climate change

Can Both Things be True? We Need to Protect Mesic Forests for Carbon and We Will Lose Them Due to Climate Change?

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This is from a classic 1992 paper on genetics in reforestation under climate change. The Douglas fir near my house don’t appear to be suffering, 30-ish years later.

Here’s an article in Mongabay, which attempts to explain this very complicated article in Nature.

  • Landscapes are showing signs of losing their ability to absorb the amount of carbon they once could, a new study revealed. That would pose serious obstacles to the fight against climate change.
  • The study reviewed the productivity of carbon storage of different ecosystems between 1981 and 2018, finding that many fluctuated greatly and were at risk of turning into permanent scrubland.
  • Researchers identified a concerning “spiraling” effect, in which landscapes absorb less carbon that in turn worsens climate change, which then destabilizes additional landscapes and puts them at higher risk of turning into scrubland.

One reason for this, the researchers said, is that landscapes have a “memory” of which years had high carbon storage and which were low. Low years are more likely to be followed by additional low years, meaning that as carbon storage potential diminishes, a landscape is more likely to permanently become scrubland.

The phenomenon can be thought of as a “spiraling” effect, researchers said, in which landscapes absorb less carbon that in turn worsens climate change, which then destabilizes additional landscapes and puts them at higher risk of turning into scrubland.

“If we destabilize the carbon net uptake, that will destabilize climate even more,” said lead author Marcos Fernández, researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF). “It’s like a positive feedback loop. As you destabilize the carbon balance, then the climate becomes more unstable, as well.”

The most-affected regions include the Mediterranean Basin, South and Central Asia, East Africa and the west coasts of North and Central America. More specifically, mapping suggests that Kenya, India, Pakistan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Iraq are losing their ability to store carbon while in the Americas, it’s the Northern Triangle, Mexico and the west coast of the United States that are the most affected.

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“For the first time, we’ve demonstrated that for certain regions of the world, the land might be reaching a tipping point in terms of its ability to host significantly forested land and absorb significant amounts of carbon,” said co-author Patrick McGuire, a staff meteorologist at the University of Reading and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science in the UK.

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“We need to take care of our land better and not let all the trees get cut down and converted to cropland,” McGuire said. “Trees can hold a lot more carbon than crops or grasslands.”

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The question is “how did the authors come to that conclusion?” The article was fortunately published with a sharing token from Mongabay, so perhaps you can access it.  Sadly I can’t copy the paragraphs that describe the authors’ thinking. but it’s something like if we measure variability in carbon uptake from year to year that might mean “ecosystems” are in trouble.  They talk about Net Biome Production or NBP.

We can access and copy the peer reviewers comments, though, and they explain perhaps better.. .

Fernandez-Martinez et al. take an interesting and novel approach by analysing changes in the interannual variability and autocorrelation of NBP to infer potential early warning signals for a “destabilization” of the terrestrial carbon sink.

Now it could be that internannual variation of NBP might be early warning signals for “destabilization” but first we’d have to define what destabilization means..  and some of us might want to see some evidence that points in that direction.  I don’t think there is any evidence of a link, just conjecture that there might be with calculations using data from Cams and Carboscope.

Anyway, it appears that CAMS and Carboscope are estimates of carbon in the atmosphere.  TRENDY appears to be a vegetation simulation.

My take: they  took two models at the global level for veg and atmospheric carbon. They used a term “destabilization” without making clear exactly what they meant.  And concluded that trees could die.

What is interesting about these kinds of papers is that they take datasets of unknown quality, define things without understanding or describing mechanisms, and then.. ask for monitoring to see if the results mean anything in the real world.

Last sentence of the paper..

Hence, regions showing increased variability and autocorrelations should be monitored in detail to properly understand the mechanisms and consequences behind these changes given that increasing variability and autocorrelation have been shown to act as early-warning signals preceding abrupt phase transitions in simulations of ecosystem functioning.

(so far observations in the “real world” have not entered in.

Here’s my fave:

Given the main role of climate change as a driver of these changes in their temporal behavior, mitigating climate change is needed to prevent further unforeseen changes in land C sinks.

I think you could probably say that without all this data. Here’s my take:

-Climate change affects trees (among other things)

-Trees sequester and store carbon

-With climate change, tree species may slow down growth or may be unable to live, and be replaced by shrubs or grass or desert.

-And we don’t know exactly what will happen one way or the other- nor can we really, because trees and forest ecosystems are so complex.

-Nevertheless, mitigating climate change is a good idea.

