climate change

Texas congressional delegation wants federal oil & gas leasing to fire up in the state

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From the Forest Service scoping notice:

The National Forests and Grasslands in Texas (NFGT) is initiating the preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS). The EIS will analyze and disclose the effects of identifying areas as available or unavailable for new oil and gas leasing. The proposed action identifies the following elements: What lands will be made available for future oil and gas leasing; what stipulations will be applied to lands available for future oil and gas leasing, and if there would be any plan amendments to the 1996 NFGT Revised Land and Resource Management Plan (Forest Plan).

The Forest Service withdrew its consent to lease NFGT lands from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for oil and gas development in 2016. The reason for the withdrawal of consent was due to stakeholder concerns, including insufficient public notification, insufficient opportunity for public involvement, and insufficient environmental analysis. There is a need to analyze the impacts of new oil and gas development technologies on surface and subsurface water and geologic resources; air resources; fish and wildlife resources; fragile and rare ecosystems; threatened and endangered species; and invasive plant management. There is also a need to examine changed conditions since the Forest Plan was published.

These leasing availability decisions are forest plan decisions that were most recently made in 1996.  The action proposed by the Forest Service would result in changes in the stipulations and would therefore require a forest plan amendment.  The changes would shift about 11,000 acres from “controlled surface use” to “no surface occupancy,” and remove timing limitations from about 35,000 acres.

A letter from five Republican members of the delegation disagrees with the premise that the 1996 analysis was inadequate, and is unhappy with the pace of the amendment process.

The published timeline anticipated a Draft EIS in the winter of 2019 with the Final EIS expected in the fall of 2020. We are concerned that this timeline is no longer achievable given current pace of progress.

We request that USFS end the informal comment period, issue a Draft EIS this spring and ultimately approve the Final EIS that reinstates BLM’s ability to offer public competitive leases of National Forest and Grasslands in Texas for oil and gas leases before the end of 2020. While USFS is required by law to respond to eligible comments received within the public comment window (CFR218.12), the Forest Supervisor also has the authority to declare the available science sound, conclude the public comment period, and proceed with the issuance of the scoping comments and alternative development workshops as the next steps ahead of a Draft EIS (CFR219.2.3, 219.3) (sic).

That last sentence got my attention as the kind of congressional attention to Forest Service decision-making that might cause them to cut a legal corner here or there (especially when there is an election coming).  I also noticed the absence of any reference to the new requirements for amendments, and maybe the delay could have something to do with this becoming evident to them as a result of scoping.  36 CFR §219.13(b)(6):

For an amendment to a plan developed or revised under a prior planning regulation, if species of conservation concern (SCC) have not been identified for the plan area and if scoping or NEPA effects analysis for the proposed amendment reveals substantial adverse impacts to a specific species, or if the proposed amendment would substantially lessen protections for a specific species, the responsible official must determine whether such species is a potential SCC, and if so, apply section §219.9(b) with respect to that species as if it were an SCC.

I found nothing in the EIS for the 1996 revision about effects of oil & gas development on at-risk wildlife species.  You’d think the new information since 1996 might have something to do with effects on climate change, too.

Climate Science Voyage of Discovery. V. The Satellite Gaze and Grazing Animals

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We’ve seen before that “where you drop the pin” (where you start) or at what scale you choose to examine a problem can lead to fundamentally different conclusions. In some cases, there seems to be no formal institution for the type of communication between people on the land, and people modeling the land. We might call this the “satellite gaze” after the idea of the “imperial gaze.”

Imperial gaze, in which the observed find themselves defined in terms of the privileged observer’s own set of value-preferences.[8] From the perspective of the colonised, the imperial gaze infantilizes and trivializes what it falls upon,[9] asserting its command and ordering function as it does so.

So let’s look at beef production, and the study that the chart above was based on. The authors are from Oxford, and published in Science. According to Our World in Data, in this study, the authors looked at data across more than 38,000 commercial farms in 119 countries. If you look at the study itself, (and the errata) the modeling is mind-bogglingly complex.

