Tag Archives: national-park

States are out of money to keep national parks safe during shutdown

by FerdinaECS Posted on December 31, 2018

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We are now 10 days into this partial government shutdown, and national parks are really feeling the hurt.

As Grist has reported, these shutdowns are not without consequences. Key scientists had holiday plans canceled and are being forced to work without pay. The Violence Against Women Act was allowed to expire. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency ran out of money. Many communities’ disaster relief funds have been held up in political limbo. And while President Trump refuses to back down on his demand for border wall funding, holiday tourists are wreaking havoc on some of our national parks.

National Park Service staff are among the roughly 800,000 federal workers affected by the shutdown. Even though rangers are on furlough, tourists are still visiting these protected areas– with potentially disastrous consequences.

The problems go beyond a lack of toilet paper in the park potties. In Texas’ Big Bend National Park, trash is piling up, which conservationists fear could attract bears and lead to them become permanently habituated to human food. At Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, dozens of cars were seen entering the park despite the lack of park staffing. In California’s Joshua Tree National Park, the Los Angeles Times reports that tourists have strung Christmas lights on the park’s fragile namesake trees.

“We’re seeing so much damage,” said Joe De Luca, an employee at a local mountain supply store, in an interview with the Times. “It’s a free-for-all in there. Absolutely ridiculous.”

In the days before the shutdown began, the National Parks Conservation Association, a non-profit, wrote that during the January 2018 government shutdown, there were similar incidents: “One hunter illegally killed a pregnant elk at Zion National Park when few staff were available to monitor wildlife and enforce rules. Other visitors brought snowmobiles dangerously close to the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone and drove off-road vehicles illegally into Joshua Tree National Park, leaving tire tracks and harming vegetation.”

Some especially impassioned locals near Joshua Tree are taking it upon themselves to empty trash receptacles and police the park for illegal activity — duties normally performed by temporarily out-of-work park staff.

A few park-heavy states, like Arizona and Utah, have dealt with the shutdown by trying to keep their parks fully staffed with state funds paid directly to the federal government. New York is footing the entire $65,000 per day bill to keep Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty open to visitors. In Hawaii, a local non-profit is staffing Volcanoes National Park.

But today, Utah’s state funding to keep Arches, Canyonlands, and Zion National Parks running with minimal staffing ran out. Rescue services aren’t available in the parks, parts of which are very remote. The Utah Board of Tourism says only Zion will remain staffed in the new year based on funding from a non-profit organization, which will pay about $2,000 to $2,500 a day until January 5.

All the shutdown-related conservation chaos brings into sharp focus how essential park rangers are for preserving these national treasures. So once things (hopefully) get back to normal, make sure to tell one how important they are.

And, you know, keep the Christmas lights at home.

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States are out of money to keep national parks safe during shutdown

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Officials tried to censor a report on national parks. Here’s what was in it.

by RedaParks71345 Posted on May 21, 2018

Roughly 25 percent of U.S. national parks are vulnerable to rising sea levels because they’re situated in coastal areas. For years, the National Parks Service has had a report in the works to quantify how higher ocean tides and storm surges could impact its sites. But in April, Reveal found that in drafts of the publication, park officials had censored all mentions of human-caused climate change as an explanation for the encroaching waters.

The story prompted Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources to write a letter to the Department of the Interior requesting an investigation into the scientific integrity of the Parks Service. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has said that he never changes reports before they go out.

In a follow-up, Reveal reported that when Maria Caffrey, a University of Colorado research assistant and the study’s lead author, fought the changes, officials said they could take her name off the paper or potentially not release it at all. “The fight probably destroyed my career with the (National Park Service) but it will be worth it if we can uphold the truth and ensure that scientific integrity of other scientists won’t be challenged so easily in the future,” she said.

Finally released Friday, the analysis illustrates how different levels of emissions would increase sea levels and storm surges near 118 national parks over roughly the next century. In the end, science prevailed: The report identifies human-caused climate change as the main culprit behind the rising sea levels that endanger the sites.

