Get Ready, Here Comes the Ocean!

January 27, 2019, 8:53 am 10.6k Views 37 Comments

Sandyland/Sand Point (Photo: Branden Aroyan/Heal the Ocean)

Source: Heal the Ocean (HTO)

The Santa Barbara Airport flooded. Goleta Beach Park, gone. The ocean over Cabrillo Blvd…are these scenarios sensationalism? No. [These] scenarios will come to pass by 2100 if nothing is done to prevent such inundation- or at least prepare for it.
Predictive coastal flooding in Carpinteria (including Sandyland/Sand Point) due to SLR in 2100 (Our Coast Our Future) 

Sea Level Rise, directly caused by climate change, is a real deal, and the King Tides of December 22-23, 2018 & January 20-21, 2019 gave us a hint of what the future looks like for Santa Barbara if we do nothing but talk about it.

Goleta Slough/Airport (Harry Rabin)

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words. HTO contracted with photographer/pilot Harry Rabin and well-known surf photographer Branden Aroyan to photograph Sandyland/Sand Point (Carpinteria coast area), Miramar Beach, Goleta Beach, and the Santa Barbara Airport.

Predictive coastal flooding in Goleta Slough due to SLR in 2100 (Our Coast Our Future)

The photos speak for themselves. All these areas are at risk of flooding – even now, in a high tide/storm event. Years ago, as climate change symposiums and plans and analyses began to proliferate, HTO made strong input about Adaptation to Sea Level Rise. Years ago, we recognized how much of our infrastructure is in flood zones and smack in the path of an incoming ocean. We maintained then, and emphasize now, that we must act. A building permitted today should last longer than 30-50 years. All the money spent on expanding the Airport might have been better spent building a monorail to the Santa Maria airport – because the Airport is already flooding, and may be totally underwater in too few years.

  
Miramar Beach December 2018 & January 2019 (Branden Aroyan)

Knowing that the seas are coming in and that groundwater will rise with it, HTO has been emphasizing a list of what a responsible community should start doing to prepare:

  • Waterproof, raise, or relocate vulnerable wastewater treatment plants, which will otherwise flood;
  • Disallow building in flood zones (including airports);
  • Clean up toxic pollution in groundwater, which is expected to rise along with sea levels;
  • Halt septic system installation in flood zones (and remove those that are already in high groundwater!);
  • Changing permitting requirement in the coastal zone (require setbacks, pilings, etc.)

Heal the Ocean is campaigning for these, and other preventative measures, to prepare for things to come.

  
Goleta Beach January 20, 2019 (Branden Aroyan)

Heal the Ocean focuses on wastewater infrastructure – sewers and septic systems – as well as ocean dumping practices that have contributed to ocean pollution. We are focused on Santa Barbara County, but our methods are now serving as a model for other coastal communities across the country.

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37 Comments

  1. So… Goleta is going to bust through all the man-made impediments and become the bay/lagoon it used to be? I am certain your organization has a valid point to make, but this comes off as wide-eyed, arm flailing hysteria, which overshadows your message. Stating the “a photo speaks a thousand words” and showing one photo of a swollen slough to represent four areas, does not speak a thousand words. The importance of infrastructure and its placement relative to impending water levels is hugely important. That should be the focus and main point, not a bullet point under apocalyptic photo-shopped images of neighborhoods under water. I support your cause, but not this method of delivery.

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  3. Netherlands spends billions to build their shore protection. And they forced a bunch of people to move in order to do it. We spend billions to rebuild after disasters. Do you think we will wise up? And start forcing people to relocate?

