[classical music] NARRATOR: The San Francisco
Bay Area is home to more than
seven million people who take advantage of a
moderate, Mediterranean climate with mild, wet winters
and sundrenched summers. Only about 2% of the planet
has a similar climate. The cool nights grow some of the
finest wine grapes in the world. During the day, pleasant
temperatures along the coast meet the cold waters
of the Pacific. It is nothing short of
spectacular. But the weather here
is changing. The fog we count on to cool us
down on hot days is vanishing. The evidence is pretty strong, showing that the fog
has been on the decline. NARRATOR: And rising water
threatens our coastline. We're planning for two feet
by 2050. NARRATOR: Monumental wildfires
threaten lives and homes. We gotta get communities
themselves better prepared for the
inevitability of fire. NARRATOR: Our prized crops
are jeopardized by those fires and drought. We know that it's warmer. We know there's more impacts
of extreme events. NARRATOR: How badly will we
be impacted by climate change? Some answers as we look toward
the Bay Area 2050. NARRATOR: One of the things that
makes the Bay Area so special is our weather. But it's changing,
and that change will impact how and where
we live. From 1950 to 2005, the Bay Area's average
temperature increased by 1.7 degrees, and the speed of that increase
is accelerating. The annual mean temperature
in the Bay Area is expected to increase
4.4 degrees by 2050, and 7.2 degrees by
the end of the century. That my not sound like much, but there are already
indications that the rise in temperature
is impacting our weather. Take the fog, for example. Love it or hate it, it is part of our
regional identity. We've even given it a name:
Karl. We notice when it's pouring in and when it hasn't been seen
in a while. MAN: How many pictures have you
seen of the Golden Gate Bridge with the fog pouring through
the gate and over the bridge? I mean, it's such an
iconic thing. There'll be people out here
visiting for a day and they'll ask me, "How long
is the fog gonna be around?" You know, and I can't answer. I can say, "Well, it may be here
for five minutes "and you'll be out in the nice,
beautiful sunshine, or it could be here for
the rest of the day." You just don't know. It just seems to have
a mind of its own. But it also has such an amazing
cooling effect. In the summer, it keeps the climate in
San Francisco so pleasant. It's really our air conditioner,
right, for the Bay Area. CHRIS: It's very foggy
most of the time, and a lot of moisture
on steel, so it can create corrosion
pretty fast. My name's Chris Dzierman,
and my title out here is Chief Bridge Painter on
the Golden Gate Bridge. There's always a danger element
involved in working out here, no matter what, whether it's
wet, dry. So you just gotta take your
precautions out here, wear your proper safety gear. The weather climate out here
is very tough. We have the fog, we have the
wind, we have the rain. When the fog is here, since we
are in full containment, with plastic walls,
plastic floors. So since we're fully contained
like that, it can be so foggy outside,
you can't see the bridge, and we can still
be in there painting. MAN: We get, right out in
the Pacific Basin out here, our saturated air
off of warm air, because it's basically
north of Hawaii. And what they do is they
start to flow toward the Pacific Coast. Well, that warm, moist air
interacts with the very cold water
that's upwelling right off the coast
of California. And it's that temperature
contrast that causes basically the air
mass to hit the dew point, and we get a fogbank
that all of a sudden forms because of this temperature
contrast. Then, of course, the inland
is warming up. Hot in the Central Valley. That hot air rises and basically
is like a big vacuum. It pulls that air in. At night, hot air rises.
