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Massive Waves Pound Some California Coast Cities, Causing Floods and Injuries (cnn.com) 78

Posted by EditorDavid from the surf-cities dept.
CNN describes them as "towering waves," driven into California's coastline by powerful storms and "posing a significant risk to people and structures along the coast."

Monstrous, 20-foot-plus waves on Thursday crashed over seawalls and swept away and injured several people, forced rescues and sent a damaging surge of water through coastal California streets.

Dangerous waves continued to slam the coast on Friday, forcing beaches to close. All Ventura County beaches will be closed through New Year's Eve because of the 15- to 20-foot waves expected along the central and Southern California coasts through Saturday evening... Sea levels have risen along most of the California coastline over the past century, NOAA data shows, as global temperatures climb and melt glaciers and ice sheets. Higher sea levels are making coastal flooding events worse and will continue to do so in the future.

The first round of dangerous waves hit alongside high tide Thursday morning. Several people were injured by a huge wave that slammed into Pierpont in the Ventura Beach area... Nearly 20 people were briefly swept away in the incident and eight people were taken to the hospital, Ventura officials said.
One bystander even filmed what CNN calls a"monster" wave, "the surge sweeping people and vehicles down the street... The massive waves pummeling the coastline, reeking havoc, flooding streets and businesses."

CNN's report also includes footage from nearly 300 miles north, showing a wave flooding a beachfront restaurant's courtyard in Santa Cruz, California. ("I just feel bad for the restaurants," says one local. "I know they just went through renovations from the last time this happened.") CNN's original article notes the sheriff's office there briefly issued an evacuation warning for some areas for part of Thursday, including one "where seawater filled beachside roadways and pushed against some homes, CNN affiliate KION reported."

And CNN's video report concludes by noting that "Parts of the California coast could see towering waves through the weekend, coastal flood and high surf alerts stretching from the southern border to the Bay Area."
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Massive Waves Pound Some California Coast Cities, Causing Floods and Injuries More

Massive Waves Pound Some California Coast Cities, Causing Floods and Injuries

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  • Can't say you weren't warned (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday December 30, 2023 @12:59PM (#64117027)

    Before global climate change, people were warned of '100-year' and '1000-year' events, and generally ignored the warnings and didn't prepare.

    With global warming, it's straight up denial. Everyone's been told there will be rise in sea levels that is a lot more significant than it sounds, and a lot more energy in the ocean and atmosphere to power stronger and more frequent extreme weather.

    Is this event due to that? Maybe it's a 1:100000 event that would have happened anyway, but statistically it's probably global warming whether in whole or in part.

    We'll keep denying it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 )

      And there's the first denial - someone with mod points labelling my post 'troll' to suppress it.

      This is why we're not going to fix anything any time soon. Too many idiots fighting the people trying to make things better.

      • And now they've wasted TWO mod points on it. God they're stupid.

        • Three. Awesome. Too stupid to figure out that a point wasted here is unavailable for elsewhere. Like anyone but the triggered denialists are reading this deep in the chain anyway.

          Morons.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yep. Climate change is a double-whammy: Average (!) temperatures get a bit higher, but extremes become much more frequent and more extreme as a result of the impact of higher temperatures on the climate system. 1.5C or even 2C, 3C or 4C do not sound that bad, right? And in fact 1.5C on average probably would not be much a problem. But 1.5C on average means something like, say, 5C or more higher and lower in the extremes and that _is_ bad. This also means more flooding and more drought, plants being unable t

      • To be fair, "fact checking" on the Internet, or, more to the point, confirming any statement to be true couldnt be easier. Literally any statement can be confirmed as true in a world where LLMs produce trillions of pages of content daily and advertising algorithms are serving up targeted results.

  • we know where this is going (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Saturday December 30, 2023 @12:59PM (#64117029)
    We have exceeded 400 PPM CO2 in the atmosphere. We're currently at 419 ppm. https://www.co2.earth/daily-co... [www.co2.earth]
    The earth has been there before, so we know exactly what's coming. Last time the earth experienced these levels was 3-5 million years ago during the Pliocene. Ocean levels were (c) 50 feet higher and temperatures were (c) 14 degrees warmer. https://www.rmets.org/event/pl... [rmets.org] . No mystery here. If you have ocean front property, you might want to move inland, it won't happen tomorrow, but bit by bit, every year will be a new record.

    • Re:we know where this is going (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday December 30, 2023 @01:10PM (#64117045)

      >We have exceeded 400 PPM CO2 in the atmosphere.

