Tag Archives: the climate desk

The Southwest’s Forests May Never Recover From Megafires

by Theodot7v8 Posted on July 8, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on The Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you doubt that climate change is transforming the American landscape, go to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sweltering temperatures there have broken records this summer, and a seemingly permanent orange haze of smoke hangs in the air from multiple wildfires.

Take a ride into the mountains and you’ll see one blackened ridge after another where burns in the past few years have ravaged the national forest. Again, this year, fires in New Mexico and neighboring states of Colorado and Arizona are destroying wilderness areas.

Fire danger is expected to remain abnormally high for the rest of the summer throughout much of the Intermountain West. But “abnormal” fire risks have become the new normal.

The tragic death of 19 firefighters in the Yarnell fire near Prescott, Arizona last Sunday shows just how dangerous these highly unpredictable wind-driven wildfires can be.

The last 10 years have seen more than 60 mega-fires over 100,000 acres in size in the West. When they get that big, firefighters often let them burn themselves out, over a period of weeks, or even months. These fires typically leave a scorched earth behind that researchers are beginning to fear may never come back as forest again.

Fires, of course, are a natural part of the forest lifecycle, clearing out old stands and making way for vigorous new growth out of the carbon-rich ashes. What is not natural is the frequency and destructiveness of the wildfires in the past decade—fires which move faster, burn hotter, and are proving harder to manage than ever before. These wildfires are not exactly natural, because scientists believe that some of the causes, at least, are human-created.

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The Southwest’s Forests May Never Recover From Megafires

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Step Inside the World’s Largest Solar Boat

by AnnaBest Posted on June 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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The solar plane will land in New York City soon, but its water-borne counterpart is already here: Early this week the world’s largest solar-powered boat steamed into lower Manhattan and docked in small marina, usually reserved for multimillion dollar yachts, in the shadow of the new World Trade Center tower. The three-year-old ship, dubbed “Turanor” after a term for solar power in The Lord of the Rings, is on a tour of the Atlantic from its home base in southern France, documenting how the warming sea is shifting the Gulf Stream, a powerful cross-ocean current that drives the weather of Europe and West Africa.

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Step Inside the World’s Largest Solar Boat

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CHARTS: You Won’t Believe How Much Disasters Cost Last Year

by dgod36 Posted on June 20, 2013

Mother Jones

2012 was the second-worst year on record for extreme weather events, both in number and in cost, according to a tally released this morning by NOAA. Eleven major events—including tornadoes, wildfire, drought, and hurricanes—racked up a collective bill of over $110 billion, with cropland damage from drought in the Midwest ($17.36 billion in crop insurance payments alone) and Hurricane Sandy, with a $60 billion pricetag, as the most expensive items.

NOAA

As for this summer, the costs are still piling on: Feed and water scarcity have shrunk the nation’s cattle supply to its lowest point since 1952, pushing beef prices to an all-time high, and NOAA scientists predict that pasture conditions will likely be worse this summer than last.

According to the latest forecast, although drought conditions have dropped 21 percent from their peak last September, nearly half of the country is still in some kind of drought, with the worst conditions moving west through the summer into California and Oregon.

“The drought has definitely been pushing westward,” Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska told reporters, adding that the devastating wildfires that have recently hit states like Colorado and New Mexico are “just the start.”

NOAA

Svoboda added that lightning from the upcoming monsoon season in the southwest created a particular wildfire risk in this still tinder-dry region, although Arizona and the central plains are expected to see some improvement of drought conditions, the result of a relatively wet spring:

NOAA

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CHARTS: You Won’t Believe How Much Disasters Cost Last Year

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How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse

by Michael Rinchen Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last year, Colorado suffered from a record-breaking wildfire season: More than 4000 fires resulted in six deaths, the destruction of 648 buildings, and a half a billion dollars in property damage. Still reeling, Coloradans are once again fleeing in their thousands from a string of drought-fueled fires. El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said on Wednesday that the Black Forest Fire, northeast of Colorado Springs, had already destroyed between 80 and 100 homes. Three other fires, including one in neighboring Fremont County fire, also broke out this week.

So what role is climate change playing in the worsening wildfires? Here’s what we’ve learned:

Is climate change making wildfires worse?

Big wildfires like Colorado’s thrive in dry air, low humidity, and high winds; climate change is going to make those conditions more frequent over the next century. We know because it’s already happening: A University of Arizona report from 2006 found that large forest fires have occurred more often in the Western United States since the mid-1980s as spring temperatures increased, snow melted earlier, and summers got hotter, leaving more and drier fuels for fires to devour.

