climate change

Behind the Science Curtain with One Carbon Science Study: II. A Simple Suggestion For Improving Peer Review

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I found this in a paper about making bio jet fuel. I’m sure that’s not the original source.

 

Thanks to Matthew for pointing out that all kinds of scientists have conscious and unconscious agendas.  That’s why open QA/QC, collaborative design, public peer review, and other techniques can be so valuable for increasing peoples’ confidence in scientific products.  I think everyone agrees on that.  To that end, let’s talk more about the Harris et al. paper. Remember we are looking at it because I looked at Figure 3 and wondered about carbon emissions due to timber harvesting in Nevada and Southern California, places I thought I knew did not have much going on in the timber harvest biz.

Todd Morgan, whose data was used in the study (without asking him), raises some questions about double-counting emissions from mill residues. Now that’s a pretty technical thing. I can’t tell who is right, and I don’t even know the field well enough to know if there is a reviewer out there who a) knows enough to tell the difference, and b) does not have skin in the game (personality conflicts with authors, and so on), so I could ask that (unbiased) person for their point of view.  To know that, you really have to know the folks in a discipline. In many cases, it’s hard to find people like this willing to do reviews (not paid extra, some credit), let alone write a piece for The Smokey Wire (not paid extra, potentially negative credit).

Nevertheless, there is one very simple thing journal editors could require that would have an enormous positive influence IMHO.  If a paper uses a variety of datasets, I would require a letter from each source a) acknowledging that they were asked for data, b) and a finding or questioning whether their data were used appropriately.  These writeups then would be shared with all reviewers.

If I put on my reviewer hat, I would say “Hey, we can’t do that! We’d spend all our time waiting for people to write up their stuff, and we can’t force them to do that, and besides, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to tell who was right if they disagree.”

I don’t think most non-scientists understand how difficult it is to do quality peer review, nor exactly what peer reviewers do. They don’t (can’t) check data sets or calculations. They mostly see if the right techniques (appear to have been) used, the findings are plausible, and the right citations (the reviewers’ own work ;)),  and conclusions are drawn.  I think the whole biz was easier when I was a young scientist and perhaps disciplines were easier to understand, scientists perhaps tried harder to be objective, there was less emphasis on multidisciplinary big data manipulation studies, and findings were easier to ground truth by observation in the area studied.

You get what you pay for, and no one pays for peer review. I acknowledge that many scientists work their tushes off with little acknowledgement or support in this area, but if anyone really cared about good scientific products, we (society) could do a great deal more to support the quality process.

Here are Morgan’s specific concerns about mill residues in the paper:

“I’m skeptical of the methods that have led to such high proportions of carbon loss attributable to harvest (Table 5) – particularly in several western states.
One major concern I have is how/why mill residues seem to be counted twice.  My understanding of the Smith et al [31] publication is that mill residue (e.g., sawdust, etc) from processing timber products (e.g.,sawlogs) into primary products (e.g., lumber) is accounted for in the sequestered vs. emitted fractions for each product.  For example, we see that about 40% of the sawlog volume (in figure 6) is emitted, 40% is landfill, and 20% is in-use.  SO, adding mill residue is essentially double-counting the carbon emissions and sequestration associated with the wood harvested for products. Since the authors assume dispositions for mill residues which show 80-90% emitted (Figure 6), it looks to me like double counting of mill residue is causing much higher amounts of emitted carbon (loss) from harvesting.”

If you had reviewed the paper, wouldn’t you want to see the authors’ answer to this question? And perhaps involve Smith et al. in the discussion?

Climate Change: Why Fund Technology When You Can Fund Communications?

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Climate Change Heroes? Dimensional Energy are finalists in the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE. They are developing a process for artificial photosynthesis.  See  this link. 

 

Thanks to Matthew for bringing up the bigger picture of climate change, which is relevant to some of our discussions here. The other point of this post is to show that folks like us can also write op-eds albeit for local newspapers, and get our own voices and perspectives out  in the public sphere.

It’s always a mystery to me why people with lots of money don’t simply fund solving the problems, instead of funding complaining about how bad the problems are, or complaining that other people won’t solve them. It makes you wonder if they are really interested in solving the problem, or whether other options have not been presented.  Or maybe big environmental funders aren’t comfortable with technology development and transfer?  Or they think that renewables are all the technology that we need (possibly convinced by corporate solar and wind interests)? That’s not so clear from watching snowplows, farm equipment, gas stoves and furnaces, nor the difference between France and Germany’s carbon production.

