In no sense promoting climate denialism this part of the world has been dealing with sea level rise and storm surges for a long time. London too: the south east is sinking under both geology and water table shifts apart from sea level rise, and geotechnical engineering for the London barrage is not new. Nor in Venice.<p>What I might take from this is a sense of optimism about point problems, places which can build dykes and sea walls and gates will make adjustments for the next period but some places like parts of the US eastern seaboard are intractable at a price the US economy wants to pay, or Bangladesh which has hundreds of millions of people at risk in a delta floodplain.