climate change

In the American West, Wildfire Comes for the Suburbs: Grist Story and a Dive Into One Wildfire/WUI Modeling Study

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Spokane neighborhood.. WUI or just suburbia?

Sorry about this post.. I got a bit carried away on some side trails.

Thanks to Nick Smith again, there’s a link to Yale Environment 360, who reposted a story from Grist as part of the “climate desk”.  The reporter is a Grist reporter who covers climate news.

We’ve heard that “people moving into the wildlands is bad for wildfire” for many years. I think the concept of “suburban sprawl” is too generalized to make those claims. It’s as if folks should just densit-ize existing footprints of cities, towns and existing suburbs. But that is difficult to do, and there are already many, many people out there in the woods and fields and grasslands, and the current reality, even if new housing was completely halted, is already problematic. Where limits are imposed, demand tends to increase prices, and so there are affordability concerns.

Of course, people living in these places are dealing with it, some more successfully than others.

“What’s happened over the last decades is we’ve had explosive population growth in naturally fire-prone areas,” said Tim Brown, director of the Western Regional Climate Center at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “People are moving in to where fire happens.”

The wildland-urban interface, which researchers often call the WUI, is the phrase given to places where housing is sandwiched between paved city centers and forests or grasslands. Researchers have been raising the alarm about the fire risk posed to homes in these areas since the 1980s. As humans burn more fossil fuels and warm the planet, longer and more severe droughts will likely make that risk worse.

And it could be argued that improved fire tech will give us more control, and if it gets dry enough, less vegetation (fuel) will grow back.  I don’t see this in too many stories, though. And despite researchers warning us, people are successfully living in those places, and enjoying it greatly.

Reno is the fastest warming city in the U.S., according to the nonprofit Climate Central.

These half-wild, half-suburban neighborhoods remain one of the most rapidly growing types of land in the country, although development has slowed compared to the surge between the 1990s and 2010s. In some places, housing scarcity in cities has pushed home buyers to the outskirts of towns, where building is generally cheaper and faces fewer permitting or zoning requirements.

People are also attracted to living with more space, near outdoor recreation areas with beautiful scenery. More than a third of all homes in the continental U.S. are now considered to be in the wildland-urban interface.

Some people are also concerned about crime in some metro areas.  As I’ve said before, I’m not sure that the definition considers the rural-urban interface.  Like if there are grazing animals on grasslands nearby, we are still fire-prone but not close to “wildlands”.

I asked Google AI about New Jersey, for example.

Percentage of Housing: Depending on the specific study parameters, between 25% and 46% of all homes or residents in New Jersey are located in the WUI. This ranks New Jersey in the top 5 states nationally for the percentage of homes built in these zones. [1, 2, 3]

Certainly New Jersey has fire-prone vegetation, particularly in the Pine Barrens, and maybe that’s the issue not “wildlands” or “farmlands” or “rangelands” per se. As we say in the Marshall Fire, houses close to one another also increase fire spread.

The story used this study to make some conclusions about the WUI..

Notably, we introduced a novel index, the “Integrated Human-centric Wildfire Risk Index (IHWRI),” which takes into account the compounding effects of critical fire-weather days and WUI expansion, which accounts for the expansion of geographical and temporal opportunities for the ignition and growth of extreme-impact fires and housing growth in harm’s way. IHWRI indicated a 4.1-fold increase in compound fire risk in California from 1990 to 2022. While climate-driven trends alone increased critical fire-weather days by 2.5-fold, the compounding impacts of WUI expansion and climate trends amplified conditions conducive to extreme-impact fires by 4.1-fold. The Sacramento Drainage climate division in Northern California emerged as the region with the highest increase in IHWRI, mainly due to its increasing critical fire-weather days.

The study has a nice section on limitations and future work:

While our study provides valuable insights into the compounding effects of climate change and WUI expansion on fire risk, we acknowledge some limitations that present opportunities for future work. Our analysis relies on data from 36 weather stations across California, which could be expanded to create a spatially continuous field of risk change, better capturing spatial heterogeneity. Incorporating additional variables related to fuel characteristics and landscape conditions would also provide a more comprehensive assessment of fire risk. Our fire proximity analysis uses a single WUI edge map from 2020 for the 2012–2020 period, which is a limitation, although changes in WUI from 2010 to 2020 were only −0.7%19. Future work could explicitly investigate how the increasing frequency of very large and mega fires affect the likelihood of their encroachment upon or occurrence near WUI zones, as our current analysis only implicitly captures this relationship. Furthermore, exploring data with higher temporal resolution could reveal seasonal or daily variations in fire risk factors, enhancing the precision of our findings. Additionally, the IHWRI index could be further refined to include vulnerability factors, potentially improving predictions of structural losses and fatalities. Finally, expanding the analysis to include various climate change scenarios would offer valuable insights into future fire risks and inform long-term mitigation strategies. Addressing these limitations in future research will enhance the understanding of compound fire risk and support the development of more effective management and policy strategies.

