A Strategy for Coping with Climate Change

Sounds like another "Do Nothing" strategy. Look to the Dutch. They have been working on solutions for hundreds of years and pushed the sea back.

Or make the area more "productive" by providing oil refineries there. It worked for the delta around New Orleans!

While rising sea levels have yet to be documented, it's certainly good to be thinking about these things. Coping with climate change, manmade or not, is a much better strategy than trying to alter it.

I trust none of it.

Dollar-value is not a reliable metric. This article asserts that the levee repair cost was 75 million dollars to protect land "worth" 22 million dollars. The methodology used for determining the "value" of land expressed in dollars is going to be flawed because the "value" of land in dollars varies. For example, when dollars are the metric, prime agricultural land is of lower "value" than land zoned for houses or Walmarts. Acreage covered with government offices is of a higher dollar value than acreage producing wheat, rice, tomatoes, celery, onions or cattle. The Delta land in this article is probably the finest farmland in California which means it equals or surpasses the finest farmland in the nation. Levees can be rebuilt, ag land cannot.

Money and politics trump science. That's the way it is in California.

Economic forces dominate Sacramento. Over-development south of the Tehachapi mountains from Los Angeles County to San Diego County is an under-reported disaster. Thus, the objectivity of the University report is shadowed by money and politics and the need in this faltering economy for large public works projects.The Governor, Westlands Water District and Metropolitan Water of Los Angeles want a peripheral canal in the Delta, they are pushing for it with an ongoing propaganda campaign which one hears every day on the major AM radio stations out of San Francisco.

The Pacific salmon runs are failing, the Delta Smelt are nearly extinct, but this is a water war. The southern half of the state wants the northern half's water and will destroy the Delta and its habitat to get it. Studies which support that destruction must be considered suspect.

Part of my family is from the delta area.  I remember in the fifties when all of the homes in the delta area were built up on 5 ft. high stilts.  I asked my uncle why this was so, and he said that it was for the yearly floods.

What we seem to be missing here is the fact that all of the work to harness hydroelectricity, store water, and feed development resulted in the constant damming of the river systems mentioned in this article.  Those rivers revived and replenished the siltation of the delta region, provided access for spawning grounds that fed the the salmon and smelt runs.  All is gone for the sake of controlling what nature did to replenish and sustain the delta.  No more silt means no more build up of the delta. No more spawning grounds means no more fish! Fish ladders don't remake flooded spawning grounds behind the dams.

The old saying amongs family members was that as kids, they could cross the Sacramento on the backs of salmon.  Today, amongs those still alive, they are sorry that they helped to build some of the dams that choke the rivers today!
Just another man made disaster..........

Soarhead  

Focus, not on CO2, but on the 10 billion pounds of aerosol (non-CO2) pollutants drifting over North America every year from East Asia.  Those pollutants wash out into the mountains, forests, lakes, streams, and coastal waters.  The Sacramento Delta is very susceptible to such pollution.  We should be making trade policy partly dependent upon environmental cleanup from our upwind trade partners.