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.
Jim Furnish, right, a former deputy chief at the Forest Service, makes a point with Dave Mertz, a former natural resources officer with the agency, on a visit to the Black Hills National Forest. “The Forest Service managers are not keeping up with the real world,” Furnish said. Marc Heller/E&E News
Thanks to Jim Furnish for sending a copy of his letter for discussion.
I write as a loving critic to confront you about the future. Today, my 77th birthday, occasions much reflection after departing the agency over 20 years ago. My hope is that you share this letter broadly to stimulate conversation about agency action on the challenges ahead. I hope you embrace the same goal that inspired me in my career: a Forest Service that achieves greatness equal to that of the magnificent estate in its trust.
From the tempest that roiled the Forest Service in the 1990s emerged a policy and a plan – ecosystem management and the Northwest Forest Plan – that envisioned a very different future predicated on principles of ecological sustainability. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule followed shortly after; controversial within the agency, yes, but broadly appreciated elsewhere. The Roadless Rule withstood lengthy litigation challenges to finally become one of the boldest legacies in agency history. Promising winds of change blew strong toward a learning organization confronting a changing climate, lofty expectations, and fraught politics.
Climate science has advanced evidence of worsening pressures on forests, fire consequences among them, but also highlighting the valuable role forests play by sequestering and storing carbon. President Biden’s recent Executive Order 14072 mandates conservation of mature and old growth forests (MOG), specifically, as a mission priority and opportunity for the Forest Service to use public forest assets to mitigate climate effects. The agency’s response to date has been tepid at best, hardly an enthusiastic embrace of the spirit of the EO to fundamentally remake agency MOG policy in keeping with the promising vision of ecosystem management.
Forest fires provide a visceral drama that MOG forests lack, yet these forests do vastly greater work providing a broad array of ecosystem services that we desperately need, at no cost. I appreciate the challenges of improving agency performance on our fire dilemma, but you must also recognize the linkage between fire issues and MOG imperatives as you address both in synergistic fashion.
The current fire dilemma and MOG opportunity create an urgency to define a different, compelling future. I illustrate this pivot point by citing the owl crisis, when a federal judge determined that agency officials at the highest level had “willfully violated the law” in efforts to appease timber industry. This condemnation prompted Jack Ward Thomas, in one of his first acts as Chief, to demand that employees obey the law. How humiliating. Is it any wonder that forest managers were not in the “room where it happened” during development of the Northwest Forest Plan?
Organizations are birthed, grow and improve, then typically decline, necessitating reformation lest they die. The Forest Service has a storied history, but a clear eyed assessment of the agency today suggests it needs rebirth. I recognize that politics can muddle the waters, but your agency has the resources and obligation to define itself, something it has yet to do in the context of the post-owl ecosystem management era. Responding forcefully to EO 14072 could point the way to a new Forest Service model for effectively addressing forest carbon and fire – and the future.
To that point, I believe your forthcoming MOG policy is a legacy issue, a time of turning. But did you consider an interim prohibition on logging MOG timber, pending completion of measures to conserve MOG forests? Why not evaluate all pending timber sales for their impact on MOG forests? Why no public statements heralding this opportunity to buttress MOG protections? The Forest Service continues to log MOG forests, completely undermining the call to conserve them. Is this simply because EO 14072 does not explicitly prohibit it? In this I hear echoes of the agency’s response to the spotted owl issue. History did not look kindly on the Forest Service’s handling of the owl crisis when the agency failed to take appropriate actions, and history is watching again.
Our national forests and grasslands are increasingly important as climate issues worsen, beckoning you to the challenge of enhancing the role of MOG forests and their carbon attributes. This is not the time for procedural and process delays. Forest carbon possibly represents the most valuable national forest asset, but the Forest Service has not yet elevated consideration and management of forest carbon to the prominent place it deserves. The situation calls for decisive leadership action.
As Deputy Chief, I found myself in the forefront of efforts to resolve the decades-long roadless area controversy. Importantly, the Forest Service’s own logging and road construction activity posed the greatest threat to the integrity of roadless areas. Yet we changed; providing durable protection by developing a timely, forward thinking, effective solution via a federal regulation. You now find yourself in a similar situation as Forest Service enabled logging poses the greatest threat to MOG forests. President Biden’s EO 14072 provides the impetus and justification to advance the conservation legacy of the Forest Service on behalf of MOG forests. I urge you to seize this moment to craft a creative and robust response as you embrace the mandate to steward the public’s magnificent forest estate.
By Tristantech – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113868246
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments on the last post. Today I thought we might dive into a real-world example of the pros and cons of using the DCN (Dominant Climate Narrative) on a specific incident. Note: I am not saying AGW did not contribute.. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. But let’s try to look at all the factors and think about solutions. My proposition is that the DCN and other popular narratives overwhelmed other observations and conclusions which did not fit.
I’ll use the Marshall Fire as an example.
First, let me start off with a pre-DCN story, from probably forty years ago, and probably in south Central Oregon, where I was working at the time. I noticed that every year was expected to be a bad fire year. Here are the two options. 1. It rained/snowed a lot so a lot of vegetation will grow and dry out and there will be greater fuel loadings. 2. Winter was dry so everything will be drier so there will be fewer fuels, but they will be drier. Either way, it was going to be a bad fire year. That was then.
Then let me show how complicated this is in reality, especially in monsoon country. I’d like to give a shout out to Dr. Matt Reeves of Rocky Mountain Station for modelling, getting feedback from people on the ground, and fixing their models based on real world observations. Check out this video in terms of the complexity.. like he says, depending on when the monsoons come, warm or cool season grasses respond differently. Also note that in parts of the west, if it’s too dry, there is very little in terms of fuels; he’s got an excellent example of that.
