A recent talk to the San Mateo Board of Supervisors gave the officials a jolting description of the likely impact of sea-level rise on the Bay Area. The speaker was Will Travis, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). The Almanac (Menlo Park and other communities) reported on his speech at some length, repeating a pattern we're starting to see more. A local scientist or official gets out the maps and shows a local audience what rising seas will do their locales, in some detail. They connect the dots between the larger, coarse-grained scenarios that come out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and show in more detail what the projections might mean.Much of the talk is rightly about mitigating carbon emissions, but the impacts are what have the potential to galvanize the audience. As the article observes: ...Mr. Travis remains an optimist even though major obstacles — government organization, laws, and cost — make a tough job tougher. "The Bay Area is the only place more balkanized than the Balkans," Mr. Travis said. He referred to the nine counties and 110 cities that make up the Bay Area. "Twenty-six cities front on San Francisco Bay," he said.
Another obstacle lies in the powers of different agencies. Control over land use lies with cities; none of the regional agencies has the authority to block a subdivision. "We can't even say, 'You're a damn fool, but at least you have to build a sea wall to protect it,'" Mr. Travis said. "The cost is going to be enormous. But we need to do it," he said. "The cost of dealing with climate change is far less than waiting and dealing with its ramifications later."
Photo of the Golden Gate Bridge by Aslak Raanes, from Trondheim, Norway (Wikimedia Commons)
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