There.. was that so hard?

If we thought western mesic forests were in danger, perhaps we could look for signs that those trees were in serious trouble. What signs would those be?

Science Friday: Yale Forest School Scientists on “Proforestation”

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When I first heard about the concept of proforestation, it seemed like an East Coast phenomenon. I thought “So what? Some of the usual suspects wrote an op-ed in Nature and various other outletsl their usual ideological beverage with a carbon twist?” Perhaps it’s timed to be part of a media campaign hoping to affect the Mature and Old Growth initiative of Forest Service and BLM.

Since I’ve worked on letters to the Forest Service about MOG, when I ran across a letter on proforestation by a bunch of scientists from The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment I could recognize both excellent writing and a host of useful references. The themes that the authors touch on are also found in MOG. What’s particularly interesting to me about this letter is that Connecticut has no National Forests, and isn’t a dry forest/wildfire area. They don’t see forests go up in smoke, with associated carbon emissions. And they are talking about state and private land. So it’s interesting to see what they have to say.

Proforestation, on which the working group recommendations are based, is a recent political movement that aims to prevent forest management in the United States under the assumption that excluding humans from forests will serve as a climate change mitigation tool [4, 14, 15]. It also omits important aspects of forest carbon science [16]. It appears to be premised on a single opinion article published in an academic journal last year [14]. The reality is that forest carbon science is complex [17]. Excluding silviculture from Connecticut’s forests could result in them sequestering less atmospheric carbon over time, due to future losses from catastrophic disturbances (such as windstorms, invasive species, and fire) and lack of carbon benefits derived from forest products.
We lack a clear scientific answer to major questions related to forest carbon. These include:
• How do forest carbon dynamics change with forest succession, species composition, climate, and site characteristics? Disturbance events make future forest carbon dynamics, and the longevity of carbon stored in today’s forests, unpredictable [16, 18-23]. These events, which release vast amounts of forest carbon, are predicted to increase with climate change [24]. Appropriate and even optimized forest management can mitigate the risk of disturbance and reduce forest carbon lost in those events [25, 26].
• What is the lifecycle of carbon in forest soils and how does this relate to disturbance, climate, species composition, forest succession, and human activity [18, 22, 27-32]?
• Under what circumstances might unmanaged forests store more carbon than managed forests, and how do time and natural disturbances factor in to this comparison?
• How do methane emissions from forests differ between sites, species composition, and age structure [33-35]?
• What are the climate implications of multiple-use forest management which includes harvested forest products, compared to proforestation? Storage of carbon in forests and/or wood products are climate mitigation components, and wood can also serve as a fossil fuel reduction mechanism [1, 16, 36-38]. System level forest carbon accounting is complex and dynamic which highlights a need for comprehensive, and product specific, wood life cycle analyses and comparisons with non-renewable alternatives and market forces [39]. Woody biomass generated in forest management activities can bring additional climate benefits by either storing carbon in forest products [37] and/or replacing fossil-based counterparts [40].

Proforestation does not account for system level carbon dynamics related to forest products and misleads us to conclude that its adoption would be the most carbon positive of all forest policy choices. Given such questions, proforestation is an undemonstrated, unwise approach as a climate solution while active management provides a suite of approaches that can be tailored to find solutions to known and emerging threats to forest carbon storage and health. The proforestation movement misleads us to believe that people are not part of natural forests, a belief based on a dichotomy of nature and culture that has been shown to promote environmental degradation instead of conservation [41]. Indeed, for thousands of years before European colonists arrived, Indigenous peoples stewarded and actively managed Connecticut’s forests, through prescribed fire and harvesting of wood for a variety of uses. This active management by people still influences the forests we see today. The myth of a “pristine” unmanaged forest being the natural state of Connecticut’s forests is just not accurate or necessarily desirable for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, or other ecosystem services. Active forest management has been crucial through time for ensuring that our forests are healthy and resilient while meeting society’s needs.

What the proforestation movement gets right is that poor land management can decimate the biodiversity and ecosystem services of forests. Just as sound management has conserved our contemporary forest after a period of destructive agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, we now need to rely on ongoing management to steward these forests through multiple threats, including more frequent and intense weather events such as droughts and storms, and losses due to invasive pathogens. These increasing threats reflect the fact that Connecticut’s forests are human influenced, they have been for millennia and this is even more true today due to climate and other environmental changes. Keeping forests healthy and growing under conditions of multiplying and intensifying threats will require the ongoing human intervention that management offers. Management allows us to maintain growing forests, and growing forests sequester carbon.