The Colorado Springs Gazette published an op-ed I wrote last week, linked here.  It follows the same logic as the discussion we’ve been having.. it’s really pretty simple. The way to stop using fossil fuels is to develop equally useful other fuels that are cheaper or use CCS (carbon capture and storage) and/or BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage).  Who is likely to do this? Well er… engineers and inventors and so on.  So it would be simple to take all the science bucks currently directed at projecting the future to the gnat’s eyebrow with unknown accuracy, and give them over to a concerted and organized Manhattan or Apollo project.  If we had left those past efforts to random investigator- initiated research, we would potentially have had many designs for exteriors but no propulsion systems. Our current technology development process is kind of a technology potluck with no feedback from the guests.   In fact, perhaps we need more of a Land Grant model in which Low Carbon Extension fills the role of communicating between technology developers and users.

If we look at the amount of money private foundations put into climate communications compared to technologies, we can see that what folks pay for is what they get.  Lots of words and not so much technology.  In fact, for the Manhattan Project comparison. it would be as if they spent lots of money decrying the bad things our enemies did in WWII, but no money on actually fighting them. I later found out that more wise persons had come up with idea of a Green Apollo Project. From this article in the Guardian on an international effort:

Lord Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics and member of the Apollo group, said it was barely believable that the world only spent 2% of its R&D money on its “most pressing problem” of climate change and clean energy. He said: “We do not think this problem can be conquered unless we reduce the cost of renewable energy below the cost of dirty energy.”

And the idea goes back at least to 1998 (here).  Of course, those tend to focus on development of technology (tends to be electric generation) and not so much transfer and adoption.

On the other hand…

Check out this analysis of major environmental grant funding by Matthew Nisbet of Northwestern University (I couldn’t reproduce the chart, but this is the caption)

“Based on analysis of 2,502 publicly reported grants available as of Spring/Summer 2016 which were distributed between 2011 and 2015 by 19 major environmental grantmakers totaling $556,678,469.  Low-carbon energy technologies include funding to make natural gas generation cleaner/safer ($8.4 million); to evaluate carbon capture and storage ($1.3 million); to promote R&D spending ($573,000), and the role of government in fostering innovation ($100,000). No grants were focused on promoting nuclear energy, though $175,000 in grants were devoted to opposing nuclear energy for cost and safety reasons.”

My own alma mater, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, runs a Yale Climate Communication with funding from the Grantham Foundation for the environment.  Here’s a link.  It seems like the logic is that if you can change public opinion, good environmental things will happen.  It seems to me that that goodwill still needs to be translated into a variety of technologies, if we want heat and food, and without undue impacts on poorer people and countries.  And if those technologies were cheaper and better for the environment, then you wouldn’t actually need massive PR campaigns. Oh, well.

 

Predicting Forest Tree Responses to Climate Change: Some Humility Required

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During the previous discussion on the Northwest Forest Plan Study here,  Lance posted a link to this article (titled “Climate modeling shows significant shifts in 21st century Pacific Northwest coastal forests” YOA (Yay Open Access). The study talks about how climate will change forests composition.  As a forest geneticist, I have always questioned the conclusions of these kinds of studies.  The first time I heard these kinds of predictions, I believe it was a Forest Biology Workshop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1994 (yes, 25 years ago).  At the time, I thought “if we don’t know how much of a change in climate mature trees can handle, and we don’t know how much genetic variation are in their offspring, how can we possibly predict where trees will live or die?”

One of my tasks in Forest Service R&D was to be on reviews of the Research Stations. I remember one particular Assistant Director, who felt that systems thinking and research was the wave of the future. One of the scientists at the  Station had done some excellent work (IMHO) on how far fish move in streams, that was utterly surprising and important for many reasons.  This AD seemed to feel that this work, and indeed organismal biology, was passe´.  Again, you might ask, if you don’t understand how an organism works, how can you possibly predict what it’s going to do under changing conditions?  Let’s look at a couple of ways of approaching the same topic- how changes in climate will affect tree species in the Northeast.

First we have this newspaper story citing a variety of researchers who talk about climate impacts on forest tree composition (from this interview, it’s not clear if these predictions are based on general principles or specific models), e.g.,

“As the climate warms, we expect to see some of the iconic species of New England, like maples and beeches, pushed out. Those will no longer be there,” he said. “We are going to see things we never even thought of — we’ll see a shift in the face of the forests of New England. You can’t change one thing, and expect nothing else to change along with it.”

We might call this the “have idea and model” approach.

And here is a study by Canham et al. here (YOA)  that may yield information to improve models from using FIA data and measuring tree growth.  They seem to arrive at the tentative conclusion that there are some phenotypic (not genetic) responses to climate change. We might call this the “observe how organisms operate” approach.