      It gets more interesting. A Harvard study (https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27662232/4892924.pdf?sequence=1) found human cognition impaired by about 15% at 945ppm.

      That may sound like a lot more than 400ppm, but it's actually not - because CO2 accumulation indoors in an occupied building is always higher than outside. Ventilation systems can only mix outside air with inside, so as outside CO2 rises, the ability to keep indoor CO2 levels comfortably low is impaired... and then our brains are too.

      We're going to get dumber, there's no way for humans to evolve to be CO2 tolerant on the kind of time scales we're talking about here.

      • I look forward to our bating future. Ow my balls!

      • We're going to get dumber,

        What do you mean, going to?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        We're going to get dumber, there's no way for humans to evolve to be CO2 tolerant on the kind of time scales we're talking about here.

        What, even more dumb? That hardly seems possible with a large faction of the human race already understanding basically nothing.

        That said, yes, very much. I do some lectures that are not regularly timed (CAS) with a CO2 monitor now. Does not take very long to go to 2000 ppm when engaging the audience.

        • Hooray for grossly inadequate HVAC! Hmm, the HVAC in the building I work in is crap, it would be interesting to take a CO2 monitor in there...

      • Nothing a few potted plants can't fix. Here are some good ones!

        https://www.respiratorytherapy... [respirator...pyzone.com]

        • For interesting values of 'some'. It's estimated it would take about 700 standard houseplants or 15 standard trees to remove the CO2 for one person from the air.

          I don't think this is a viable plan for lowering CO2 levels in an occupied building.

          • That would be only necessary in a situation where you have zero ventilation and you're at significant risk of oxygen starvation. Such as in a sealed bunker or similar.

            • ...Or where the 'fresh' air from outside is already higher in CO2 than your biology is adjusted for.

      • In the mean time, measured intelligence levels have been rising over the last century. Read about all the improvements made over the last 200 years and then come back with how much worse it can get. The world has been a lot worse place to live in for millions of years. You should also know, the average varies about 10 ppm throughout the year and the average (which is really only measured in a handful of locations on earth) increases steadily at about 1ppm per year.

    • That is the right answer. But, people being people, and economic realities being... real... "moving inland" will probably look less like being proactive and pragmatic, and more like being a climate refugee. Look at all the people living their whole life in something called Tornado Alley and then crying on the news that they can't believe tragedy struck them.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 )
        It's worse than just pragmatism. My former sister-in-law, with whom I'm still on a friendly, social basis, went to Florida last year. I joked, "Oh, you want to see it while it's still there!". She replied, "Oh, that's a climate change thing. I don't buy into that". This is a women with a masters degree in chemistry and teaches high school. Big oil/ right wing propaganda is still alive and flourishing in the minds of intelligent, educated people who vote and have influence over young peoples opinion.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          This type of denial actually seems to only weakly correlate with education (or not at all?). Obviously any reasonably educated person has all the facts to verify climate change is real. Yet many fail at that. My take is that it needs an independent thinker (only about 10-15% of the human race are that) or somebody that can be convinced by rational argument (about 20%, including the independent thinkers) to actually verify the facts rationally. The rest just goes with what their dominant in-group things and

          • Worse is the people who think they are independent thinkers but are actually trusting a less reliable source in doing so.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Most people mistakenly believe they are independent thinkers and that they can fact check. Most people do not even understand the very basics of how to do that though, hence their mistake. Dunning-Kruger effect at work.

              Well, there are no even remotely reliable sources for "climate change is not real", but of course the deniers will never admit or rather the majority of deniers is not even capable of seeing that, due to the mechanisms I just described.

          • Another story: a guy who worked for me has a EE (electrical engineering) degree. Super smart guy, he was my go to get problems solved. Yet, he is a climate change denier. Both of these people (former sister-in-law and staff member) are in the Midwest. They both watch FauxNoise and the EE is a firm believer climate change is just a liberal plot to extract money from the rich via "carbon credits", nothing more. I think it doesn't matter how educated or smart someone is, anyone can be mentally poisoned by m

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              I do not think you can blame media for that. Media pushing lies is just a crime of opportunity. My take is these people are deeply flawed and actively decide to not use their mental capabilities on certain questions, well knowing that they should.

