Editorial: The disappearing Delta

Global warming forces a review

Published 2:15 am PST Wednesday, November 10, 2004

The most comprehensive report to date on the arctic and global warming rings another alarm for a challenge beyond the nation's political comfort zone. In their four-year project, hundreds of scientists concluded climate change is happening faster than previously thought. Within our children and grandchildren's lifetimes (somewhere between 2070 and 2090), the icy arctic will be a seasonal phenomenon. In the winter, there will be snow and ice. In the summer, much will melt away.

The melting ice will cause the world's sea levels to rise by three feet. This is not the scientists' worst-case scenario. It's their middle-of-the-road estimate.

Even before the report's formal release, the Bush administration offered an appalling response. If addressing global warming means reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a way that costs America jobs (a "single" job, one official said), the administration simply won't respond. That position is breathtaking. Global warming will cost this country many more jobs in the long run than a careful transition. Even so, federal inaction does not absolve California from preparing for the future.

The report singles out California as facing a dramatic change. A three-foot rise in the sea level would transform the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta -turning its water salty and perhaps submerging key central islands. Many Delta islands are already many feet below sea level because years of farming exposed and oxidized the peat-based soils. Substandard levees are the only protection to keep the islands from disappearing today. It is wildly irresponsible to assume that levees can hold back a rising sea, floods and earthquakes. The Delta appears destined to become a brackish body of water. And because pumps that fill the state and federal aqueducts are in the Delta, they could no longer provide a useable source of water for two-thirds of the state or millions of acres of San Joaquin Valley agriculture.

One physical solution is to stop pumping water directly from the estuary and instead route the water supply around the Delta with a peripheral canal. Defeated in a state election in the 1982, the canal remains the state's most controversial piece of proposed plumbing. The fear, a legitimate one, is that the canal would harm the Delta and make the southland more dependent on the North's water. But what if a new fear - global warming - has changed the equation? What if today's Delta is nothing like tomorrow's? Global warming, regardless of its causes, gives California no choice but to rethink the Delta. This process must enlist those with a high degree of political independence and brainpower. No idea should be off the table. No solution should be preordained. The state needs a rational conversation about this huge topic. It falls to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to launch that discussion.