Something's gotta replace it, and it's coming
right off the coast. So we get that daily carry of
it, coming in and out. DAVID: There's all kinds of ways
the fog sits here through the Gate. It'll sit low sometimes where you'll just see the tower
of the bridge, or it'll sit high, you'll just
see the deck of the bridge. It could be here in
a matter of minutes. I think the evidence
is pretty strong, showing that the fog has been
on the decline even since the early 1950s. And the rate of decline
has slowed, but it's still going down. And so we've lost about
three hours a day of fog that we normally get during
the foggy season between May and October. And the projection is that's
gonna continue. The fog's not gonna go
completely away, but having less of it is
definitely showing itself. That's gonna mean that probably
energy use is gonna change in the
summertime. If we have less cool weather, people are gonna have to turn on
their AC more. They're gonna consume more
power. It's gonna affect the crops. Like many of the strawberry
fields here in California are right near Watsonville
and Castroville. All the artichokes. They really benefit by having
that cool coastal climate. Who knows what's gonna happen
when this changes? It'll ripple through, you know,
society in various ways. And how rapidly this changes
is really gonna have some, I think, some social
and ecological consequences. But these are my collectors. The water will condense
onto these. It's basically just
fishing line. And they create these beads that
hit them. They roll down and then they
fall into the reservoir. My name is Paul Seibert.
I'm a Ph.D. student in environmental engineering at the University of California,
Berkeley. So I'm looking at the plant
water usage. Specifically attributing
where they get water from. Most of the time we assume
that the majority of the water that plants use comes from rain. And so we sort of assume
where there's rain, plants are healthy. When there's not rain,
the plants are water stressed. But we live in kind of
a unique climate where we have this really
distinct rainy season between October and, roughly,
like, the middle of May or so. And then directly after,
it's followed by a time where there's basically
no rain but a lot of fog. And so I'm interested in seeing
what the impact is of that on the vegetation that exists
in the San Francisco Bay Area. An then as the rain starts
to decrease and fog starts to come in, are they getting 30-50% of their
water overnight from fog? Plants have these little pours
called stomata that open and close based on
the environmental conditions, temperature, relative humidity,
light. And usually it's considered
that during the night that they're closed, and so they
don't take in any water. And sometimes whenever there's
a lot of fog, they do open a little bit. When there's a lot fog present
and not a lot of ground water, they tend to, like,
using a lot of fog, 'cause that's what's available
at the time Some plants aren't
able to move, but they're able to adapt to
their environmental conditions to try to...stay alive.
[laughs] It's a really important question
about how fog changes are gonna affect everything, both social, ecological,
climatic. And, I mean, fog's declining
around the planet. We see fog declines off
the coast of Chile, of the coast of West Africa,
and here in California as well. I don't think people wanna see
it disappear, you know? I think most people at least
enjoy it, unless it's, like... Unless they want more sun, they can go to SoCal
if you want to. NARRATOR: What we do know is
the weather is changing. Those changes will mean
different things to different parts of
the Bay Area. Around the Bay, that means
higher sea levels that will endanger thousands
of homes and businesses on the water's edge. WOMAN: We went into the bay
to create our shoreline and that the water will
come back into the city where the original shoreline
once existed. NARRATOR: We explain when
"Bay Area 2050" continues. [music] NARRATOR:
The San Francisco Bay is at the very heart of
the Bay Area. The largest land-locked harbor
in the world is likely to get bigger. Water levels could rise by
nearly a foot by 2050 if current human cost emissions
continue. More than 300,000 homes
in the Bay Area have an 80% chance of flooding
in the next 30 years. Sea level rise won't just flood
low-lying areas. It could potentially unleash
an environmental disaster. Tearing down existing levees
and letting the water flow may protect Bayside communities. WOMAN: What the lay audience
might not understand is we went into the bay to
create our shoreline, and that the water will come
back into the city where the original shoreline
once existed. I'm Elaine Forbes. I'm the Executive Director of
the Port of San Francisco, and I and my team are
responsible for 7-1/2 miles of
Bayfront property. So our seawall and our
stability here provides flood protection
to big swaths of the city. [applause] Now the public will see
that this work has led to key answers
to the puzzle of how to protect this
waterfront. Our future depends on
taking action now. This is why the Draft Plan
is so critical to protecting the city's seawall from
