California must act now to prepare for sea level rise, state lawmakers say

[Elderberry]

LA Times by By Rosanna Xia 12/4/2019

At a packed meeting catering to state lawmakers and top planning officials, Mark Merrifield played a video that he and his research team at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have seen many times before.

“This is a natural phenomenon; it’s feeding the beaches, but it’s happening more and more frequently in part because of sea level rise,” said Merrifield, director of Scripps’ Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation. “So what can do? That’s why we’re here, right?”

The rising sea might feel like a slow-moving disaster, they said, but this is a social, economic and environmental catastrophe that the state cannot afford to ignore. By the end of this century, the sea could rise more than 9 feet in California — possibly more if the great ice sheets collapse sooner than expected.

Lawmakers have told cities they must start addressing climate adaptation in their planning, but have otherwise shied away from issuing mandatory directions. The California Coastal Commission, through modest grants and some general guidance, has been encouraging local officials to consider “everything in the toolkit” — including the controversial option of relocating oceanfront properties and critical infrastructure away from the water — when updating city policies.

More: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-04/sea-level-rise-special-committee-california-assembly

[bigheadfred]

Sea level rise?

California is sinking.

[Wingnut]

Man this is good news.   But then every prediction has been false.  So I suspect this is much todo about nothing.

[libertybele]

Sounds like a new California 'tax' in the making.

[roamer_1]

I can't believe a single bit of this nonsense. You're talking a measurement measured in millimeters across decades, and without any way to calculate accurately whether the top is going up (technically measured against the land subsiding causing the water to look higher)  or the bottom is going up (sedimentation), not only locally, at each interval, but across the whole dang show too...

I think the whole thing is so incredibly dynamic - even just acurately measuring the the wave action and tidal forces alone - That anyone claiming to measure a 2 or 3 mm rise annually is bound to be full of crap.