Maybe you should try to open an elevation sign business.
The biggest expense will be throwing away our freedoms so some bureaucrat can protect us from phantom catastrophes like sea level rise. I suspect you haven't really noticed any rise in the sea level, you just heard it from someone that was trying to scare you. The sea hasn't risen noticeably since your grandmother was a little girl. In spite of the rhetoric, there is no reason for it to rise now. There hasn't been any real warming since you were born, presumably, or I should say no net warming on the surface or anywhere else IMO. Just a bunch of hype from people with a political agenda. Most of those aren't even aware enough to realize it is all about the agenda. Some really think there is a significant threat.
Note: Dook actually makes a good point for once. The signs should be still be good for a few hundred years at the recent rate of sea level rise.
It may come as a surprise but all elevations are now measured relative to a new sea-level.
Prior to 1991 all elevations in North America were measured relative to something called the National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929, also known by the catchy title of NVGD29; since then they’ve been measured relative to the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 or NAVD88.
The old datum was calculated as an average of 26 tidal gauges in the US and Canada but the new one uses just a single reference point, namely the mean sea-level at Rimouski in Quebec.
Because sea-levels vary from place to place there is always going to be an error when stating a particular elevation. The elevation as stated on town entrance signs will be an approximation.
Further, the elevations on signs would normally refer to the datum point on the focal building, this could be somewhere such as a City Hall, in the absence of such a building it could be a church. These datum points are not at ground level, they’re usually about 18 inches above the ground.
The thing about elevations is that they exist primarily for surveying purposes and when surveying an area you don’t need to know the actual elevation, all you need is one elevation against which all surveys will be measured.
Thus, across a surveyed area all elevations will be correct in their relationship to each other but they could all contain the same error. For example, two points on a survey may be given as 400m and 450m, the difference between the two heights will be exactly 50m but their true elevations could be 398m and 448m.
That's funny. Very few towns are perfectly flat anyway, so what it says on the sign hardly matters. The place where I live is about 2000 feet higher on the east side of town than on the west, so the change in sea level is hundreds of times less than the difference due to sign positioning.
Not necessarily!
Some towns like mine are more progressive & put their signs on ratcheting posts.
I'm the official Washington town ratchet & my job is to go to the edge of town every 8 or 9 years & click the posts up one notch.
The salary is only average but as with any government job the side benefits & retirement plan are GREAT & no one notices if I'm a year or 2 late performing my duty's.
I'm nearing full retirement age now,but following standard government patronage practice I'm training a close relative to take over the town ratchet job so theres no need to worry. The city limit signs will always be visible from your boat in the future.
Most posted elevations are only accurate to within one or two feet. Most signs are going to be in the rounding error zone for quite a few years to come without need of any updates, and the eventual cost of replacing road signs will be somewhere in the range of 0.000001% of the total costs of global warming, by any reasonable projection.
Since there has been no rise in the sea level since we began measuring,Its unlikely we will need to make any changes
I think I'm starting to see how expensive global warming is going to be.