Science has a section for e-letters. Ilse Kohler-Rollefson of the League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogenous Livestock Development wrote:

This article, both in its database and its conclusions, totally ignores the vital role of livestock for the life and livelihoods of the people living in the non-arable parts of the world. Without livestock large parts of the world wold become uninhabitable. Please see http://www.ilse-koehler-rollefson.com/?p=1160
In addition, one wonders about the usefulness of “land use” as indicator for judging the environmental impact of a food production strategy. Applying this indicator to livestock production would give preference to intensive and factory animal farming over extensive herding.

When this graph was posted on Twitter, I and a fellow from Sasketchewan and a woman from Ireland pointed out that some people raise animals because (1) people can’t raise anything else, or (2) in the case of Sasketchewan, the prairie was plowed for wheat, canola and lentil monocrops, which are arguably worse for biodiversity. I pointed out that there is no land conversion associated with beef in the prairies and the answer was that “if you look overall at beef, you have to account for the env cost of land converted to corn/beef.” My point being that consumers don’t have to look overall at beef, they only have to look at the beef that they’re buying. Who decided that we needed to make a purchasing judgment call based on a global average, and call it “science”? You can follow the Twitter feed here.

A variant of the same convo occurred in the letter section of New Scientist this month:

You might think that as a livestock farmer I would resent vegans claiming that my way of life is unethical, and you would be right. You quote Michael Clark saying that eating animals fed on plants must be less efficient than people eating plants. This ignores the fact that many herbivores can, and do, get much more feed value out of plants than people. What’s more, much of the north and west of the UK and Ireland can only be farmed practically using grazing animals.

The editor writes:

Much of the world’s beef is now produced in intensive feedlots – pens without pasture. This may have a lower carbon footprint than pasture-fed beef. We suspect that most of that is done on fertile land, not rough grazing. It is even harder to find figures for other meats. We note that in the UK, upland sheep production is only marginally viable even with EU subsidies.

There are two more ideas here- that feedlots (feeding animals lots of grain) produces less carbon than feeding animals grass. Again, the editor “suspects” that most of it is done on “fertile land”. And upland sheep production is only “marginally viable” even with subsidies.

At the same time in the US, grassfed beef is undergoing popularity for environmental reasons, and as as of 12/27/2019, USDA FSIS published new guidelines clarifying grass-fed labeling.

As this HuffPost piece says:

Our best bet is to educate ourselves about where our meat (and all our food) is coming from and the practices used to raise it.

“Don’t be afraid to ask questions,” Williams told HuffPost, adding that consumers have an incredible effect on the market. “Go to the grocery store and ask for products that are regeneratively produced. Go to restaurants and demand grass-fed meat and dairy. You’ll be amazed at how quickly those businesses will respond.”

A complex question indeed. What does “the science” say? Who produced it, and how relevant is it to our lives and choices?

Public land developers getting financial pushback

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An interesting observation from the Washington Post.  As investors become more enlightened about the financial risks caused by climate change they are starting to hold corporations accountable.  That includes their operations on public lands – and litigation is part of the risk.

A dozen-and-a-half senators wrote letters to 11 of the largest U.S. banks asking them to back down from financing any oil and gas activity in an unspoiled expanse of Arctic wilderness.

“The scale of your banks’ assets individually, let alone together, give you the ability to drive change in protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in shifting towards a U.S. financial sector that effectively analyzes and plans for climate risks,” the group of a senators, led by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), told Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and six other banks in a letter sent last Thursday.

Democrats hope these banks follow the lead of one key peer: In December, Goldman Sachs said it is ruling out financing new drilling or oil exploration in the entire Arctic.

The world’s largest asset management firm, BlackRock, said last month it would divest from coal burned in power plants and make climate change a “defining factor” of its investing strategy.

And just last week, a group of investors representing nearly $113 billion in assets under management issued a similar letter to energy, mining and timber companies. Their warning: Don’t invest in certain federally controlled areas once protected but now open to development by the Trump administration.

These areas include not only the oil-rich Arctic refuge but also Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest where the U.S. Forest Service wants to allow new logging, (discussed here) and Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (the Twin Metals mine litigation is discussed here), a popular lake-pocked forest near where the administration wants to allow a copper and nickel mining operation.