earthquake and flooding risk. ELAINE: We will have different
solutions for different areas
of the waterfront. So that's really important
to understand. So along the three miles of
historic seawall, which is really, really the
urban edge of the city, we're gonna be looking at
interventions, like very serious ground
improvements, retro fits to buildings
so they're safer. We're planning for two feet
by 2050, which will allow us to move
up to seven feet to be ready in 2100. ELAINE: So that's a great
example, Pier 70. So they're lifting the building,
lifting the site to prepare for sea level rise. It has more capability for
accepting a rising tide. I think the thing that's most
important for people to understand is that
while the risk seems remote, planning for the risk,
designing the project, permitting the project, finding financing for
the project and executing for the project
takes a long lead time, and that's why we're
planning now. And I have a big, big expert
team on hand and working hard to figure out, how do we solve for this
major challenge? And it takes time
to do it right. [wind blowing, water lapping] I'm Sherry Padgett. I live here on the shoreline. I work on the shoreline. I play on the shoreline
of Richmond. And I'm concerned about
sea level rise and the ground water moving up. We live here on the shoreline
where you look out, and it looks benign, but it is insidious. There is industrial waste, including all the heavy metals,
from arsenic to zinc. And we're looking due east
at Stege Marsh, and just behind it is
the Zeneca, which is a toxic landfill. And the proposal is, and it's been approved, to build 4,000 condominiums
on that site. It's not that we're opposed to
development, per se, we wanted the site cleaned up
before any development occurred. We know that contaminants
from a whole bunch of sites right here along the Richmond
south shoreline are in the mud. I'm Kristina Hill,
and I'm a professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, and I study the things you can't
see underground. So, like most of
the San Francisco Bay, a combination of industry and
military activities during World War II really
transformed our bay edge. This, what we're standing on
here, was an old railroad bed that
took workers to the wartime factories, like the Rosie the Riveter
factory idea. So we know that there are
very important contaminants that would cause cancer
in people in the mud here, and those have concentrated and
flowed down in the ground water. Because those contaminants
are buried. So these containments typically spread out on the surface
of the water table. Oftentimes they float
on that surface. They're lighter than water. And then they make their way
into creeks and into the bay, as well as into sewer pipes
and utility trenches. It is a catastrophe
ready to happen all around the San Francisco
Bay shoreline. We need to get our
act together, now. MAN: Well, in the 1960s,
when I was born, just a couple of miles
from here, a third of the bay had already
been filled in, or dived off from the tides, and there were plans to fill
60% of what was left. It would have left just a
narrow river, destroyed all this
great environment. People started to realize
the threat, and they took action. I'm David Lewis, the executive
director of Save The Bay. We're the oldest organization
working to protect and restore San Francisco Bay
for people and wildlife. Now we have this amazing
opportunity because the bay was saved
and these shoreline areas were protected against
development. Now we have an opportunity to
restore many of them and help protect us against
sea level rise that's coming. This feels great. Nature can really restore itself
in many cases if we give it a chance, if we give it a head start,
if we give it a push, and that's what we're
doing here. And in just a few years,
it'll start revegetating. And in this gentle slope
on the edge here, that we've replanted,
with volunteers, that will also become transition
zone habitat. Native plants that help protect
endangered species and that will also protect
against sea level rise as the tides come up in
the next few years because of climate change. Well, if we're successful
in the next decade with work to restore these areas
of the shoreline and begin planning to protect
areas where we can't restore marshes but where we can protect
infrastructure, the bay can still be healthy
and vibrant. We can restore some of
the wildlife back to sustainable levels. And also build communities
that are resilient, that are protected against
sea level rise, I think the Bay Area could be a
better place to live than ever. NARRATOR: To be better,
changes will need to be made. Nowhere is that more evident
than in the parts of the region that face the threat
of wildfire. Climate change means fire season
is an annual threat. MAN: When you think about
fire in the state, to be honest with you,
it's gotten so bad so quickly even a person like me, who's been studying it for
30 years, was surprised. NARRATOR: How do we live
with this growing danger when "Bay Area 2050" continues. [music] NARRATOR: Summer in the Bay Area