Ultimately, it will be critical to understand whether the patterns we have observed represent genetic adaptation or phenotypic acclimation, or some combination of the two. The consequences for responses of these tree species to climate change could be very different depending on that balance. If the results are genetically based, trees within a given location could be much more sensitive to climate change than indicated by the very broad geographic distributions of these temperate tree species. But if the results are phenotypic, this would represent local acclimation that could help buffer species in the face of climate change. Adult tree growth is a dominant term in interannual variation in forest productivity and the attendant ecosystem properties associated with primary productivity, including carbon sequestration and nutrient retention. But from a demographic perspective, adult tree growth is much less important to the geographic distribution and successional dynamics of these temperate tree species than are other life history stages, particularly seedling recruitment and survival, and adult tree mortality (Pacala et al. 1996, Canham and Murphy 2016a, b, 2017). It remains an open question whether the ubiquitous local adaptation to long‐term climate conditions we have documented for adult tree growth in these temperate tree species is present in those other critical life history stages.

Like I said in 1994, if we don’t know how trees adapt, either phenotypically or genetically, we can’t really place much faith in models that try to predict what will happen in the future.  And that’s leaving aside changes in diseases, insects, pollinators, seed spreaders, mycorrhizal associations and so on. But that’s OK- humility in the face of the complexity of Nature is, perhaps, the most appropriate response.

Climate Adaptation: Policy Groundhog Day?

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Yesterday, Matthew posted this piece with an interview with Andrew Revkin. It began

“Once derided, ways of adapting to climate change are gaining steam”

I had a feeling that I had read that somewhere, possibly a long time,  before.   I looked it up, and sure enough, I found this 2007 science op-ed (that is, an opinion piece by scientists, published in Nature)  claiming much the same thing. The authors are Roger Pielke, Jr., Gwyn Prins, Steve Rayner and Daniel Sarewitz.

But perspectives have changed. Adaptation is again seen as an essential part of climate policy alongside greenhouse-gas mitigation. Both the recent Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change demonstrate that adaptation is firmly back on the agenda. There are at least three reasons why the taboo on adaptation can no longer be enforced.

First, there is a timescale mismatch. Whatever actions ultimately lead to the decarbonization of the global energy system, it will be many decades before they have a discernible effect on the climate. Historical emissions dictate that climate change is unavoidable. And even the most optimistic emissions projections show global greenhouse-gas concentrations rising for the foreseeable future.

Second, vulnerability to climate-related impacts on society are increasing for reasons that have nothing to do with greenhouse-gas emissions, such as rapid population growth along coasts and in areas with limited water supplies. As Hurricane Katrina made devastatingly clear, climate vulnerability is caused by unsustainable patterns of development combined with socioeconomic inequity.

Post-Katrina debate focused on whether or not the event bore the signature of global warming, despite the fact that scientists have known for decades the inevitability of a Katrina-like disaster in New Orleans.

Finally, those who will suffer the brunt of climate impacts are now demanding that the international response to climate change focus on increasing the resilience of vulnerable societies to damaging climate events that — like Katrina — will occur regardless of efforts to mitigate emissions. In 2002, developing countries put forward the ‘Delhi Declaration’, calling for greater attention to adaptation in international climate-change policy negotiations.

Does the above statement about Katrina remind anyone else of wildfires? Of course, adaptation is required, regardless of the proportion of climate change attributed, or attributable, to human impacts.   Most of us who have done climate planning for feds or others have consciously targeted both adaptation and mitigation.  Some groups deal more with adaptation and not so much mitigation (think plant breeders, water engineers).  But why is adaptation not as “cool” as mitigation? Why does it need to be repeatedly rediscovered? What are the forces that have been, and may be continuing to, work against adaptation as having its own place in the sun?

Here are my hypotheses:

(1) First in, last out.  Climate modelers found a primary place in the public conversation and a certain liking of being close to power, plus lots of research funding.  They may be reluctant to give some of that up to adaptation folks. Does anyone know how much federal research goes to mitigation (I’m also interested in the proportion to predicting and analyzing vs. developing technology) compared to adaptation?

(2) Physics envy.  Let’s just say that the traditional biases say the closer you are to organisms and people in your studies, the less cool your research is.

(3) Not as engaging. Media and politicians like getting people worked up, the former so they click, and the latter so they click on donations.  County planning or a new milo variety does not have the same cachet (I guess the word is engagement) as a new study that shows that things are worse than previously thought.

Other ideas?

