00:00High surf and waves continue to pound Southern California as one tropical storm after another
00:05moves through the area. We're also seeing an El Nino effect, which is a warming in the Eastern
00:12Pacific that often leads to higher sea levels. Plus, we're seeing high tides and a phenomenon
00:17called a Kelvin wave sweeping off the coast, and all of this has brought devastation to some
00:21coastal communities. You've all seen the viral videos, the waves crashing over the barriers,
00:26the flooded beaches, people water skiing or skimboarding behind trucks on suburban streets.
00:33Is this the future? Some people say it is. This is caused, they say, by climate change. But climate
00:39change is fairly complicated, and some of the phenomena we're seeing are simply natural.
00:44The other problem is that even if California stopped using fossil fuels altogether, it probably
00:49would not have any effect on global temperatures. That's because even as big as the California
00:54economy is, it has a negligible effect on global climate, particularly because it's already a
01:00fairly green economy. We do more damage to the climate by allowing our forests to burn
01:05than we perform helpful activity by moving to electric vehicles. So it's all a bit of a wash.
01:12What we could be doing is planning better coastal communities. And the first thing to understand
01:17about the coastline is something people didn't understand 100 years ago, which is that it's
01:21constantly changing. 100 years ago, people came to a beach and they assumed that's where
01:25the beach always was. So they put down infrastructure, they put down railroad tracks, sometimes they
01:30built homes right on the beach. But beaches change, sand moves, and mountains erode, and coastlines
01:37change all the time. There needs to be a consciousness that when we plan along the coast, especially a
01:43coast as volatile as the California coast, which is subject to tsunamis occasionally and earthquakes,
01:48we have to take change into account. Change is the only constant on the coastline and therefore
01:54that's how we have to build in the future.