      • My grandparents lived in the 1994 Guinness World Record tornado capital of the world, Wichita Falls, TX. My mom said she was in the basement of a house one time when a tornado came through a few blocks away. Their house had a fallout shelter adapted as a tornado shelter in their backyard. Guess what? They used to have storm radios but don't anymore because it's no longer has the same pattern of severe convective storms since Tornado Alley shifted its pattern to the east over the season due to climate change
      • 2/ The thing is though that storms now appear with greater variance in intensity and damage potential due to very hot sea surface temperatures and an unstable N hemisphere jet-stream due to a lack of Arctic ice. The possibility of a very large hurricane is on the horizon and it cannot be defended against by conventional construction. At some point, it becomes too expensive and too futile to rebuild in areas that get continually hit. And then there are the idiots who buy and build in "sacrifice zones" of HTX

  • the thing is (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Saturday December 30, 2023 @01:00PM (#64117031)
    the ocean is made up of mostly water and water gets splashed around and sometimes quite severely

  • Long time Central Coast resident (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cahuenga ( 3493791 ) on Saturday December 30, 2023 @01:08PM (#64117039)

    It never ceases to amaze me. Nearly every year has an event like this - 25'+surf, often with an accompanying high tide, and usually hitting around Dec/Jan.

    It's like we forget that this happens, EVERY year

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Fly Swatter ( 30498 )
      If you can't make something sound alarming and act like the sky is falling, you can't be called an influencer, er I mean blogger, er I mean reporter, er journalist.

      The summary doesn't actually say if it is from high ocean winds or perhaps a distant earthquake. Instead they mention clickbait ocean rising and global warming. They actually did mention high tide, which is much more significant. But instead of news they had to go and make it clickbait end of world news.

      • Re:Long time Central Coast resident (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Admiral Krunch ( 6177530 ) on Saturday December 30, 2023 @02:03PM (#64117143)

        The summary doesn't actually say if it is from high ocean winds or perhaps a distant earthquake. Instead they mention clickbait ocean rising and global warming.

        You must be "reading" a different summary to the one I saw.

        CNN describes them as "towering waves," driven into California's coastline by powerful storms and "posing a significant risk to people and structures along the coast."

        It was "hidden" in the very first sentence.

        • Granted I'm new to the area and have only been here for just over a year, I actually saw bigger waves in Florida once. The water still hasn't even reached the top of the sand portion of the beach. I'm no geologist, but as far as I know, the reason that part is sandy to begin with is because it has had a history of getting repeatedly and severely beaten by big, powerful waves with the bluff basically marking where it stops. And there I was this morning, standing on dry sand.

          Sure, the waves are a LOT choppier

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          Damn those sneaky CNN people clearly stating facts up front just to confuse people! :-)

      • It's all the same thing. Sea level today is about 25 cm (10 inches) higher than at the start of the 20th century. That doesn't sound like a lot, but every time there's coastal flooding, it means the water comes up 25 cm higher than it would have before. You put roads and buildings high enough up that you don't expect them to get flooded even in the biggest storms, then find them getting flooded every few years.

        And it's accelerating. For most of the 20th century, sea level rise was between 1 and 2 mm per

        • Thatâ(TM)s not at all what it means. The coastal tidal range, the difference between high tide and low tide in California is about 12 meters. If you built something in 1900 near the coast and taking only into account the tidal range for your area and allowing for just a 10% margin, youâ(TM)d still have 200 years to go before high tide would start to put you at risk.

          • According to that logic, coastal flooding should never happen. Everything is built high enough that it never floods. Strangely, that isn't the case. Coastal flooding is common and becoming more common, which shows there's a flaw in your reasoning.

            Here's a hint: infrastructure is located based only on the high tide line. The low tide line, and the difference between the two, never comes into it.

            • Coastal flooding happens in areas where the following are true: there has always been seasonal coastal flooding OR the area was already below sea level (New Orleans, the Netherlands) or the weight of the infrastructure (eg. New York City) has caused the area to start sinking.

              High tide +20cm is not exceeding any safety margins.

        • It's all the same thing. Sea level today is about 25 cm (10 inches) higher than at the start of the 20th century. That doesn't sound like a lot, but every time there's coastal flooding, it means the water comes up 25 cm higher than it would have before

          More than that, because the average shore slope is about 2:1, the water comes further inland as well

    • The point isn't that big waves don't happen in the region. It's that they are happening where they didn't before

      Unless, of course, you're telling us that those particular piers, storm walls, businesses, and homes are flooded like clockwork, which doesn't seem to be the case.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        TFS makes it sound like clockwork:

        "I just feel bad for the restaurants," says one local. "I know they just went through renovations from the last time this happened."