The study was apparently funded by NIFA, DOE and Joint Fire Sciences. What did they find out?

Our findings underscore the urgent need for a multifaceted approach to fire risk mitigation, addressing both climate change adaptation and fire-aware developments and planning. Failure to address these compounding factors can lead to increasingly catastrophic fire events, posing grave threats to human lives, property, and ecosystems. By understanding the critical role of human activities and WUI developments in exacerbating the compound fire risk, this research informs policy interventions aimed at reducing human-ignited fires and regulating development in fire-prone area

This is a fairly common finding in what I call the “modeling over understanding” literature- that there are things that other people could do to make things better and if they used our info it would be helpful.  In my opinion, we already know stuff about human-ignited fires and we already have had various issues at regulating development in fire-prone areas.  The key literature would be “what works, what doesn’t and why” in terms of interventions.  It mystifies me why someone like JFSP doesn’t run some kind of interaction with communities to find out what their questions are, find out what info already exists in the literature, and design research to fill in those identified gaps.  In my experience, people claiming their research will be helpful is not exactly the same as it being helpful.  My own experience with research panels is that they don’t tend to ask these kinds of questions.

If you did this research, would you find anything we don’t already know?

You say it will be helpful to policy makers.. which ones.  How would they use it? Have you asked them if this would be helpful to them? Who did you ask and what was their answer?

In my brief experience on a Dave Cleaves-led national wildfire research review,  I received the info from a researcher “yes the national forest folks want this.” Then I asked the national forest person and he said “yeah, whatever they want to do, it’s their money and we want to have a good relationship.” And that’s within one of the only agencies that does useful things and still has its own research arm.

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Anyway, back to the story..

Evacuating from neighborhoods in these fire-prone areas can be especially fraught. Roads are often narrow and connected by a single road with only one way out. During the recent wildfires in Spokane, the rush of fleeing traffic caused hourslong jams, leaving families sitting in their cars as the flames closed in. Similar scenes of gridlock unfolded during the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and drives that normally took 25 minutes took hours.

I have buddies working on evacuation routes in the Denver Mountains. Part of the problem is that it doesn’t seem like in Colorado, it’s anyone’s job in government specifically to make evacuation plans. Still, this is a known problem that local people work on, and WUI and wildfire researchers, including social scientists,  have been studying for, well, here’s Sue LeVan et al. from  .. 1990!.

The hazard to structures in the wildland-urban interface or intermix (WUI) has been increasing as people move from the cities into rural areas. This movement has increased the likelihood of wildland fires occasionally threatening these structures. Forest fire fighters must defend these structures from wildfires.

Apples and oranges again..

In January 2025, the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out in the shrubby sprawl surrounding Los Angeles, forcing more than 200,000 people to evacuate and burning down thousands of structures.

Those two neighborhoods were around when I was a tyke, and a quick Google search found that the communities were established in 1921 and 1887 respectively. Paradise in 1979.

Climate Model Output Uncertainties Not Communicated to Research Users: Comments on the CWG Report II

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I was originally going to do three posts on the  DOE CWG report, but the series is expanding.  Today I’m going to talk about a series of disconnects between climate research and potential users of climate research, including some other ways of thinking about and communicating uncertainties.

Regional Models Fit For What/Whose Purpose?

From the CWG report:

The IPCC acknowledges limitations in the accuracy of regional climate model outputs. This example shows that users need to assess model projections carefully on a case-by-case basis since local biases might be sufficiently large that the models are simply not fit for purpose. As has recently been noted by two leaders of the modeling community (emphasis added)
… for many key applications that require regional climate model output or for assessing large-scale changes from small scale processes, we believe that the current generation of models is not fit for purpose. (Palmer and Stevens 2019)

I became curious as to “fit for what purpose” and “who decides?”.  So I looked at Palmer and Stevens (open access) which turns out to be a “science op-ed” pointing out that models are not as helpful as they could be, with the perspective of needing lots more bucks to be better.  The authors think that overstating model accuracy has led to lack of investment in making them better.

As climate scientists, we are rightfully proud of, and eager to talk about, our contribution to settling important and long-standing scientific questions of great societal relevance. What we find more difficult to talk about is our deep dissatisfaction with the ability of our models to inform society about the pace of warming, how this warming plays out regionally, and what it implies for the likelihood of surprises.