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  7. If anyone is concerned their santa barbara or goleta properties will be literally underwater anytime soon, I will gladly buy at a discount…(cough cough) I mean at fair market value factoring in the impending destruction…

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  9. I’ve found some pretty cool rocks where glaciers used to be during the ice age. Climate change is inevitable, with or without human help. I wonder how much of that prediction is based on natural climate change and how much on man’s contribution? I agree about it coming of as a bit of a scare tactic. If the rise of the ocean gets to a point as predicted, the Dutch will be hired to build dikes in Goleta. That said there needs to be prudence about where structures are located as evidence in the photos. Rising oceans or not, while building a house at the edge of the surf is kinda cool, it’s not prudent. I guess one could say that if these homes are swollowed by the surf, it could be considered ‘littering’. LOL

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  10. Climate change will not matter a bit if we humans dont stop reproducing at the current rates. Conservative estimates puts the population at 11-12 billion people by 2100. That would likely put CA in the 80-100m range and the USA at over 500m. If that’s anywhere near the case, we’re doomed regardless of these projections of sea rise.

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  11. Mr. Starbucks was on 60 minutes last night talking about climate change, etc. Thought it ironic that the one person responsible for mountains of cups, plastic lids, straws and the like was postulating about a world environmentally friendly. Saving the world and being ecologically correct is a noble idea. But this freight train is headed in the opposite direction at light speed.

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  12. I worked out of S.B. harbor for almost 30 years and never noticed the ocean rising? Most people understand that water expands when frozen and contracts when melted. We are actually in a cooling cycle and N America is over the 30 year snowpack average. That’s why whistler ski resort has an all time snow record this year. We have also had no warming as measured by gov satellites in almost 20 years. Add to that we are entering a grand solar minimum and the last thing we should be worried about is man made G.W. – Buy a good winter coat! All these things are easily checked online or you can stamp your feet and say i’m wrong because of your feelings …

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  15. Up until 2015, NOAA reported 1.7 to 1.8mm per year of global sea level rise. Here is a link to an archive of NOAA’s website from September of 2015.
    https://web.archive.org/web/20150910050658/http://www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/globalregional.htm
    NOAA no longer believes it was correct back in September of 2015. The 3 inches in 25 years you quoted from NOAA’s current website works out to about 1/8 inch, or 3mm per year. This is nearly double what NOAA was reporting as recently as 2015.
    If you check the tide gauge data, there is no dramatic change in the sea level trend in the last 20-30 years as NOAA is claiming. For example, the tide gauge at the Battery in New York shows a consistent linear sea level trend from the 1850s to present.
    https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750
    If you check all of NOAA’s tide gauges, you will find the vast majority of them show consistent trends over long periods of time that are well below 3.0 mm per year.

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  16. Things that seem correct in the article and comments so far:
    1. Infrastructure needs to be modified and adapted for the rising levels of ocean.
    2. Building in imperiled zones should be prohibited.
    3. There are too many people on earth, much less in CA.
    4. Scare tactics are not very effective when the threat is alleged to be decades off.
    5. Calm rational discussions of these sort of science based concerns is really hard for a lot of people.

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  18. If you can’t get people concerned about the public pension debts (one trillion dollars in just California) that more directly effect them right here and right now, I agree the alleged threat of rising oceans is too vague to generate any more concern than they currently have over the very real public pension debt. Hearing the world will end in 12 years almost sounds like a good thing. Party on.

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  20. Benefits of climate change – funding Nordic socialism. Last Ice Age stripped away the earth’s mantle in Nordic countries and exposed iron bearing rocks for the Swedish steel industry that undergird Swedish social benefits. Ice age compressed decaying organic material to create the vast North Sea oil fields that now support Norwegian social benefits. Climate change need not always be dreary.

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  24. We’ve been through all this denialist crap about tidal gauges before, when Shasta Guy repeatedly put up doctored graphs and cited the same NOAA dataset, which was cherry picked on denier websites in a manner that deliberately misrepresented the actual rates of sea level rise. You can find out what’s actually happening in the discussions about climate myths 25, 69, 100, and 125:
    ===============================================================
    https://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise.htm
    ===============================================================
    https://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise-predictions.htm
    ===============================================================
    https://www.skepticalscience.com/decelerating-sea-level-rise.htm
    ===============================================================
    https://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-not-rising.htm