Silviculture enables us to facilitate successional trajectories that will make forests more resilient to ongoing and emerging threats from global change, while supporting rural livelihoods and sustaining biodiversity. The science of silviculture in Connecticut is not about cutting primary forests, planting monocultures, or other such extractive practices which deliver only short-term gain. Outdated caricatures of forestry professionals are detrimental and threaten the resiliency of our state’s forests. Silviculture is about sustaining healthy forestlands, which involves anticipating and responding to disturbances that threaten long-term forest health, through science- and practice-informed strategies.

There are also broader issues at play here relating to sustainable rural economies and environmental justice and responsibility. For example, ‘preservation’ of a wealthy society’s resources leads to greater exploitation of forest resources in places where less regulation and scientific knowledge exist to ensure sustainable management. This concept has been described as the illusion of preservation [42]. We are loath to be drawn into the nuances of these arguments, but suffice to say that meeting energy and wood demands must involve globally-coordinated initiatives with consideration to the differences between biogenic carbon emissions and fossilized carbon emissions [17, 37, 43, 44]. In Connecticut, we have restored our state forestland through management which can continue to maintain – and even enhance – the carbon, other environmental, and rural community benefits of our forestlands. Exporting demands for forest products to regions without our rich scientific and practitioner expertise is damaging to both our state and the planet. Connecticut needs to support the DEEP Forestry Division by providing them with enough resources to fully, and appropriately, steward our State forestlands.

We end by stating that we are ProForests, ProBiodiversity, ProClimate and ProRuralCommunities. In Connecticut, that necessitates being ProManagement.

Attached is the letter with the references and the names of the signatories. My bold on the first sentence.

The “Climate in Forest Plans” Roundup- What Are Your Observations and Why?

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I thought this was funny, it’s from Guido Núñez-Mujica of The Breakthrough Institute and used with his permission. No, I don’t addressing climate mitigation in forest plans is like this, except we could substitute emissions from recreation, wildfire, grazing, timber and so on..not to speak of what we used to call “sustainable operations” or the workings of the agency itself.

From Guido Núñez-Mujica here https://twitter.com/OSGuido/status/1628833580649684992/photo/1

Now it’s time to share your examples of climate in forest plans.. I posted on some possible ways to look at “how well” forest plans deal with climate change last week. As I said before, one of my contacts had been asked “what forest plans do you consider to have handled climate change best”. So this thread is an opportunity for anyone to weigh in on the forest plans you have worked with, and what you think.

How does addressing climate change make a difference in desired conditions (maybe resilience, but I think many folks are managing for that anyway via projects), standards and guidelines, land allocation and other plan-level decisions?

That’s precisely what we should be able to see in some of the new forest plans. So please let us know what you think!
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In a research paper to be discussed later this week, the authors state:

Forest planning is a relatively obscure and byzantine policy process for most ordinary citizens. In contrast, it is a high priority to interest groups because of the ability to impact long-term outcomes on the national forests.

I will be interesting to see who has actually read forest plans (and EIS’s) among us. For one thing, they are so very complex (obscure and byzantine, as the authors said). For another thing, an individual’s opinion probably does not matter much, so in the weighting of spending of time, reading plans may not rank highly. There seem to be no powerful interest groups representing “general interest” or “recreation tolerance” or even “resilient ecosystems”- the latter concept seems to get broken down into the same old “manage vegetation or not”; even when there isn’t a timber industry to speak of. So I think it will be interesting to see who among us has taken the time to read what’s in them and why.

Finally, for those who are following individual forest plans, it would also be interesting to track whether and how climate change comes up in forest plan-related litigation. And whether “integrity” and “resilience” are ever in tension- seems like they might be.

Why People Disagree About (How Forest Plans Deal With) Climate Change. II. Some Philosophical Orientations and The Problem of Climate Everythingism

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Ski area parking lot.There are many AGW-Climate Change philosophical differences that are out there that may influence forest planning. I’m sure there are more that readers can add. I’ll use “you” to mean a forest or other planning entity.

1. How do you handle uncertainties about future climates? How explicit are you about them? How do you treat model outputs, or like Denver Water, do you use a pretty broad uncertainty envelope? How do you combine uncertainties about climate with uncertainties about other things.. population, recreation use, economics? Do you use scenarios and involve the public, or what is your approach to discussing uncertainties with the public? (this was discussed more generally in the previous post).