is wildfire season, and it's now longer and more
intense than ever before. Between 2020 and 2023, almost as many acres burned
as the entire decade before. 15 of the top 20 most
destructive wildfires in California history happened
within the past decade. If things don't change,
environmental scientists predict the amount of
forested land burned in wildfires
in Northern California will increase up to 52%
between 2031 and 2050. Living with wildfires will now
be a part of life for many in the Bay Area
and beyond. MAN: We estimated 4-1/2 million
acres burned every year in California
on an average year. Climate change makes our
difficult situation worse. Thinking about 2050 and where
people are gonna be living is not gonna be the same as
where we are today. California, we're known as
the Golden State. Sometimes they call us
the Pyro State. WOMAN: It was never really
the idea of really our town
burning down. What happened on November 8th will never ever happen
in Paradise again. Never. MAN: I'm afraid that if we don't
start to change our relationship with
where we live and also the landscapes
around us, there's no way we're gonna get
out of this hole. But the good news is,
it's a possibility. It is a wildfire-prepared
home. The beautiful thing is that the
town of Paradise actually adopted all of the
building codes for a wildfire-prepared home. So now every house that
gets built in Paradise is built to this standard. There's ember-resistant vents, metal gutters. You have to have a six-inch
vertical clearance from any exterior wall. You also have to have a Class A
fire-rated roof. The biggest piece for homeowners
now in Paradise since houses are just being
built this way anyway is maintaining a five-foot defensible space area
around your home. I lost my home in
the Camp Fire a couple neighborhoods
over from here. The town of Paradise completely
burned to the ground in just a matter of hours. It was the most deadly and
expensive fire in the United States
before Lahaina. We lost 85 people, 18,000 structures burned
to the ground, and 50,000 people
were displaced. When you think about fire in the
state, to be honest with you, it's gotten so bad so quickly,
even a person like me, who's been studying this for
30 years, was surprised. My name is Scott Stephens.
I'm a professor of fire science at the University of California,
Berkeley. When we think about fire, our relationship is
very adversarial. When you talk to indigenous
communities like I have over the last
several years, and it's not that way at all. People think of fire
as a gift, a gift for the stewardship
of the land. When you think about fire
in California, it's as integral as our soils,
our water, our ecosystems. So when you take fire
out of a system that had it so integral
for so long, you change things abruptly. And, of course, then we have
human populations that come in and change
kind of where we live, our susceptibilities. CASEY: More than 18,000
structures were burned in Paradise. 90% of the homes
were burned. So almost every single lot
had a home on it that was not wildfire prepared. It was built in the Fifties,
Sixties, Seventies. And now as homes are being
rebuilt on all of these different
properties, they're being built to
the new town codes that are wildfire prepared. Every home in Paradise is
meeting a Wildfire Prepared
Designation. I think at the community level,
we can do so much better just getting ourselves better
prepared. The services are great, but they're not, again,
gonna be the solution. We've gotta get our communities
better prepared and actually take action
at more organic levels. There are neighborhoods
all over Paradise now that are becoming what's called
fire-wise communities, where you meet together
as a community, you walk, and CAL FIRE is
walking along with us, to do a risk assessment of
every home in the neighborhood. I think in some ways, though,
it needs to be more systematic, that we can encourage this,
you know, and facilitate this a little bit
better in the state, because we gotta get communities
themselves better prepared for the
inevitability of fire. But we still have to do
the other work, the other work that is
what I call the stewardship. the stewardship of these lands
and getting better prepared for the inivitablilty of fire. It just feels like
we're just getting kicked around all the time,
right? And that's where I would say
there is tremendous things to be done. We can work in the forests
of this state. Most of these forests in
this state are all frequent fire
adapted. That just means
they used to burn ever few decades or so
or less. We can go in there and do
prescribed burnings, restoration thinning,
combinations thereof, cultural burnings with tribes
if they choose to do that work, manage lightning fire
in remote areas, like Yosemite National Park,
been doing that for 50 years. You could do what we've talked
about, you could do that in an effort
in the next ten years, and at the end of ten years,
you'd have victories. Fire's still gonna beat us up. We're still gonna have
bad fires that unfortunately are gonna
burn down communities, cause harm, but we can see
the trajectory of hope I think there is.