My bold.  And this is where “fit for purpose” comes in.

The deemphasis of this type of information, while helpful for focusing the reader on the settled science, contributes to the impression that, while climate models can never be perfect, they are largely fit for purpose.However, for many key applications that require regional climate model output or for assessing large-scale changes from small-scale processes, we believe that the current generation of models is not fit for purpose.Figs. 2 and 3 develop this point further by showing how, on the regional scale and for important regional quantities (7), these problems are demonstrably more serious still, as model bias (compared with observations) is often many times greater than the signals that the models attempt to predict.

Again, my bold. You might be thinking.. uh-oh.. whose purpose? Who decided? Is the purpose for the climate science community or for users of models?  Were the users asked what their needs were? Why are we using regional models to inform land management decisions if we haven’t figured out what purposes they are fit for? And how can people write papers about impacts on plants, like corn or forest trees, whose growth depends on micro-not even regional -climates if the climate models are not “fit for purpose” in some undefined way?

Stories:  Long ago, I was chatting with forest economist Richard Haynes one day, and he mentioned something that stuck with me.   He had worked on (I think it was the ICEBMP scientific assessment) and said “those biologists develop models and don’t do sensitivity analysis on their assumptions.” It stuck with me because I thought it was interesting how different disciplines operate with apparently different views of treating uncertainties.  Years later, a co-worker and I (we were the Climate Change folks  in R-2) went to the Temple of Climate (NCAR in Boulder) to talk to folks there who were collaborating with the BLM (on a pointless research project IMHO but whatever).  I asked the question “do y’all do sensitivity analysis on your assumptions?” and they said they couldn’t, because the models were too big and it would have taken too much computing power.  That’s the time it became clear to me that we were being asked at the Forest Service to incorporate model outputs in our management, without the uncertainties being provided with the information.

Uncertainties are hard. I get it.  Economists have various ways of dealing with it in terms of math.  We forest genetics folks gave projections with caveats in words.. like “you can expect to get this kind of increase in growth on plantations in this area, managed like this, unless conditions change, like hurricanes or bugs or ….” so the uncertainties were communicated directly to the decision maker. In fact, it reminds me of an apocryphal story of the Timber Years in Region 6.  The story was that genetic improvement could have been put into models, and Pete Theisen, the Regional Geneticist, was asked if we could cut more now, based on those projections.  His answer was no, we have to wait and see.  We’ll see more about this idea in the next post.

My point here is that many disciplines have developed ways of dealing with uncertainties. Often these are explicitly communicated via words, or math, or both, to users of the information.  Or the expert just says something like “that’s our best guess.” And the user of the information would balance that with other factors, each with their own associated uncertainties. But perhaps, as the Palmer and Stevens paper suggests, in the rush to influence policy, some climate scientists have not been upfront about the uncertainties around their projections, and especially those that matter most to us..at regional and local spatial scales.  What to do? Some ideas in the next post.

We Need to Reframe and Reorient the Climate Sciences- Comments on the CWG Report I

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One of my favorite sports is tilting at windmills.  I know that USDA won’t pay much attention to any comments I might have about the reorganization (nor did the prior Admin).  So I thought, if I’m going to be ignored, why not aim higher?  This is the first of three posts on my comments on the DOE CWG report. The first post is “maybe climate folks could learn something from  us”; the second is “ways to handle uncertainty” and the third “what about the wildfire section”?

It turns out that DOE produced a report by some climate scientists that looked at the climate modeling and impacts literature and stated that they wanted to open a discussion.  Some say that the document is related to the EPA endangerment finding.. personally, I think that’s a legal question and will be resolved there.  If you read about the report in the media, it’s a lot of “good guys” vs. “bad guys” talk.  Scientists are supposed to disagree, and trying to maintain a line of “the right way to think or we’ll say bad things about you” hasn’t really worked.

But what neither side seems to be asking is “how can we move from debating the details of attribution, for example, into understanding the trade-offs of moving forward? Fundamentally, how can we expect the physical sciences of climate to answer the question of “what should we do”?  Doing things, and not doing things, toward any end, requires trade-offs.  Trade-offs that one discipline, or even a small set of subdisciplines, can’t describe, and don’t have the institutions set up to examine.

So I think both “sides” have it wrong in terms of discussing details of climate science instead of what we’re going to do about it.  So I decided to take the report at face value, and first looked at the wildfire section.

