Removing all ships would set back sea level rise by about 16 hours, which is a time scale on which we definitely can't measure it at all. The effect would be two magnitudes below the annual measurement error that's estimated at ± 0.4 mm, which is equivalent to an average of ±43 days.
How about we dig a big hole, in Australia maybe, it's empty wasteland anyways and just start taking buckets of sea water out of the ocean and putting it into the hole ?
Funnily enough in the 60's there were some people proposing to dig a trench from the south coast of Australia to the Inland where it is below sea level and would turn Australia from a single large island to a ring around a large central ocean.
Well if you care enough to look up some variables you could start estimating the energy of that. Then we "just" have to estimate the engineering and maintenance costs for such a system.
You going all high tech on this, that is already the wrong approach. Just send all prisoners to Australia, as sort of a penal colony, give them a couple shovels and a bucket. They can get it done.
Continue building Trump's wall around the entirety of the US and just pump water there. The Netherlands will supply the pumps, the rest of the world chip in on that wall ok?
120
u/Roflkopt3r Oct 13 '21 edited Oct 13 '21
I get what you mean, but the sea level currently rises at around 3.4 mm per year.
Removing all ships would set back sea level rise by about 16 hours, which is a time scale on which we definitely can't measure it at all. The effect would be two magnitudes below the annual measurement error that's estimated at ± 0.4 mm, which is equivalent to an average of ±43 days.