the edge of wetness

The latest tear-jerker from the ongoing Weather Network melodrama is titled The fight to save Vancouver's disappearing beaches:

“As the oceans get warmer the oceans expands and as ice melts from the glaciers all that water gets added to the ocean and the seas are coming up. We have already had about 10 cm of sea rise globally so this isn’t just a problem for the future’s future, this is a problem right now,” Christopher Harley, a professor at the University of British Columbia's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, told The Weather Network.

Adding to global warming fear and promoting the alleged sea level crisis, the City of Vancouver established their Climate Change Adaption Strategy in 2012. This document still drives today’s planning, including the purported need to save the City’s shoreline from the problem right now … not surprisingly, the Stragedy says it’s only going to get worse:

Based on present and expected increases in emissions in the near future, sea levels are expected to rise at accelerating rates into the next century.

However, the extreme modelling pathway (RCP8.5) that supported predictions of a half-metre sea level rise (SLR) by 2050, has been scientifically discredited - www.nature.com. Yet all the future doom scenarios, caused by those faulty projections, remain.

A couple of years ago, in response to the supposed SLR emergency, Vancouver engaged two international Architecture firms and a number of local politically-correct others to devise a flood protection plan for False Creek. That Sea2City Design Challenge returned several fantastic adaptation ideas including a floating First Nations restaurant. There was little in the proposed dreamscapes that actually dealt with potential increased ocean volume, beyond abandoning existing colonial infrastructure to let indigenous nature take its course.

As set out in the Weather Network episode, the latest vision to save the City’s oceanfront is called Imagine West End Waterfront. The problem once again is that these Parks Board ideas don’t address beach protection at all and appear to be just another SimCity joyride.
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Part of the City’s job is to improve shoreline access and parks, but staff proposals should succeed or fail based on the merits of whether to increase taxes for such municipal icing-on-the-cake. To suggest that artistic upland changes and intertidal platforms where impromptu ballet breaks out next to kayakers trapped on the rocks by the outgoing tide (see picture on pp.8 of the West End plans) can help avoid SLR damage or flooding, is funny.

How necessary is any expensive mitigation process? Vancouver sea level has gone up only 60 millimetres (about 2.4”) since 1911, or about 0.54 millimetres (0.02”) per year:
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​But local SLR is accelerating, right? Nope:
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​Alarming predictions of a half metre SLR by 2050 (just 27 years away) have been based on an impossible CO2 emission pathway. Real measurement shows that the long term rate of increase is not significant and has actually decreased since the 2012 Climate Change Adaption Strategy was put in place.

Vancouver’s civil-servant-creatives have a number of utopian scripts they are promoting as the next big show. Staff obsessed with these fictional climate soap operas are a shameful waste of resources for a City that needs resolution to real dramas, like the homeless problem.
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