Thomas Tidwell, the head of the United States Forest Service, told a Senate committee on energy and natural resources recently that the fire season now lasts two months longer and destroys twice as much land as it did four decades ago. Fires now, he said, burn the same amount of land faster.

How many more fires are we talking about?

We can expect “as much as a fourfold increase in parts of the Sierra Nevada and California,” in fire activity across the rest of this century, says Matthew Hurteau, assistant professor of ecosystem science and management at Pennsylvania State University. It’s a trend likely to continue: A 2012 study in Ecosphere, the peer-reviewed journal of the Ecological Society of America, found a high level of agreement that climate change will fundamentally alter fire patterns across vast swaths of the globe by 2100: While some areas around the equator will see fewer fires, there will be striking increases in high altitude boreal fires in the Northern Hemisphere. Fire will even reach a thawing Arctic, which will be more capable of growing plants to burn.

Break it down for me. What’s driving the change?

Fires are much more likely to occur during periods of extreme heat. The draft National Climate Assessment report, prepared by more than 240 authors, says, “There is strong evidence to indicate that human influence on the climate has already roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat events like the record-breaking summer of 2011 in Texas and Oklahoma.”

Droughts are another major driver. Right now, nearly half the West remains locked in the worst drought in 60 years. The vast majority of Colorado—more than 70 percent—is experiencing “severe” or “exceptional” drought right now, setting the background to the current fires. Low levels of winter snow and spring rains in the Western states don’t bode well for this year’s fire season, either. “The forest is much more flammable,” Hurteau says. Heat sucks the moisture out of forests, making them more susceptible to ignitions from lightning. And there’ll be many more hot days to contend with: Research has shown that ratio could increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.

This is further complicated by the role of climate change on the Gulf jet stream, which government scientists said earlier this year failed to deliver moist air from the Gulf of Mexico northward like it normally does, denying much of the continental US of much-needed rains. Drought and subsequent wildfires may also be driven by weather systems thousands of miles away: A 2012 study also links a warming Arctic, and its affect on great global currents of air and water, with increased instances of extreme weather, including drought and heatwaves in the US.

There could be another nasty cycle at work here, too: US forests currently absorb about 16 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning in the US. By destroying trees, wildfires not only release carbon dioxide, they potentially alter their ability to absorb carbon, in turn meddling with amount of carbon in the atmosphere that leads to global warming…and more wildfires.

81firegal/Photobucket/James West

Rising temperatures I get. But isn’t climate change meant to produce wetter conditions?

That’s true. As the air gets warmer, it can hold more water. But “we’re alternating between periods of extreme wetness and extreme dryness,” says Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology. A warming world may produce a higher average precipitation and a higher average humidity, but fires perversely enjoy this, says Frelich: It means they can feast upon even more forest fuel once conditions snap back to dry and hot.

What about wind?

We do know with great certainty that when the wind is higher, fire behavior changes, whipping up embers through the forest canopy that can jump highways and even lakes. That’s certainly the case in the current Colorado fires, with the National Weather Service warning of gusts of up to 35 miles per hour.

But is there a link between climate change and windy weather? A Canadian study from 2009 found that projected increased fire correlated with a slight increase in wind speeds, but the exact climate connection isn’t known yet. We do know that intense storms will become more frequent due to climate change—and that increased likelihood of storms with high winds means more fallen branches. Fire ecologists call this debris “slash fuel.” Add some “ladder fuels”—understory plants that grow in the shade—and you have an easy pathway for fires to leap up into the forest canopy, where they gain momentum. Frelich says Minnesota is still seeing the effects of built-up fuel from a deadly 1999 derecho, a fierce wind storm that blows in a straight line across a landscape accompanying bands of thunderstorms and rain.

Couldn’t we prevent all these mega-fires by getting rid of the smaller ones earlier?

You might think that tackling fires before they roar out of control is the best way to prevent death and destruction. Last year, the US Forest Service briefly flirted with an “aggressive initial attack” plan. But evidence suggests the early intervention approach may actually produce bigger fires: By burning out dry undergrowth, small fires can actually help prevent large and deadlier blazes. Fighting every little fire might also put more firefighters at risk and deplete strained budgets.

Are we making it worse by building more houses in fire-prone areas?

Development doesn’t necessarily make fires worse, but it does put humans right in the path of destruction. I-News, an investigative journalism group in the Rocky Mountains, last year discovered that, “In the past two decades, a quarter million people have moved into Colorado’s red zones—the parts of the state at risk for the most dangerous wildfires… 1.1 million Coloradans live in more than half a million homes in red zones across the state.” The Forest Service’s Tidwell also told the Senate yesterday that more than 40 percent of US forests are in need of hazard reduction, but that’s a tall order in the era of sequestration.

