Drone shot of California coast. Eric Cheng via The Nature Conservancy

Melting glacier. Photo via NOAA.

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Pacifica coast. Photo by Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia Commons



A slow-moving emergency is lapping at California’s shores— climate-driven sea-level rise that experts now predict could elevate the water in coastal areas up to 10 feet in just 70 years, gobbling up beachfront and overwhelming low-lying cities.

The speed with which polar ice is melting and glacier shelves are cracking off indicates to some scientists that once-unthinkable outer-range projections of sea rise may turn out to be too conservative. A knee-buckling new state-commissioned report warns that if nothing changes, California’s coastal waters will rise at a rate 30 to 40 times faster than in the last century.

The potential result: crippled economies, compromised public safety, submerged infrastructure, and a forced retreat from our iconic Pacific coast.

No state has done more than California to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and sea-level rise. But experts say that even if carbon reductions continue, residual warming of the ocean will continue unchecked, breeding surges that will re-shape the state’s coast and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Last month the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that without intervention, as much as 67 percent of Southern California’s beaches could be lost to rising seas by the end of the century.

Check sea level rise in your neighborhood. Interactive courtesy of Climate Central

A consensus of scientific research makes catastrophic projections that, in the worst case, will be reality by the end of this century:

• Malibu’s Broad Beach will dwindle into a seldom-seen slice of sand, its name an oxymoron.

• Power plants and nuclear waste sites, such as San Onofre, need to be fortified.

• Roads, bridges and railways along the coast from Mendocino to San Diego will be abandoned and relocated inland.

• San Francisco’s Embarcadero and low-lying cities, such as Huntington Beach and Santa Monica, will flood more frequently and more severely.

• More than 42,000 homes in California will be under water—not merely flooded, but with seawater over roofs.

The grim outlook is mirrored in the latest report, which was presented April 26 by the state’s Ocean Protection Council. Its sea-level rise projections will assist state agencies and local governments with planning.

No stretch of the state’s 3,400 miles of coast, bays, inlets and islands will be spared. Addressing sea-level rise will cost a staggering amount of public and private money, and will particularly impact the poor and vulnerable. The problem becomes more urgent with much of California’s wealth huddled along the coast, supporting an ocean-dependent $44 billion economy.

In the end, state and local officials may come to the gut-wrenching conclusion that some coastal land should be simply abandoned.

“We’re not doing well at all,” said Democratic Assemblyman Mark Stone, chairman of the Select Committee on Coastal Protection and Access to Natural Resources. “We have yet to really start to answer the hard questions and make policy—saying, ‘No, we are not going to put public money here.’ Eventually we should get to the point that we are not going to do any public investment in those places any more.”

Most scientists tread lightly in the policy realm, providing information for others to craft into regulations. Not Bill Patzert, who for years has sounded the alarm about rising oceans.

“It’s not an existential threat. It’s real. It’s gonna happen,” said Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Here’s the bigger issue: If you’re in the tunnel and you see the train coming at you, what do you do? Do you race towards it or do you back out? It’s just common sense. As a society, why aren’t we doing that?”

Watching the horror

From deep in the hive of large brains at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set hard against the San Gabriel Mountains, an intense group of scientists from Caltech and the NASA are harnessing satellites that for decades have been peering into space and are now directing their gaze to Earth.

The researchers—with advanced degrees in physics, mathematics and oceanography—are engaged in what many consider to be the critical research of our time.

They are watching ice melt.

Sitting alone in a cubicle, bathed in the glow of a computer screen or staring down the barrel of a telescope, can be a balm for scientists. Concerning themselves with one finite slice of a planet-wide catastrophe allows them to compartmentalize and disengage from the entire sobering picture.

But even professional detachment fails against the unfolding horror show depicted in the cold display of satellite imagery.

An enormous iceberg—described as towering over the waves like an ice colossus—is floating past Newfoundland.

“We are in the process of watching the ice sheet in Greenland disappear,” said the lab’s oceanographer Josh Willis, who leads a team studying Greenland. “This is the first time humans have been able to measure it. The last time it was shrinking at this rate was tens of thousands of years ago.”

The reduction of Greenland’s ice mass has been accelerating, losing a trillion tons in the last four years. The rapid melting is getting the attention of scientists because locked away in the Greenland ice sheet is the possibility to raise global sea levels by 24 feet. The Antarctic holds 187 feet of potential ice melt. Polar ice loss on that scale would have unfathomable consequences for continued life on earth.

Willis uses satellites to measure the warmth of the waters around Greenland. Because he has a sense of humor, his project is known to all as OMG: Oceans Melting Greenland. (He preferred calling it Water Temperature Fjords, but couldn’t get the acronym past government sensibilities.)