There's huge hope. NARRATOR:
That hope is shared by the agricultural industry
as well. California grows a huge amount
of the country's food, and many people are now
wondering how changes in the climate
will impact our ability to grow things like our
world-famous wine grapes. WOMAN: There've been a lot of
issues that directly relate to climate change. Drought, lower yields associated
with that, smoke taint, heatwave. NARRATOR: How will the wine
industry survive climate change? We all know that global warming
doesn't just mean that we keep getting hotter. It means changes in patterns,
right? As a grape grower,
you have to be prepared to pivot at any given time. NARRATOR: More when
"Bay Area 2050" continues. [music] NARRATOR: More than a third of
the country's vegetables and nearly three quarters
of the country's fruits and nuts are grown in California. But fluctuations between
dry and wet years and rising temperatures
have made predicting the future of some crops
challenging. According to the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, all of these regions in
California will suffer economically. Among the crops to watch,
the state's wine grapes. California produces roughly
80% of the U.S. wine production. Much of that is grown right here
in the Bay Area in Napa and Sonoma Counties. Napa County will see more days
above 90 degrees, going from an average of
29 extreme heat days per year to an average of 45 days
by 2050. The region is being stressed
by climate change. Experts say warming temperatures
in the region are forcing the wine-growing
season to start a month earlier than it did
in the 1950s, forcing vineyards to grow
smaller vines, and even changing the types of
wines grown as well. [music] WOMAN:
We know that it's warmer. We know that there's more
impacts of extreme events. There've been a lot of issues that directly relate to
climate change. Drought, lower yields
associated with that, smoke taint, heatwaves. There's been a mean change of
having earlier harvest. My name is Dr. Elisabeth
Forrestel. I'm an assistant professor at
University of California, Davis, in the Department of Viticulture
and Enology. Napa and other regions have had
much lower yields in certain varieties and
cultivars than what would be normal in the last several years
because of issues around smoke taint and because
of issues around climate change. I think it's impacted
specifically Cabernet. WOMAN: Cabernet is incredibly
resilient as a grape. Number one, it can grow in a lot
of different conditions. My name is Elizabeth Vianna. I'm the winemaker and general
manager here at Chimney Rock Winery
in the Napa Valley. We listen, we worry. We know climate facts. I think if you're a human being
on this planet today and you're not worried,
something's wrong with you. We all know that global warming doesn't just mean that
you keep getting hotter. It means changes in patterns,
right, and variability. So I think that as a
grape grower, you have to be prepared to pivot
at any given time. And so you have to be ready for
a cool rainier season, or you have to be ready for
a very warm season. But at the end of the day,
that's really no difference to being a farmer anyway, right? Farmers have always been
at the mercy of different weather changes. So it's something that I think
we're kind of inherently prepared for. ELISABETH:
When you see change, starting in the Seventies
or Eighties, you see that increase in not
only mean climate change, but really dramatic increase
in extremes. So more heatwaves, more extreme
precipitation events, more fire.
