9 ms·

The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea

stevenwoo 7y ago
For most who do not own a home near a shore or in a flood plain, the answer is obvious, and the game reinforces this (it only allows this as a long term success) - do not attempt to change the advance of rising sea levels at sandy beaches and buy back the threatened homes for a managed retreat, every other option essentially is short term stop gap solution for the threatened home owners.
- ruytlm 7y ago
  To play devil's advocate a little, why should those homes be bought back?
  - olliej 7y ago
    they shouldn't be. But then I believe Texas ruled that requiring realtor/home-sellers to report that a property was on a known flood-plain was the government "taking property" (because requiring realtor to say the house will flood decreases sale value) and therefore illegal.
  - eloisant 7y ago
    Because it's the job of the country/state to decide what land are safe to be built on. If building too close to the shore was a bad idea, and it was known at the time, the zoning should have forbid it to start with. These people are not personally responsible for the raise of the sea level, it makes sense to have the risk taken away from them.
    - lettergram 7y ago
      > Because it's the job of the country/state to decide what land are safe to be built on. Not everyone agrees with you. Personally, I don’t think it’s up to the government to tell you where you can / can’t live on land you purchase. However, inspections should and do occur informing you of risks. Zoning has to do with a variety of factors, but I doubt for most of U.S. history it had to do with “will this coast erode in 100 years” From my limited understanding it has more to do with what CAN be built, not what SHOULD. Basically, “this can be commercial real estate because we need revenue/jobs” vs “this can be residential because we need people”
      - hrktb 7y ago
        > Personally, I don’t think it’s up to the government to tell you where you can / can’t live on land you purchase. I respect your opinion, but isn’t it the very purpose of zoning to define what can and cannot be done on that purchased land ? And it’s already used for protection of habitations, for instance not allowing houses in industrial areas. For high risk areas, this all issue could have been avoided by refusing building permits as well, but blanket deciding a whole area can’t be used for living is the easiest course of action IMO.
  - stevenwoo 7y ago
    I think we see the reasoning a bit in the current flood insurance program in the United States, the federal backup insurance plan has become the sole insurance plan for a lot of homes built in areas where there were flood plains in the past or are now in flood plains due to climate change or our past definition of 100 year flood plain (used for pooling into requiring flood insurance) was not a good measure. The home owners do not want to move and will not accept a buyout at a realistic price, and we get homes in flood plains getting rebuilt 10 and even 20 times. https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-house-22-floods-repeated-claims-drain-federal-insurance-program-1505467830 https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-house-22-floods-repeated-cl...
mogadsheu 7y ago
Macro trends in nature are strong, humans can try and mitigate but we’re ultimately takers on the trend. There might be cases where sea walls provide compelling protection along specific parts of the coast, but as a grand plan to save the existing coastline, it’s a waste. We studied Pacifia’s cliff side/coastline degradation in hydrology class. What’s happening is that waves erode the bottom of the cliff and the rest sloughs off, like pulling Jenga blocks from the bottom of the pile. A massive sea wall could slow the rate of cliffside erosion on the time scale of a generation, But the risk/hazard will remain. I don’t see the the benefit to society for not retreating development here.
- olliej 7y ago
  No. We created almost all of this - the increase in global sea level due to melting ice caps and glaciers is entirely on us. Similarly the increase in energy in the global weather systems is driven by the same source, and causes the increases in "extreme" weather, which further drives accelerated erosion of coastal regions, flooding, and droughts. We can try to slow down the damage caused by the symptoms, and as you say, that's all we can do, but it's super important to acknowledge that humans do override "macro" trends in nature. The problem is how we undo changes we caused. Short of magically coming up with a way to dramatically remove heat from the oceans and atmosphere we are at best stuck where we are. Given we haven't made any meaningful changes in the industries causing the climate change we can't expect anything more than further acceleration of the extremes.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Even at a constant sea level we still have wave erosion.
  - mogadsheu 7y ago
