Two articles in the Sunday Marin IJ starkly detail the effects of climate change on our local environment.
Writing about the Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s newly adopted regional shoreline adaptation plan, IJ reporter Adrian Rodriguez states that water levels are expected to rise “more than 6 feet by 2100 — according to the California Ocean Protection Council. Global sea levels have already risen around 8 inches since 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is caused by global warming.”
Rodriquez reports that Marin County is facing about $17 billion in expenses to build adaptation projects, such as living shorelines, marshes and potentially seawalls and levees, to protect itself from inundation. It will cost Bay Area counties $110 billion to protect themselves from the effects of about a foot of sea-level rise through 2050, the commission said.
The IJ also carried a report from the New York Times with contrasting, but equally disturbing, news from Southern California:
“As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement Friday that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.
“With temperatures rising around the world and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the planet has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.”
The Times quotes Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate focused on wildfires and the West Coast at Climate Central, a nonprofit research group: “In the last couple years, we’ve seen an increase in extreme weather events and increasing amounts of billion-dollar disasters, It’s very clear that something is off, and that something is that we’re pumping an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere and causing the climate systems to go out of whack.”