From there, I noticed that the relationship of  “climate science” and their arguments pro and con are very different from the way that say, wildfire scientists, or wildlife biologists are involved in policy in say, federal lands policy.   Generally, managers and policy makers have questions, and then round up the relevant disciplines to answer the questions.  With climate policy, it seems like the climate scientists have determined that it is a serious problem and then arrived at preferred answers.  Chris Wright thinks it’s a problem, too, one of many, including energy access. So we all think it’s a problem, and then.. isn’t the question what to do about it? Which leads us to considering trade-offs, and the US has a model for considering trade-offs in analyses.

And we could also refocus climate science to be more user-centered. What if we asked ourselves “how accurate do climate projections have to be for my variable of interest in my specific location to make a difference in management choices?”  And of course,once we had arrived at that, we could ask the climate scientists if their model results were accurate enough for those purposes.  This view centers the information needs of specific decision-makers, not the climate science community. People have pointed out that the scenarios were originally designed for research purposes and then applied to policy.  This is bad juju (we did the science without asking you and you must use it or you are not using the best science! ) in any field, but the stakes are especially high in climate world.

Opportunity to Reframe How Different Scientific and Engineering Disciplines Contribute to Policy.

In the policy sciences, we say that framing the issue is key to involving the right disciplines and stakeholders in developing the information needed for comparing approaches to solutions. It seems to me that all this discussion of “what climate science says” centers atmospheric and other physical sciences as the de facto arbiter of what “science” can contribute to public policy.
Instead, I would recommend that DOE (and perhaps more broadly; but DOE would be a first step), step way back from the current positions and debates and instead frame two
questions:

1) What is the best mix of energy sources to promote in the next 20 (or pick a time) years, considering:

a. Cost to consumer
b. Carbon
c. Other pollution
d. Environmental impacts
e. Impacts and costs of obtaining material and transmission
f. Social acceptability of placement of facilities and transmission
g. Ability to respond to disruptive events
h. National and other security
i. Workforce availability and training
j. What happens to materials afterward (recycle, storage)
k. Demand projections
l. Potential efficiency increases
m. Expected improvements in technologies

Many of these will change through time and maybe the analysis would have to be updated every five years.  When I worked for the FS, this would have been much more useful to me (not the least of which would be to use in NEPA docs) than the National Climate Assessments.

The analysis should explicitly consider uncertainties, including climate model projections, economic uncertainties, and technology development and deployability uncertainty (the technology horserace). As a bystander, one of the most annoying things about this has been that some academics have arrived at the correct conclusion, in their eyes, without engaging explicitly with the experts on these trade-off questions.

It seems to me that a debate on the footprint of geothermal would be more easily resolved, and of greater utility, than a debate on different ways of projecting global average temperature in 2070. Having a NEPA like organizational framework for dealing with the alternatives and disagreements about various numbers and uncertainties seems more comprehensible to the rest of us, and is likely to lead to a less partisanized and more politically robust approach to decarbonization.

2) Since most agree that carbon is an international issue, and what other countries are doing, what should be the US’s unique role in energy leadership?
a. Natural gas to replace coal
b. Innovations for cheap, low carbon energy
c. ?

As the involved scientists, engineers and practitioners in all the relevant fields worked together to conduct this analysis, one question they might consider is “what questions can climate scientists answer that might influence our analysis?” and “what are the uncertainties around those answers?”

I expect that we might find that many of the contested topics in the climate science-including the ones in the CWG report-are only peripherally relevant to the questions as framed above.  Any choice has trade-offs; and examining the trade-offs carefully is not the role of a particular branch of science.  Such an effort is also likely to break down the current climate science battles that have already gone on too long, while the rest of us want to analyze the options and move on.

 

Will Someone Please Send Us a Copy of the USDA Climate Letter? News Gets Weirder

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I wouldn’t be following this story but..here’s a story from an outlet called Newsbreak

In an email sent out on Thursday, USDA Director of Digital Communications Peter Rhee detailed the process, which required staff to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and “document it in a spreadsheet.”

Pages are separated by the tiers that their climate-related content falls under, “Tier 1” including pages dedicated entirely to climate change and “Tier 2” categorizing those where a significant portion of the content relates to climate change.

Website managers at the Agricultural Research Service received a separate email that emphasized the urgency of the request. Several websites went dark on Friday, including the United States Forest Service website. It has resources such as research and adaptation tools that provide vital vulnerability assessments for wildfires.

The bolded part was news to those of us who had been following it.

OK so the FS website did not go dark. But the vulnerability assessments did. But other very odd ones are also gone. Like this one for wildfire crisis landscape investments (???)

Click to access WCS-Second-Landscapes.pdf

And here’s one about climate change that’s still there as of now (10:32 AM MT).
https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/features/economic-risks-forest-service-estimates-costs-fighting-wildfires-hotter.
(As of 11:41 AM MT I could see the content on Chrome but not on Firefox.. as if I couldn’t get any more confused).