2. I give adaptive management its own category here because it is something that the FS (and BLM?) were supposed to be doing, but may have had trouble.  At least at the level that some have talked about it (extremely formalized, scientist design, and so on).  Perhaps at the District human being observational level or the specialist level (say fuels or wildlife or reforestation)  it is working just fine using old-fangled communication- person to person and through professional groups. But maybe different “adaptive management” aficionados simply mean different things by their use of the term. How is adaptive management currently working on the forest, and how is the plan going to help- does it have a role; what are the requirements of the 2012 Rule on this, and how are they being applied?

3. Climate mitigation. Seems like we mostly hear about SOSO (same old same old) with regard to mitigation. ENGOs who didn’t want to cut trees now say it’s bad for carbon. ENGO’s who don’t like cattle grazing say it’s bad for methane. Less fossil fuel leasing seems like it would be mitigation, until you analyze it and discover that the sources simply move to private land or offshore. And what about recreation? Most recreators, myself included, use vehicles to access NF lands that are powered by fossil fuels directly or via electrical sources. What are the key issues in the plan vis a vis mitigation?

4. There’s also a bit of meta-thinking that I call Climate Everythingism.
To some, climate now the mantle for everything- other environmental issues, all natural hazards, as we have seen with EPA, CEQ, and many media outlets now have environment as a subset of climate. Check out the WaPo main page where Environment is a subset of Climate.

Others think that climate another source of uncertainty, like population and economics, which all need to be addressed through planning- and it is the role of each discipline to learn about what CC means for their resource.

Most Everythingists I’ve met consider themselves to be “climate experts” (whether I would consider them that or not). But for every Forest Service Everythingist who thinks we need climate specialists advising on each project, there is someone outside the Forest Service who thinks the agency itself can be done away with and replaced by a Climate Adaptation Agency staffed with.. climate experts. 
I often find what is least talked about in these discussions are the disciplinary and authority implications of Everythingism, as well as moving the locus of knowledge and authority away from experts on the ground and the people most affected. At its worst Everythingism could be a systemic antagonist to the idea of empowering disadvantaged communities. I find Everythingists not usually involved with forest planning, but their ideas are in the atmosphere, and may well be among partners and the public, so I think it’s something to be aware of.

Addition: I just ran a across a job ad for a Climate Editor at Vox Media on Linked-In. Under “About the Job” it says:

Climate change is the most important story in the world. It’s no longer a looming consequence in the far-off future, but rather a present challenge that’s forcing all of us to adapt. Wildlife and natural habitats are disappearing, driving a biodiversity crisis.

If you’re an Everythingist, I suppose biodiversity is a subset of climate. It’s a mantle that you can place over everything, except perhaps non-native invasive species. But we don’t hear about the latter much anymore.

Please add your own philosophical differences that may affect the approach to climate change in forest plans.

Why People Disagree About (How Forest Plans) Deal With Climate Change. I. Introduction and How Broad are the Scenarios?

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This is the first of a series of posts that lay out a framework for thinking about how forest plans address climate change.  Some people are curious as to what we might think are the forest plans that have handled climate change the best, and so we’ll have a post later that will ask that question.

But I think we need to be upfront on where we stand on different approaches or philosophies for how AGW-CC (I’ll just call it CC for the rest of these posts) should be handled.  It seems to me that there are two components to this question: first, do you agree with the approach of how they handled it, and second, given their approach, how well do you think they handled it?

I hope by consciously thinking about how diverse approaches might work, we might be able to contemplate the true diversity of approaches in addition to what is in current forest plans.

One of the things I did around 2010-ish was help forests in Region 2 develop their “climate action plans”, I think they were called.   I was the climate change coordinator for the Region, so I was on some of the conference calls. The interesting thing about this effort was that it was not tied to NFMA planning, but more about “are there things we are doing we would do differently if we considered climate change?”.  In many cases, they already were considering CC and the plan simply documented how they were thinking about it.

Our Regional view was to use generic scenarios based on down-scaled models (I mean really generalized, like “hotter and drier” generalized) and to use a “no regrets” strategy.
Just now I tried to find a definition for “no regrets’ strategies and discovered a plethora of literature with not-exactly-identical definitions.
But I liked this one from Law Insider (!)

no regrets means taking climate-related decisions or actions and/or investments that can be justified from economic, social, and environmental perspectives whether or not a specific climate threat materializes in the future, and this is achieved by building resilience to different hazards/risks (Heltberg, Siegel, Jorgensen, 2009; Siegel, 2011).

Well, Region 2, if I can generalize, has always been a relatively poor Region and employees are pretty pragmatic and don’t tend to overthink things.