Fire has become a huge issue. Changes in the fire dynamics. Earlier frosts. More frost
in the spring. All of these things are
compounding and create a lot of issues
with being able to figure out what might be able to grow
well where. It's one of the few crops
where it actually see stress design, and so how
much stress you have is really important, and you wanna keep temperatures
within a range. So if you have extreme heat,
the grapes start ripening versus having a more consistent
climate that's gonna give you a very different style of wine
potentially, issues around development, or development of really
important compounds of the grapes that relate
directly to how a wine tastes or how high quality it is. My name is Tom Gamble. I'm the founder and farmer
for Gamble Family Vineyards. We're sitting in the heart
of Napa Valley, Oakville. Here you can see an expression
of a small vine mentality. The mentality of thinking about
planting smaller vines because they can withstand
climate change better than a larger vine. I'm a third-generation resident
and farmer of Napa. I have been shrinking the size
of my vines. So the healthier roots
I'm developing with... a more extensive root systems. Those nutrients have to
support less of a trunk and have more energy
and nutrients going to the leaves
and the grapes. Those are the things that
I'm investing in to help drive the ability to continue growing
Cabernet Sauvignon. There's a lot more
consideration, I think, of how we can mitigate
climate change with using...
managing the soil and using more regenerative
practices, or practices that take into
account what's in the soil. Can we actually use cover
cropping to use less resources? Less nitrogen input,
less water input. Can it help us save water?
Can it mitigate heat? I think Napa Valley is very
pro-active right now, and has been for the last
20 years, on, what are the things that
we have to continue to do to thrive and to produce
these great wines? And so there's a lot of amazing experimentation
going on. ELISABETH: Napa Cabernet
will be there. There's still a lot of room
for moving it into other sub-appellations or
cooler regions in Napa. I think too there are options
for making decisions around when they're harvested,
how you farm them. And I think we have to consider
that... Napa makes a lot of good wine, and it doesn't have to be
Cabernet. NARRATOR: The wine-growing
regions of the Bay Area will adjust to the changing
temperatures. But how will California's
coastline adjust to changing terrain? California has 1,100 miles
of coast. The whole coastline is pretty
much eroding. There's absolutely nothing
we can do over the long run. NARRATOR: The cliffs that make
our coastline so beautiful are crumbling away, taking with it homes and
businesses built decades ago. MAN: You're up against forces
that are certainly more powerful than we are. Nature takes the toll. NARRATOR: What can be done to
address erosion when "Bay Area 2050" continues. [music] NARRATOR: By 2050,
the Pacific Ocean is expected to rise by a foot
along the Bay Area coast. That increase if fueled
in large part by warming ocean temperatures. Warmer water brings
new dangers, including more powerful storms. Together, these forces of nature
will be catastrophic for the Bay Area coastline. Homes will be lost. Beaches will vanish. Roads will be destroyed. Much of the infrastructure
we count on that supports millions
of people will be rendered useless. The losses will be
in the billions of dollars. The cost to prepare for them
will cost billions more. [music] MAN: California has 1,100 miles
of coast. The whole coastline is pretty
much eroding. There's absolutely nothing
we can do over the long run to hold back
the Pacific Ocean. We don't battle with
Mother Nature and win. We're up against forces
that are certainly more powerful
than we are. Along West Cliff Drive here, the waves and tides beat the
hell out of this coast. Took out the road
and the bike path. We lost 20 or 30 feet
in one day. And I've been here
55 years. I've never seen anything
like that before. Approximately I lived there
45 years. We would lose a half an inch,
a foot at the most, every couple years... until around 2010. Big chunks of earth would
fall into the ocean. At the shortest point,
we're ten feet from the ocean. GARY: We built those houses
without any regard for coastal erosion. It was the war, the waves,
and the wind. JOAN: The cost of saving the
building was so astronomical. So to raise 10 million would be
almost an impossible task. Nature takes the toll. Erosion. It's hard to balance
between the strength of the materials,
the rock, if it's granite or sandstone,
and the forces acting on it. So whether it's rainfall,
whether it's waves, whether we're cutting
a slope too steep, once we exceed the strength of
the materials, it's gonna fail. And it could be
a river runoff, it could be a wave attack,
it could be glacier. So it's basically sort of the
external forces dominating over the strength
of the material. In the long term,
the sea level is rising. We're gonna have at least
another foot of sea level rise, maybe more, by 2050. So the higher the ocean is,
the more frequently the waves will attack the cliffs
or the bluffs, near Pacifica,
Santa Barbara. So we get usually really
high tides and large waves. That's when most erosion
takes place. The higher the sea level gets, the more erosion and the faster
the erosion will occur. It's accelerating. How much faster it goes up,
we don't know. The other that's gonna be
more problematic, up to 2050 and probably beyond, are what we could call
short-term extreme events. A hurricane, a typhoon,
a tsunami. Those are gonna get us
in the short-term. With global warming, obviously,
the sea has warmed up. The warmer it is,
the more energy. And so you have stronger events,
stronger storm events than you had in the past. Maybe more frequent too. GARY: Through episodic events,
we lose it all at once. And that's what happened here
in January. So really high tides,
seven-feet-plus, offshore wave gage showed
the waves 28 feet high. Those happened exactly
at the same time, 9:00, the morning of
January 5th. The sea level's gonna continue
to rise, and so everything's gonna get
bumped up. Short-term events on top of
sea level rise. Every coastal city and county
in the state is now beginning to think about,
what are our options? And there aren't very many.