I’ve also heard about beetle outbreaks making fires worse?

While the science is still being debated, the fear is that dry, beetle-ravaged trees combust more quickly than their non-infested counterparts. Over the last decade, higher temperatures caused by climate change have allowed the pine beetle and the spruce bark beetle to survive the winter, causing the biggest outbreak in the last 125 years, killing pine forests across extensive areas of western US and Canada. The beetles are also venturing to higher altitudes where trees are more susceptible to the infestations. Since 1996, spruce beetle has affected 1.2 million acres in Colorado and Wyoming. In Colorado, mountain pine beetle attacked more than 750,000 acres in 2011.

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How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse

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TV Weathermen and Climate Scientists Kiss and Make Up

by Hadwin Partize Posted on June 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Weather forecasters and climate scientists aren’t exactly known for being the best of buds. Several surveys have shown that among members of the American Meteorological Society—and especially among professional TV forecasters—there’s a substantial degree of global warming skepticism. Indeed, more than half of AMS members perceive conflict within the organization over the issue of climate change. Meanwhile, members of the climate science community are sometimes accused of speaking down to their weather geek brethren.

Given this tense history, what happened at the most recent Climate Desk Live event, featuring Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis and Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, might be considered fairly remarkable.

“Jennifer’s coming at it from a different direction than I am,” said Ostro after he and Francis delivered complementary analyses of how global warming is upending our weather. “But what’s interesting is that we have converged on a very similar spot—I as a day to day weather forecaster, and Jennifer, who has a background in meteorology but who’s in more of a climate science research area.”

Ostro believes that climate change is increasing the atmosphere’s overall thickness and, thereby, forcing weather patterns to stay in place for longer—with sometimes devastating results. Francis, meanwhile, argues that the dramatic warming of the Arctic is, in turn, slowing down the hemisphere-sized loopings of the jet stream—with very similar consequences.

And there are other signs that relations between climate scientists and weather forecasters are improving—signs that go considerably beyond the scientific mutual admiration society that is Francis and Ostro. “I think for the mainstream broadcasters, who may have been sort of agnostic, it’s getting harder and harder, the evidence is becoming a little bit stronger with each passing day, and certainly as the years go by,” says Bob Ryan, a meteorologist for over 30 years with NBC and ABC affiliates in the DC area, and a former president of the American Meteorological Society.

Indeed, the past several years have seen a growing number of forecast meteorologists speaking out about climate change. There’s the Weather Channel’s Ostro, who attests that “something ain’t right with the weather.” There’s Ryan, who produced a 6 part series on global warming at WRC-TV in 2009.

There’s Paul Douglas, the Minneapolis St. Paul area forecaster—and a Republican—who last year drew massive attention after he proclaimed that “acknowledging climate science doesn’t make you a liberal.” There’s Jim Gandy, chief meteorologist at South Carolina’s CBS affiliate, WLTX-TV, who just won the American Meteorological Society’s “Excellence in Science Reporting” award for segments on climate change.

But why is this rapprochement happening now? In significant part, it’s because of increasingly wacky weather itself–from 2012’s dramatically warm winter to, just this week, extreme floods in Europe that were recently called “unprecedented since the Middle Ages.” “Meteorologists are trained to look at the atmosphere, and generally are pretty intelligent. And anybody with that sort of training, watching the atmosphere, is going to notice that there are new patterns emerging,” explains Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground and a leading commenter on climate change and weather.

The history of meteorology is, in one sense, a history of divides between scientists who approached the very act of research in a different ways. “Meteorology has often been an apple of contention, as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who attempted to study them,” wrote the Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry in 1858. Henry was referring to the mid-19th century “American Storm Controversy,” in which two pioneering meteorologists, William Redfield and James Espy, engaged in a vitriolic battle over the nature of storms. Redfield was an empiricist, a data gatherer, who collected large numbers of observations on storms. Espy, in contrast, had a theory rooted in fundamental physics and the behavior of moisture and gases in the atmosphere.

It’s a striking parallel to the modern rift between forecast meteorologists, who focus on large numbers of daily weather observations and analyze them for very practical reasons (like keeping people safe), and climate scientists, who are often trying to understand, based on equations and first principles, how the system works.

