Wednesday, March 28, 2007

"The future is not completely bleak for Japan, however, providing that combative measures are taken "now.""

Well I'm relieved to hear that. The justification for this not-entirely-reassuring comment is a report calculating that 30 million Japanese live within 10m (vertical) of the coast...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This from the article:

'...Estimates of global mean sea-level rise show increases of 10 of centimeters within the next century and the report is, as a result, keen to indicate how the risks to human settlements could be reduced if people and enterprises could be encouraged to move away from the most risk-prone coastal areas...'

Eh?

James Annan said...

I suspect there's a minor typo there: "10s of centimetres". But still, it doesn't add up, does it?

C W Magee said...

How many of those folks are in tsunami-prone areas? My guess is that 10 meters of tectonically-nudged water will hit parts of Japan before 10 meters of global sea level rise happens.

James Annan said...

I'd bet on a city-levelling earthquake getting them (us) first. Fuji is probably due to blow too, for that matter. Maybe we should all emigrate to the middle of Texas, or Australia, or somewhere like that. You'd probably not even notice :-)

EliRabett said...

You'd be DOA in those places anyhow, or wish that you were. Best story I know about the middle of Texas was a guy who sight unseen accepted a position at Texas A&M (he was a theoretician). Plane landed, he walked out on the roll up ramp, looked around, walked back onto the plane and left.