Now it gets serious about sea level rise. An architect in the coastal village of Bolinas offers a plan to rebuild the town’s core on higher, safer ground. Around San Francisco Bay, cities and counties face a new state mandate to brace for encroaching tides. In the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, sometimes called “doomed” because of subsiding islands and rising rivers, there’s new hope in rice and tule plantations: these wetland crops build up peat soil and raise island surfaces, potentially even outpacing the rate of sea level rise in surrounding tidal channels. I tracked these developments in 2024 for KneeDeep Times and Maven’s Notebook. There is still time to get ahead of the creeping flood, experts say. Just not that much.