    Geoengineering on the local scale of building sea walls to prevent cliffside erosion will almost certainly be far too expensive to justify the benefits or time it buys before the inevitable happens. This isn’t just about global warming. It’s about the power of the ocean, possibly with increased power from the effects of global warming, tearing down a town built on a cliff. The discussion in the article is about people building on pretty real estate that’s dangerous to inhabit, and asking the government to preserve it.
sulam 7y ago
A good friend used to rent a house overlooking the ocean in Pacifica. That was 2000, and that house is gone now. Amusingly, she lives in Manhattan now, and might get to see Chapter 2 or 3 of this epic saga we are living through. My kids will hopefully get to the end of the first book, if we get lucky and avoid a serious war somewhere in the middle. We moved from 8’ above sea level to 700’ above sea level last year. I still expect to help pay for saving the SF Bay Area, which will actually be able to engineer its way out of this thanks to a combination of fortuitous geographical circumstances and an economy large enough to sustain the trillion dollars it will cost to protect the area. Ocean Beach will be history soon enough, though...
- olivermarks 7y ago
  I've lived in the bay area for over 25 years and Ocean Beach has always remained exactly the same. Pacifica has had serious cliff erosion problems for as long as I can remember. huge problem in California is building in places that shouldn't be built on - fire plains, cliff tops etc
  - khuey 7y ago
    The reason Ocean Beach has always remained exactly the same is that the city relocates thousands of tons of sand to south end of it every year.
    - olivermarks 7y ago
      The city moves the wind sand drifts yes, but the tidal flows in and out of the golden gate are moving incredible amounts of sand pretty well every day, which is why the high surf moves around so much. It's not as though SF engineering is pushing sand south with bulldozers every year after it piles up near the golden gate bridge. There is way to much drama and misinformation flowing around on this topic IMO
      - brodie 7y ago
        It's hard to imagine SF being affected by this that much anytime soon. I can imagine the Marina and places like that having issues, but SF itself is so tall and there's so much hard rock everywhere. But I don't know much about the Sunset or the Richmond so I guess you could speak better to that. I live near Twin Peaks.
nerdponx 7y ago
The ocean is literally inundating your town, and you're worried about home values and 30-year-mortgages? These people all need some kind of loss and grief counseling. Can't wait for the federal bailout money to start pouring into these areas over the next few decades as localities deny and delay until they have no choice but to up and relocate in a hurry.
- olliej 7y ago
  Federal money has been plowing into many of these regions for years. Guaranteed loans and insurance are entirely tax payer funded subsidies/payouts to people who aren't willing to move to areas that don't get flooded/washed out every few years. I recall John Oliver having a segment on it at some point - basically a bunch of areas in Florida and the South get wiped out repeatedly but the federal support means they're not moving, and some of the same houses have been wiped out multiple times, and are still getting federal support to be rebuilt in the same place.
  - tzakrajs 7y ago
    Also that federal support comes without any funding to make the house more weather-ready for the next storm.
scarejunba 7y ago
There are homes right on the edge in Pacifica. You walk out of your backyard and to the cliff. I can't wait for us to bail out these people.
cobookman 7y ago
If the Netherlands managed to reclaim land through dikes. Why couldn't California do the same in their coastal affluent neighborhoods? California doesn't get bad storms and it rarely gets a hurricanes / tornadoes / tsunamis...etc. For the bay area...Why not just drain the bay. There was a proposal previously and cost wise it'd easily pay off given the land gains. Heck could easily solve our housing and transit issues
- _jn 7y ago
  There are large wildlife preservation efforts in the Bay Area marshlands (particularly near shoreline park) that would be destroyed.
  - vanrysss 7y ago
    They'll be destroyed by rising sea levels eventually anyway.
  - cobookman 7y ago
    Then just damn up the entrance to the bay and control it's water level. Same risk as draining the bay all together. Either way global warming is going to change the landscape. Might as well attempt something that limits damage
    - cjensen 7y ago
      That's close to literally impossible. There was an absurd plan to place a dam between Richmond and San Rafael[1]. When it was finally studied, there were two fatal problems with the plan. (1) There is not enough water in Summer, to keep the bay behind the dam full. (2) There is too much water from snowmelt in early spring and the San Joaquin valley would turn into a lake. Now to the environmental side: the bay is amazingly productive. It also acts as a nursery for the ocean. The damage done to the Pacific Ocean ecosystem would be all out of proportion to the gains of a little bit of land. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan
