San Francisco & Global Warming

Melting polar ice would drown parts of San Francisco Bay Area
18 February 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Highways, houses, industrial developments and entire neighborhoods along the San Francisco Bay will be under water if global warming causes tides to rise as much as 3 feet in the coming decades, according to new maps developed by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

The maps, prepared for The San Francisco Chronicle, depict entirely submerged parts of residential cities such as Corte Madera, Mill Valley, Sausalito, San Rafael, Hayward and Newark. In San Francisco, the Caltrain mass transit system and an ambitious Candlestick Point redevelopment project would be vulnerable to flooding.

Much of the Silicon Valley shoreline would be under water, including a portion of a NASA research site and the spot where Google Inc. wants to build a 1 million-square-foot campus. Flooding could damage sewage treatment plants in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Alviso.

Silicon Valley is particularly at risk because some parts of Santa Clara County -- epicenter of the global technology industry -- have dropped 14 feet as the ground sank when groundwater was pumped from the 1940s to 1960s.

Problems for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta area, northeast of San Francisco, could be catastrophic. The region pumps send fresh water to two-thirds of Californians. Homes, businesses, highways, groundwater and wetland habitat would be flooded.

The Bay Area has zoning requirements to deal with earthquakes, but it hasn't treated rising sea levels with the same urgency, said Will Travis, executive director of Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Some development plans should be scrapped or drastically re-engineered, he said.

"The amount of planning and preparing that we do is really what will affect how severe the impacts are here," Travis told the Chronicle.

Climate scientists still debate how much sea levels could rise in upcoming decades. Some models predict a rise as high as 15 feet by 2100. Most models don't take into account the recent increasing rate of melt in Greenland and sloughing of ice in western Antarctica.

Officials from the bay conservation agency and the Pacific Institute are seeking funds to conduct a study to identify real estate, infrastructure and natural resources at risk, and calculate the costs.>