“As scientists, we’re witnessing these huge events, and it’s telling us how the Earth is changing,” he said. “Of course, I’m also a citizen, I live on this planet, and it is worrying that it’s happening. It’s sometimes profoundly shocking to wake up and realize we’re reshaping our entire planet.”

Understanding the threat of sea-level rise in California depends to some extent on where you are standing: Boots in the dust of the Central Valley and you might curse the lateness of a rail shipment held up by flooding at the port of Oakland; bare feet in the sand at Huntington Beach and you may have to consider relocating your family, your home and all your possessions.

Some simple math: Every inch of sea-level rise equates to an 8- to 10-feet loss of beach. So, using the conservative projection of a 4-foot rise, and the lower-end 8-foot-per inch formula, that equates to 384 feet of coastal beach loss in the next 70 years.

The 10-foot rise scenario, which scientists peg as the new worst-case, would cause a land loss of 800 feet—the length of two-and-a-half football fields. The sea will not rise the same amount in every place; scientists say each discrete elevation is dependent on factors such as the shape of the sea floor and the slope of the landfall.

Considering the scope of this coming catastrophe, it does not appear to be front-of-mind to many in the state. But that doesn’t mean it’s gone unstudied. California has a peerless capacity to turn over problems until they are smooth and shiny. Understanding comes first, with action often a distant and expensive second.

A tour through recent scientific analyses:

A 2009 report on sea-level rise commissioned by the state paints worst-case scenarios that are the stuff of disaster movies: A half-million Californians at risk of flooding and more than $100 billion worth of infrastructure. More than two dozen coastal power plants flooded, along with hundreds of hazardous waste facilities, as well as schools, hospitals, police stations, ports and major airports.

A 2012 report prepared for the California Energy Commission focused just on the San Francisco Bay and its 1,000 miles of shoreline, concluding: “Rising sea levels will overwhelm the existing protection structures, putting the 140,000 people currently living in vulnerable areas at increased risk.” The authors cautioned their findings did not reflect worst-case scenarios. And, if no action is taken to address the vulnerabilities, the risk projections should be considered “substantially low.”

The California Assembly weighed in with a report in 2014, and the next year the Senate chimed in with its own review, amping it up a bit: “With current projections, rising seas combined with a 100-year flood event would close over 2,000 miles of roadway, the Oakland and San Francisco airports, and the Port of Oakland.”

The sobering fact of those state-of-the-art reports, recent though they are, is that they are already out of date and not nearly comprehensive enough in describing the scope of what currently faces California. Nor remotely scary enough.

What scientists are observing now is, they say, a rapid and steep change that, even as it unfolds over comparatively long periods of time, is nonetheless occurring at a breathtaking pace.

High rent catastrophe

Brett Sanders, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Irvine, is using a grant from the National Science Foundation to help inform communities along the California and northern Mexican coast about the risk of rising waters. Most people are thrilled that they’ve managed to fulfill a dream of living near the beach, Sanders said, and are unaware of what they should do to protect themselves.

“We have done a bad job of mapping flood risk. It’s awful,” Sanders said.

Zillow, the website that calculates residential real estate values, recently took its maps of coastal property and overlaid NOAA’s sea-level projections. Using what are now thought to be conservative projections, the company estimated 2 million coastal homes in the United States would be underwater by the end of the century. Not as in being upside down on a mortgage, but as in fish swimming through the den. The total value of those homes? Nearly $1 trillion, in California, $49 billion.

Zillow’s chief economist, Svenja Gudell, said she was surprised that when the company shared its information with mayors or city planners, officials saw it as an event that would take place far in the future. “For some of these places the time horizon is not 100 years, it’s happening now,” she said. “It’s not as top of mind as it should be or you would like it to be. People are underinsured when it comes to flood insurance. The system is broken.”

Gudell said that her research showed that homeowners living in high-risk areas are not getting market cues —real estate values in beach areas destroyed by Hurricane Sandy are now higher than before the superstorm that played out on national television in the fall of 2012.

“We were not able to explain that rationally,” Gudell said. “We will see in the future, if you are on a cliff and that cliff is further eroding and if you put a piece of property on that land, it won’t be safe anymore. For now, the benefit of living in these homes clearly outweighs the current and future cost of living there.”

So what now?

California planners and policymakers will pore over the latest report. Their deliberations will result, at some point, in “updated guidance” to use the parlance of the bureaucracy. The final document will help local officials incorporate the sea-level rise projections into their future plans for building and safety, in some cases altering zoning and building codes.

Meanwhile, Greenland’s summer ice melt season begins, and the 2-mile deep ice sheet that was created in the last Ice Age continues to shrink. Researchers drilling ice cores have been astounded to find more and more streams of water rushing below the sheet—a river of water scything through ice. The proliferation of these ‘melt streams’ is leading scientists to consider that the loss of Greenland’s ice may be set on an unstoppable trajectory.

No longer a matter of if, but only of when.