Here’s what the collaboration between the National Parks Service and the University of Colorado found:

Rising seas will flood parks. By the end of the century, some sites in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, for example, could experience an ocean rise of nearly two-and-a-half feet. The researchers caution that this would submerge large parts of those parks.
Wright Brothers National Memorial is predicted to face the largest sea-level rise. By 2100, the shoreline near the park is predicted to see up to a 2.7 foot increase under the most severe global warming situation they studied.
Unsurprisingly, islands are at an increased risk. The authors note that for more remote national parks, like those in the Caribbean or the National Park of American Samoa, a storm surge could be particularly ruinous, as it’s difficult to deliver aid to those sites quickly.
Overall, parks in the U.S. southeast are at highest risk for storm surges. For example, a category two hurricane would inundate Everglades National Park.

Now is the time to plan. The authors say that their findings can help inform parks as they adapt to a warming world that endangers their infrastructure and historical structures.

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Officials tried to censor a report on national parks. Here’s what was in it.

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Zinke says the Interior isn’t censoring science. The evidence begs to differ.

by tadeusz444 Posted on April 6, 2018

This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

National Park Service officials have deleted every mention of humans’ role in causing climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report on sea-level rise and storm surge, contradicting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vow to Congress that his department is not censoring science.

The research for the first time projects the risks from rising seas and flooding at 118 coastal national park sites, including the National Mall, the original Jamestown settlement, and the Wright Brothers National Memorial. Originally drafted in the summer of 2016, yet still not released to the public, the National Park Service report is intended to inform officials and the public about how to protect park resources and visitors from climate change.

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained and analyzed 18 versions of the scientific report. In changes dated Feb. 6, a park service official crossed out the word “anthropogenic,” the term for people’s impact on nature, in five places. Three references to “human activities” causing climate change also were removed.

The 87-page report, which was written by a University of Colorado Boulder scientist, has been held up for at least 10 months, according to documents obtained by Reveal. The delay has prevented park managers from having access to the best data in situations such as reacting to hurricane forecasts, safeguarding artifacts from floodwaters or deciding where to locate new buildings.

The omissions reflect a broader crackdown on climate science at federal agencies, including removal of references to human impacts, since President Donald Trump took office. Trump previously called climate change a Chinese hoax, took steps to withdraw from an international agreement to cut greenhouse gases and moved toward reversing former President Obama’s policies to regulate power plant emissions.

The word “anthropogenic,” the term for people’s impact on nature, was removed from the executive summary of the sea-level rise report for the National Park Service.

Reveal News

Critics say the National Park Service’s editing of the report reflects unprecedented political interference in government science at the Interior Department, which oversees the park service.

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, said the deletions are “shocking from a scientific point of view, but also from a policy point of view.”

“To remove a very critical part of the scientific understanding is nothing short of political censorship and has no place in science,” he said. “Censorship of this kind is something you’d see in Russia or some totalitarian regime. It has no place in America.”

Several scientists said the editing appears to violate a National Park Service policy designed to protect science from political influence.

“It looks like a pretty clear-cut, blatant violation of what we generally would consider to be scientific integrity,” said Jane Lubchenco, who led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Obama.

National Park Service spokesperson Jeffrey Olson said the agency would not comment on the editing of a report that had not yet been released. He said that it was premature to report on it and that it would be released soon.

A reference to “human activities” causing climate change was deleted from the report.

Reveal News

Zinke testified at a Senate committee hearing last month that the Interior Department has not changed any scientific documents.

“There is no incident, no incident at all that I know that we ever changed a comma on a document itself. Now we may have on a press release,” Zinke told the senators. “And I challenge you, any member, to find a document that we’ve actually changed on a report.”

Zinke’s press secretary said no one at the Interior Department was available to comment about the report.

A hallmark of the Trump administration is equivocation about climate change to downplay the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels are warming the planet.

Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker documents more than 100 instances of government trying to restrict research or public information about climate change. Among them are reports on climate change that have been stripped from government websites. Climate change was removed from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s strategic plan. Environmental Protection Agency employees were issued talking points that promote an inaccurate message about gaps in climate science and downplay the role of human activities in global warming.

The edited national parks report “is probably the biggest scientific integrity violation at the Department of Interior, by far … because this is an actual scientific report,” said Joel Clement, who was the Interior Department’s top climate change official in the Obama administration. He resigned in October after Zinke reassigned him to an oil and gas accounting office and now is a senior fellow for the Union of Concerned Scientists working on scientific integrity issues.

“By taking the words out, they are depowering the (climate change) issue,” Clement said. “It’s a horrible thing for reports to be suppressed and for the words to be changed.”