So we ran through some of this stuff with one forest (may have been the Nebraska) and the conversation went something like this:

“So we need to protect our riparian areas because it might get hotter and drier?” a Forest employee asked.

“Right,” we said.

“And we need to monitor what we do to be sure it works as the climate is changing?”

“Yes,” we agreed.

“In other words, for climate we should be doing the things we were already supposed to be doing?”

“Well, there are some differences, but.. pretty much.”

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That was perhaps too minimalist for some. Today I’d add consciously managing for resilience.

But why not manage for resilience under a variety of future climate (and other) scenarios?  When we visited Denver Water and looked at their scenario planning, climate wasn’t the only unknown.  At the time, they also considered different plausible scenarios about populations and their uses of water. If you look at their website, they are not even sure about hotter and drier, but also include hotter and wetter.

Denver Water is adapting to, and addressing, climate change through what it calls “scenario planning.” That means building flexibility into its operations and decisions to prepare for a range of plausible futures climate change could bring. Simply put, those scenarios range from warmer and wetter to hotter and drier.

“Uncertainty is the name of the game going forward,” said Laurna Kaatz, Denver Water’s climate program manager. “We don’t know exactly how it will unfold on the ground, but we do know it’s going to keep warming. Climate change is here and now.”

Then there’s resilience of communities to climate hazards (or things now defined to be “climate” hazards such as drought, wildfire, and flooding). For example, in this Western Watersheds Assessment study plan,

but could take the form of collaborative scenario planning processes that engage diverse stakeholders to explore climate projections, sources of vulnerability, and strategies for increasing resilience.

Which sounds like what the FS may have done a while back (at least some forests did this with the aid of FS R&D) . And of course, community resilience is related to economics, so that ties back to a topic that fits forest planning.

Next time: Some Categories for Climate Approaches in Forest Plans

CEQ Uses First Street’s “Wildfire Risk Maps” Instead of US Government Maps in EJ Screening Tool- Why?

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There are two current tools (at least) one by CEQ and one by EPA.  We’ll look at EPA’s in another post. Both of them refer to the CEJST, which is:

Federal agencies will use the CEJST for the Justice40 Initiative. It will help them identify disadvantaged communities that should benefit from the Justice40 Initiative. The Justice40 Initiative seeks to deliver 40% of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments to disadvantaged communities. These investments relate to seven areas: climate change; clean energy and energy efficiency; clean transit; affordable and sustainable housing; the remediation and reduction of legacy pollution; the development of critical clean water and wastewater infrastructure; and training and workforce development. This task of delivering the benefits of hundreds of Federal programs to disadvantaged communities is challenging. It requires fundamental and sweeping changes to the ways in which the whole Federal government operates

So that’s why it’s important to us. It will be a tool to disperse government funds, so .. should be looked at quite carefully.  There are a variety of ways to do this.  This one combines data sets collected for other purposes with intentions of “justice” so certainly deserves some scrutiny.

First, CEQ used First Street’s questionable Wildfire Risk Maps instead of the USG’s own. Why?  We’ve critiqued those maps here.

If you read their v. 1.0 technical support document, table 2 on page 18, it stands out among the other sources.    If CEQ needs wildfire risk data, wouldn’t it make more sense to ask the wildfire agencies… and if it doesn’t work for CEQ for some reason… explain why and ask the agencies to analyze that?  I think it’s really quite puzzling, given the extra transparency and quality that government data requires (e.g. the Data Quality Act).  And taking public comment and so on.

Anyway, that was a surprise!

If you think it’s a bad idea to use their data, or have other improvements to suggest,  they have a couple of places on the website to give feedback.

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Here’s what I did.. check out some area you know. (they use census tracts so that leads to straight lines where you can imagine more of a gradient).

And then on the right side, you can check out why it is “overburdened and underserved.”

For example, I picked one next to Boulder, Colorado an area I’m familiar with.

It explains:

This tract is considered disadvantaged because it meets more than 1 burden threshold AND the associated socioeconomic threshold.

  • Expected building loss rate

    Economic loss to building value resulting from natural hazards each year 95th
    above 90th percentile
  • Expected population loss rate Fatalities and injuries resulting from natural hazards each year 96th
    above 90th

And

Low income People in households where income is less than or equal to twice the federal poverty level, not including students enrolled in higher ed
71st above 65th
I guess that must be true, but having looked at real estate in the area, I thought this was odd.