There's about four. One is denial. There's some states back east
that have used that approach. There's more armor, more rocks,
more walls. They're very expensive, and I'll say relatively
short-term. It's impossible to keep the
ocean from destabilizing the big boulders that they
armor the cliffs with. In California, the Costal
Commission is saying, you know, we're not gonna
approve very many more of those. We'll fix an old one maybe. There's a controversy with
the Costal Commission. The Costal Commission has a
mandate where it says, "Hey, we're just gonna let
nature take its course," let what happened in Pacifica
just happen everywhere. There was actually
three apartment buildings, and those apartments were built
on, not rock, it's dirt. It's a 90-foot drop
to the water, and they were within
five or six feet. So the city posted
it's unsafe to occupy, and they were all demolished. And then there's the word that
nobody wants to use, managed retreat. Understandably,
coastal homeowners, maybe that house has been in
the family for a generation or two,
they're not gonna give it up. Retreat is like...
that's losing. It just gets messy, and people don't even wanna
talk about managed retreat. We can't do much about it. The only thing we can do
in the long run is to... quit burning fossil fuels, quit putting more greenhouse gas
in the atmosphere, and start to lower that
long-term potential. But so far we've not done
very well. And it's no question that
what we're seeing today is dominantly anthropogenic,
or human abuse. Because the normal cycle of
planetary changes, we'd be going into a cool
period, but we're not. JOAN: Global warming has
attacked us. [music] NARRATOR: But what can be done
to stop global warming? Well, I think what we see is
continued change in climate, hotter draughts,
more unpredictable droughts, possible longer droughts. Also periods of
higher rainfall. We're not prepared, really,
for that yet. We've gotten used to the climate
situation that we live in, and how rapidly this changes
is really gonna have some, I think, some social and some
ecological consequences. And every costal city
and county in the state is now beginning to think about,
what are our options? And there aren't very many. NARRATOR: Many are hoping things
can get better, when "Bay Area 2050"
continues. [music] NARRATOR: So where do we go
from here? Without dramatic action
to stop climate change globally, the future looks much different
than what we know today. The Earth has already warmed
by an average of two degrees Fahrenheit. It's expected to rise to 2.7
degrees by the early 2030s. Without intervention, we can
expect that warming to continue. We can't stop climate change
overnight, but we can slow the rate
by reducing the human-generated emissions
that are causing it. The Industrial Revolution
started us on this path more than 150 years ago. Stopping climate change now
will take new ideas, new technology, and generations of action to
slow down and reverse course. [crowd chanting] MAN: We see things today
that really shock us. The past few years,
the past five, there've been a lot of issues that directly relate
to climate change. Heatwaves, drought. 2050 is very soon. Obviously it'll be warmer. MAN: More unpredictable
droughts, possibly longer drought. Also periods of
higher rainfall. And the climate models have
all said this. We expect to have
more variability. We're not gonna have as much
of the baseline data that we've experienced in
the last hundred years. We're not prepared. We've gotten used to the climate
situation that we live in, and how rapidly this changes
is really gonna have some, I think, some social and some
ecological consequences. Energy use is gonna change
in the summertime. If we have less cool weather, people are gonna have to turn
on their AC more. They're gonna consume
more power, you know? So that's gonna change the
economics of the area, the fossil fuel consumption,
whatever it might be. What I'm seeing is developers
who are piling up dirt a little bit, just to get out of
the flood plane designation, and then developing housing, and then selling it
to someone else who's gonna be
holding the bag. They're making money, and they're transferring risk