The report, titled “Sea Level Rise and Storm Surge Projections for the National Park Service,” reveals that national treasures will face severe flooding if global greenhouse gases keep increasing. Some of its projections, according to the drafts, include:

In North Carolina, the Wright Brothers National Memorial has the highest projected increase in sea level among parks nationwide — 2.69 feet by 2100 under a scenario of high growth of greenhouse gases. Along with Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras national seashores, the memorial could face significant permanent flooding. “Future storm surges will be exacerbated by future sea-level rise nationwide; this could be especially dangerous for the Southeast Region where they already experience hurricane-strength storms,” the report says.
In Virginia, three parks — Colonial National Historical Park, home of Historic Jamestowne; Fort Monroe National Monument; and Petersburg National Battlefield — face the biggest potential sea level increases in the park service’s Northeast region — 2.66 feet by 2100.
Parks in the Washington, D.C., region could experience some of the greatest sea level increases — 2.62 feet by 2100. “Storm surge flooding on top of this sea-level rise would have widespread impacts,” the report says.
If a Category 2 hurricane hit Florida’s Everglades National Park, the entire park could be flooded, with most of it under several feet of water.

Reveal obtained almost 2,000 pages of drafts of the report showing tracked changes and dating back to August 2016 — along with dozens of pages of other documents about the report and preparations to release it — in response to a public records request to the state of Colorado.

The lead author, University of Colorado geological sciences research associate Maria Caffrey, worked full-time on the report on contract with the park service from 2013 through 2017.

Caffrey declined to discuss the editing and long delay in releasing her report, instead referring questions to the park service. Asked whether she has been pressured to delete the terms “anthropogenic” and “human activities,” she replied, “I don’t really want to get into that today.”

“I would be very disappointed if there were words being attributed to me that I didn’t write,” she said. “I don’t think politics should come into this in any way.”

Although references to human-induced change were deleted, data and maps showing the severity of impacts on the parks were unchanged.

In drafts dated January 2017 to May 2017, the executive summary starts: “Changing relative sea levels and the potential for increasing storm surges due to anthropogenic climate change present challenges to national park managers.”

But editing dated Feb. 6, 2018, changed that to: “Ongoing changes in relative sea levels and the potential for increasing storm surges present challenges to national park managers.”

In a section about 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, one of the costliest storms to hit the U.S., this sentence was deleted: “This single storm cannot be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but the storm surge occurred over a sea whose level had risen due to climate change.”

An entire sentence was removed from the report’s section on Hurricane Sandy.

Reveal News

The introduction also was substantially altered in February. These two sentences were deleted: “While sea levels have been gradually rising since the last glacial maximum approximately 21,000 years ago, anthropogenic climate change has significantly increased the rate of global sea-level rise. Human activities continue to release carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm.”

Other scientists who reviewed the draft reports said the deletions about the cause of climate change were alarming.

“It’s hiding from the public the reality of the causes and the possible options to choose or influence what scenario plays out,” Lubchenco said.

Some of the editing apparently remained in play. Caffrey has pushed back on at least some of the deletions, according to a March draft.

Editing notes in a draft obtained by Reveal indicate that many of the deletions were made by Larry Perez, a career public information officer who coordinates the park service’s climate change response program.

Perez declined to comment on why the changes were made. Watchdog groups say that in some cases, career officials within the administration may be self-censoring to avoid angering Trump appointees. In others cases, they may be responding to verbal orders from superiors who have been told to avoid creating records that eventually could be made public.

The National Park Service’s scientific integrity policy prohibits managers from engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, misrepresentation, coercive manipulation, censorship, or other misconduct that alters the content, veracity, or meaning or that may affect the planning, conduct, reporting, or application of scientific and scholarly activities.” It also requires employees to differentiate between their opinions or assumptions and solid science.

Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said “the edits are glaringly in violation” of the science cited in the report and “such alterations violate” the policy.

“The individual who edited the document is making a personal opinion/assumption that runs counter to the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions responsible for sea-level rise are of anthropogenic origin and that the threat to the National Park Service assets arises primarily from human activities,” said McNutt, who led the U.S. Geological Survey, the Interior Department’s main scientific agency, from 2009 to 2013.

Clement, who worked for seven years as a high-ranking director in the Interior Department, said it would be unusual for such editing to occur without an order from a top supervisor.