Housing cost

Share of households making less than 80% of the area median family income and spending more than 30% of income on housing 55th  not above 90th
 If that were true, they must be housing low income people there at low cost. Which would be worth investigating.

Wastewater discharge

Modeled toxic concentrations at parts of streams within 500 meters   96thabove 90th
What’s interesting is you can also look at the wastewater modelling results in the neighboring census blocks and try to detect a pattern.

Also:   High school education

                 Percent of people ages 25 years or older whose high school education is less than a high school diploma 13% above 10% percent
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What I’m most interested in is the “building loss rate and the expected population loss rate from natural hazards”. If we go to the next census tract west  (east of 28th street in Boulder proper) we see that the expected building loss rate is above the 90th percentile but the expected population loss rate is 86th rather than 96th.  I wonder why.
It turns out you can find out their thinking in this document.
Anyway the  building loss rate  is from FEMAs  National Risk Index and is filed under “climate change” (?).  As far as I can tell,  But when I looked around for what hazards FEMA was talking about, I could only find floods.  Which of course, First Street also models.  And sure enough, CEQ is using First Street flood models instead of FEMA’s.  So are they double-counting floods or what other hazards are being counted? I don’t think it’s earthquakes in Boulder County.

Friday News Roundup: Hogs, Montana Story, Bourbon and Decarbonization

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Photo North Dakota Game and Fish

Best headline.. goes to the Cowboy State Daily for

Hogpocalypse Now? Feral Swine In Colorado, Montana Could Bode Badly For Wyoming

 

Hordes of hogs running wild across Wyoming aren’t likely anytime soon, some hunters and wildlife agents said, but feral pigs reaching the Cowboy State could be inevitable.

There have already been reports of feral swine showing up in Colorado, North Dakota and Utah, and there’s serious concern over them pushing south from Canada into Montana.

Perhaps worse, people sometimes deliberately transplant feral hogs, apparently because they want the opportunity to make money by offering “canned” hog hunts, Montana’s state veterinarian, Martin Zaluski told Cowboy State Daily.

“Much of the spread of feral hogs has been in stock trailers being pulled down highways at 80 miles per hour,” he said.

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As a special treat for our TSW Montana residents… here’s a Livingston, Montana resident (Walter Kirn) getting grumpy ( in a good writer way) about a recent New York Times Magazine story…

Walter: There always has to be a center of evil in the United States, right? For a while, it was northern Idaho, like you say, which did genuinely have some Christian white supremacist compounds as it were. But so now I guess it’s Montana’s turn in the stocks. But more than that, I think the piece was a lifestyle piece gone wrong. Everything about it was exotic. Even if I were Marxist, I’d want to move to Montana after I read this piece. It looked unreconstructed and wild and full of characters and conflict and so on….

The funny thing is that having lived there for 32 years, this is now about the third cycle of ‘Montana as militia threat’ that I’ve watched in the press. In the nineties around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, there was something called the Patriot movement and the militia movement. And it was usually located in Montana because, for readers of the New York Times, you can pretty much set any scary trend in Montana without anyone checking on it. It’s harder nowadays because there are direct flights to Bozeman and there didn’t use to be…

Walter: But accompanying the text of this piece, and even more damning in the eyes of the person who knows nothing about Montana, were a bunch of photographs that were absolutely completely manipulated and filtered in the way of like dystopian campaign ads. They put dark filtering on them, and they showed things like some kind of a Republican meeting in a hotel ballroom or something, but filtered so as to look like some satanic pageant.

Here’s a link to the discussion with Walter and Matt Taibi on Substack.  It might be behind a paywall.

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Another interesting article on the White Oak Initiative and how they need openings for seedlings to get started:

But the intensity of land use a century or two ago tipped the balance too far. “Back then, we did wide-scale burning on purpose or accident. We abused the system with practices we don’t think [are] appropriate now,” says Stringer. That realization led to policies that introduced decades of fire suppression, such that shade-loving trees have enveloped the undergrowth again. Add in pests and invasive plants encouraged by climate change, and baby oaks don’t stand a chance.

But controlling invasive species and pests, and cutting to provide light to the understory, takes commitment and resources many forest owners don’t have. “Missouri’s forest cover is 15 million acres, and 12 million acres are privately owned. Only 10 percent of that is being actively tended to,” notes Missouri State Forestry specialist Hank Stelzer. “Landowners have the attitude, ‘If it’s green, it’s good.’ So the forest is like an unweeded garden, and we know what happens when you neglect a garden. You don’t get large tomatoes; you get insects and disease. We see the same thing in woodlands. We don’t get the quality white oaks or those that can sustain climate change.”