 

Are Trees Good or Bad for Climate Change? Nature News Story

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At 304 metres high, the Zotino Tall Tower Observatory measures gases and aerosols above taiga forest in central Siberia. A similar tall tower in the Amazon makes measurements above the tropical rainforest.Credit: Michael Hielscher/MPI

 

Forests (albeit not so much individual tree species) tend to pretty much do their own thing without human intervention. Sometimes humans cut forests down, and other times humans plant trees. In the Nature article here, case, people are researching whether it makes sense to do these activities specifically for climate change mitigation reasons.  There are separate issues around changing forests for adaptive reasons (e.g., increasing resilience through encouraging diverse species, more fires means greater need for fuel treatments, cut trees to increase water supplies and so on).  In all of these discussions, climate change factors have to take their place in the universe of other pros and cons of changing forest management.

There’s quite a bit about VOC’s in this article as well as albedo.  The VOC’s may remind you of Ronald Reagan and his famous quote about polluting trees (for those of you of a certain age). Here’s a link to a story about that from 2004. But now back to the Nature news story.

Researchers are now turning to sophisticated computer models and using larger and more-comprehensive data sets to nail down exactly what forests in different places do to the climate. In some cases, the results have been sobering. Last October, a team led by ecologist Sebastiaan Luyssaert at the Free University of Amsterdam modelled a variety of European forest-management scenarios8. The researchers concluded that none of the scenarios would yield a significant global climate impact, because the effects of surface darkening and cloud-cover changes from any added forests would roughly eliminate their carbon-storage benefits.

To estimate the climate impact of planting forests in different parts of the United States, ecologist Christopher Williams at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, is combining global satellite data collected over more than a decade with carbon-sequestration figures based on data from the US Forest Service. He has found in preliminary work that adding trees to the US west coast and to regions east of the Mississippi River makes sense, climatically speaking. But albedo changes make forest planting in the Rockies and the southwestern United States a bad deal for the climate in most cases, because the conifers that thrive in those regions are dark and absorb more sunlight than do underlying soils or snow. He hopes to turn this research into a standardized methodology that forest managers can use to assess a project’s climate impact.

Getting planners to adopt such methods could prove challenging, however. Williams has found that some resist considering albedo effects, including representatives of companies hoping to sell carbon credits for forest projects. “Even other scientists sometimes have disbelief in the magnitude of the albedo effect, or even its existence,” he says.

“I have heard scientists say that if we found forest loss cooled the planet, we wouldn’t publish it.”

These controversies may be important to people doing carbon credit trading (which is rife with other issues and problems).  Maybe one of the reasons people in the Southwest and Rockies may still want to plant trees is that they provide valuable ecosystem services regardless of climate impacts. Maybe this is one of those cases in which people might not use scientific information, not because scientists disagree and are waiting for a degree of completeness or agreement, nor because of a mistrust of models with unknown measurements and assumptions, but because climate is one environmental concern, but not always the top one.

 

 

Zinke.. Why Such a Lightning Rod?: Or, Sometimes He’s Not Quite Wrong I.

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Former Interior Secretary Zinke

I think former Interior Secretary Zinke was definitely a lightning rod for many folks. We don’t know why, nor if the new Secretary be equally controversial. Looking back, we can ask questions like “why him? and why not Secretary Perdue?”. Part of it may well be his personality (which I don’t actually know), but plenty of politicians can be irritating.  My biases and personal experience would tend to be along the lines of “Congressfolk aren’t necessarily good at governing, more at playing partisan football.”

So let’s talk about four things he’s said that people disagree with (two in this post):

  1. Fires and Climate

From a story in The Hill here: “It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change. What is important is we manage our forests,” Zinke told reporters while visiting the Whisteytown National Recreation Area on Sunday. “This is not a debate about climate change. There’s no doubt the [fire] season is getting longer, the temperatures are getting hotter.” (I think it’s Whiskeytown, but the Hill spelled it that way).

I was mildly surprised when I read this article because the top quote was “I’ve heard the climate change argument back and forth. This has nothing to do with climate change. This has to do with active forest management,” Zinke told Sacramento station KCRA.

(my italics). So in two sentences he said 1) fire season is getting longer and temps hotter so yes to climate change but 2)  framing this debate as being about climate change does not help people managing fires deal with them.

I agree with 2) . We can’t throw up our hands and say “let’s not do fuel treatments, we just need to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere”. Because we had fires before climate change, and we’ll have fires after climate change. Not only that, but as the IPCC says, it’s unlikely that we will be as successful as we would like in the short run. So we’re stuck with this problem either way. No matter how complicated pundits or academics try to make this, the records show that this is, was, and will be fire country.

So I would say, climate is part of the problem, but only part, and we honestly can’t say how big a part. What we do know is what we can do to help the wildfire problem (many things).