The institutional investors, which include several religious funds as well as a fund established by the late oil heir David Rockefeller, warned companies that many of the administration’s rollbacks of public land protections are legally precarious, and may be struck down by the courts or the next presidential administration. The letter went out to ExxonMobil, the timber company Weyerhaeuser and 56 other firms, according to Reuters.

“Many of these projects are mired in litigation,” the letter stated, “challenging the legality of any current or future industrial activity initiated in these regions and providing evidence of the risks associated with conducting commercial development on lands that the American public has deemed valuable for protection.”

The institutional investor letter also mentioned other areas, including protected sage grouse habitat (litigation discussed here) and the national monuments that have been reduced in size by the Trump Administration that are also under litigation (discussed here).  Here’s the latest on that.

Question to TSW Community.. Keystone Ski Area and Nitrous Oxide Pollution?

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Bruce Finley had an interesting article in the Denver Post in January, that covers all sources of various greenhouse and other polluting gases. Interesting graphs if you happen to live in Colorado. What was curious to me was this:

“The biggest nitrogen oxides polluters include power plants, topped by the Tri-State facility in Craig (6,677 tons) and Colorado Springs’ Martin Drake plant (1,293 tons), along with multiple oil and gas industry polluters and others, including Vail Resorts’ Keystone ski area.”

Naturally, I wondered, “what’s this about?” and “why Keystone and not the other ski areas?”. I emailed Bruce and he said that Keystone made the top 20, and he was also curious and double-checked with the State. Apparently the use of generators and other equipment emits these gases.

Hopefully others more familiar with Colorado ski areas will know something about why Keystone is different. If not, I’ll do some more scratching around.

Australia and US Wildfire, Similarities and Differences: III. Coverage of Negative Impacts of Wildfires on Wildlife and Water

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A boom floats across a small bay near the dam wall at Warragamba Dam in Warragamba, Australia, on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. Although there have been no major impacts on drinking water yet from the intense wildfires, authorities know from experience that the risks will be elevated for years while the damaged catchment areas, including pine and eucalyptus forests, recover. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

In the last post in this series, we talked about “to what extent do models show that Australia and US wildfires are impacted by climate change?” Although that scientific work did not show Australia’s fires as necessarily having a big climate imprint, most of the stories I have read have focused on the climate angle. What is interesting to me is that that lens has led to many stories about the negative impacts of fires on wildlife and watershed.

In this AP story, the narrative is that bad/intense/hot fires lead to drinking water problems and flooding. The author even mentions the efforts of Denver Water to “clear trees and control vegetation” albeit perhaps not only in “populated areas” as the story says. There were also the stories (e.g., here in Scientific American) on wildlife deaths and burns. It’s true that Australia has many more unique species, so the loss in terms of biodiversity is different, but if you are a deer or elk or bear or raccoon, it would be equally unpleasant to be burned or killed by fire.

It seems that in the US there was a certain school of thought that fires were “natural” and so unpleasant effects to wildlife and water were just part of the deal, and in fact were particularly good for some species (while obviously not good for others, at least in the short term).

However, if you thought that the fires were “unnatural” due to previous fire suppression policies, then perhaps it might be more OK to intervene in terms of fuel treatments? Another question that perhaps was never discussed was how do you weigh making more habitat for one species compared to the deaths and injury to individuals of other species?

Looking back on the coverage, it looks to me like the narrative goes “climate change is bad and watershed and wildlife impacts from hot fires will be really bad” is a popular way to frame the Australian case. (If we don’t solve the international problem of climate change, the future looks worse and there are many negative impacts).

But in the US case, when the challenge was to do fuel treatments to help with suppression, (if we do prescribed burning and mechanical fuel treatments, it will help suppression folks deal with fires and lessen the likelihood of these negative impacts to wildlife and water) the same kinds of negative impacts to wildlife and water did not get as much press.