I also ran a search on the Foreign Ag Service for climate change and there were 154 results including a Ghana Climate Change Report which sounds like it’s all about climate change.

https://www.fas.usda.gov/search?keyword=climate+change

So here are my thoughts.

1. Many things appear to be messed up at the FS in terms of links, regardless of what the memo says, outside of the climate biz. Like the Wildfire Commission report.
2. We still don’t know what the memo says.
3. It seems likely that the agencies are being told to do something, but that there is some fall down (unknown intention) between what they are told to do and what’s disappearing. We don’t know why other than systems are complicated and searches are complicated and don’t always work (I had this experience with FOIA searches they ran at CEQ during the Biden Admin).

We could impugn the motives and/or capabilities of anyone along the way from the writer of the memo to the IT folks, but we don’t know, so why add to the negative energies in the universe? It is likely to sort itself out.

Let’s now look at this media outlet who said the Forest Service website “went dark” Friday. Traditional uses of the English language and my browsing history would suggest that that is not true.
The source is called Upolitics. The editor says here it “delivers the news liberals need to know.”

It also said that “research and adaptation tools provide vital vulnerability assessments for wildfires”; I think they meant “for planning responses to wildfires” except that’s not true either. I don’t blame the reporter, our stuff is complicated. At first I thought it was AI generated, since often those write-ups sound plausible but don’t actually make sense.

The story came to me via via Newsbreak, which is the “nation’s leading local news app”. But that particular news is not local and it appears to have originated at Medium? Oh well, it turns out the reporter appears to be Angela Schlager from Medium. Below is her info.

Here to explore ideas represented through diverse stories in the entertainment industry. From all things literature, to cinema and videogames; I plan to to look into the psychological and sociological components of storytelling that make these displays compelling.

I hope that I can share my opinion and collaborate with others who share similar views–or learn from those who have different ideas! As a journalism student, I will often times aim to be an informative source. However, I also wish to use this platform to simply talk about how I feel on a matter and start a conversation with others.

Even more puzzling.

I hate to think we have to do DIY journalism around here, but sometimes that appears to be the case. At least we can be transparent and accountable.

Update on the USDA Climate Change Memo

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Thanks to Anonymous who linked to this Politico piece which seems to answer the questions raised yesterday about the Wildfire Commission Report link.

Agriculture Department employees have been ordered to delete landing pages discussing climate change across agency websites and document climate change references for further review, according to an internal email obtained by POLITICO.

The directive from USDA’s office of communications, whose authenticity was validated by three people, could affect information across dozens of programs including climate-smart agriculture initiatives, USDA climate hubs and Forest Service information regarding wildfires, the frequency and severity of which scientists have linked to hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change. And it is reminiscent of moves made during the first Trump administration to remove references to climate change from federal government websites.

The email sent Thursday afternoon calls on website managers to “Identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and “Identify all web content related to climate change and document it in a spreadsheet” for the office to review. It set a Friday deadline for handing over titles, links and “your recommendation on how the content should be handled.”

Interesting that Politico did not post the actual leaked memo.
First, we have to imagine that both the leaker and Politico are being accurate. So I guess we have to trust both of them on this, for now. Stories and reality will be changing by the day, the week and the month.

As reported, the email talks about “landing pages” and not all pages. Which would explain why we can go to any USDA agency, search on climate change, and find many links. Then  it says “identify all web content related to climate change and document it in a spreadsheet for the office to review.” So let’s imagine ourselves tasked with this. Since folks had to claim some relationship to climate change to get funding,  there is a climate mention in probably all the programmatic documents and many of the administrative ones (at least for grants, and many positions). They are going to put thousands (or millions?) of documents in a spreadsheet by Friday?

What is likely to happen, based on my experience, is that agency/Department career folks will come back and say “here is a sample, is this what you really want?” and the criteria will be refined. Perhaps this refinement will also be leaked, so we can keep up with it?

But I don’t know. So maybe the thing to do is wait and see what happens. If we believe the email has been correctly leaked and reported , and if the Wildland Fire Report was taken down intentionally, then the agency is not following the email. So that’s confusing.

For those of you who haven’t observed this, there’s a thing that happens – particularly in R Admins because most federal employees are Ds. It’s what I call “intentional overreaction.” What happens is that new politicals will send an email or otherwise order agencies to do something. Some people in some agencies overreact (it’s always fun to watch how a Department will send a memo and see how different agencies react or overreact) and shut down things beyond what the memo actually calls for. Sometimes the employees then contact cooperative media outlets and then media outlets interview affected people, but we never get to see the actual memo.

