Guest “I couldn’t make this sort of schist up, if I tried” by David Middleton
California is feuding with this SoCal city over ‘planned retreat’ from sea level rise
By PHIL DIEHL
OCT. 6, 2019
10:19 AMDEL MAR, Calif. — Del Mar is gearing up for a tussle with the California Coastal Commission over the best way to adapt to rising sea levels, an issue with statewide implications.
The city north of San Diego has taken the position that one of the Coastal Commission’s basic strategies, called “managed retreat” or sometimes “planned retreat,” will not work in Del Mar.
“We have a plan, and we stand by our plan,” Del Mar Councilman Dwight Worden said Friday.The City Council is scheduled to review its sea level rise adaptation plan Monday in preparation for a Coastal Commission hearing on Oct. 16. The commission’s staff has recommended its board reject Del Mar’s plan unless the city agrees to a list of 25 modifications that Worden said could be a “back door” to managed retreat.
[…]
Del Mar, after nearly five years of community meetings and work by residents, staffers and consultants, has agreed to reject the idea of managed retreat. Instead, the city intends to focus on restoring sand to eroding beaches, reinforcing its existing seawalls and dredging the channel of the nearby San Dieguito River.
“The extremely high land value in Del Mar means that public acquisition of any property the city does not control will be difficult and cost-prohibitive,” states a resolution approved last year by the City Council.
[…]
Planning for sea level rise is a relatively new requirement of the Coastal Commission. The state agency was founded in 1972 when there was little knowledge of climate change and rising sea levels.
[…]
Los Angeles Times
Planning for sea level rise is a relatively new requirement of the Coastal Commission. The state agency was founded in 1972 when there was little knowledge of climate change and rising sea levels.
Now that’s funny right there.
The morons hawking the “ExxonKnew” horst schist keep telling us that the oil industry knew all about climate change as early as the 1960’s… And everything the industry knew came from publications from groups like the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the government of these sort of United States of America. All of the “secret science” was publicly available. So… Why the hell didn’t the Coastal Commission try doing a bit of research?
The even funnier thing is this bit:
The state agency was founded in 1972 when there was little knowledge of climate change and rising sea levels.
The schist I couldn’t have made up if I was trying.
“The city north of San Diego has” no excuse for being ignorant of sea level rise before 1972.
interval of +/- 0.18 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1906 to 2018 which is equivalent to a change of 0.72 feet in 100 years.” NOAA
interval of +/- 0.27 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1924 to 2016 which is equivalent to a change of 0.71 feet in 100 years.”
Del Mar experienced more sea level rise from 1906-1971 (145 mm) than it has since 1972 (103 mm). How many inches is that? 5.6 inches from 1906-1971 and 4.0 inches from 1972-2018. The daily tidal range is nearly 5 feet.
The even funnier thing, is that Del Mar grew from nothing to some of the most expensive real estate in the world while that catastrophic 10 inches of sea level rise was inundating the coastline.
Old Del Mar
On August 14, 1882, the first California Southern Railroad train rode the tracks of its new route from San Diego to San Bernardino. Theodore M. Loop – the contractor and engineer who worked on the project – had acquired acreage and built a home on the north shore of Los Peñasquitos Creek, a setting he described as “the most attractive place on the entire coast.” Loop built a tent city on the beach, now Torrey Pines State Beach. His wife, Ella, called it “Del Mar” – words taken from a popular poem, The Fight on Paseo Del Mar.
In that same year “Colonel” Jacob Taylor (left) – who had come with his family to live on Rancho Peñasquitos – met Loop who suggested that they build a town. Taylor was captivated by the beauty and potential of the area, and in the summer of 1885, he purchased 338.11 acres at the northern end of the mesa from homesteader Enoch Talbert for $1,000. Thus the town of Del Mar was officially founded.
Taylor was a dynamic visionary who pictured Del Mar as a seaside resort for the rich and famous. With technical support from family and friends, he designed and built a town whose focal point was Casa del Mar, a hotel-resort on what is now 10th Street. Other town attractions included a train station, a dance pavilion, and a bathing pool extending from the beach out into the sea.