I’ve noticed in the press and in many climate science papers, as we shall see, predictions are made about bad things happening without acknowledging the efforts of other communities to dampen these effects. Some of these communities include fire suppression, plant breeding, water managers, and so on- each of whom have their own scientists who understand the mechanisms of responses and relevant uncertainties and unknowns. At the same time, other factors, such as fire suppression policies, or changes in prescribed burning practices, in the Australia example, may be overlooked in stories designed to attract attention in relatively small space. My concern is that it could make people more despairing and fearful about the future than they might be given what is known by all these scientific communities. Fear leads to anger at “the other” and the idea that the ends justify the means, and the accompanying unpleasant impacts to our society of that worldview.

Does anyone doubt that the western US and Australia would still need to deal with wildfires if there were no climate change? Hint: existence of fire-adapted plant and animal species.

Bats and bighorns and bears (oh my?)

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Two of these were originally posted as comments related to other posts and the third I would have, but Sharon intimated that they might not get noticed there, so here they are at the top end of a post.

BATS

We were discussing how the wolverine is most affected by climate change, and yet ESA requires mitigation of other less harmful activities that we have more control over. The effect of an introduced disease on bats also came up there.  A federal judge has just overturned a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect northern long-eared bats as threatened rather than endangered under the Endangered Species Act.  Here’s the Center for Biodiversity’s read-out of the judge’s opinion (there’s a link to the opinion, but I haven’t read it):

The Service argued that since the species was primarily threatened by disease, there was no need to protect its habitat.  But the court rightly noted that, in combination with disease, habitat destruction and other threats can cumulatively affect the bats, and thus are cause for concern.

It’s a point of contention these days whether climate change should be a factor in listing decisions when there is little likelihood of reducing its effects, but the law says it’s important to address and potentially mitigate other actions that may harm the species.

BIGHORNS

The Bridger-Teton National Forest is considering a restocking request for returning domestic sheep to two vacated allotments in the Wyoming Range.  It hinges on changing the forest plan to deemphasize protections for the Darby Mountain bighorn sheep herd. This would purportedly be consistent with the State of Wyoming’s bighorn plans.  The Forest is proposing to do a “focused amendment” to their forest plan,  but …

Bighorn advocates and conservationists who have watchdogged the restocking conversations wanted the Forest Service to instead deal with the issue in its forest plan (revision). The years-long revision process was supposedly coming up, though O’Connor said it’s now indefinitely on hold. Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation Director Steve Kilpatrick said the Darby Mountain Herd deserves the longer, closer look.

I’m not sure the Forest is going to be able to do a “focused amendment” for this issue, since bighorn sheep should be a species of conservation concern under the 2012 Planning Rule, which warrants greater attention. Maybe this is a case where the inability to revise a forest plan is going to cause some problems. Then there is the question of why these allotments were vacant. The permittees were “bought out” through the efforts of the National Wildlife Federation (to protect bighorns?). Would they need to be paid back?

GRIZZLY BEARS

The discussion of reintroducing wolves to Colorado brought up the experience with grizzly bears in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana and Idaho.  A reintroduction proposal was rejected in 2001, but at least two bears have been documented there in recent years.  Here is the recent news about that.  The Fish and Wildlife Service has written to the Forest Service that bears that have made it there are fully protected by the Endangered Species Act (not an experimental population). All four of these forests are revising or will soon revise their forest plans and will have to provide conditions to support grizzly bear recovery.  The Nez Perce-Clearwater is farthest along but has been avoiding doing that.

Carbon pollution and solution

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I’ve said I try to stay out of climate change debates, but I’m trying to learn more.  I’m taking a retired-person class from a retired person well-known in climate change circles, Steven Running (google him), and I thought I’d share a couple of his many slides that I think say a lot about the role of forests in saving the planet from dangerously unpredictable climate changes.

For any doubters, the first slide shows the the role of human activities in raising the world’s temperature.  It’s basically all about us, and CO2 is the biggest problem.  The second slide shows the role of land  in CO2 emissions and sequestration.  The point is that when the atmosphere and the ocean must absorb the new emissions it causes the serious problems we are starting to see today.  That means we have to attack the three parts of this equation we have control over, the human sources of emissions and land-based carbon sequestration.  I suspect the answer is mostly “reduce the use of carbon fuels,” but maximizing the carbon content of land is going to be important, too.  Regarding forests, he has already said that planting trees can’t be done at the necessary scale, and cultivated biofuels are a net carbon source (though converting organic residue to energy would help).