So this climate change memo at USDA is interesting, because we actually have the memo (if we trust leakers and reporters) and can compare it to any actions.

Since the 90’s or so, anything technical we wrote at the FS  had to have some reference to climate change, just to assure people we had considered it and were not asleep at the scientific wheel.  Since the IRA megabucks were supposedly directed at climate action, then anyone who wanted bucks would definitely make some kind of climate connection, even if it was a stretch. Here’s a fairly stretchy example but probably not unusual.

This one’s actually an EPA grant for $20 mill for a “climate-focused” grant for a community center.

A new community center intended to be a hub for southwest Denver is set to bring food stalls, a coffee shop and sweeping mountain views to the Loretto Heights campus by 2026 — with help from a recent $20 million federal grant.

Loretto Heights, a former college campus known for its sandstone clocktower, is under a major redevelopment after Westside Investment Partners purchased the campus for $15.8 million in 2018.

The new community center, which will be operated by a nonprofit group called Commún, will also offer a wide swath of services, including a donation-based grocery store, a child care center and a community market.

“Think of a food hall,” said Margaret Brugger, executive director of the nonprofit. “It’s lively, there’s coffee, you can get a meal and it has beautiful views. So who wants to come there? Everybody that feels like they belong.”

While the Loretto Heights Community Center will provide some services for lower-income residents, it’s intended to be a space for anyone in the community to connect with their neighbors, Brugger said.

The $20 million grant was awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency in a climate-focused program. It will only partially fund the remodeling of the 1950s-era building known as Machebeuf Hall — a 45,000 square feet structure that formerly operated as a cafeteria. The full project’s budget is $41 million, with other funding coming from the Colorado Trust, the Gates Foundation, the Sisters of Loretto and some government tax credits.

My point being that climate is everywhere, whether or not landing pages are taken down.

Understanding the Wet and Dry “Whiplash” Idea And How It Gained Traction

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Anonymous posted this in the New Topics from Readers section.
“I know this issue has been covered on here already, but I thought this interview of Daniel Swain on the LA fires was worth a watch. Daniel Swain is extremely thoughtful, articulate, knowledgeable, and a well-respected scientist focused on CA.”

I have to admit, the whiplash idea was new to me this year. Especially since the Colorado Marshall fire had the same conditions, previous wet spring, plus fall and winter dryness with high winds, and I don’t remember it coming up. We have NCAR (the National Center for Atmospheric Research, what I call the Temple of Climate) in the neighborhood, so if whiplash had been involved, we might have heard about it.

Today Patrick Brown posted about “hydroclimate whiplash” and I’d like to draw your attention to some of his points.

“Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection.”

That was the first line of the UCLA Press Release on a recently-published Nature review paper Swain et al. (2025): Hydroclimate Volatility on a Warming Earth.

Thanks in no small part to the huge journalistic audience that lead author Dr. Daniel Swain commands, the “climate whiplash” vernacular was immediately adopted in international headlines covering the recent Los Angeles fires:

This coverage is not entirely organic as organizations like Covering Climate Now—which advise journalists on how to frame stories through a climate lens—highlighted climate whiplash as a good talking point for the Los Angeles fires.

I’d add this piece in Scientific American

Regardless, the paper has demonstrated incredible reach and is in the 99.99th percentile in terms of online attention for all research (not just climate research) of a similar age.

Most of us have no idea how or why certain outlets suddenly coordinate and highlight some scientists and dismiss others.  For example in Shellenberger’s interview with Jon Keeley of USGS who has been in the climate/wildfire space for some time:

It all depends on who the journalist interviews. If they interview a climatologist who really doesn’t know very much about wildland vegetation and also has an agenda of demonstrating climate change, they’re going to see climate as the major driver. I don’t discount the importance of climate change. I think it very likely exacerbates what’s going on.

But it’s not the only show in town. There are other things going on. And the important things going on in this case is an unusually extreme Santa Ana wind. Typically, Santa Ana winds are clocked at 30, 40 miles per hour. These are 60 to 70 miles per hour. It was unusually severe wind.

And it was coupled with an ignition source. We don’t know what that ignition source is, but we do know that two-thirds of all Santa Ana wind events never have a fire. And the only reason for that is that nobody starts a fire. There’s no ignition source. So it’s the combination of unusually severe winds, drier than normal conditions, and somehow people started a fire.
It’s safe to say that UCLA wants to highlight the work of its professors, and the media folks there want to add a little hype.
Anyway, back to Brown’s post.

These concepts are taught regularly as a part of Climate Change 101 classes, including my own, and they are accepted as consensus climate science, articulated with “high confidence” in the IPCC’s most recent assessment report:

“A warmer climate increases moisture transport into weather systems, which, on average, makes wet seasons and events wetter (high confidence)”

“Warming over land drives an increase in atmospheric evaporative demand and the severity of droughts (high confidence).”