- tomc1985 7y ago
cletus 7y ago
Let me preface this by stipulating that I believe the evidence that humans have contributed to a warming climate in the last few centuries with all of our carbon emissions, primarily from energy production. I'll further add that it's entirely possible and even quite likely that we are in and have either caused or massively contributed to a mass extinction event. That being said, I really wonder at the thinking of what I would call "climate alarmists". I mean the Pacifica cliffs are a story about erosion. Ok, sure. But some like to push this narrative that unless we drastically do something the Earth will turn into Venus, basically. Thing is, these "boy who cried wolf" type narratives don't really help change perceptions or habits around climate change. What's more, they don't really pass the smell test. The Earth has been around for billions of years. It's also been much hotter than it is now (eg [1]). The smell test is basically this: a lot can happen in 5B years and if the Earth has been much hotter than it is now and it hasn't turned into Venus yet, why is now different? There's actually a pretty natural limit to how much carbon we can add to the atmosphere. Eventually we'll just run out of fossil fuels, at which point, we'll just start making them out of thin air and that, by definition, will be carbon neutral. Honestly I just don't believe we'll fundamentally change human nature here. While that might be fatalistic, even pessimistic, personally I'm optimistic. And I'm optimistic because with not much more automation than we already have the Earth can grow enough food for 10 times as many people as we have now and possibly much more than that and that everything changes once we get sufficiently cheap energy (and obviously I'm optimistic about that happening in the not too distant future). Some here will write that off as naive futurism. Whatever. With regards to sea level rise, let me add some more context. Over the span of ~5000 years 9000 to 14000 thousand years ago the sea levels rose SIXTY METERS [2]. And we're still here. That's also a blip on the timeline of Earth's geological history. Whose to say the sea levels won't recede with the next Ice Age? Or are we now arguing the Earth is done with those too? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Holocene_sea_level_rise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Holocene_sea_level_rise
- olivermarks 7y ago
  '...the evidence that humans have contributed to a warming climate in the last few centuries with all of our carbon emissions, primarily from energy production' What is this evidence exactly? I"m on the fence about human contributions to changes in earth weather and suspicious about carbon taxation. Sensible stewardship of the planet is a no brainer, but the hysteria is slowly increasing with children particularly freaking out about the planets demise after daily doses of alarmist rhetoric. This can't be healthy and pushes people to go along with questionable political measures. We are at a point where 'climate change' by human activity has to be pushed by Greta Thunberg and others as a slightly fanatical emotional event. I'm not seeing nearly enough hard evidence despite the legions of angry people I come up against who assure me 'it's all been proven' and claiming I am anti science...
vixen99 7y ago
For those interested in data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO 1233) Published by: WMO ; 2019 "Over the period January 1993 to December 2018, the average rate of rise was 3.15 ± 0.3 mm yr-1, while the estimated acceleration was 0.1 mm yr-2. " https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=5789 https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=5789 There are of course debates relating to the well-known discrepancy between land-based and satellite observations of sea level rise.
lurker9000 7y ago
good. I'll throw more coal on the fire to help expedite the process.
everybodyknows 7y ago
Not mentioned at all are the big winners, at least for a time, of managed retreat: Owners of the properties just inland, who suddenly acquire whitewater views. These can now charge rent to vacationers at some multiple of what was formerly possible. Admittedly it's a bit of a puzzle how in practice either their former seaward neighbors, or the public, could lay claim to a share of that increase in value.
el_don_almighty 7y ago
Why are you all responding as if the information in this article is true? It's obviously false to anyone who has been to the same beach for the last 30 years. Have you all lost your minds? Have your eyes stopped working? GO LOOK FOR YOURSELVES. Go watch the compelling video from Tony Heller regarding this article. I thought my friends on Hacker News were smarter than this