to homeowners and renters. So we have to stop conventional
development, now, before there are thousands
more people who are gonna be vulnerable to
contamination in the soil and to flooding problems
that we can't fix. We're struggling with,
what's the appropriate response? And there aren't too many. I think in 2050, we're gonna have to
figure this out. Or I do think some places
in California are gonna have far less
people in 'em. 'Cause they're gonna continue
to burn, and they're gonna continue
to stress environments, stress people,
stress resources. We'll see a lot of poverty
created by an unorganized adaptation. If, instead, we use
redevelopment authorities and other kinds of government
structures to prepare the ground for
development that can be appropriate
for high ground water, then we'll thrive. We could live in the kind
of environment that we've imagined the Bay Area
becoming if we just prepare
the ground. You know, we're starting
to see companies that do great, interesting
things. AI, trying to work with ideas
of trying to get more technology into fire, more predictability,
more detection, all that is great. But I have to say unless
we change the fundamentals, the fundamentals is literally
the way we interact with land, where we live,
how we live, our stewardship of land, if we don't change that,
AI and all the technology is not ever gonna get us
out of this hole. But I'm afraid that if
we don't start to change our relationship
with where we live and also the landscapes
around us in California, there's no way we're gonna
get out of this hole. I hate to think of California
having to abandon areas because we haven't taken actions
that we think could actually
make a difference. But the good news is,
it's a possibility. There's great hope
in this area. There's real things we can do. So we can actually
make a difference. So that's the good news. If we're successful
in the next decade, with work to restore these
areas of the shoreline, and begin planning to protect
areas where we can't restore marshes but where we can protect
infrastructure, I think the Bay Area could be a better place to live
than ever. The bay can still be healthy
and vibrant. We can restore some of
the wildlife back to sustainable levels, and also build communities
that are resilient, that are protected against
sea level rise, and hopefully that emit
less greenhouse gases too, so climate change isn't as bad
as the worst-case scenarios. We still have time
to do this work. Increasingly we have the money
to be able to afford it, and the missing piece, I think,
is the political will from our leaders to make the
changes and laws and regulations that climate adaptation
is not optional. It's not voluntary. We have to require that
this planning gets done and gets implemented soon. There's absolutely nothing
we can do over the long run to hold back
the Pacific Ocean. Everything we do
is short-term. So the question is,
you know, what ae your most vulnerable
locations and how do you deal with them? So that's coming. It's happening already, though.
It's not the future. We are dealing with
the mitigation. What climate change produces and how to build a shoreline
to prepare. The other side of it, how to prevent the hazards
of climate change, how to clean the environment,
how to reduce carbon, it's a whole picture
of preparing for what we've essentially
caused. The only thing we can do
in the long run is to quit burning
fossil fuel, quit putting more greenhouse gas
in the atmosphere and start to lower that
long-term potential. But so far... even thousands of Teslas...
[chuckles] are not yet making a difference. So we've got, you know,
global issues, trying to get China and India
and us together to do that, and so far we've not done
very well. We know it's an existential
threat. I mean, climate is absolutely
the most important hazard we have for our future
generations. ELAINE: And I'm so pleased that
everyone's thinking about it, and young people are
thinking about it. As we go into that era,
I think it's on all of us to do better. You know, it's not going away. GARY: It's very real, it's now,
and it's us. NARRATOR:
The clock is ticking... as we speed toward
the Bay Area 2050. [music]