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  25. And BS back to you? Here is what NOAA says in full: “Global sea level has been rising over the past century, and we’ve seen the rate increase in recent decades. Global tidal records from 1900 to 1990 show an estimated 4- to 5-inch rise in global mean sea level. Then, in the 25 years from 1990 to 2015, this global tide gauge network showed global sea level rising 3 inches, agreeing with measures by satellite altimeters taken since 1992. Currently, sea level is rising about one-eighth of an inch per year but is projected to rise in the future. By 2100, sea levels may rise another 1 to 8 feet – that’s feet, not inches.” https://www.noaa.gov/explainers/tracking-sea-level-rise-and-fall

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  31. Denialist, doctored, crap graph guy here. Tidal gauges are an important method of assessing relative sea level rise, especially locally (not just the SB area). That method has its issues which are well known. Presently that method does not support the rate of rise necessary to cause the type of inundation projected to occur in this article. Several posters brought that up and were unjustly excoriated for it. Satellite altimetry for assessing sea level rise also has its own issues which put it in significant disagreement with the tidal data set. Neither are wrong, just different. A recently published paper is on the topic of pacific basin tidal gauges with at least a 100 year record is linked here. http://notrickszone.com/2019/01/28/pacific-ocean-tide-gauges-of-100-years-both-the-relative-rate-of-rise-and-acceleration-are-negative/ I’m sure prominent posters here will huff and puff in their usual way.

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  32. So all of the climate change deniers here are smarter than the nearly 100% of scientists that agree that climate change is a reality? I really hope you are right, but I would bet that you aren’t. The quote that I remember is by a scientist that goes to the climate change meetings and reports- No one ever comes to these things and says- well, that happened slower than I thought it would. Let the denier downvotes commence.

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  34. Haha. AOC is still waiting for World War II to happen and we’re supposed to believe she knows science…psshh. Who do we blame for all the natural disasters that happened before man or the ice age or sea shells on mountain tops?

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  35. It doesn’t take a scientist to see that the ocean off our coast is rising, just experience on the beach and two eyeballs. Nero fiddled while Rome burned is an apt analogy for what is happening with our rapidly heating earth and oceans. Instead of curbing pollution we are building more extremely polluting, luxury cruise liners, larger and larger cars and personal jet airplanes, enlarging airports and freeways and electing a federal government that denies any attempt to curb pollution. Eventually we’ll wake up from the fossil fuel lifestyle and do something, but it will probably be too late to save our beaches and climate. I hope I’m wrong.

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  36. There is another threat of flooding in Santa Barbara that could cause tremendous damage a lot sooner than the year 2100. Mission Creek runs through many low lying areas of Santa Barbara. The Bren School at UCSB published a report on the flooding risk from the mission creek watershed back in 2009, which can be found here:
    http://www.esm.ucsb.edu/research/documents/Hydro_Final_Report.pdf
    In section 7 of the report, there is a map showing the areas of Santa Barbara predicted to flood during a storm that comes after a fire in the watershed. The debris basins protecting Santa Barbara from the Mission Canyon watershed today are woefully inadequate.
    There is nothing we can do to influence the potential long term movements of the land and the sea, however, we could build new debris basins to protect our city from post-fire flooding. Carpinteria built the Santa Monica debris dam after it was flooded with mud during a post-fire storm in the 1960s. The Santa Monica debris dam protected Carpinteria from flooding and mud flows after the Thomas Fire. Without it, history would almost certainly have repeated itself in Carpinteria.
    The Mission Canyon watershed will burn again one day, and it will rain afterwards. This will happen a lot sooner than the year 2100. We know there will likely be severe flooding and mud flows when this happens. However, we can prevent this unfortunate outcome if we commit ourselves to building the infrastructure necessary to protect our city.

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  37. Thanks for your educational efforts, MacP, as unwelcome as they are. I’ll be dead, didn’t have kids by choice, and believe homo sapiens is just another species headed toward desperate hardship. The earth will outlive us if it comes to that.

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