For most who do not own a home near a shore or in a flood plain, the answer is obvious, and the game reinforces this (it only allows this as a long term success) - do not attempt to change the advance of rising sea levels at sandy beaches and buy back the threatened homes for a managed retreat, every other option essentially is short term stop gap solution for the threatened home owners.

ruytlm 7y ago
To play devil's advocate a little, why should those homes be bought back?
- olliej 7y ago
  they shouldn't be. But then I believe Texas ruled that requiring realtor/home-sellers to report that a property was on a known flood-plain was the government "taking property" (because requiring realtor to say the house will flood decreases sale value) and therefore illegal.
- eloisant 7y ago
  Because it's the job of the country/state to decide what land are safe to be built on. If building too close to the shore was a bad idea, and it was known at the time, the zoning should have forbid it to start with. These people are not personally responsible for the raise of the sea level, it makes sense to have the risk taken away from them.
  - lettergram 7y ago
    > Because it's the job of the country/state to decide what land are safe to be built on. Not everyone agrees with you. Personally, I don’t think it’s up to the government to tell you where you can / can’t live on land you purchase. However, inspections should and do occur informing you of risks. Zoning has to do with a variety of factors, but I doubt for most of U.S. history it had to do with “will this coast erode in 100 years” From my limited understanding it has more to do with what CAN be built, not what SHOULD. Basically, “this can be commercial real estate because we need revenue/jobs” vs “this can be residential because we need people”
    - hrktb 7y ago
      > Personally, I don’t think it’s up to the government to tell you where you can / can’t live on land you purchase. I respect your opinion, but isn’t it the very purpose of zoning to define what can and cannot be done on that purchased land ? And it’s already used for protection of habitations, for instance not allowing houses in industrial areas. For high risk areas, this all issue could have been avoided by refusing building permits as well, but blanket deciding a whole area can’t be used for living is the easiest course of action IMO.
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  I think we see the reasoning a bit in the current flood insurance program in the United States, the federal backup insurance plan has become the sole insurance plan for a lot of homes built in areas where there were flood plains in the past or are now in flood plains due to climate change or our past definition of 100 year flood plain (used for pooling into requiring flood insurance) was not a good measure. The home owners do not want to move and will not accept a buyout at a realistic price, and we get homes in flood plains getting rebuilt 10 and even 20 times. https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-house-22-floods-repeated-claims-drain-federal-insurance-program-1505467830 https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-house-22-floods-repeated-cl...

mogadsheu 7y ago

Macro trends in nature are strong, humans can try and mitigate but we’re ultimately takers on the trend. There might be cases where sea walls provide compelling protection along specific parts of the coast, but as a grand plan to save the existing coastline, it’s a waste. We studied Pacifia’s cliff side/coastline degradation in hydrology class. What’s happening is that waves erode the bottom of the cliff and the rest sloughs off, like pulling Jenga blocks from the bottom of the pile. A massive sea wall could slow the rate of cliffside erosion on the time scale of a generation, But the risk/hazard will remain. I don’t see the the benefit to society for not retreating development here.

olliej 7y ago
No. We created almost all of this - the increase in global sea level due to melting ice caps and glaciers is entirely on us. Similarly the increase in energy in the global weather systems is driven by the same source, and causes the increases in "extreme" weather, which further drives accelerated erosion of coastal regions, flooding, and droughts. We can try to slow down the damage caused by the symptoms, and as you say, that's all we can do, but it's super important to acknowledge that humans do override "macro" trends in nature. The problem is how we undo changes we caused. Short of magically coming up with a way to dramatically remove heat from the oceans and atmosphere we are at best stuck where we are. Given we haven't made any meaningful changes in the industries causing the climate change we can't expect anything more than further acceleration of the extremes.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Even at a constant sea level we still have wave erosion.
- mogadsheu 7y ago
  Geoengineering on the local scale of building sea walls to prevent cliffside erosion will almost certainly be far too expensive to justify the benefits or time it buys before the inevitable happens. This isn’t just about global warming. It’s about the power of the ocean, possibly with increased power from the effects of global warming, tearing down a town built on a cliff. The discussion in the article is about people building on pretty real estate that’s dangerous to inhabit, and asking the government to preserve it.