The first Del Mar store, located on the north side of 9th Street, was owned by Henry John Gottesburen and his wife Mary who had moved from Atchison, Kansas, to Del Mar in 1884.[…]
The Fairgrounds and The Racetrack
In 1933, a search for a permanent location for the San Diego County Fair began. Ed Fletcher suggested that the 184 acre site in the San Dieguito Valley – just off the main highways and the Santa Fe Railroad – would be easily accessible and a perfect setting for a fairground.The Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided initial funding and the “Del Mar” Fair opened to a great fanfare on October 8, 1936. Fifty thousand people came to enjoy the exhibits and entertainment. Selection of a queen – the Fairest of the Fair – soon became a highlight of this annual event. The final touch on the fairgrounds was the mile-long oval racetrack.
Bing Crosby took the leadership role in making the Del Mar Turf Club a reality, and Pat O’Brien became the Vice President. On opening day of the race track (July 3, 1937), a new era began in Del Mar. The track was hailed as Bing’s Baby or Movieland’s Own Track. In 1938, Bing recorded the song that would open and close every day of racing since those early days – Where the Turf Meets the Surf (click to listen to the song).
For decades racing season has brought crowds to Del Mar. Hollywood celebrities, such as Pat O’Brien, Jimmy and Marge Durante, Lucy and Desi Arnaz and their children, as well as Burt Bachrach and Angie Dickenson,
Post World War II and The University Years
By 1959, Del Mar decided to incorporate as a city and the 60s marked a time of relative tranquility with the exception of a local student uprising. As the University of California in San Diego came into being, its presence influenced the social, cultural, and political life of the area. The city of Del Mar gained new residents, many of whom were politically active, providing new community leadership. Emphasis began to shift to protecting the environment and beautifying Del Mar. From the late 60s to the early 80s people spoke of the “open space decade,” thus Seagrove Park was born. The 80s marked an increasing emphasis on beautification, coupled with progress and a higher cosmopolitan profile. Del Mar grew to become home to a major publishing concern and attracted artists, writers, and business. In 1985, Del Mar celebrated its centennial, and the Del Mar Historical Society was born.The centerpieces of new Del Mar are L’Auberge – a beautiful hotel designed with the Hotel Del Mar in mind – and the elegant shops and boutiques of the picturesque seaside shopping center, Del Mar Plaza. Its selection of restaurants provides great taste, mood, and rave reviews.
Del Mar Historical Society
Jacob Taylor would be pleased to know that his vision retains its elegant ambiance, hosting guests from all over the world in the crown jewel of San Diego, our Del Mar.
I think I actually have more empathy for the sea level rise fraudsters in Kiribati and Vanuatu… They, at least, have the excuse of being impoverished.
That said, Del Mar deserves credit for not surrendering to sea level and simply continuing employ standard civil engineering methods of coexisting with sea level.
[T]he city intends to focus on restoring sand to eroding beaches, reinforcing its existing seawalls and dredging the channel of the nearby San Dieguito River.
[…]
The commission’s staff has recommended its board reject Del Mar’s plan unless the city agrees to a list of 25 modifications that Worden said could be a “back door” to managed retreat.
“Retreat, hell! We’re just attacking in the other direction!”
Obviously, the Peoples Republic of California thinks this sort of thing is unacceptable.
Del Mar CA earns a Jon Lovitz award for choosing civil engineering over stupidity…
Addendum 1
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
What ought to be done, is to construct a massive concrete wall out into the sea to create an enclosed lagoon, and simply dump all the county waste into it over a period of years,
Then compact it and build fantatstically expensive condos.
Coastal erosion has very little to do with sea-level rise, and has a lot to do with the ever-present effect of waves, especially during storm surges.
To those that are really worried about melting ice caps causing rising sea levels:
To melt ice we need to heat it, that is, we need to add heat energy to it.
