Louisiana is shrinking as Climate Change softens up the already-vulnerable Gulf coast

[Igel]

2. The problem is NOLA.

To prevent flooding, levees and channels were built. Channels are dredged to prevent silting.

The land's been subsiding for millennia. It's just that the Mississippi's always provided muck to raise the level of the marshes during floods. Until it was necessary to protect NOLA.

You can have one or the other.

More recently--as in "during much of the 20th century"--it's become recognized that the Mississippi is ready to change its channel entirely. One or two decent floods and the Mississippi would no longer flow through New Orleans. It's changed its channel regularly over the millennia. But because of NOLA, it can't be allowed to change.

The climatologist's wording is chosen very carefully. We're seeing not the results of climate change but the *implications* of climate change. The difference is that NOLA and the wetlands around it are set up to demonstrate how climate change will affect coastal regions--the entire process is playing out in an accelerated way. The primary problem still isn't rising sea levels or increased hurricane activity. The primary problem is still what the CoE and others have done to protect, at the sacrifice of the Mississippi Delta, NOLA.