        Some people [theinertia.com] seem to think it's a good thing, at least for their hobby -- saying that the combination of El Nino and winter waves is a once-per-decade kind of event. It happened last winter [sfgate.com] and in 2020 [nbcbayarea.com] (this year the waves there are "only" 30-40 feet high) as well. 2011 and 2022 both saw widespread damage from tsunamis. Overall, "like clockwork" seems to be a pretty good analogy.

        • Well, fair enough. The time I have doesn't allow me took look further, and you did the legwork.

          I unreservedly withdraw my counterpoint. Consider me swayed.

        • It's not like clockwork, but it is becoming more frequent. I'm from Santa Cruz county (I have lived in Aptos, Capitola, and Santa Cruz, as well as the unincorporated area between Capitola and Santa Cruz) and literally the only part that used to flood regularly within the last 40-odd years was the Capitola Village. And even it would only flood during major storms. I have also seen moderate flooding of the flood plain area (shocker, I know) near downtown, around the bottom end of Ocean Street (another shock t

    • Except this is undeniably more than a little water and sand in the garage from a storm. Climate change symptoms are getting worse and will continue to get worse so long as CO2 keeps climbing.

  • That's not a wave. This is a wave:

    https://media.hswstatic.com/ey... [hswstatic.com]

    Nazare is on the Atlantic; the pacific is bigger and stormier.

  • not everything is climate change (Score:3)

    by Lehk228 ( 705449 ) on Saturday December 30, 2023 @01:19PM (#64117057) Journal
    a rise of 3-8 inches has nothing to do with 20 foot waves, trying to spin everything as being climate change just makes it harder to get people to take climate change seriously

  • "Up, up, and away!" -- Superman

    https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/tren... [noaa.gov]

  • The one in Ventura looked unlike other rogue waves, since it produced an abnormally large flow into land. The fact that it looked like a tsunami might mean that actually it was some kind of tsunami whose origin may have been missed, rather than the product of the standard huge waves that hit Calif this time of year due to Pacific storms. Rogue waves are nothing new in Calif, but that one was.

  • Ever since the Weather Channel came along every storm has been hyped. It's always unprecedented, the worst storm ever, massive, towering, whatever.

    The important thing is "Tune into our channel for our nonstop wall to wall coverage of the apocalypse".

    • You'd rather be the slowly boiling frog then and deny climate change. Good one!

      • You'd rather be the slowly boiling frog then and deny climate change. Good one!

        The real "good one" is you believe the "boiling frog" urban legend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        "While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual,[2][3] according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling wa

        • One does not have to believe that the story is true in order to use the story as a method of communicating a concept. He nowhere stated he believed in the actual boiling frog urban legend. Sigh.

          • One does not have to believe that the story is true in order to use the story as a method of communicating a concept. He nowhere stated he believed in the actual boiling frog urban legend. Sigh.

            Communicating with a falsehood can just as easily lead to the conclusion "Climate change is no more real than the boiling frog"

            Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • The massive waves pummeling the coastline, reeking havoc...

    Well if they don't pick up the bodies it certainly will be.

    Almost all the "stuff that matters" in this shit site is bot-written. Just remember, after Katrina, NOLA government issued information that bodies floating in the streets were not an immediate threat to one's health. Something to remember when you and your family waded past one snagged by a mailbox on your way to a FEMA distributed bologna & yellow mustard sandwich.

  • I've spent some time in Capitola. It's a quaint, charming, semi-tourist city (not mutually-exclusive) as an alternative to Santa Cruz to the immediate north. Parking enforcement was done by 2 wheelchair-bound officers. And there was a sushi place over an ice cream shop that served a habanero purée "Satan Roll".

  • To wreck is to ruin something, to wreak is to cause something to happen, and to reek is to smell bad.

    • And filming something is to record onto film. 99.999% of us never film anything. We have recording devices, but not filming devices.

  • Californicating Pussyville pouterz have yet another complaint; sand on their toesy-wozzies. Da po' po' poooz. First the reservoirs were drying out because of too much sun ordered to run their Chinese solar-sells. Then too much snow to ski from one sauna to another. Finally now, Surfer-turfferz get all the curl they can handle, while some fool parks their car beach-side like Ventura ( in the wave-line ) it's the Salton Sea !! Bright bulbs those ... How 'bouts releasing a f

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