“Climate scientists look at things differently than meteorologists do,” explains South Carolina TV forecaster Jim Gandy, who works for the CBS affiliate WLTX-TV. “The fundamental difference is that we don’t really have to think too much about the physics of infrared radiation”—the heat radiation that is being trapped at the level of the Earth’s atmosphere by carbon dioxide. Or as the pioneering Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron put it in 1959: “This seems to be a rule in our science: progress is impeded by want of meteorological knowledge on the part of the theoreticians and by a too poor mathematical training of weather-men.”

Stu Ostro fits the empiricist mold to a T. His documentation of the wild weather that he’s been seeing takes the form of a 1072 slide (and growing) powerpoint—the work of a data gatherer through and through. Jennifer Francis, in contrast, writes in a recent scientific paper of how Rossby wave theory helps to explain the hypothesized effect of greater Arctic warming on weather in the mid-latitudes. Her paper has plenty of data too—but much more in service of an overarching theoretical account of what the atmosphere is doing.

But methodological rifts can also heal, once theory and data line up and naturally push empiricists and theoreticians back together. “What’s happening is that the theorists saw this coming ahead of time, but the data wasn’t supporting it,” explains Jeff Masters. “Now that we’re seeing the impacts, the climate is changing before our eyes, the empiricists are recognizing this and saying, the theorists were right.”

How’s this for evidence: In two weeks in Nashville, the American Meteorological Society will be offering a short course on climate science for forecast meteorologists, taught by leading climate scientists. The room is oversold—there’s already a waiting list.

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TV Weathermen and Climate Scientists Kiss and Make Up

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Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever visited a cave, you know the rules: Stay on the path, and keep your greasy paws off the formations. So Stacy Carolin was a bit taken aback the first time she headed into a cave not as a tourist, but as a scientist, and took a step off the beaten path. “I was a city girl back then,” she recalls. “It was very muddy and slippery… and also completely pitch black.” Not exactly the setting you’d expect for cutting-edge climate change research.

A few years later, Carolin, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, is breaking ground in the field of paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climates, using an unconventional but increasingly prevalent tool: “speleothems,” a catch-all term for cave formations that includes stalagmites (remember the mnemonic: those that “mite” reach the ceiling from the floor) and stalactites (those that hold “tite” to the ceiling).

In a study released today in the journal Science, Carolin and her colleagues outline 100,000-year-old rainfall conditions in Borneo, mapped from chemical clues in cave formations there. Like most historic climate reconstructions, the goal is to compile real-life data against which to test predictive models; if scientists know how much rainfall there was in the tropics in the past, they can see how well their models are able to replicate those conditions, and tweak accordingly. But the most commonly-used “proxies” for ancient climates, including tree rings and ice cores, are notoriously inadequate in the tropics, leaving holes in scientists’ geographic picture of the past and making it difficult to measure historic changes in tropical weather systems, like monsoons, which can themselves have major impacts on global climate.

Deep inside caves in Mexico, Southeast Asia, China, and other limestone-rich locales worldwide, scientists have found rich troves of data in speleothems. Researchers look for formations that have already fallen over or broken off, so as not to damage the cave, haul these back to the lab, slice them open (“like a hot dog,” Carolin says), and study the ancient atoms within to discover how old they are and how much rainfall there was at different points in their past (speleothems form when rainwater drips through the limestone, picking up acid and minerals that pile up in the cave).

Tim McDonnell

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Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

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Here’s What Antarctica Looks Like Under All That Ice

by Aaron Duff Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Wired website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Check out the most detailed map of a continent never truly seen by human eyes: the de-iced surface of Antarctica. By virtually peeling back the frozen ice sheet and studying the land beneath, researchers can get a better sense of how the southern pole of our planet could react to climate change.

Bedmap2 was created by the British Antarctic Survey, and used decades of data to produce this detailed view of the frozen continent. NASA’s contribution to the dataset includes surface measurements from its now-retired orbiting Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), and results from several years of flyovers by specialized aircraft that collected radar and other data measuring changes in the thickness of sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets as part of Operation IceBridge.

The work improves on the decade-old Bedmap project, which virtually thawed the continent, but at lower resolution. Both maps combine information on ice thickness, bedrock topography, and surface elevation. Bedmap2 added millions of extra data points and also covers a wider swath of land than its predecessor. Over on NASA’s site, you can compare the two datasets by sliding between them.

Researchers need good information about the under-ice ground of Antarctica to better simulate its response to changing environmental conditions. Antarctica’s ice is not static but constantly flows to the sea. Knowing the shape of the bedrock and the thickness of the ice allows scientists to model these movements and predict how they could change in the future.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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Here’s What Antarctica Looks Like Under All That Ice

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Sequester Guts Wildfire Prevention, Sets Up Bigger Blazes

by 2343b4u4u Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Tree coming down!”

