Global Warming Effect : Rising Sea Seeping Into Coast Plans
It still seems more science fiction than fact--the prediction that global warming will cause ocean levels to rise and inundate coastal areas around the world.
And even though it may be more than a decade before the theory can be proven, a small but growing band of planners, politicians and environmentalists isn’t willing to wait. Already, they are preparing for the flood.
Against the din of skeptical developers and engineers, these regulators have already begun to incorporate sea-level rise into coastal planning in Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington and other states--but nowhere more than in California.
Bay at City’s Door
Sandra Marker, mayor of Corte Madera, runs a city already fighting back the waters of San Francisco Bay. To her, the threat is real and, on the time scale of public works, imminent. “Our projections indicate that we have to do something within 10 years,” Marker says.
Likewise, Signal Landmark, a large Southern California landholder, is including ocean rise in plans for its 1,600-acre Bolsa Chica project, a marshland restoration and housing development that could cost as much as $2 billion.
“It’s like looking at the earthquake potential of an area,” Carl Neuhausen, the company’s vice president for planning, says.
Even unconvinced developers such as Donald P. Warren, president of Redwood Shores Inc., which owns 3,000 acres on the shores of San Francisco Bay, take planners’ concern about sea-level rise seriously. Warren has already pondered a round number for the higher dikes his development might eventually need: about $3 million.
‘Greenhouse’ Side Effect
A dramatic, if gradual, rising of sea level could be one of the most calamitous effects of the predicted warming of Earth from heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases, released since the first industrial smokestacks pushed skyward, include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons. Their effect in the upper atmosphere has been compared to closed windows in a car left out in the sun.
Like any other material, oceans expand; water rises as it is warmed. Estimates deemed plausible by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency range from 2 to 7 feet of rise around U.S. shores by the year 2100, just from this great swelling. In a worst-case scenario, one or more major sheets of polar ice could melt rapidly and cause seas to rise higher still.
Coastal management decisions--from the building plot of a bungalow to nationwide strategies for wetlands preservation--are now based on time spans ranging from 30 to 100 years. Yet planners worry that rapid ocean rise is not yet being anticipated.
Inexpensive, long-range planning now, planners say, would involve relatively minor inconvenience and would be well worth the effort, compared to the costly, destructive, ad-hoc defenses likely to be thrown up if the big waves arrive.
Recently, the White House Council on Environmental Quality agreed, warning that government may have to adjust for global warming “even before all the uncertainties are known.”
Still, serious planning for global warming can seem like so much hot air to many understandably dubious politicians, developers and civil engineers, who are being told again--as in the on-again, off-again energy crisis--that disaster is just around the corner.
When a staffer recently presented a draft report on sea-level rise to the California Coastal Commission, he described a future in which dikes might be thrown up at Malibu and the sand could disappear from Will Rogers State Beach.
Realtor’s Nightmare
“I’d hate to have to tell some guy who wants to build a house in Malibu . . . that we think the ocean’s going to come in your front window,” protested Commissioner Steve MacElvaine of Morro Bay, who called for a more careful review of the scientific evidence.
“We don’t have enough resources for work we need to do today,” complained Dorill Wright of Ventura County, “let alone to deal with something being studied by others that could happen 100 years from now.”
The trouble is, many scientists believe that higher sea levels could be here a lot sooner than that. They say that the first flooding of Corte Madera and other low-lying developments in California could come within the next 10 years.
In April, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as two University of Toronto scientists, independently announced that the world’s oceans have been warming and rising twice as fast as previously observed--a confirmation of the greenhouse theory, though still not proof of it.
Further complicating matters, no one knows how high the waters might go.
Jeffrey Haltiner, a San Francisco coastal engineer advising Corte Madera, said of the bales of technical reports on global warming being released worldwide: “You see numbers all over the place. They seem to be revising them all the time--but they seem to be revising them upward.”
Skeptics say it is too soon to base policy on shifting predictions, but many in the public-regulations game around the country sense a need for urgency.
“Every time we make (construction) permit decisions, it’s a 40- to 50-year decision at least,” said state Coastal Commissioner Madelyn Glickfeld of Malibu. “To not be concerned about things that are 40, 50 years in the future is very shortsighted.”
Few areas have yet looked to that future as soberly as communities in California.
Orange County Rule
--Since 1985, Orange County has required developers to assume in their engineering plans that the level of the Pacific is rising.
--The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which oversees development within 100 feet of the bay, began in March to require that plans for structures from pier restaurants to waterfront condos allow for rising water.
--Laguna Beach now allows seawalls only as a last resort against erosion. A recent study raised concern that future barriers, including those that might be thrown up to protect hotels and homes from a rising sea, could also destroy beaches. Seawalls have lately been found to encourage the movement of sand in front of them and, by protecting cliffs from erosion, to discourage formation of new sand.
--Corte Madera has factored sea-level rise into its $8-million plan for dike renovations.
--Foster City, much of which lies below the water level of adjacent San Francisco Bay, may also have to raise its levees. If it does, the city plans to add enough height for the next 100 years of projected sea level rise.