Australia and US Wildfire, Similarities and Differences: II. How Much is Due to Anthropogenic Climate Change?

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Time of emergence of anthropogenic climate change for (a) the frequency of days exceeding the 95th percentile, (b) the length of the fire weather season, (c) the peak 90‐day average FWI, and (d) annual maximum FWI. Mapped is the 17‐model median date at which the anthropogenic signal emerges based on the change exceeding the standard deviation of the baseline period. Areas of light gray highlight where the signal does not emerge for at least eight models by 2050. Unburnable lands where >80% of the area is water, snow, and ice or barren or sparsely vegetated are shown in dark gray. The percent of burnable land with emergence by 2050 is denoted in the bottom left corner of each map.

The above maps are from this paper by Abatzoglou et al.

Here’s a link to a Science Brief from the University of East Anglia about climate and wildfires. It’s kind of like a scientific rapid response team when an issue comes up, which made it easy to compare the Western US and Australia in terms of ACC.

First, here’s Australia

Climate change also affects fire weather in many other regions, although formal detection does not yet emerge from natural variability. ​Abatzoglou ​et al. (2019) suggest that the anthropogenic climate change signal will be detectable on 33-62% of the burnable land area by 2050. Other global studies agree that the effect of climate change is to increase fire weather and burned area once other factors have been controlled for (e.g. Huang ​et al.​, 2015; Flannigan ​et al.,​ 2013). ​Regional modelling studies corroborate these global findings by projecting how climate change will affect fire weather:…

Australia. Observational data suggest that fire weather extremes are already becoming more frequent and intense (Dowdy, 2018; Head ​et al.​, 2014). However, the divergence between anthropogenic and natural forcing signals is weaker, and more challenging to diagnose, than in other regions due to strong regional and inter-annual variability in the effect of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on fire weather (Dowdy, 2018; Sharples ​et al.​ , 2016). ​Other important regional weather patterns, such as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) also contribute to natural variability in fire weather, but their effects are increasingly superimposed on more favourable background fire weather conditions. ​Impacts of anthropogenic climate change on fire weather extremes and fire season length are projected to emerge above natural variability in the 2040s (Abatzoglou​ etal.,​ 2019)

Then here’s the western US:

The impact of anthropogenic climate change on fire weather is emerging above natural variability. ​Jolly et al. (2015) use observational data to show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across ~25% of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in a ~20% increase in global mean fire weather season length. By 2019, models suggest that the impact of anthropogenic climate change on fire weather was detectable outside the range of natural variability in 22% of global burnable land area (Abatzoglou et al., 2019). Regional studies corroborate these global findings by identifying links between climate change and fire weather, including in the following regions with major recent wildfire outbreaks:…

Western US and Canada. Models suggest that the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on fire weather extremes and fire season length emerged in the 2010s (Abatzoglou ​et al.,​ 2019; Williams ​et al​., 2019; Abatzoglou & Williams, 2016). Yoon ​et al​. (2015) similarly predicted the occurrence of extreme fire risk would exceed natural variability in California by 2020. Kirchmeir-Young ​et al​. (2017) found that the 2016 Fort McMurray fires were 1.5 to 6 times more likely due to anthropogenic climate change, compared to natural forcing alone. Westerling ​et al. (2016) found that burned area was >10 times greater in Western US forests in 2003-2012 than in 1973-1982. The 2015 Alaskan wildfires occurred amidst fire weather conditions that were 34-60% more likely due to anthropogenic climate change (Partain ​et al.​, 2016).

Note that the claims are sometimes models and sometimes empirical. For example, the increase in burned area noted by Westerling may have had many reasons besides changes in fire weather.

