Were San Diego’s Storm Floods Due to Climate Crisis or Failures of City’s Maintenance of Drainage System — or Both?

Flooding along Abbott Street in Ocean Beach, Jan. 5, 2016.

By Michael Smolens / San Diego Union-Tribune / Feb. 4, 2024

Extreme weather events always trigger discussion of how much of an impact climate change may have had, if any.

That has come into play in San Diego over the past two weeks as major storms — with more on the way — barreled into the region. Widespread flooding and damage occurred in some communities during the most powerful one on Jan. 22.

Mayor Todd Gloria made the climate change connection after that record rainfall. Flooded-out residents and others said the mayor was using climate change to distract from the city’s failure to maintain and make improvements to the stormwater drainage system the city itself has long said are needed.

They both had a point.

According to scientists, storms are becoming more intense, temperatures are higher, droughts are longer and seas are rising because of climate change.

Long-term climate studies show the San Diego region will see fewer days with moderate rainfall, while the top 1 percent of wettest days are going to become “much wetter,” Martin Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told USA Today.

“Longer dry spells in between bigger, wetter events,” he said.

This doesn’t mean actions can’t be taken to mitigate some impacts of climate change. Fixing and enhancing flood protection infrastructure is one relatively simple, if expensive, way to adapt to the brutal rains unleashed by the atmospheric rivers we will continue to experience.

“We live in a community that is known for perfect weather and generally arid conditions, but the climate is changing and it’s calling into question how we’re going to finance the system,” Gloria said on Wednesday, according to David Garrick of The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Nor should it discourage long-range changes on a broader scale that can help slow, stop, or even reverse global warming.

Many years of dire predictions about the future of a warming Earth have led some people to believe nothing can be done, so why try?

In the last couple of years, climate experts, academics and others have sought to shift the conversation away from such demoralizing talk, while not sugarcoating the consequences if important and often difficult moves are not made.

Business as usual won’t cut it, whether it’s the penchant for putting off needed infrastructure or not making serious reductions in carbon emissions that exacerbate climate change.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann told The Associated Press that “doomism” has become more of a threat than denialism, and he believes that some people, trade associations and companies that denied climate change are encouraging people who say it is too late.

He said scientists used to think Earth would be committed to decades of future warming even after people stopped sending more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than nature takes out. But newer analyses in recent years show it will only take a few years after net zero emissions for carbon levels in the air to start to go down because of carbon being sucked up by the oceans and forests, according to Mann.

Doomism “is definitely a thing,” said Wooster (Ohio) College psychology professor Susan Clayton, who studies climate change anxiety. “It’s a way of saying, ‘I don’t have to go to the effort of making changes because there’s nothing I can do anyway.’”

Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, acknowledged the obvious to AP: “Everybody knows it’s going to get worse.”

But, Francis added, “We can do a lot to make it less bad than the worst-case scenario.”

Hannah Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford, is the author of a book called “Not the End of the World.”

“It seems like we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Ritchie told The New York Times. “I want to push back on that.”

Ritchie said the global temperature is on track to increase between 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius. “That is catastrophic,” Ritchie said. But the Scottish researcher said that’s lower than projections a decade ago.

“Part of why I have optimism is . . . We’ve chopped a degree off our trajectory based on solutions that we’ve implemented, but that’s not enough,” Ritchie said.

Economics more than politics may be the key to whether that trend continues. People will go to what’s cheaper and more efficient.

It’s worth noting that Texas, a Republican state if there ever was one, generates more wind and solar power than any other state, including deep-blue California, and it’s not even close, as the Texas Monthly pointed out.

People often contend that state and local climate efforts won’t change things if the rest of the world doesn’t go along. But much of the world is.

“In the last decade, China has gone from being an outlier to a world leader in the development of technology aimed at tackling climate change,” according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In June, non-fossil fuel energy sources exceeded 50 percent of China’s total electricity generation capacity for the first time.”

Going on offense to combat climate change is hard. So is defending against it. Building culverts is one thing. Rerouting rail lines away from collapsing coastal bluffs and, someday, moving entire neighborhoods off the seashore are quite another.

It can be hard to get your head around some of what may need to be done, or what may happen regardless, in the climate-changed future.

The threat is a lot bigger than when the phrase “think globally, act locally” was coined more than a century ago. The slogan seems almost quaint these days, but it still applies. Actions big and small are needed.

After all, 2023 was the hottest year on record. And this year is predicted to be even hotter.