2. Role of Litigation

This is probably the least popular in many circles:

From CNN Politics here “lawsuit after lawsuit by, yes, the radical environmental groups that would rather burn down the entire forest than cut a single tree or thin the forest.” Remember, Zinke is from Montana, where in fact a high proportion of appeals and litigation occur. So I certainly can understand how he would get that impression (for some reason, it seems like passions run higher in Montana about the same issues that other western states deal with). According to some folks in California, not only litigation, appeals and objections, but also fear of litigation, appeals and objections have made some  FS folks less enthusiastic about doing fuel treatments or other vegetation management.  Litigation is indeed one element of not being able to do fuel treatments (in addition to lack of money and lack of trained people).

Here are more quotes from the same article,

“This is where America stands. It’s not time for finger-pointing. We know the problem: it’s been years of neglect, and in many cases, it’s been these radical environmentalists that want nature to take its course,” Zinke said in the Sunday interview. “We have dead and dying timber. We can manage it using best science, best practices. But to let this devastation go on year after year after year is unacceptable.”

Interestingly, Perdue is also quoted:

His colleague in federal land management, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, spoke instead of misguided efforts of “well-meaning environmentalists.” “If not doing anything to the forests kept them pristine, I’d be all for that. That’s the problem,” Perdue said on the call with reporters. “That’s been the theory from well-meaning environmentalists over the years, is that a forest that you did nothing to was pristine. We know that’s not to be the case.”
Zinke went on Breitbart, which conceivably he didn’t have to, and has more colorful/inflammatory language. Personality or history as Congressperson?  And perhaps oddly, the CNN story ended with a quote from Chad Hanson saying that the “science shows” that fuel treatments that involve logging don’t work. As we’ve seen, the contrary scientific evidence is vast (not to speak of practitioner evidence). The CNN article also notes that Hanson is also a Director of the Sierra Club, but it looks like this is outdated information (see here).

Energy dominance coming to national forests

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The Forest Service plans to submit a rule that would make it easier to explore oil and gas drilling, as well as mineral mining, in National Forests.

“It is in the national interest to promote clean and safe development of our Nation’s vast energy resources, while at the same time avoiding regulatory burdens that unnecessarily encumber energy production, constrain economic growth, and prevent job creation,” the rule notice reads.

“The intent of these potential changes would be to decrease permitting times by removing regulatory burdens that unnecessarily encumber energy production. These potential changes would promote domestic oil and gas production by allowing industry to begin production more quickly,” the notice reads

I assume that any such burdens are in place because someone thought they were “necessary,” and I hope there is a good discussion of why they are no longer so.

For mining,

“Increasing the consistency of the agencies’ procedures and rules would benefit persons who conduct locatable mineral operations on the public lands managed by the [Bureau of Land Management] as well as on National Forest System lands managed by the Forest Service,” the notice reads.

Interesting how they are not even paying the lip service that usually sounds like this: “while protecting the environment and other national forest uses.”  I look forward to their analysis of effects on global warming.

The Wildfire Situation and Definitions of Worseness

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Yosemite National Park, California. Burning piles 2003 (NPS photo)

Lots of newspaper articles say that “wildfires are worse now than they used to be” and often say “the major part of that is due to climate change”. Logically, first we have to define “worse” before we can go on to ascribing causes. In other words, we need to be clear on “what aspects of them are worse, compared to what other time periods” before we can collect relevant data (assuming it exists) and be clear on attributing causes. So can we be more specific about what is worse? Through reading different articles and studies, we can come up with different variables possibly related to “worseness.” It should be noted that the value of the differences and the timeframe of comparison are both essential to clearly understanding the “worseness” question.

First, there are acres burned. I would argue that that does not tell us much, for at least two reasons. If we have WFU (wildland fire use) now and we didn’t used to do it, it seems logical that that this change in suppression policy would lead to increased acres burned by wildfires. Kevin and Andy have also brought up the question of whether burned area is currently accurately measured (a) and whether that can be compared to measurements from the past (in the US) (b). See Kevin’s comment here for links to the more recent data. In the last 150 years or so we have gone from (1) intentional and natural ignitions with no suppression (by Native Americans) in the western US to (2) serious attempts to get fires out all the time but perhaps without the greatest technology, to (3) great technology to put out fires, coupled with the concept of WFU to reduce fuels.

If wildfires can be good, and we are encouraging fire on the landscape through WFU, we would expect burned areas to go up. If that makes wildfires “worse” for purposes of attributing the increased acres to climate change (for example), that seems like it’s a logical problem. Burned area, in and of itself, seems like it would be a function of suppression strategies and tactics.

So people maybe don’t mean “number of acres” when they say “worse”. Maybe there’s more damage to property, infrastructure, soils and watersheds? Or the latter damage is more visible? Of course, there wasn’t as much property around in the past (not in forests or shrublands, but maybe in grasslands). And no one was measuring soil and watershed damage. So how can we compare that to the past? What people might mean is that “nowadays in some cases (most notably in California, based on the news) people are unable to suppress wildfires until they burn up housing and other infrastructure.” And the scariest thing is that there are conditions under which fires become uncontrollable, even today. What could be the differences from the past? 20 years ago? 50 years ago?