--Sometime next year, the California Coastal Commission is expected to reconsider a sea-rise policy, Peter Douglas, the executive director, said.
--The district engineer of the Marin County Flood Control and Water Conservation District said that his office is drafting new codes to raise by two feet the minimum floor level of shoreline buildings above the water, in direct reaction to the possibility of sea-level rise.
No one knows how much any of this eventually will cost. Even on a nationwide scale, financial projections are scarce. Yet a rising sea could be expensive.
Based on a modest three-foot rise, EPA cost estimates run as high as $111 billion over the next century for efforts to save only the densely developed areas of the American shoreline, or about a sixth of the area that would be flooded.
Such an enormous effort would still abandon thousands of private homes on shores outside those areas. Environmentalists aren’t likely to accept another cost of this strategy, either. Because of the way shorelines work, the dikes and levees needed for such an all-out battle to hold back the sea could destroy as much as 70% of America’s coastal wetlands.
How likely is an ocean rise?
The sea has been lifting, in fact, in a grand, natural cycle since the last ice age peaked, about 15,000 years ago. Yet this should bother only the most long-range worrier. In the past 100 years the oceans have risen a mere 4 to 6 inches.
What concerns most scientists is the prediction that global warming, which most now believe is real, could greatly accelerate this rate. In that case, the sea will expand and rise, overflowing coastlines around the world and drowning low-lying areas such as the Marshall Islands (including Bikini and Eniwetok atolls, the former atom-bomb test sites) in the Pacific.
Californians at first would likely experience infrequent but massive storm surges, when the effects of sea-level rise, an El Nino condition and a winter storm converged. Eventually, in most scientists’ scenarios, they could see a doubling or tripling of the size of San Francisco Bay, bulldozed rock seawalls along the Southern California beaches, a landward migration of development and a northward migration of people from Mexico and Central America--people the United Nations already has dubbed “ecological refugees.”
1 Billion Homeless
Recently, in fact, the United Nations warned that over the next 60 years, rising oceans could flood the settlements of 1 billion people. The study, by the U.N. Environment Program, advised nations to begin now to curtail coastal development, and to be ready to assist the owners of existing shore-based businesses and homes as their lands must be abandoned.
As EPA Administrator William K. Reilly announced unhappily on a recent trip to Los Angeles: “The world, I am afraid, is not yet ready for this.”
Yet it could be, with a little planning, said James G. Titus, the EPA’s project manager for sea-level rise. Anyone researching the subject sooner or later hears of Titus, who is both respected for his science and known variously as Mr. Sea-Level Rise, the Guru of Sea-Level Rise or simply as a true believer.
Skeptics on global warming commonly blame the true-believer scientists and environmentalists for stirring up debate--and worse, more government regulation--over a mere theory.
“If we don’t plan now,” Titus said, “people will develop the coast on the assumption that they can stay there forever. Then, as sea level rises, and you either evacuate or defend the coast, people will instinctively erect bulkheads and levees to protect their investment.”
In fact, many developers and engineers currently dismiss any sea-level concern by saying they will build protective seawalls if and when they have to.
Titus and other scientists say that over time, most of these defenses will have to be abandoned, yet by then the seawalls will have thwarted the ability of wetlands and beaches to adapt slowly and move inland. So there would be not only a lot of unhappy developers and homeowners, but a lot of lost beaches and wetlands, too.
Many scientists and environmentalists want planned abandonment of shore developments as the ocean rises, and they think this hot-potato policy decision should be considered soon.
Titus believes the first step is to put people on notice that sea-level rise could happen. Formal wording could be included in property deeds, for example, spelling out that a house would likely have to be moved or abandoned in 30 or 50 years.
Then, when the time comes, instead of the panic of imminent catastrophe, “People will go relatively quietly,” Titus predicts.
Planning would also ensure fairness to developers, he continues, with more optimism than most. Without uniform rules, it doesn’t pay a builder to make costly plan adjustments just to assure that a house won’t be threatened by rising water before the owner pays off the mortgage--especially since practically no buyers yet even ask about sea-level rise.
“Government planning,” Titus said, “would eliminate the competitive disadvantage of being far-sighted.”
The real issue, Titus believes, is not whether the sea level will rise, but planning for the risk.
“If you’re building a hazardous waste site, or a septic tank, under the beach, something that could become a real nuisance,” Titus said, using an extreme example, “maybe even a 1% chance of a rise in sea level would motivate you to change the decision.”
Meanwhile, the skeptics remain unmoved.
To developers such as Lewis (Tig) Tarlton of San Francisco, ocean rise is just more gloom-and-doom from environmental Cassandras, the “sky-is-falling, sea-is-rising group.”
“Chicken Little, and the world is falling down,” rails Charles R. Roberts about planners’ fears. Roberts is chief engineer for the Port of Oakland, having spent 39 years in the field. “And I haven’t seen the sea level rise in that half century . . . . It’s a trend to talk about sea level.”
In Malibu, Robert Rubenstein of Malibu Realty said: “No one really seems to care” about such disasters in Malibu. “When the floods hit, they just build again. My clients, they get another deal for a (motion) picture, they come back and buy another house.”