If we accept the Australian claim at face value (differences due to anthropogenic climate change expected to show up in the 2040’s) then they have some time to get their prescribed burning and other programs up to speed before the additional problems due to ACC surface. In that case, it looks like they have about 20 years before they get the additional problems due to ACC. However, if climate modelers don’t understand the natural cycles or anthropogenic factors well enough, though, as seems likely, conditions could be worse sooner or later than the 2040’s. So the Aussies and us, despite the difference in model predictions both need to get on with prescribed burning, building and community design, improving suppression and all that.

As the authors state:

Nonetheless, wildfire occurrence is moderated by a range of factors including land management practises, land-use change and ignition sources.

Carbon Capture and Forests: Might We Co-Design and Co-Produce Research for Realistic Options?

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I’ve been following climate science since the mid- 90’s with the inception of the US Global Change Research Program.  I remember one of my co-workers, Elvia Niebla, coming back from a meeting and telling us about this source of funding, and our saying “hey the climate affects everything; you could justify anything under climate.”  With the passage of time, researchers who, say, had formerly studied loblolly pine physiology in greenhouses started writing proposals called “effects of climate change on loblolly pine” from work in greenhouses. I don’t think we fully understand how that shading of funding for the last 20 years or so has affected not only what work has gotten done, but actually how we think about climate change- especially relative to less-studied and less-funded problems.

Needless to say, the US and other governments have spent beaucoup bucks attempting to describe future impacts, and not quite so much on fixes to the problem. This could be because it may make sense for all of it to go to DOE for practical fixes, and not be broadly distributed across agencies and disciplines. That’s why I think that former Energy Secretary Moniz’s effort is so interesting (and is in some current bipartisan bills), as it’s all about fixes. AS DOE and its Labs understand so well (yes, because they are “separate” the Labs are allowed to lobby Congress, unlike the other agencies), telling Reps that some funding will go to their district is a good way to get funding. You can tell this from Moniz’s presentation at this House Appropriations Hearing.

That’s why I think that former Energy Secretary Moniz’s effort is so interesting (and is in some current bipartisan bills), as it’s all about fixes.

He noted there are three main approaches to carbon removal: “natural techniques,” such as afforestation; “technologically enhanced natural processes,” such as the uptake of carbon in rocks through accelerated mineralization; and purely technological approaches, such as direct air capture, which uses chemical processes to absorb carbon from ambient air. Some removal techniques also require associated storage solutions, such as incorporating the carbon into new products or sequestering it underground. Justifying a broad approach, the EFI report argues it is “too soon to declare a ‘winner’” among the techniques.

In proposing a detailed funding profile for the initiative, Moniz noted EFI drew from a 2018 study by the National Academies that similarly charted a 10 year interagency research agenda for negative emission technologies. He said EFI’s plan is not “jarringly different” from the Academies study, though he said there are some divergences.

Moniz said the initiative would require an annual investment that would begin at about $300 million and peak at $1.4 billion. Of the $11 billion total, $2 billion would go toward large-scale demonstration projects in the latter phase of the initiative. Across agencies, DOE would spend about $5 billion in total, and the National Science Foundation, Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would spend about $900 million each…..

Moniz acknowledged the price tag for the initiative could be a tough sell in Congress and observed its inclusion of agencies spanning multiple appropriations subcommittees further increased the complexity of gaining the necessary support. He remarked, “The fact that we have 10 agencies involved and six appropriations bills does not make it easier from the process point of view. In other words, the program is not well matched to the silos in Congress.”

However, he noted the federal government has committed to other interagency initiatives costing more than $1 billion annually, such as the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and the National Networking and Information Technology R&D Initiative.

IMHO forests and trees are mostly going to do what they’re going to do. Live, die, burn up, regenerate and so on. Our ability to change that on a mega scale (enough to affect large amount of carbon, with a high degree of certainty over time) tends to be both questionable and usually expensive. In general, drastically changing land use practices (afforestation where no trees are now) for carbon sequestration is 1) difficult to do and 2) runs into all kinds of social and environmental obstacles. Plus there are no guarantees that our carefully-tended carbon uptakers won’t just die due to climate change and/or invasives, or their interaction, in all kinds of unpredictable combos. I suspect what will happen is with more funding some people will dream up possible forest interventions, and other people will critique them, which is pretty much the cycle that research is already on; self-sustaining but not necessarily productive of useful policy options. I wonder whether there’s a way to design ourselves out of that cycle, perhaps by co-design and co-development of proposals with people who disagree about the existing proposed forest interventions?