There’s also “more frequent“. Since many are human-caused, this could be because of more people being around and/or more people around behaving unsafely. Across the West, there are powerline started fires, steam train started fires (apparently, I don’t think this has been found out for sure), and military training exercise started fires, plus clueless campers and shooters who start fires. At some point, does “more frequent” mean “less attention can be paid to each individual fire” which would also allow acreages to increase?

To understand all this, we really need to interview people working in fire suppression right now, in the past, and perhaps people who study their observations in some way. To readers: in your area, are fires “worse” than the past? When in the past? How do you define “worse”? What do you think the reasons are?

Validated Science versus Unproven Scientific Hypothesis – Which One Should We Choose?

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In a 6/13/18 article, David Atkins provides a critique of the assumptions behind the Law et al article titled: “Land use strategies to mitigate climate change in carbon dense temperate forests” and shows how hypothetical science can and has been used, without any caveat, to provide some groups with slogans that meet their messaging needs instead of waiting for validation of the hypothesis and thereby considering the holistic needs of the world.

I) BACKGROUND

The noble goal of Law et. al. is to determine the “effectiveness of forest strategies to mitigate climate change”. They state that their methodology “should integrate observations and mechanistic ecosystem process models with future climate, CO2, disturbances from fire, and management.”

A) The generally (ignoring any debate over the size of the percentage increase) UNCONTESTED points regarding locking up more carbon in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Reforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 5% improvement in carbon storage by 2100’
2) Afforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 1.4% improvement in carbon storage by 2100′

B) The CONTESTED points regarding locking up 17% more carbon by 2100 in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Lengthened harvest cycles on private lands
2) Restricting harvest on public lands

C) Atkins, at the 2018 International Mass Timber Conference protested by Oregon Wild, notes that: “Oregon Wild (OW) is advocating that storing more carbon in forests is better than using wood in buildings as a strategy to mitigate climate change.” OW’s first reference from Law et. al. states: “Increasing forest carbon on public lands reduced emissions compared with storage in wood products” (see Law et. al. abstract). Another reference quoted by OW from Law et. al. goes so far as to claim that: “Recent analysis suggests substitution benefits of using wood versus more fossil fuel-intensive materials have been overestimated by at least an order of magnitude.”

II) Law et. al. CAVEATS ignored by OW

A) They clearly acknowledge that their conclusions are based on computer simulations (modeling various scenarios using a specific set of assumptions subject to debate by other scientists).

B) In some instances, they use words like “probably”, “likely” and “appears” when describing some assumptions and outcomes rather than blindly declaring certainty.

III) Atkins’ CRITIQUE

Knowing that the modeling used in the Law et. al. study involves significant assumptions about each of the extremely complex components and their interactions, Atkins proceeds to investigate the assumptions which were used to integrate said models with the limited variables mentioned and shows how they overestimate the carbon cost of using wood, underestimate the carbon cost of storing carbon on the stump and underestimate the carbon cost of substituting non-renewable resources for wood. This allows Oregon Wild to tout unproven statements as quoted in item “I-C” above and treat them as fact and justification for policy changes instead of as an interesting but unproven hypothesis that needs to be validated in order to complete the scientific process.

Quotes from Atkins Critique:

