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 (???)
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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, includingmyown, 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.
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.
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.
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.)
“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.
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.
Zeke Lunder had an interesting series of tweets on the Shelly Fire about one of our favorite topics, carbon credits, dry forests, and dead trees.
I couldn’t help but think “don’t some groups effectively believe the same thing?” Leaving trees alone gives you most carbon benefits, assuming away the whole wildfire/dead tree problem in dry forests. Isn’t the concept the same? Not allowing tree cutting in overstocked dry forests does not actually help with carbon, it can lead to more intense and destructive wildfire behavior, and impact the use of beneficial fire in neighboring forests. The concept is “leaving trees alone is always good for carbon” and the mechanisms are federal MOG policy and the carbon credit markets. It seems to me if the concept is wrong, it doesn’t matter what the mechanism is. Except, yes, more people make money via carbon credits, monitoring and accounting.
BREAKING: Today, President Biden announced a plan to protect old-growth forests across the country
The Biden admin released a plan to protect old-growth forests. This is essential for achieving permanent protection, but we must do more.
This is big news! For the first time, President Biden announced a comprehensive plan to protect old-growth trees across the country from commercial logging.
Why is this a big deal? Trees get better at absorbing carbon as they age, making the oldest trees super-absorbers. This is a significant step for climate action, safeguarding our public lands, and ensuring our communities have access to clean air and water.
This exciting outcome is thanks to the over half a million advocates like you who submitted comments. Thank you!
For far too long, profit-driven corporations have looked at our forests only for the value of their timber. But, as Indigenous communities have known for centuries, the value of old-growth and mature forests is much more significant. Protecting these trees would preserve our clean water and clean air, safeguard wildlife habitats, and offer a much-needed buffer against the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
President Biden is taking an essential step with this proposed amendment, but we need to finish the job and protect these trees once and for all.
Anyway, back to Zeke’s thread, I excerpted enough to give you a taste, but reading his whole thread is best.
*****************************
This looks good on paper. But promising to ‘further enhanc(e) conservation values and climate resilience for all who inhabit and visit this vast landscape’ while adopting a forest management strategy which aims to maximize the amount of carbon (fuel) on the site seems absurd. 5/x
Much of the landscape in the 40,000 acres recently placed into conservation easements here has not burned for 70 years or more, and as a result is covered with extremely over-stocked, sick forests. Yet carbon pirates like EFMI hawk them as ‘Undervalued Carbon Assets’. 6/xefmi.com/why-invest/
Conservation groups, carbon bankers, and industrial timberland owners all face an existential challenge: How can you maintain conifer forests in fire-prone landscapes without re-introducing mixed-severity fire at scale? (You can’t). Map shows fire history adjacent to EFM lands. 7/x
You can’t sell dry forests as a ‘tool to decarbonize infestment portfolios’ unless you are willing to do the work of making them fire resilient again. Any many of us who work in the woods are not sure this is even possible at this point. #YourCarbonIsGettingSmoked 8/x
The presence of overstocked private timberlands on the margins of the backcountry ends out being a huge obstacle to letting beneficial lightning fires burn out there. The impacts of the carbon nerds’ shenanigans extends well beyond the boundaries of their (stolen) lands. 9/x
A uranium ore pile is the first to be mined at the Energy Fuels Inc. uranium Pinyon Plain Mine Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024, near Tusayan, Ariz. The mine began operation in January in the heart of northern Arizona after decades of regulatory battles. | Ross D. Franklin, Associated Press
For those of you not following the energy-climate biz, the fact that tech folks want to do bigtime AI means that they are thinking they need nuclear. Our Northern Virginia TSW folks can attest to the growth of data centers. And many folks think that depending on other countries for supply is suboptimal. So here’s an op-ed by a fellow who visited such a mine on the Kaibab National Forest. I was surprised by the 17 acre footprint. There’s no doubt that the footprint of nuclear is smaller than wind and solar, plus new transmission also happening on federal lands. Meanwhile, the Admin is “protecting” more land from energy development of all kinds. I think energy needs a cohesive strategy..
Uranium mines, which provide the fuel for nuclear power, were plentiful in the American Southwest until the late 20th century. Once most American uranium mines closed due to heavy regulation, we began exporting uranium mining and production to Russia and Kazakhstan, among other countries with lower environmental standards.
But recently, Congress passed a bipartisan bill banning Russian uranium imports — which is good news for those who want to expand uranium mining in the U.S. at sites such as the Pinyon Plain Mine, which began operation in January in Arizona after decades of regulatory battles. The mine’s ore is processed at the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah.