Why Some Things Some People Say Sometimes About Wildfires Are Wrong: Michael Shellenberger in Forbes

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In a small gesture for accuracy in media, I took the liberty of retitling Shellenberger’s November 4 Forbes piece for our TSW post. Here’s the link.

Let’s look at this article in light of what we discussed yesterday. Climate and wildfires both have their own sets of experts and a variety of disciplines, each of which having different approaches, values and priorities. I’m not saying that studying the results of climate modelling is entirely a Science Fad, but listen to Keeley here:

I asked Keeley if the media’s focus on climate change frustrated him.

“Oh, yes, very much,” he said, laughing. “Climate captures attention. I can even see it in the scientific literature. Some of our most high-profile journals will publish papers that I think are marginal. But because they find climate to be an important driver of some change, they give preference to them. It captures attention.

And the marginal ones are funded because.. climate change is cool (at least to “high-profile” journals, which have their own ideas of coolness). And who funds it? The US Government. Me, I would give bucks to folks for, say, physical models of fire behavior,(something that will help suppression folks today)rather than attempting to parse out the unknowable interlinkages of the past. But that’s just me, and the way the Science Biz currently operates, neither I nor you get a vote.

Note that the scientists quoted, (Keeley, North, and Safford) in this piece are all government scientists. Keeley and North are research scientists while Safford appears to be a Regional Ecologist (funded by the National Forests), so if we went by the paycheck method (are they funded by R&D?) Safford would have to get permission from public affairs, while Keeley and North would not. On the other hand, Safford has published peer-reviewed papers, so perhaps he should not have to ask permission? Even with permission requirements, though, they seem able to provide their expertise to the press.

Keeley talks about the fact that shrubland and forest fires are different beasts, and sometimes get lumped together in coverage. Below is an interesting excerpt on the climate question.

Keeley published a paper last year that found that all ignition sources of fires had declined except for powerlines.
“Since the year 2000 there’ve been a half-million acres burned due to powerline-ignited fires, which is five times more than we saw in the previous 20 years,” he said.
“Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s associated with climate change.’ But there’s no relationship between climate and these big fire events.”
What then is driving the increase in fires?
“If you recognize that 100% of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add 6 million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley.
What about the Sierras?
“If you look at the period from 1910 – 1960,” said Keeley, “precipitation is the climate parameter most tied to fires. But since 1960, precipitation has been replaced by temperature, so in the last 50 years, spring and summer and temperatures will explain 50% of the variation from one year to the next. So temperature is important.”
Isn’t that also during the period when the wood fuel was allowed to build due to suppression of forest fires?
“Exactly,” said Keeley. “Fuel is one of the confounding factors. It’s the problem in some of the reports done by climatologists who understand climate but don’t necessarily understand the subtleties related to fires.”
So, would we have such hot fires in the Sierras had we not allowed fuel to build-up over the last century?
“That’s a very good question,” said Keeley. “Maybe you wouldn’t.”
He said it was something he might look at. “We have some selected watersheds in the Sierra Nevadas where there have been regular fires. Maybe the next paper we’ll pull out the watersheds that have not had fuel accumulation and look at the climate fire relationship and see if it changes.”
I asked Keeley what he thought of the Twitter spat between Gov. Newsom and President Trump.

Sharon’s note: I don’t know Keeley, but I thought he handled this very well, considering it’s not really a question about his research. The above italics are mine.

“I don’t think the president is wrong about the need to better manage,” said Keeley. “I don’t know if you want to call it ‘mismanaged’ but they’ve been managed in a way that has allowed the fire problem to get worse.”
What’s true of California fires appears true for fires in the rest of the US. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled 37 different regions across the US and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables, the scientists explored, “none were as significantly significant… as the anthropogenic variables.”

It’s encouraging to think that research shows that fire suppression has an big impact on fires. Otherwise, we’d have to give it up because fire suppression isn’t “based on science” 😉