A) Wood Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) Versus Non-renewable substitutes.
1) “The calculation used to justify doubling forest rotations assumes no leakage. Leakage is a carbon accounting term referring to the potential that if you delay cutting trees in one area, others might be cut somewhere else to replace the gap in wood production, reducing the supposed carbon benefit.”
2) “It assumes a 50-year half-life for buildings instead of the minimum 75 years the ASTM standard calls for, which reduces the researchers’ estimate of the carbon stored in buildings.”
3) “It assumes a decline of substitution benefits, which other LCA scientists consider as permanent.”
4) “analysis chooses to account for a form of fossil fuel leakage, but chooses not to model any wood harvest leakage.”
5) “A report published by the Athena Institute in 2004, looked at actual building demolition over a three-plus-year period in St. Paul, Minn. It indicated 51 percent of the buildings were older than 75 years. Only 2 percent were demolished in the first 25 years and only 12 percent in the first 50 years.”
6) “The Law paper assumes that the life of buildings will get shorter in the future rather than longer. In reality, architects and engineers are advocating the principle of designing and building for longer time spans – with eventual deconstruction and reuse of materials rather than disposal. Mass timber buildings substantially enhance this capacity. There are Chinese Pagoda temples made from wood that are 800 to 1,300 years old. Norwegian churches are over 800 years old. I visited at cathedral in Scotland with a roof truss system from the 1400s. Buildings made of wood can last for many centuries. If we follow the principle of designing and building for the long run, the carbon can be stored for hundreds of years.”
7) “The OSU scientists assumed wood energy production is for electricity production only. However, the most common energy systems in the wood products manufacturing sector are combined heat and power (CHP) or straight heat energy production (drying lumber or heat for processing energy) where the efficiency is often two to three times as great and thus provides much larger fossil fuel offsets than the modeling allows.”
8) “The peer reviewers did not include an LCA expert.”
9) The Dean of the OSU College of Forestry was asked how he reconciles the differences between two Doctorate faculty members when the LCA Specialist (who is also the director of CORRIM which is a non-profit that conducts and manages research on the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of forest products). The Dean’s answer was “It isn’t the role of the dean to resolve these differences, … Researchers often explore extremes of a subject on purpose, to help define the edges of our understanding … It is important to look at the whole array of research results around a subject rather than using those of a single study or publication as a conclusion to a field of study.”
10) Alan Organschi, a practicing architect, a professor at Yale stated his thought process as “There is a huge net carbon benefit [from using wood] and enormous variability in the specific calculations of substitution benefits … a ton of wood (which is half carbon) goes a lot farther than a ton of concrete, which releases significant amounts of carbon during a building’s construction”. He then paraphrased a NASA climate scientistfrom the late 1980’s who said ‘Quit using high fossil fuel materials and start using materials that sink carbon, that should be the principle for our decisions.’
11) The European Union, in 2017, based on “current literature”, called “for changes to almost double the mitigation effects by EU forests through Climate Smart Forestry (CSF). … It is derived from a more holistic and effective approach than one based solely on the goals of storing carbon in forest ecosystems”
12) Various CORRIM members stated:
a) “Law et al. does not meet the minimum elements of a Life Cycle Assessment: system boundary, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. All four are required by the international standards (ISO 14040 and 14044); therefore, Law et al. does not qualify as an LCA.”
b) “What little is shared in the article regarding inputs to the simulation model ignores the latest developments in wood life cycle assessment and sustainable building design, rendering the results at best inaccurate and most likely incorrect.”
c) “The PNAS paper, which asserts that growing our PNW forests indefinitely would reduce the global carbon footprint, ignores that at best there would 100 percent leakage to other areas with lower productivity … which will result in 2 to 3.5 times more acres harvested for the same amount of building materials. Alternatively, all those buildings will be built from materials with a higher carbon footprint, so the substitution impact of using fossil-intensive products in place of renewable low carbon would result in >100 percent leakage.”
d) More on leakage: “In 2001, seven years after implementation, Jack Ward Thomas, one of the architects of the plan and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said: “The drop in the cut in the Pacific Northwest was essentially replaced by imports from Canada, Scandinavia and Chile … but we haven’t reduced our per-capita consumption of wood. We have only shifted the source.”
e) “Bruce Lippke, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former executive director of CORRIM said, “The substitution benefits of wood in place of steel or concrete are immediate, permanent and cumulative.””

B) Risks Resulting from High Densities of Standing Timber
1) “The paper underestimates the amount of wildfire in the past and chose not to model increases in the amount of fire in the future driven by climate change.”
2) “The authors chose to treat the largest fire in their 25-year calibration period, the Biscuit Fire (2003), as an anomaly. Yet 2017 provided a similar number of acres burned. … the model also significantly underestimated five of the six other larger fire years ”
3) “The paper also assumed no increase in fires in the future”
4) Atkins comments/quotes support what some of us here on the NCFP blog have been saying for years regarding storing more timber on the stump. There is certainty that a highly significant increase in carbon loss to fire, insects and disease will result from increased stand densities as a result of storing more carbon on the stump on federal lands. Well documented, validated and fundamental plant physiology and fire science can only lead us to that conclusion. Increases in drought caused by global warming will only increase the stress on already stressed, overly dense forests and thereby further decrease their viability/health by decreasing the availability of already limited resources such as access to minerals, moisture and sunlight while providing closer proximity between trees to ease the ability and rate of spread of fire, insects and disease between adjacent trees.

Footnote:
In their conclusion, Law et. al. state that“GHG reduction must happen quickly to avoid surpassing a 2°C increase in temperature since preindustrial times.” This emphasis leads them to focus on strategies which, IMHO, will only exacerbate the long-term problem.
→ For perspective, consider the “Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm”

Landscape Changes and Climate: Toward a Broader Climate Accounting

by
From Betts, 2000

Back when I was reading about the IPCC scenarios and what they included in this post, I thought “uh-oh, reforestation and afforestation, no one told us!”. As far as I know, though, the IPCC scenarios only include GHG based (I don’t know if they include other GHGs besides carbon), but not landscape changes that influence climate.