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Decarbonization Corner

Following the Money- Climate Edition

(note there are many things that people can do or fund about decarbonizing, from concrete to nuclear to hydro to geothermal; this focuses on anti-fossil fuels and pro- wind and solar.)

I find ENGO’s interesting and where the $ come from, and to what specific ends.

Robert Bryce apparently had the patience and the facility to look into climate related ones.. which relates to our federal lands issues in that, for example,  “rapid scaling” and “stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Given that other ENGO’s are likely to litigate some of the rapid scaling (but will be with the big $ on the “stopping the expansion”), it would be interesting to see (if we could, but I don’t think we can) what this money will be used for.

 

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Building Things, McKibben on the IRA

Bill McKibben in this New Yorker article  which is generally interesting.. talks about rural people being influenced by outside (bad, fossil fuel) groups.

The same kind of manufactured opposition is shaping up on land. For many years, surveys found that solar energy was incredibly popular across political groups—Republicans, independents, and Democrats all favored far more public support for photovoltaics. But front groups sponsored by the fossil-fuel industry have begun sponsoring efforts to spread misinformation, crisscrossing the country with slide shows claiming that wind turbines routinely catch on fire, or lower property values, and that solar farms shed toxic chemicals into the water supply. “There’s always been some run-of-the-mill nimbyism,” Norris, the North Carolina solar developer, said. “But there’s an increasingly organized opposition effort.”

So.. I’ve actually attended public meetings on these things and I didn’t see any sign of “front groups”. Maybe the difference is that it seems like a good idea. until it industrializes your landscape. And we were told industrialized landscapes were bad and to be resisted, until now. Notice how concern for the environment is now NIMBYism and even “the culture wars”. I don’t know the answer, but more listening, and less critiquing might be a start. And if our neighbors, protecting what they see as their environment, become the key to the “climate crisis slipping irretrievably out of control” then perhaps someone has bet on the wrong decarbonization horse.

Based on the way that project approvals work, it’s going to come down to a county-by-county basis,” Norris told me. “I thought solar energy was insulated from the culture wars until relatively recently, but it’s getting worrying.” Nationally, Billy Parish said, “We used to be able to say solar polled in the low nineties for popularity. But I think that’s probably begun to trail off a bit, become a little more polarized. It’s still very popular, but there’s definitely slippage.” And that slippage could mean a thousand different fights, each one delaying change past the point where the climate crisis slips irretrievably out of control. “Thanks to the I.R.A., money is not the chief obstacle,” Gillis said. “What Congress did was change the economics of the technologies we’re talking about. But what they did not do was remove all the other barriers slowing us down. Really, economics was the tailwind for renewables already. It just got better with the I.R.A. But the other friction remains.”

Is Permitting Reform Paternalistic? And- Let’s Discuss: Manchin’s Permitting Reform Bill Specifically

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This proposed bill language of the current bill would affect the FS and BLM with regard to certain projects (not of the veg management persuasion). The link takes you to the full bill, the the section by section, and a summary of the changes.

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Sidenote: The permitting reform discourse, as opposed to the permitting reform bill.  As Marcela Mulholland of Data for Progress pointed out at the Breakthrough Institute conference that I posted about here,  the (at least “progressive”) discourse around permitting reform is not very productive.  It’s like the concept itself is wrong (everything is currently perfect), which seems kind of irrational.  What human, let alone government, activity, can’t be improved?   Why is the concept, as opposed to the reality, such a flashpoint? A person, apparently on the New York State Climate Action Council, and I had a discussion on Twitter that reflects this.. I actually thought it was kind of funny.

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Oh, and I thought this op-ed on the Hill by Catherine Wolfram “Progressives should have supported Manchin’s permitting reforms: Here’s why” had some good points.

Indeed, the arguments that the progressives make against carbon pricing are exactly why they should have supported Manchin’s permitting reforms. Blocking fossil fuel projects makes it more costly to deliver energy with existing fossil fuels. In effect, it creates a kind of carbon price, just one that’s haphazardly applied, usually extremely high, and where the revenues accrue to fossil fuel producers instead of the government. At the end of the day, low-income households’ energy bills go up.

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But let’s move on to what’s specifically in the bill.

Projects are defined as “those projects for the construction of infrastructure to develop, produce, generate, store, transport, or distribute energy; to capture, remove, transport, or store carbon dioxide; or to mine, extract, beneficiate, or
process minerals which also require the preparation of an environmental document under the NEPA and an agency authorization, such as a permit, license or other approval.