sulam 7y ago

A good friend used to rent a house overlooking the ocean in Pacifica. That was 2000, and that house is gone now. Amusingly, she lives in Manhattan now, and might get to see Chapter 2 or 3 of this epic saga we are living through. My kids will hopefully get to the end of the first book, if we get lucky and avoid a serious war somewhere in the middle. We moved from 8’ above sea level to 700’ above sea level last year. I still expect to help pay for saving the SF Bay Area, which will actually be able to engineer its way out of this thanks to a combination of fortuitous geographical circumstances and an economy large enough to sustain the trillion dollars it will cost to protect the area. Ocean Beach will be history soon enough, though...

olivermarks 7y ago
I've lived in the bay area for over 25 years and Ocean Beach has always remained exactly the same. Pacifica has had serious cliff erosion problems for as long as I can remember. huge problem in California is building in places that shouldn't be built on - fire plains, cliff tops etc
- khuey 7y ago
  The reason Ocean Beach has always remained exactly the same is that the city relocates thousands of tons of sand to south end of it every year.
  - olivermarks 7y ago
    The city moves the wind sand drifts yes, but the tidal flows in and out of the golden gate are moving incredible amounts of sand pretty well every day, which is why the high surf moves around so much. It's not as though SF engineering is pushing sand south with bulldozers every year after it piles up near the golden gate bridge. There is way to much drama and misinformation flowing around on this topic IMO
    - brodie 7y ago
      It's hard to imagine SF being affected by this that much anytime soon. I can imagine the Marina and places like that having issues, but SF itself is so tall and there's so much hard rock everywhere. But I don't know much about the Sunset or the Richmond so I guess you could speak better to that. I live near Twin Peaks.

nerdponx 7y ago

The ocean is literally inundating your town, and you're worried about home values and 30-year-mortgages? These people all need some kind of loss and grief counseling. Can't wait for the federal bailout money to start pouring into these areas over the next few decades as localities deny and delay until they have no choice but to up and relocate in a hurry.

olliej 7y ago
Federal money has been plowing into many of these regions for years. Guaranteed loans and insurance are entirely tax payer funded subsidies/payouts to people who aren't willing to move to areas that don't get flooded/washed out every few years. I recall John Oliver having a segment on it at some point - basically a bunch of areas in Florida and the South get wiped out repeatedly but the federal support means they're not moving, and some of the same houses have been wiped out multiple times, and are still getting federal support to be rebuilt in the same place.
- tzakrajs 7y ago
  Also that federal support comes without any funding to make the house more weather-ready for the next storm.

scarejunba 7y ago

There are homes right on the edge in Pacifica. You walk out of your backyard and to the cliff. I can't wait for us to bail out these people.

cobookman 7y ago

If the Netherlands managed to reclaim land through dikes. Why couldn't California do the same in their coastal affluent neighborhoods? California doesn't get bad storms and it rarely gets a hurricanes / tornadoes / tsunamis...etc. For the bay area...Why not just drain the bay. There was a proposal previously and cost wise it'd easily pay off given the land gains. Heck could easily solve our housing and transit issues

_jn 7y ago
There are large wildlife preservation efforts in the Bay Area marshlands (particularly near shoreline park) that would be destroyed.
- vanrysss 7y ago
  They'll be destroyed by rising sea levels eventually anyway.
- cobookman 7y ago
  Then just damn up the entrance to the bay and control it's water level. Same risk as draining the bay all together. Either way global warming is going to change the landscape. Might as well attempt something that limits damage
  - cjensen 7y ago
    That's close to literally impossible. There was an absurd plan to place a dam between Richmond and San Rafael[1]. When it was finally studied, there were two fatal problems with the plan. (1) There is not enough water in Summer, to keep the bay behind the dam full. (2) There is too much water from snowmelt in early spring and the San Joaquin valley would turn into a lake. Now to the environmental side: the bay is amazingly productive. It also acts as a nursery for the ocean. The damage done to the Pacific Ocean ecosystem would be all out of proportion to the gains of a little bit of land. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan
tomc1985 7y ago

