As I wrote on Friday in the Bay Area edition of The Times, residents of the West Coast have been locally sheltered from the impact of accelerated sea level rise.
Surfers in San Diego still paddle into waves that roll about as high up the sandy beaches as they did when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. In San Francisco Bay marinas, average high tide marks have fallen slightly over the same period.
Seas are meanwhile rising around the world at a quickening pace in a phenomenon that scientists attribute to global warming. The Pacific Ocean was rising roughly two millimeters a year midway through the 20th century, scientists estimate; since the 1990s, they say, the ocean has been rising 3 millimeters a year.
But after three decades of this good fortune, sea levels are suddenly forecast to start rising along the eastern Pacific Ocean. They might not only catch up with global averages but could even surpass them, scientists say.
That’s because changing ocean winds are poised to reverse a tilt in the Pacific Ocean that has inundated parts of Asia and protected America’s western states from rising seas since the late 1970s, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego reported last week.