Unfortunately, Pinyon Plain is still battling environmental groups that have substantially delayed projects like these through intense litigation. They’ve claimed the mine is too close to the Grand Canyon and that it poses serious threats to the people and environment nearby. They are pressuring Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs to close the mine even though Hobbs has called it “probably the most regulated mine in the entire country.”
For years, the Energy Fuels White Mesa Mill in Blanding was the only operating uranium mill in the United States. Last week, the company announced it has commenced production at the facility and at two other locations in Utah and/or Arizona. Energy Fuels is also preparing two mines in Colorado and Wyoming to begin uranium production within one year. The company stated it has commenced production due to increased prices, supportive government policies from the Biden Administration, and an enhanced interest in securing domestic supply.
And
Irina Tsukerman, a member of the American Bar Association, Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources (SEER), said she believes domestic interest in uranium mining may now have bipartisan support due to increased trust in our country’s ability to regulate the industry and ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
“Utah is one of the few states that harbors most of the uranium in the US,” she said. “It aligns with the goals of both parties: environmental concerns, energy independence, and support for United States security… It simply works, and when something simply works there won’t be much room for political bickering.”
Maybe not, but I think there will be plenty of room for litigation, as always ;).
Anyway, back to the op-ed.
Driving up to the mine on a warm June afternoon, I was struck by what a small area the mine occupies. The mine sits in a natural clearing of trees in the Kaibab National Forest, occupying a 17-acre plot of land. I wondered how this blip on a map could hold enough energy to power the state of Arizona for a full year with carbon-free energy, as the mine’s owner, Energy Fuels, claims.
After a safety briefing, two of the 35 miners who work at Pinyon Plain accompanied me on an elevator descending 1,400 feet below the surface. (That’s roughly equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building.) Once underground, I saw how information about the mine shared by some environmental groups was wildly exaggerated or, in some cases, flat-out wrong. What I saw was an operation that had countless measures in place to protect the safety of those working there and to prevent harm to the surrounding environment.
Underground, I spoke with many of the miners, who were immensely proud to provide clean energy for the country and ensure its production in and for America. I learned the truth about uranium’s radioactivity: that a lifelong uranium miner is exposed to less radiation than an airline pilot, and I even held uranium in my hand. I saw how the mine’s natural geological protections have been supplemented with carefully crafted technological systems to prevent any opportunity for water contamination.
But most of all, I was struck by how small-scale an operation it was, especially when compared to the immense size of the Grand Canyon, which itself is a 40-minute drive from the mine.
Enough protection for the environment and worker safety? I don’t know. I don’t think Benji Backer (the author) knows. Grand Canyon Trust folks don’t want it to exist, so they may know but will always tell us that it’s not enough. I guess we have to depend on the regulators, both the state and feds, and unions.
For those of us with a long weekend and possibly more time for reading, here are three thoughtful pieces by knowledgeable climate folks.
My personal opinion is that I believe something is going on climate-wise, affected by greenhouse gases, irrigation, changes in surface reflection, and many other things humans do or don’t do (and likely some we are not currently aware of). I also think that a mix of folks with good intentions and grifters of all kinds have jumped on the climate bandwagon, with varying end results in mind. And I think that better understanding of the various elements of science and practice around mitigation and adaptation (more light and less heat) will ultimately make our world better, as we jointly confront whatever lies ahead. And I wonder about the tendency for solutions in this space to become both top-down, and stick-y rather that carrot-y. This does not build trust IMHO.
1) Ricardo Simonds on his direct experience of the Brazilian flood disaster. Here are a few tables of interest.. also look for his Katherine Hepburn vs. Walter Brennan analogy, probably particularly meaningful to those of a certain age..
As I wrote,
The cast of characters in a disaster is well established, comprised of components and their associated drivers. Any natural disaster is comprised of three components: the hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Each component in turn is affected, or motivated, by drivers.
I recently posted about flooding in Brazil in May, 2024, that left almost 600,000 people displaced, 77,000 rescued, 800 injured and 169 dead (see official data here). It’s a terrible tragedy that has mobilized the nation.
If the Brazilian landslides were a movie and the disasters causes were personified by actors, the Oscars would nominate best actresses and supporting actors. While the media and science activism overwhelmingly promote climate change at the lead actress in every single weather disaster, many times the lead actor is vulnerability or exposure.
The media always tells you climate change is Katherine “Climate” Hepburn (most lead actress Oscars of all time) when climate is often Walter Brennan (most supporting actor Oscars of all time). Never heard of Brennan? That’s my point.
Here’s a few of the many interesting tables in his post- for those of you who don’t follow this stuff, Swiss Re is a reinsurance group (insures insurers), and is one of the world’s largest. SCS are “severe convective storms”:
If you’re interested in talking with friends over the weekend about trends and attribution, Ricardo posted this Table 12.12 on page 1856 Chapter 12 of IPPC AR6. Because Ricardo’s post is about landslides, he circled those, but the whole table is interesting.