“I can’t imagine a career man or woman would take those steps without some sort of direction,” he said.

The editing seemed to cross a line that Zinke drew during last month’s hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, pressed Zinke about censoring science. She asked him about department officials deleting this line from a press release about a newly published scientific article: “Global climate change drives sea-level rise, increasing the frequency of coastal flooding.”

In his testimony, Zinke differentiated editing press releases from altering scientific reports. He also rebuffed suggestions that he considers references to climate change unacceptable, saying “man has been an influencer” on the warming climate.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska and the committee’s chairperson, summarized Zinke’s comments: “I think you were pretty clear … that within the department, you’re not altering the reports that are coming out from the agencies.”

Caffrey, the park service report’s lead author, said it’s crucial that the report address the human role in climate change. One of her key findings is that decisions about reducing greenhouse gases will determine how much peril the coastal national parks face from sea-level rise and storm surge.

The report calculates projected sea-level rise in 2030, 2050, and 2100 under four scenarios for global emissions. For instance, projections for the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington in 2100 range from 1.74 feet to 2.62 feet. The low end envisions a future in which people burn significantly less coal and other fossil fuels, while the upper number reflects increases in use.

“What scenario we choose to follow in the future will have a significant impact on how we protect our resources, like the National Park Service resources,” Caffrey said. “I feel it’s an important part to include in the report because it’s an essential part of those findings.”

In an October 2016 webinar for park staff about her research, Caffrey showed an aerial photo that depicts Washington in 2100 if global emissions rise and a Category 3 hurricane hits the city. The National Mall and Constitution Avenue are flooded. Water surrounds museums.

“We can see the results could potentially be quite catastrophic,” Caffrey said in an interview.

The report is intended to be released with an interactive website that would allow the public and park managers to visualize rising waters in their favorite parks.

“You can zoom in and move around and see the underlying infrastructure and see what’s at risk,” said William Manley, a University of Colorado Boulder research scientist who worked on data, maps, and the online viewer.

“The data and the viewer, if released, would help park decision-makers to see more clearly what decisions they should make to avoid costly mistakes,” he said. In addition, “the maps and information would be helpful to resource managers in preparation for any storms that were forecasted.”

For instance, if the report had been released by late last summer, park managers could have consulted it when hurricanes Irma and Maria, both Category 5 storms, headed toward the U.S. Virgin Islands in September. The storm surge maps for Virgin Islands National Park could have shown managers which areas were likely to flood. The interactive viewer possibly could have helped evacuation planning.

“It’s becoming clearer and clearer to most Americans that weather patterns are changing, climate change is a real phenomenon, and it’s affecting things they care about, people they love, and places that they love,” said Lubchenco, the former NOAA administrator.

“I think what we are seeing is an effort to undermine that realization in a very subtle way. And it’s very dangerous. It’s counter to the best interests of a fully democratic society.”

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Zinke says the Interior isn’t censoring science. The evidence begs to differ.

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Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

by WinifredK29 Posted on August 28, 2016

Human/Nature

Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

By on Aug 28, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Summertime is prime time for national parks. As snow melts, wildflowers bloom, and waterfalls roar, generations of visitors have flocked to the natural wonders that dot the American landscape (to say nothing of all the amazing cultural sites the National Park Service protects).

The National Park Service was created a century ago — Aug. 25, 1916, to be exact — to keep an eye on the growing treasure trove of national parks. It’s been a good century as more and more land has been set aside and annual visitors now number more than 300 million, but it’s also not been without challenges. Chief among them is climate change, which will drastically alter national park landscapes in the coming decades including cranking up the heat.

As part of Climate Central’s ongoing States at Risk project, we analyzed just how much hotter parks are projected to get later this century. We looked at the future summer temperatures in all the parks in the Lower 48 states except Dry Tortugas National Park (sorry, Fort Jefferson lovers!) assuming greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trend. To put it in clearer context, we mapped out what places today are most comparable to park’s climates of tomorrow.

The results could make you sweat. Parks are projected to have summers that are 8 to 12 degrees F hotter by 2100. That means currently cool mountainous parks could be as hot as the plains. Parks in the Southeast, already a pretty hot place, will face even more extreme temperatures with a climate more like southern Texas. And otherworldly Joshua Tree National Park in southern California will face the greatest geographical climate shift, with temperatures more like Abu Dhabi by 2100.