If we are to heat it with warmer air the air needs to be at a higher temperature than the ice at the shared surface.
This is elementary high school physics – heat energy can only flow from a hot body to a cooler body.
Thus the ice at the surface must be raised by the air to zero degrees C for melting to even begin.
Over this ice sheet, the air temperatures range from
–11C to –40C in summer and –28C to –57C in winter.
The air temperatures here are always below the freezing point of ice. (Check the data for yourself)
With those air temperatures being always so much lower than zero and lower than the ice temperature
(The Antarctic ice is typically –5C), no heat transfer to the ice can occur to raise its temperature to zero, therefore no melting can occur. For this reason, air temperatures would need to increase, not by half a degree or even two degrees as the IPCC predicts, but by tens of degrees for any melting to even begin. Since the Antarctic ice cap contains 90% of the world’s ice, any risk of warmer air causing ice cap melting or hazardous sea level rise is nonsense.
The alarmists behind the scare (self appointed experts) need to brush up on their high school physics.
….”The even funnier thing, is that Del Mar grew from nothing to some of the most expensive real estate in the world while that catastrophic 10 inches of sea level rise was inundating the coastline….”
That says it all, really, David. A sense of perspective, or indeed knowledge of history, seems near-totally lacking in the climate business. Even were the rate of rise to treble, it still wouldn’t pose anything like the threat that the doomsters expect us to assume.
Sure, there is an arguable case in places for retreat from rapidly-eroding coasts (we have that on parts of the North Sea coast in UK) but rapid erosion is not quite the same thing as sea level rise. Where there are few coast dwellers with few funds or political clout, they are losing their homes as the land is being given up to the sea, and the normal sea defences are being abandoned. In this, the planners are assuming things will get a lot worse due climate change, making defending the line a likely lost cause, and this overrides the pleas of the residents for help. Sad.
Yet another good post, thanks.
To say erosion is “not quite the same thing as sea level rise” is to conflate two completely separate processes.
When material is eroded from one location, it is deposited somewhere else, often nearby, especially in regard to sand on a beach.
Sea level rise has little to do with this.
They are not only not quite the same, they are nothing like the same.
AS good example of adaptation to a rising sea is of course to build a sea wall.
A extreme example of this is Canvey Island in Essex , UK. Previously just a mud flat off the coast, the King way back invited some Dutch dyke builders to reclaim this lad and link it to the mainland.
They were both paid well and a bonus was to own a parcel of land. A original Dutch house is still there.
The sea wall is about a 100 feet in height, so none of the residents can see the sea, but they can and do walk to the top and enjoy a walk above the sea. As a child I lived there for a few months.
Bring it up on Goggle.
MJE VK5ELL
Piling new sand on beaches may not work.
Here in Norfolk, UK, we have serious coastal erosion and a minimal relative sea level rise (isostatic rebound is mainly responsible for what there is). There are large towns now under the sea due to erosion: Google Dunwich.
On the coast just a few miles from us is a huge natural gas terminal at Bacton. The beach was eroding so very recently it was topped up by 1.8 million tons of sand dumped without much care. Those of us with basic knowledge of the long shore drift and hydrology of the local coastline simply said, “wait”.
Sure enough, within a few weeks a lot of that introduced sand has vanished.
A few miles to the east, there was a sea wall built following the serious tidal inundation in 1953. The wall remains intact and has been supplemented by a barrier of imported rocks in places. If you walk to the western end of the sea wall the natural shoreline is now some 200ft behind that line and is receding: the lifeboat station that was there twenty years ago has gone as the sea maintains its inward encroachment.
The answer to Del Mar’s situation is obvious: forget reliance upon sand and build a strong sea wall.
USACE doesn’t dump or authorize the dumping of sand on beaches “without much care.”
Fear ye not me? saith the Lord: will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it?
JEREMIAH 5:22
I don’t understand the complaint at all. I just don’t. Lake Michigan (a/k/a Michi Gamu) is notorious for rising and falling lake levels and eroding beaches on its west side,never mind what happens over on the east side.