The whole piece is worth a read for sure. Let me know if there’s a paywall, I’m a subscriber to his Substack.
2) Roger Pielke, Jr. is starting a series on extreme events and climate change, which looks to be interesting, including the discussion.
It is now a ubiquitous cultural ritual to blame any and every weather event on climate change. Those hot days? Climate change. That hurricane? Climate change. The flood somewhere that I saw on social media? Climate change.
As he goes through, he wants folks to get more specific and meaningful. What the stories mean is that “increasing GHGs in the atmosphere have made this event more likely”; but Roger starts back with IPCC definitions. Maybe it seems like a trivial detail, but short hands for complicated concepts can be misleading.
Climate refers to a “statistical description”1 of the climate system, defined as:
The global system consisting of five major components: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate system changes in time under the influence of its own internal dynamics and because of external forcings such as volcanic eruptions, solar variations, orbital forcing, and anthropogenic forcings such as the changing composition of the atmosphere and land-usechange.
The climate system. Source: NRC 2005. HT Pielke Sr. Note that the sun, volcanoes, human activities are all defined to be outside the climate system.
The climate system is complicated, but at a high level, we can get our brain around it (above). There is a deeper discussion to be had about why the climate research community decided that people are not included as part of the “climate system,” but let’s leave that for another day.2
Looking forward to that one.
As to detection, he has an interesting thought experiment.
Also, “deck change” cannot be used to attribute the cause of receiving an ace in a single hand. If you know that you have a stacked deck with one additional ace, then you can say with certainty that the odds of receiving at least one ace in your next hand increased from 14.8% to 15.3%.
Did that increase of 0.5% increase cause the ace to appear in your most recent hand?
After 329 hands, you can be 90% confident that the greater number of aces that you received over those hands than you would have expected from an unstacked deck are due to the addition of the extra ace.
A final point for today — The thought experiment described today is a pure statistical example. Dealing two cards from a deck does not remotely describe how weather occurs on planet Earth.
Weather can be characterized statistically, but weather does not occur as a result of simple statistical processes.8 Weather is the the integrated result of at least: dynamical, thermodynamical, chaotic, societal, biospheric, cryospheric, lithospheric, oceanic, vulcanological, solar, and, yes, stochastic processes.
3) Patrick Brown tries to clarify language about climate change impacts in this post .
When the IPCC says “decreasing,” (sometimes) they mean in comparison to what otherwise they would have modeled to occur (and given how complex human/agricultural/environmental interactions are, I would take such models with several grains of salt), not (as we might commonly use the term) decreased from the past. Decreasing crop yields compared to the past (observable decreases in something measured regularly on this planet) are very different in real life than overall increases with the increase smaller than what might have been without (modeled) climate change. Now, I am not against the use of models, but they are not the same thing as observations.
This seems like a very important point. Here’s a piece of his post.
Take, for example, the statement, “Climate change is decreasing crop yields.” This could mean that we are seeing crop yields decrease over time, and this trend is being driven by climate change (left side), or it could mean that crop yields are increasing over time, but they would have been increasing faster if the climate wasn’t changing (right side).
So, which is it? For crop yields, the situation is much more like the right side than the left side. However, the IPCC repeatedly states in its reports that climate change is “decreasing” crop yields, misleadingly conveying the message that the situation is more like the left side.
Climate change impacts on agriculture have been calculated to make up the largest negative societal impact of climate change as quantified in the social cost of carbon, while heat impacts on mortality represent the second largest. So, how does the IPCC report on mortality associated with heat? In its technical summary (B.5.3), the IPCC reports that,
“Increasing temperatures and heatwaves have increased mortality and morbidity (very high confidence).”
Most readers will interpret this to mean that heat deaths are increasing relative to the past (they will infer a direction of trend). But only those who read the technical chapters will understand that only a direction of impact is being reported because there you will read that heat deaths are decreasing over time:
“Heat-attributable mortality fractions have declined over time in most countries owing to general improvements in health care systems, increasing prevalence of residential air conditioning, and behavioural changes. These factors, which determine the susceptibility of the population to heat, have predominated over the influence of temperature change.”
What Patrick doesn’t mention in this post is that people who deal with observations (like many of us) tend to read something like “climate is decreasing crop yields” and look around and see that in the meaning of “decreased from the past” it doesn’t appear to be true. Without digging into the technical chapters, we’ll just think “they don’t know what they’re talking about.” For myself, I have this crazy idea that we should try as much as we can for people observing the real world, and the people modeling it, to try to get on the same page. What a simple clause to add, “decreased from where it would be modeled to be without climate change.”