We also analyzed how many more days with extreme heat the parks could face. Extreme heat is a hallmark of global warming, and its impact will be most arresting in the national parks where people go, by design, to be outside in the summer. Like the rest of the country, parks are going to be seeing more dangerously hot days above 90 degrees F, 95 degrees F, and 100 degrees F.

By 2100, the glaciers of Montana’s Glacier National Park will be long gone and rising temperatures will be one of the big reasons why. Visitors will not only have to contend with an ice-free landscape, but also hotter temperatures. Today the park sees an average of only one 90 degrees F day each year. It could see 27 days with temperatures above 90 degrees F by the end of the century.

Yosemite National Park, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, currently sees about two weeks of 90 degrees F weather every year. By 2050, it could see nearly a month of those temperatures, and by 2100 it could get nearly 50 such days each year.

And the Great Smoky Mountains, currently the most visited National Park, could go from fewer than 10 days above 90 degrees F each year, on average now, to three months with those scorching temperatures.

In numerous other parks, the number of days above 100 degrees F is projected to skyrocket. Big Bend National Park in Texas could see more than 110 days above 100 degrees F each year, on average. And Great Basin National Park in Nevada, which currently doesn’t have any days above 100 degrees F in a typical year, could see a month of those temperatures each year by 2100.

It’s likely that parks on the more extreme end of the temperature scale will see a drop in summer visitation, but more visitors are likely to show up in fall and spring when it won’t be fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot. That may stretch park resources thin as most parks are set up to handle summer crowds and quieter shoulder seasons. How parks will deal with the change in visitation season is an open question.

And all this is to say nothing about the impacts extreme heat will have on the natural resources around which we created national parks in the first place. Joshua Tree could become too hot for its namesake trees, and there’s evidence that extreme summer days could create more rockfalls in Yosemite, which could change the face of the stunning valley at the center of the park. Wildfire risk will also skyrocket across the West and could make summer park vacations not only more hot but more smoky.

Those are just the most visible changes. Whole ecosystems are likely to be disrupted and there are consequences scientists probably haven’t even uncovered yet (those are the ones that could be the worst since we’ll be least prepared).

Despite the daunting situation facing the National Park Service in its second century, there are signs it’s up for the challenge. It’s already addressing climate change from the coast to the high mountains and has an A-Team team of experts to help parks answer the gnarly questions they face.

There’s no denying that national parks will look a lot different by the end of the century, but that won’t make them any less a part of the fabric of American identity.

Analysis by James Bronzan and Alyson Kenward, PhD.

Methodology: Future temperatures for 47 National Parks were calculated based on the median of 29 spatially downscaled climate models (CMIP5) at 1/8 degree scale, then averaged within park boundaries. National parks in Alaska and Hawaii, along with Dry Tortugas National Park, were excluded because projections at this resolution were unavailable. Temperatures for 2050 are based on the 20-year average of 2041-2060 and for 2100 are based on the period 2080-2099. Projected temperatures assume that greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate (RCP8.5). The interactive map features the average summer daily high temperature (June-August), while days over 90oF, 95oF, and 100oF were counted annually. The current period values for parks and climate divisions are based on the 1991-2010 average calculated using a gridded observational dataset by Ed Maurer of Santa Clara University. 

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More stories in this series:

If you think technology has no place in the national parks, think again

From smartphones to webcams, technology could help us understand — and appreciate — parks in the coming century.

People of color are fans of national parks, despite obstacles that keep them out

Only 57 percent had ever set foot in the parks, but 85 percent want more of them — especially in cities.

The uncertain, hopeful future of the National Park Service

“The goal of our centennial is not to scare everyone to death about climate change.”

More in Human/Nature: National Parks and the Humans Who Use ThemElection Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

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Time to Follow Teddy Roosevelt’s Advice: ‘Drop Politics’ and Enjoy a Park

by Myrna Posted on August 24, 2016

In 1903 Teddy Roosevelt dropped politics and took a hike. One result was the National Park System. Continued here:  Time to Follow Teddy Roosevelt’s Advice: ‘Drop Politics’ and Enjoy a Park ; ; ;

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Time to Follow Teddy Roosevelt’s Advice: ‘Drop Politics’ and Enjoy a Park

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