Findings ignore how river valley works

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, July 26, 2007

I was disappointed with the sensationalism of the Wednesday article that by 2100 sea levels will rise and eliminate hundreds of acres of habitat for salmon and erase beaches.

The researchers clearly have no clue how a river valley works. If the sea does come up 27 inches as they predict, the river will flood hundreds of new acres upstream, creating new salmon habitat and new beaches, as not all of the river is diked.

This process will be dynamic, and take a long time when measured in a human lifespan. The new “delta” will be further upstream and may even be more productive. If appears the study only looked at a small piece of the river system, but to anyone who has seen a flood, one knows the river goes where it wants.

With the river 27 inches higher than today and with higher levels of salt water many (all?) of the diked lands will be too wet to farm. When that happens, dikes will be removed or breached and there will be many more thousands of acres of wetlands in 2100 than today. This seems like another in a long list of global warming scare tactics.

Curt Young

Snohomish