From the article: “A rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 is predicted, according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now. If we do nothing, this extreme dam might just be the only solution.”<p>Building these dams will be a lot easier than getting people to stop driving SUVs and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
The environmental results of such a project would be devastating, and human civilization in Europe might just be better off with a 10m rise in sea levels.
“ The cost of building a so-called North Sea Enclosure Dyke, estimated at between €250bn and £500bn, amounts to barely 0.1% of the combined GDP of all the countries that would be protected by it, they calculate.”<p>That would mean those countries GDP is estimated at 250 to 500 trillion pounds or 320 to 645 trillion dollars<p>France 2.6 trillion, england 2.75 trillion, Scotland 202 billion, Netherlands 826 billion. Or about 6.4 trillion dollars per Wikipedia.
There was a similar idea for the Mediterranean sea almost 100 years ago:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa</a><p>Edit: some grad student more recently (2014) proposed this as well:
<a href="https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html</a>
Risk distribution is very bad. You have a long dam, of which a single failure at any point means flooding a lot of land. Individual dams along the coastline will, in most cases, only affect the land behind them. Plus it's easier to fix a coastline dam than one in the middle of the sea, possibly during a storm.