It seems to me as if it’s mostly speeding up things (documents and disagreements and litigation) that can otherwise languish (and don’t we know it…). That’s what it says in the summary.

WHAT THE BILL DOES: Accelerate, not bypass. The bill will accelerate permitting of all types of American energy and mineral infrastructure needed to achieve energy security and climate objectives, without bypassing environmental laws or community input.

Here was the one I thought will be interesting to observe (if this passes):

Sec. xx15. Litigation Transparency
Topline Summary:
• Requires public reporting and a public comment opportunity on consent decrees and settlement agreements seeking to compel agency action affecting energy and natural resources projects.

Detailed Summary:
• Subsection (a) defines civil actions, consent decrees, and settlement agreements covered under this section.
• Subsection (b) requires that agencies publish online the notice of intent to sue and the complaint in a covered civil action not later than 15 days after receiving service. The subsection also requires agencies seeking to enter into a covered consent decree or settlement to publish online the proposed consent decree or settlement and provide an opportunity for public comment not later than 30 days before filing the consent decree or settlement with a court.
• Subsection (c) requires an agency to consider public comments received on a proposed consent decree or settlement agreement under subsection (b) and authorizes agencies to withdraw or withhold consent if the comments disclose facts or considerations that indicate that the agency’s consent is inappropriate, improper, inadequate, or inconsistent with any provision of law.

What do you all think about this, and about other parts of the bill?

Sierra At Tahoe Ski Area Re-opens

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After the Caldor Fire seriously impacted the ski area, Sierra At Tahoe is open again. As you can see, it was a high intensity portion of the fire, with the previous forest being highly flammable and loaded with decades of heavy dead fuels. After several droughts, the area did not have any salvage operations. The area is also known to have nesting pairs of goshawks around.

As you can see, snow sports people will be enjoying a new experience of skiing and boarding, without so many trees ‘hindering their personal snow freedoms’. *smirk*

Climate Scientists (Re?)Discover Trees Produce Shade

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From our friends at Center for Western Priorities. Honestly I kind of got a laugh out of this, as plants, animals, insects and so on picked up on this billions of years ago.  It’s not the study so much, but the  CWP summary…

A new study finds that protected forests with limits on human activity are significantly cooler than neighboring forests that lack protections.

 The findings suggest the cooling effect is strongest in boreal forests at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, which make up about 27 percent of total global forest area.

The researchers attribute the cooler temperatures to the fact that protected forests have more vegetation and a more complex structure that creates a buffer against heat. An analysis of forest canopies shows protected areas have higher leaf densities, which means more shade and cooler temperatures that help protect biodiversity near the forest floor.

“The cooling effect is very important for life below the tree canopy near the ground,” said co-author Pieter De Frenne, a climate researcher at the University of Ghent. He added that most forest biodiversity is in that zone, including in temperate, mid-latitude forests.

Oregon State University forest ecologist Matthew Betts said the findings of the study are important but that further research is needed to determine how they hold up in the United States.

“At the moment we don’t have under-canopy data for large tracts of the planet,” he said. “Pieter has done a great job of implementing a network of under-canopy climate stations across Europe, but we don’t have anything like that in North America.”

I’d say unless they’re burned up… say, for example my photo of the Hayman Fire above. I don’t have too many photos because my friends don’t like to hike there.. due to lack of shade. Oh well, I suppose there could be a study of that. I think that was the point of Zach Steele and coauthors in the paper mentioned in posts here and here  last week, that forested lands can lose “forested” old-growth-y habitat due to wildfires, regardless of the level of “protection” unless “protection” involves being  protected from wildfires..

I’m kind of against using satellite data to make Global Pronouncements of What We Need to Do, as an average across the world is meaningless to a piece of land.  A So it amounts to a new class of folks -“climate scientists” telling local people and governments what to do in the name of “climate” .. oh and “biodiversity.” There’s obviously a power and privilege dynamic here with research institutions, scientific journals (wow, they say their conclusions impact the whole planet!), the media, and international ENGO’s who support this kind of thing, apparently uncritically. The voices questioning this tend to be social scientists, continually pointing out what I have just said, but the climate/media/ENGO behemoth rolls on.  Thanks to you social scientists, you have many supporters!

How’s this title for hubris:  Protected areas provide thermal buffer against climate change.

Maybe people from mesic areas don’t have the understanding and experience of shade that those of us from drier areas do. Or perhaps it’s just disciplinary swamping and rediscovery of what we already know by People With Large Datasets.