Oh Noes: Sacramento Could Be Doomed By Flooding

It’s always some sort of doom with these people

Could this major California city see mass ‘abandonment’? New risk model predicts just that

The flood plains of Sacramento are a geologic world away from the more cinematic California of coastal crags and lofty peaks. Yet, that sometimes overlooked region could be home to one of California’s great disasters waiting to happen, according to a February report from First Street, a prominent climate risk prediction firm.

The firm’s models suggest that the mounting risks of catastrophic flooding will drive Sacramento County — the heart of California’s fourth-largest metro area, at about 2.4 million people — to lose, in the average scenario, 28% of its population by 2055. Increasingly bad air quality, higher insurance costs and demographic shifts could also be drivers of population decline.

But is this scenario, which First Street calls “climate abandonment,” actually likely?

Sacramento isn’t the only Central Valley locality with a dire outlook. First Street predicts that Fresno County, which anchors the Valley’s second largest metro area, will lose almost half its population. Together, those urban declines are two of the five largest predicted by First Street nationwide, and the largest predicted in the nation outside of low-lying coastal areas on the East and Gulf coasts.

This is all based on one event

In 1861, California had been suffering the effects of a long — possibly a 20-year long — drought. But in December of that year, the dry spell abruptly ended. Storm after storm pummeled the state, causing nearly endless rains and prodigious mountain snows. Then, in January, a sudden warmup caused much of the snow to melt, almost instantly flowing into the Central Valley. As rivers overflowed their banks and the waters spread, the valley became a fishbowl. Forty days after the rains started, floods had inundated an area some 300 miles long and 30 miles wide, devastating the new state’s towns and farms and drowning hundreds of thousands of livestock.

That’s right, First Street is fearmongering (they have a long rapsheet for climate fearmongering) on something that happened all the way back in 1861. And blaming the possibility on human caused climate change. What caused it in 1861, when the world was barely out of the Little Ice Age?

Anyhow, it is a very long fable. Yes, fable. Because it’s all based on something that may possibly maybe happen due to computer models.

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