Even Hans Brinker Won't Be Enough

Back when heroes didn't have super-powers, a favorite children's story was about the little Dutch boy, Hans Brinker, who saved the town by putting his finger in the dike. Nowadays saving the Netherlands from rising seas involves expert engineering and vast expenditure of resources.

Headline: Dutch reinvent critical dike as seas rise, climate changes

The Afsluitdijk is 20 miles
long. (Wikipedia)

Engineers are strengthening the Afsluitdijk, including laying thousands of custom-made concrete blocks and raising parts of it....Engineers built a scale model of a cross section of the Afsluitdijk in the tank and are pounding it with waves that they say should occur only once every 10,000 years. The goal is to make sure the new design can survive the destructive power of such a storm.

The government has earmarked nearly $20 billion to fund such projects for the period from 2020-2033.

$20 billion is the equivalent of $460 billion to the United States, which has an economy 23 times the size of the Netherlands. The Dutch are devoting a huge portion of their resources to defenses against rising seas; one doesn’t need to buy into all the tenets of climate change to take action when one’s survival is at stake.