However, I like to point out that it is useful to break down lines of evidence in climate science into categories of

1) Historical observations/trends

2) Fundamental theory

3) Mathematical modeling

I know from teaching the “wet gets wetter, dry gets drier” concept that the evidence for increased variability in the same location is much stronger in the theory and modeling categories than it is in observations. This is important because observations should take precedence over the other two. Focusing on observations tells us a lot about how big of an effect we’re talking about (i.e., do we see major trends emerge through the noise of the observation system and natural variability?). Furthermore, a fundamental point of doing science is to explain observations. The canonical order of operations is that first you observe some phenomenon, and then you use the tools of theory and modeling to make sense of it.

So Brown goes back and looks at the datasets that Swain used, both locally and world-wide.  For the more climate-y among us, his whole post is interesting.

Western Solar Energy Plan update

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It’s past time for a follow-up to Sharon’s post on the BLM’s western solar plan.  The final plan was released at the end of August.   The BLM says it received 162 formal protests during that 30-day protest period that are being reviewed (but apparently won’t release the names of the parties, unlike the Forest Service objection process).

A number of conservation groups have protested the failure to protect the integrity of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail. Lynn County, Nevada, just southeast of Reno, is concerned the proposed plan will “result in fiscal impacts as it will be left to deal with speculative solar applications in inappropriate areas.”  Apparently, the Western Congressional Caucus doesn’t like it because it “risks taking lands offline for purposes other than solar use, limiting the potential for mining, grazing and public access.”  And, of course, enviros are unhappy, too.

According to the BLM,

“It would make over 31 million acres of public lands across 11 western states available for potential solar development, driving development closer to transmission lines or on previously disturbed lands and avoiding protected lands, sensitive cultural resources and important wildlife habitat.

Steering project proposals away from areas where they may conflict with other resources or uses will help ensure responsible development, speed the permitting process, and provide greater predictability to the solar energy industry.”

That sounds like good planning.  However, a scientist says that, instead, “It makes available to solar areas that are ecologically sensitive, areas that include sensitive species. It stands to significantly impact and alter ecosystems across the Great Basin and Mojave Desert.”  The federally threatened desert tortoise is a particular concern.

The Center for Biological Diversity would have opted for an alternative that prioritized already developed or degraded areas on public lands and rooftop solar on structures.  There seems to be some debate about whether it is necessary to essentially plow up the desert in order to install solar facilities.  But things may be different in Wyoming, where local conservationists see this as additional protection for big game habitat.

And then there’s some “sensitive cultural resources” that got missed.

There are also questions about how responsive the BLM will be to site-specific concerns that arise when more information is available for a proposed project.  We have an early example of that with the Rough Hat Clark Solar Project in Nevada.  According to E & E news, “The Bureau of Land Management is paving the way for a major solar power project to be built in a valley west of Las Vegas despite the objections of environmental groups that have petitioned the agency to protect the region.”

This is obviously a very large-scale planning effort, where it is not possible to identify more localized issues (though it seems like there was local knowledge that was provided by the public that might have been incorporated). The total acreage “available” is admittedly much greater than what is needed, so presumably further “unavailability” is expected and will be provided as future projects are considered.  As a Wyoming representative of the Wilderness Society put it, “The implementation is going to matter.”  A final decision is expected by the end of the year.

“Conserving and Restoring Terrestrial Wildlife Habitat Connectivity and Corridors in the United States”

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Center for Large Landscape Conservation

 

One of the hills I died on near the end of my Forest Service career was an attempt to get national forest planning to coordinate with future plans for adjacent ownerships to provide for wildlife habitat connectivity among them, including local government planning and land trust conservation easements.  I thought the Forest Service could play a leadership role in coordinating this.  The response I got was that anything to do with private lands was a “third rail” that they didn’t want to go near.  This sounds different.

On October 21, a Department of Agriculture memo announced “a Department-wide effort to support connectivity of wildlife habitat on working landscapes through the management of National Forests and voluntary conservation assistance on private agricultural lands.”  Specifically, a new Secretary’s Memorandum directs USDA agencies to:

  • Incorporate consideration of terrestrial wildlife habitat connectivity and corridors into relevant planning processes, programs, and assessments.
  • Improve the coordination, compatibility, and delivery of USDA planning processes and programs to improve outcomes for terrestrial wildlife connectivity.
  • Increase inter-jurisdictional coordination with states, tribes and other federal departments.
  • Coordinate within USDA to implement the actions outlined in this memo, with the goal of improved delivery of USDA programs and outcomes for terrestrial connectivity.

