander around a bit longer and then vanish into the mess of people that is the Great Migration. They’re probably in some way the ancestors of most Europeans today, which does explain a lot…
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When New Orleans was completely out of control, that was a temporary condition. “We” got the city back. (For a while anyway).
This flooding is likely temporary as well, I doubt very many citizens are saying to themselves, “1.5 meters? Time to evacuate to the mainland!”.
The dark thought that occurred to me, though, was, "What if we lost Venice for good, everyone leaves and it becomes a ghost town. And what if that cultural jolt were sufficient to get the rest of the (USia) world to wake up and take global warming seriously, as in, existential threat, invading army at our doorstep seriously?
If that were the price, and if that were enough, I’d be happy. Unfortunately by the time Venice does become a ghost town, everyone else will be too busy with problems of our own to give it much notice.
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That 70% figure doesn’t tell us much without knowing how much of it is normally underwater.
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Looks just like Manhattan in '34!
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Just FTR: the Venetians (and their neighbours) fucked with local and even regional climate long before global warming was even a thing. They basically cut down everything larger than 20 cm diameter - first in the Adriatic area, and then everywhere in the Mediterranean basin - for their fleet and their city.
As far as I know, until Venice became the Mediterranean superpower, the Dalmatian coast was rather green. And the effect of trees should not be underestimated…
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That’s the European perspective on them, enshrined in medieval literature like the Niebelungenlied. A bit one-sided, maybe.
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Problem is that while history is written by the winners, the Huns didn’t really write anything down. So in this case it got written by the people that suffered at their hands.
To be fair, every major naval power in the age of sail did this. Ireland got deforested to build English fleets. My ancestors built a merchant empire on Baltic forests, and so on.
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I take it you’ve never done any reading on either the US civil war or the eastern front during WW2 then?
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This is the season when the gondolas wax fat and brutal as their hunting grounds pour over into thoroughfares that habit fills with unwary prey; right?
Because I’m pretty sure that’s a thing.
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We lost a whole island earlier this month:
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venice is like a canary in a coal mine, Other cities will flood too.
from this story
A few weeks ago, as the IPCC report loomed, I had lunch with a prominent climate scientist who’d been involved in earlier reports and has done considerable work on local preparedness as well. I asked if he thought New York would eventually build a sea wall or surge barrier to protect the city from sea-level rise and flooding. Yes, he said, Manhattan will be protected, at any cost. But major infrastructure projects like these take decades — typically about 30 years. Even if we began building today, he said, the barrier would not be finished in time to save Howard Beach and other parts of southern Queens and Brooklyn. Soon enough, he said, you’ll see the city adjust accordingly — halting new infrastructure projects there, eventually pulling back from even quotidian maintenance like sewer repairs and generally signaling to current residents that they will not be able to leave behind their homes, when they die, to their children. And of course a sea wall to protect New York only encloses the narrows of New York Harbor, leaving all of Long Island exposed.
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Building such defenses is not going to work in the long run anyway. The current Dutch coast will hold as it is until the end of the century, give or take a few years. But once sea level rise goes beyond 2 meters we’ll have to replace everything and if it reaches about 4 meters the utility of higher and higher walls becomes questionable. Beyond say 6 meters the best option is to give up and retreat. This will not happen in our lifetime but it’s a possibility in a century or two.
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Well, this is quite the “cheery” thread; I must say…
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Another country might as well be on another planet for most Americans. Tens of billions lost to Sandy was not enough to spur any serious action to prevent the next one like those gates on the Venetian lagoon or in the Netherlands, to say nothing of actually combating global warming. There are Americans fighting tooth and nail for us to burn MORE carbon!
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