So the DNR people bring in and replace the beach sands that the lake stole during its more tempestuous moments between fall and spring, and add more riprap (e.g., jumbled concrete blocks and BIG rocks) in less popular places, and get the beaches read for the summer season.
HOWEVER: if Mother Nature decided that SHE wants to reclaim the entire scoop of the (current) Great Lakes, all SHE has to do is flood them with enough snow runoff and rain to raise the levels of Michi Gamu and Gichi Gamu (Superior) so that Lake Michigan’s waterline is right back up at the ridge that Clark Street follows in Chicago and everything lower than Clark Street will be T-O-A-S-T….. or submerged, if you don’t get “toast’. And all that will eventually flow out through Lakes Ontario, Huron, and Erie and flood those areas. That would be interesting.
That article’s context says that the state of LaLaLand wants to seize Del Mar at some point in the future and the people who live there know it. I wish them good luck in defending their turf from the predators on land. Of course, the down side to seizing it is that if the landowners moved away, they’d take their taxes with them.
Beach erosion has never occurred until now, especially along active margins. /s
Active margins used to be only marginally active
Of course, sandy beaches are NEVER stable.
Apparently Del Mar understands this. They’re allocating ongoing funds to maintain their beaches. It’s a neverending battle, having nothing to do with climate… and much to do with how oceans function.
Hmmm…does planned retreat mean public acquisition of prime value property from private owners (for their own good, of course)?
Seems legit.
A meteorite strike in the Pacific Basin would create massive tsunamis so some prep for the wrong reasons is okay as long as the informed class of AGW skeptics is not harmed by policy adventures and virtue signaling.
The city of Del Mar has it right–building a sea wall (10 inches in 100 years) is a whole lot cheaper than moving a city.
In response to Mardler’s comment about the futility of building beaches by moving sand, there was a recent example in western France, near the mouth of the Loire River, where it flows westward into the Atlantic Ocean, where the river is spanned by the Saint-Nazaire Bridge. To the north of the river, the coastline turns westward for about 30 miles, with south-facing beaches, including the ritzy casino resort of La Baule. To the south of the river, the coastline extends southward for about 15 miles, with west-facing beaches (with much lower land values) of Saint-Brevin and Tharon, until another shorter peninsula (Pointe de Sainte-Gildas) extends westward, with rocky beaches facing north and south.
The bay has a very strong tidal flow, and owners of expensive homes in La Baule complain that sand was disappearing from their ritzy beach, and piling up in Tharon, where the width of the beach below the barrier dune has actually grown toward the sea, making the Tharon beach more attractive to tourists than the La Baule beach. So, every winter, lots of large diesel-fueled dump trucks are hauling pretty white sand about 40 miles from Tharon to La Baule, to cover up all the gravel for the rich folks at La Baule. who don’t worry that the CO2 emissions from the dump trucks might be raising sea levels somewhere else, and the other air pollutants from the trucks are blown by the prevailing westerlies back toward Tharon.
Of course, the waves and tides will bring all that pretty sand back to Tharon every summer…
+10
I guess the issue will be who pays for the trucks in the future amidst organized finger pointing and money bag handling. The French have excellent diplomatic skills in that department.
“We have a plan, and we stand by our plan,” said councilman Canute.
Ahhhh…1885. Those were the days, when a couple of guys could get together over drinks and decide to build a whole new town.
Another California shit show . In 50 years move your beach furniture an inch or move .
Guaranteed there will be lots of buyers for waterfront .
Maybe people just have too much time on their hands .
The new family unit is a cat .
Another California gong show . In 50 years move your beach furniture an inch or move .
Guaranteed there will be lots of buyers for waterfront .
Maybe people just have too much time on their hands .
The new family unit is a cat .
Maybe it would be best if the entire town were abandoned and turned into a wilderness area. I am sure that the current residents would be more than happy to pay for their homes to be torn down and carted away and the whole area returned to its wild state.