Here’s one 2000 paper by Betts of the UK on this topic. This paper is one of those that covers the whole world, uses remote sensing, uses a variety of datasets, makes a variety of assumptions, and may not relate well to more local studies, or even observations. For example, on soils like the Hayman, green trees vs bare soil post-fire may well impact albedo.. how much, is another question. Perhaps there are more recent and/or more local papers on this?

Still, it raises an interesting point. If you want to move from the general idea of afforestation (or changing crop back to forest lands, e.g. the Williamette Valley) how would the potential carbon sequestration and landscape change relate to each other? In the 2003 Marland et al. paper cited below (coauthored by several forest scientists), the authors consider a more holistic form of accounting for climate impacts beyond carbon.

It might even be appropriate to think of carbon management in the biosphere in terms of adjustment factors, or suitability factors, that capture other objectives of land surface change as well as carbon sequestration. These could include carbon leakage, other impacts on climate, ecosystem composition and structure, other impacts on hydrology and the environment, sustainability, and social and cultural objectives. Although this paper discusses changes in land surface entirely within the context of climate change, it is clear that changes in land surface have important considerations within other social and environmental contexts and within other international conventions. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, specifically notes that achieving mitigation objectives for climate change should be accomplished while
taking into account “relevant international environmental agreements; promotion of sustainable forest management practices;” and promotion of sustainable development. Relevant international agreements include the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (
IPCC, 2000 , p. 114). Alternatives for carbon management, whether protection of existing ecosystems or encouragement of more carbon intensive ecosystems, can have particularly important implications for biodiversity (Huston and Marland, 2003).

To fully consider the climatic effect of changing land surface and/or managing carbon stocks in the biosphere would require complex modeling of the interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface, Option 4. An international consensus would need to consider climate impacts that are both global and regional (multinational) in scale. Effects on the climate system could be expressed in quantifiable energy units such as joule or watt/m2 , perhaps normalized for the area affected (
Pielke et al., 2002 ). Both increases and decreases in energy flows would be recognized as impacts on the larger system. Such an accounting system could be equally rigorous, but would inevitably be more complex, than the evolving system based on tons of carbon equivalent.

I wrote one of the leaders in the field, Roger Pielke, Sr. and asked for a set of papers that would be helpful for readers to introduce them to this topic area. So here they are.they are accessible without a firewall (others are on his research website -https://cires.colorado.edu/research/research-groups/roger-pielke-sr-group)

Pielke Sr., R.A., R. Mahmood, and C. McAlpine, 2016: Land’s complex role in climate change. Physics Today, 69(11), 40. https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/r-384.pdf

Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., T.R. Loveland, and C.A. McAlpine, 2016: Climate relevant land use and land cover change policies. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 195-202,
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00221.1

Marland, G., R.A. Pielke, Sr., M. Apps, R. Avissar, R.A. Betts, K.J. Davis, P.C. Frumhoff, S.T. Jackson, L. Joyce, P. Kauppi, J. Katzenberger, K.G. MacDicken, R. Neilson, J.O. Niles, D. dutta S. Niyogi, R.J. Norby, N. Pena, N. Sampson, and Y. Xue, 2003: The climatic impacts of land surface change and carbon management, and the
implications for climate-change mitigation policy. Climate Policy, 3, 149-157. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-267.pdf

Mahmood, R., R.A. Pielke Sr., K. Hubbard, D. Niyogi, P. Dirmeyer, C. McAlpine, A. Carleton, R. Hale, S. Gameda, A. Beltrán-Przekurat, B. Baker, R. McNider, D. Legates, J. Shepherd, J. Du, P. Blanken, O.Frauenfeld, U. Nair, S. Fall, 2013: Land cover changes and their biogeophysical effects on climate. Int. J. Climatol., DOI:
10.1002/joc.3736. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/r-374.pdf

Hossain, F., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2012: A two-way street. Intl. Water Power & Dam Construction, 64:11, 26-28. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/r-373.pdf

Hossain, F., J. Arnold, E. Beighley, C. Brown, S. Burian, J. Chen, S.Madadgar, A. Mitra, D. Niyogi, R.A. Pielke Sr., V. Tidwell, and D. Wegner, 2015: Local-to-regional landscape drivers of extreme weather and climate: Implications for water infrastructure resilience. J. Hydrol. Eng., 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0001210 , 02515002.
https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/r-380.pdf”

If you’re interested in this topic, you can also sign up for Dr. Pielke’s Twitter feed. There’s an interesting current study on the effects of irrigation in Nebraska going on right now.