Needless to say, I like the recognition in the first bullet that planning, specifically recognized later to include “FS land management planning,” is important to a desired outcome that requires designing bridges connecting multiple owners; otherwise, the result may be bridges to nowhere or with missing spans.

The memo recognizes that “A recent revolution in animal tracking, remote sensing, and computational analysis is improving the prioritization of conservation and restoration actions.”  It also notes, “The agency’s 2012 planning rule, which governs land management planning across these lands, included requirements for evaluating, maintaining, or restoring connectivity” (my contribution to posterity).  The directive includes a specific proposal related to forest planning:

  • Improving planning through Forest Service analytic tools, including a Climate Risk Viewer that identifies climate change-driven risks to key resources, such as corridors and connectivity, as well as migration corridor tool development among the National Forest System, Research Stations, and partners.

Because “Federal lands often serve as anchor points for wildlife, but most of the country’s wildlife reside on private lands,” much of the emphasis may be on supporting private land conservation.  However, “this collaboration will build on the crucial connection between public lands and the private lands around them.”  (Or at least to the extent that a Secretary’s memo can accomplish anything.)

Dont’ miss Climate Week

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Not my specialty, but since there seems to be some interest in climate change here, I wanted to make sure we didn’t let this week pass us by.

Here are the statements of the Forest Service and Interior Department.  The Forest Service says:

“It is abundantly clear that our nation’s forests and grasslands have a big role to play in helping build a more climate-resilient nation but are also threatened by climate impacts. Our forests and grasslands need adaptive management solutions to foster resilience and sustain lasting ecological, economic and social benefits in a rapidly changing climate.

Climate change is threatening the Forest Service’s ability to fulfill its mission. Warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns in the Western U.S. are already contributing to changes in wildland fire frequency, severity and size. In the East, changing climate conditions are contributing to more frequent and severe floods and droughts, changes in pests and diseases, and shifting habitat suitability for economically and culturally important tree species. These changes are expected to become more profound in the coming years.”

It goes on to talk about the various agency programs that address climate change.  USDI talks about specific projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law “to improve the nation’s natural infrastructure.”

“Projects selected will advance the three pillars of the Restoration and Resilience Framework: building climate resilience and addressing climate change impacts; restoring healthy lands and waters; and enhancing communities’ quality of life.”

Both notably focus on adaptation rather than mitigation through emphasis on renewable energy.

 

Humility, Misinformation and Climate Discourse

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Matt Burgess, a prof at CU in Boulder,  wrote a guest post on Lee Jussim’s Unsafe Science Substack that might be of interest. You also might be interested in Matt’s “How polarization will destroy itself”

The title is “Both sides should separate misinformation from reasoned debate about climate change policy.” His bottom line is:

Stick to Facts

Progressives turn people off by dismissing reasoned criticism of climate policies as “denial” or “fossil-fuel misinformation”. Conservatives make it too easy to dismiss their reasoned criticisms of climate policies as climate change denial, when they also amplify actual climate change denial uncritically.  Both sides would have the best chance of persuading people if they rigorously seek out and then stick to the facts, and jettison both pseudoscience and ad-hominem attacks.1

I think that many “facts” are in more dispute than Matt does, but that’s not necessarily a problem. We don’t seem to have difficulties discussing the nuances here at TSW.

My favorite part was this footnote:

Lee here. While I generally endorse Matt’s emphasis on sticking to facts and avoiding ad hominem, this final sentence is actually an empirical question. Do facts persuade people more than ad hominem attacks? I do not know. Also, persuade people of what? There is the truth of the claim, the integrity and decency of the claimant versus accuser, trust and credibility afforded to academia and experts, and more. The effectiveness of ad hominem for persuading people of different things might itself vary depending on the outcome. Secondarily, avoiding pseudoscience and misinformation is not that easy. Although some things are clearly pseudoscience (e.g., astrology) and others science (e.g., astronomy), there is no hard, clear line between pseudoscience and science, and misinformation is little more than being wrong — and people are wildly overconfident about wrong beliefs all the time. Avoiding misinformation in science and politics often means doing a deep dive into source credibility, references, and alternative sources or reporting, and most of us don’t usually have time for all that. And if you don’t, you really are in no position to stick to the facts because you do not have them, in which case, the best approach may be epistemic humility — avoiding making strong claims altogether when you really have neither the expertise nor have done the deep dive necessary to do so.

I’d only add that when you do have the expertise, and have done the deep dive, you can still be humble.  It’s really easy to be humble when you’ve worked in many places and seen many things, including the unpredicted and unpredictable.