Parts of each city will go underwater. It's not like the entire city is at a single elevation.
The first US locality which will go under is the Alaskan village of Kivalina, located on the edge of the Bering Sea. This village has 400 indigenous Inuit people. The US Army Corps of engineers built a defensive sea wall along the beach in 2008. According to them, it'll hold the water off for about 10 years... we're currently looking for a place to relocate the entire village.
As for Global Warming being natural... to an extent, I believe you're right. However, CO2 is hastening it by a lot more than just a little. It's accelerating Global Warming to at least a 1000 to 1 (in other words, for each 1000 years of natural heating, we're doing it in a single year). The ice caps melting will not enable a return. Their is only two ways to return to natural temperatures.
One is that the earth gets so hot that humans can not longer survive. This is already happening now, not in 100 or 200 years, but with the extreme out of normal days that happen each year. Articles in region summer months pop up around the globe, such as "Extreme temperatures kill another ten people in Romania" due to hypothermia.
Two is that humans change their behavior on generation of CO2. Over time, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere will decline, which will then stop the entrapment of heat. We would gradually return (over a couple of decades) back to the earth's natural temperatures. It's not as if we haven't banned Global Warming agents before. Remember "Freon" which is a name by DuPont for CFC (Chlrofluorocarbon), Hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) or Hyrdofluorocarbon (HFC)? Phase out of these started in awhile back and should totally disappear by 2020.
Since the average elevation of New Orleans is 6 feet below sea level & Miami is 6 to 23 feet above sea level Its obvious that New Orleans already won that race more than a hundred years ago.
http://www.uwec.edu/jolhm/EH3/Group7/Why...
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_ap...
every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans has to be pumped UP to the ocean , its been that way for more than a hundred years & all the land under New Orleans is still sinking at a pretty good rate.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/vi...
there is nothing natural about having 7billion people on the planet and increasing the concentration of CO2 to 400PPM. That level has not been seen in over a million years before humans were around.
you can build sea defenses, the Dutch have been at it for centuries. It's very costly and it take time to build. I would think New York or Miami are more likely to be saved than New Orleans.
New Orleans
Both at the same time.
Ha! Ha! You probably voted for President Obama, he promised to lower the seas. You should ask him.
I believe global warming is natural, though we are speeding up the process. To which the Earth will return to its natural temperatures when the ice caps melt. We are just unfortunate to build our cities on the coasts to which they will flood out. Unless you could build a massive seawall to block out the flooding. Both cities are situated on a coast and both in 100 or 200 years maybe underwater. But which do you think will go down first?