cletus 7y ago

Let me preface this by stipulating that I believe the evidence that humans have contributed to a warming climate in the last few centuries with all of our carbon emissions, primarily from energy production. I'll further add that it's entirely possible and even quite likely that we are in and have either caused or massively contributed to a mass extinction event. That being said, I really wonder at the thinking of what I would call "climate alarmists". I mean the Pacifica cliffs are a story about erosion. Ok, sure. But some like to push this narrative that unless we drastically do something the Earth will turn into Venus, basically. Thing is, these "boy who cried wolf" type narratives don't really help change perceptions or habits around climate change. What's more, they don't really pass the smell test. The Earth has been around for billions of years. It's also been much hotter than it is now (eg [1]). The smell test is basically this: a lot can happen in 5B years and if the Earth has been much hotter than it is now and it hasn't turned into Venus yet, why is now different? There's actually a pretty natural limit to how much carbon we can add to the atmosphere. Eventually we'll just run out of fossil fuels, at which point, we'll just start making them out of thin air and that, by definition, will be carbon neutral. Honestly I just don't believe we'll fundamentally change human nature here. While that might be fatalistic, even pessimistic, personally I'm optimistic. And I'm optimistic because with not much more automation than we already have the Earth can grow enough food for 10 times as many people as we have now and possibly much more than that and that everything changes once we get sufficiently cheap energy (and obviously I'm optimistic about that happening in the not too distant future). Some here will write that off as naive futurism. Whatever. With regards to sea level rise, let me add some more context. Over the span of ~5000 years 9000 to 14000 thousand years ago the sea levels rose SIXTY METERS [2]. And we're still here. That's also a blip on the timeline of Earth's geological history. Whose to say the sea levels won't recede with the next Ice Age? Or are we now arguing the Earth is done with those too? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Holocene_sea_level_rise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Holocene_sea_level_rise

olivermarks 7y ago
'...the evidence that humans have contributed to a warming climate in the last few centuries with all of our carbon emissions, primarily from energy production' What is this evidence exactly? I"m on the fence about human contributions to changes in earth weather and suspicious about carbon taxation. Sensible stewardship of the planet is a no brainer, but the hysteria is slowly increasing with children particularly freaking out about the planets demise after daily doses of alarmist rhetoric. This can't be healthy and pushes people to go along with questionable political measures. We are at a point where 'climate change' by human activity has to be pushed by Greta Thunberg and others as a slightly fanatical emotional event. I'm not seeing nearly enough hard evidence despite the legions of angry people I come up against who assure me 'it's all been proven' and claiming I am anti science...

vixen99 7y ago

For those interested in data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO 1233) Published by: WMO ; 2019 "Over the period January 1993 to December 2018, the average rate of rise was 3.15 ± 0.3 mm yr-1, while the estimated acceleration was 0.1 mm yr-2. " https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=5789 https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=5789 There are of course debates relating to the well-known discrepancy between land-based and satellite observations of sea level rise.

lurker9000 7y ago

good. I'll throw more coal on the fire to help expedite the process.

everybodyknows 7y ago

Not mentioned at all are the big winners, at least for a time, of managed retreat: Owners of the properties just inland, who suddenly acquire whitewater views. These can now charge rent to vacationers at some multiple of what was formerly possible. Admittedly it's a bit of a puzzle how in practice either their former seaward neighbors, or the public, could lay claim to a share of that increase in value.

el_don_almighty 7y ago

Why are you all responding as if the information in this article is true? It's obviously false to anyone who has been to the same beach for the last 30 years. Have you all lost your minds? Have your eyes stopped working? GO LOOK FOR YOURSELVES. Go watch the compelling video from Tony Heller regarding this article. I thought my friends on Hacker News were smarter than this