Louisiana and Florida are just as vulnerable.
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And regrettably, damn few people are doing anything about it. The measures the US is taking are half-assed at best.
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As is my home city, but I was responding to the question of would losing Venice prompt the US to action. Given recent history, I’d say losing NO to flooding again would still result in nothing. For some reason we’d rather rebuild than prevent. Witness how the Feds will rebuild homes lost to coastal flooding again and again and again.
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This is indeed really strange. Sooner or later reality will catch up I guess, rebuilding won’t work forever.
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Not to mention the Vandals…
I read it as 70% of the part of Venice not normally underwater.
Which sounds like a lot, so perhaps I’m wrong. From what I remember of the public flood maps, not a huge amount of the city suffers from typical acqua altas, but it’s the prominent areas.
Well, we could raise the whole city. We have done it before:
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And Rio de Janeiro.
And Osaka.
And Manhattan.
And Miami.
And Shanghai.
And… oh… hell… you know:
(Bless The Guardian with their geeky horrifying interactive maps.)
New York Times, looking for the angle, huh?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/climate/mapping-future-climate-risk.html
Holy crap Jakarta is actually sinking. When did that start?
That city is massive: >10 million residents. Ouch!
FTR:
In 2018, 260,897 people resided in Comune di Venezia , of whom around 55,000 live in the historic city of Venice ( Centro storico ). Together with Padua and Treviso, the city is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), with a total population of 2.6 million.
Not to diminish the suffering of the Venetians, of course.
Obligatory, and don’t think the accompanying text here is lost on me, metaphorically:
https://shop.pbs.org/climate-change-mug/product/CLCM501
“Add hot water and watch sea levels rise. Let things cool off and the coastlines return.”
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Well, no cars on the main tourist island.
And yet, without engineering most of The Netherlands would be under water. Stealing back the land from the sea can be done. It just takes a LOT of public effort, ahem, I mean money.
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The problem with Venice is that they don’t build reliable foundations. I was there two years ago and saw new pilings which were just raw tree trunks whacked into the mud. Most buildings in Venice are out of square because they sink selectively towards the little canals. In that direction there is nothing to hold them up.
In my two days there I saw three tilting bell towers which would be pulled down in any sane environment (just in Venice alone). They seem content to rake in the tourist dollars while waiting for a major disaster.
Stealing back the land from the sea can be done. It just takes a LOT of public effort, ahem, I mean money.
Yeah and the will to take the long view. The dutch have that. I don’t think the italians do.
Yeah, well, they print a lot of stories on sea level rise. Not all of them have to cover the same angle.
And frankly, that sort of information is useful for more than just land speculation.
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Oddly enough they’ve been building that way for a while and most of the buildings are still up.
There is a reason they do it that way.
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Monument at the Oosterscheldekering (Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier). The inscription translates as “here, the tide is controlled by the Moon, the wind and us”
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I thought that this was between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas?
This news story reminded me of one of my favourite symbolist paintings, “The Abandoned City” by Fernand Khnopff. A very enervated apocalypse.
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Hey, he doesn’t need anybody’s help!
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Probably a few years before Amsterdam 
.
I have heard pessimistic (but not unrealistic) predictions that Amsterdam will be underwater in 30(*) years, so before that.
(*)Probably it will still be dry, but Holland will be broke.
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I hadn’t considered that, thanks. /s
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Update: I particularly like the phrase “wax fat and brutal” … it has a rich Melvillean tone.
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Lagoon press! The Venetians never mention that they were the ones who bribed religious fanatics to effectively destroy the last of the Roman Empire.
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