Skyler Lofgren shouts above a din of buzzing chainsaws, leans into his own, and with a final heave topples another 40-foot Ponderosa pine. Lofgren, 27, a forest firefighting crew boss with Flagstaff, Arizona’s fire department, felled a dozen trees on Monday, overseeing an outdoor classroom for a new crop of seasonal recruits who will spend the summer patrolling the Coconino National Forest with three-foot chainsaws at the ready. The crew will fight wildfires when they come, but the vast majority of their time will be spent on prevention or, as Lofgren puts it, “working ourselves out of a job.”

In a stand of trees ten minutes outside downtown Flagstaff—a tight cluster of low-slung brick buildings peppered with Route 66 paraphernalia—Lofgren and his fellow firefighters are hard at work on a new project that local officials say is the first of its kind in the nation. Funded by a $10 million bond that voters approved by a three-to-one margin in November, the program puts local tax dollars to work clearing trees and brush, and lighting carefully-managed fires, in an effort to stave off the devastating, astronomically expensive megafires that have become increasingly common in the West. If successful, the project could also untether the community from a withering federal firefighting budget.

Last year saw the third-worst wildfire season in five decades; the Southern California fire that threatened thousands of homes earlier this month looks to be only the first flash of what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week will be an above-average season for much of the Southwest. But the sequester took a 7.5 percent bite out of the Forest Service’s budget, nearly half of which is spent fighting wildfires. That means there will be 500 fewer pairs of boots on the ground and 200,000 fewer acres treated to prevent fires; the agency’s next proposed budget cuts preventative spending by a further 24 percent. It’s all part of what fire ecologists, environmentalists, and firefighters interviewed by Climate Desk describe as an increasingly distorted federal budget that has apparently forgotten the old adage about an ounce of prevention: It pours billions ($2 billion in 2012) into fighting fires but skimps on cheap, proven methods for stopping megafires before they start.

Firefighting greenhorn Jake Hess, 23, practices his chainsaw control on a fallen tree. Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk

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Sequester Guts Wildfire Prevention, Sets Up Bigger Blazes

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WATCH: What Does 400 ppm Mean? Talking with Climate Scientist Michael Mann

by f3x43zg0 Posted on May 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week in Washington, DC, leading climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania sat down with Climate Desk Live to talk about the significance of an planetary milestone—we’ve reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As Mann explained, humans are altering the content of the atmosphere at an alarming rate—one perhaps never seen before in the history of Earth itself.

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WATCH: What Does 400 ppm Mean? Talking with Climate Scientist Michael Mann

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We Tracked Down Our Biggest Troll…and Kind of Liked Him

by BayalaHillesland628 Posted on May 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever read anything on the internet, chances are you’ve encountered a troll. No, not the kind that live under bridges, or the ones with a shock of neon hair. We’re talking about those annoying commenters who get their kicks by riling people up as much as possible. But have you ever wondered who these people really are? Well, we found out.

Internet researchers at George Mason University recently found that when it comes to online commenting, throwing bombs gets more attention than being nice, and makes readers double down on their preexisting beliefs. What’s more, trolls create a false sense that a topic is more controversial than it really is. Witness the overwhelming consensus on climate change amongst scientists—97 percent agreement that global warming is real, and caused by humans. But that doesn’t settle the question for Twitter addict and Climate Desk perennial thorn in the side Hoyt Connell:

“If you allow somebody to make a comment and there’s no response, then they’re controlling the definition of the statement,” Hoyt says. “Then it can become a truth.”

We first encountered Hoyt, or as we know him, @hoytc55, several months ago on our Twitter page, taking us to task for our climate coverage. And the screed hasn’t stopped since: In April alone, Hoyt mentioned us on Twitter some 126 times, almost as much as our top nine other followers combined. So we did the only thing we knew how to do: track him down, meet him face to face…and ask a few questions of our own. So we did, in Episode One: Trollus Maximus (above).

Episode Two: The Troll Slayer: Some online commenters are silent, watching from the wings, what internet researchers call “lurkers.” Not Rosi Reed, a 34-year-old nuclear physicist at the Large Hadron Collider and long-time internet truth crusader, who goes by the nom de guerre PhysicsGirl.

Finally, we launched an experiment: Episode Three: The Showdown. What if the trolls and the troll slayers met face to face and talked it out, analog-style (or as close as we can get with Google Hangout)? For all their differences, Hoyt and Rosi have one thing in common: They aren’t cowards. They agreed to square off in a debate about online commenting, climate change, and what defines truth in the digital age.

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We Tracked Down Our Biggest Troll…and Kind of Liked Him

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