Anyway, back to the Marshall Fire. It was a grass fire in high winds that burned through several urban or suburban communities in the Front Range north of Denver last December. I paid particular attention to it because where I live also has many grass fires in high winds, including a recent one right out my office window.
Caused by Climate
Let’s also look at the exact words used in news stories, as the idea of “causes” is pretty complex. Any journalism grad students out there interested in doing a study? In this Colorado Public Radio story, they quote someone who said it, not exactly the same as claiming it themselves.
“The impact of climate change was undeniable in the Boulder County fires
Regional land managers draw a clear line between the fire and climate change.
“This is a result of climate change,” said Stefan Reinold, the resource manager for parks and open space in Boulder County. “It is impacting communities across the west. This drought and having no snow is outside the norm.””
Or in this article, it’s “the face of climate change.”
But what did our science friends at NOAA say?
High winds, even with occasional hurricane-force gusts, are not unusual in this “foothills” region, where the eastern prairies meet the Rockies. The day of the windstorm, atmospheric pressure dropped sharply east of the Rockies, and strong downslope winds followed. At the base of the foothills west of Denver, wind gusts reached 100 miles per hour.
But winds alone didn’t account for the destruction. In the months leading up to this wildfire, climate conditions set the stage for a disaster. The spring of 2021 brought unusually wet conditions, encouraging vigorous plant growth. Starting in June, though, precipitation levels fell below average, and remained well below average for the rest of the year.
OK, so after unusually wet spring (is that AGW also?) precipitation below average and temperatures above average. But of course averages are averages because.. some observations are higher and some are lower. I would have said “the dry conditions we experienced (not the wet ones that encouraged plant growth) are predicted to become more likely under AGW.” That is very different from being a “result” of climate change. Also there is a difference between the same conditions that used to happen, happening more frequently (we know how to adapt, and have to just do those things more often) and things that never happened before happening (where we need to respond differently). I’m not sure that distinction is often made.
Ignitions
This fire was what we call “human caused”. Generally we think wildfires caused by humans are, at least to some extent, their fault and we hold them responsible (hence, prosecuting arson). So I think we need to think this through- it seems like a possible defense for people who start wildfires.. “but for climate change, the fire I started would not have burned up forests and homes, so you can’t hold me solely responsible.” For example, Sierra Pacific and the Moonlight Fire.
We apparently still don’t know exactly what “started” (in the used-to-be-considered causal sense) the Marshall Fire. Contenders include people being irresponsible, something to do with electric wires, and coal seam fires. It seems to me that lighting fires in areas with dry grasses on windy days is a bad idea, regardless of climate change. So, while we are working toward our goal of decarbonization, perhaps it would be useful to focus on improvements in reducing ignitions.. remember the old Smokey Bear.. “only you”? Maybe it’s time to bring him back..
The Frequently Maligned Cow and Grassy Fuels
Note that Boulder County Open Space Wildfire Risk Management talks about how the Open Spaces “evolved with fire” and includes “tree thinning, livestock grazing, prescribed burning and weed management.” It also includes fire prevention (anti-ignition) practices and education. On the TV news coverage, I saw a rancher who showed how the fire had burned right up to a grazed pasture. While overgrazing removes too much plant cover, it’s pretty clear that (cattle) grazing reduces grassy fuels. It’s also pretty clear that that helps both with AGW-related drying and natural variability related drying. Cows can be good!
Fires are Now in Cities/Suburbs Due to Climate Change
We are sitting ducks to the repercussions of the climate that we have to deal with year-round
Patty Limerick, noted western historian at University of Colorado, has a different take.
In the last half of the nineteenth century, fires regularly laid waste to Western towns and cities. In April 1863, a fire swept through Denver, leaving “most of the eastern half” of the town “in blackened ruins.” Flagstaff, Arizona, was an epicenter of cyclical combustion, with major fires in 1884, 1886, and 1888. In 1889, three major cities in Washington Territory — Spokane, Ellensburg, and Seattle — went up in flames, leaving their residents hard-pressed to rebuild. In that same year, the residents of Durango watched a fire destroy their downtown.
Throughout the West, Euro-American settlers harvested timber from local forests or sometimes imported ready-cut wooden houses for on-site assembly. They then packed these structures close to each other, with little or no preparation for emergency water supplies. Frequent, devastating fires became a feature of Western urban life. When people caught onto the pattern, they made more use of building materials like brick and stone, created permanent fire departments, and set up better systems for supplying water to firefighters.
Solution: Fire Suppression?
And so, as Limerick points out, we now have suppression folks who are endlessly well.. putting fires out.. of whatever contribution from AGW.
Here is the After Action Report on the fire, so what suppression folks feel that they could have done better. The Colorado Sun had an article here on the AAR. There were communication problems, power knocked out a water plant. I suppose all Front Range fire folks will be reviewing the AAR.
Densification, Evacuation and Public Transport
In case you haven’t noticed this (I was on the El Paso County Planning Commission) it is considered cool, noble and environmentally best to advocate for dense housing and people using public transportation. However, the evacuation during the Marshall Fire (including the livestock evacuations by volunteers from around the Front Range and beyond) was amazingly successful. One wonders if those folks hadn’t had personal vehicles, would that have been as successful? Something to think about.
The insurance industry researchers determined that the Marshall firestorm, as it spread from grasslands into houses, accelerated because flames found abundant fuel and radiant heat ignited closely-packed structures, adding to the ignitions from wind-whipped embers.
“Conflagration happens when you get that proximity,” Roy Wright, chief executive of the insurance institute, said Thursday as his team began their investigation.
Spacing closer than 12 feet favors fire, researchers have established, and gaps between homes of 50 feet or more are advisable, Wright said. “Dispersion is one way to eliminate the domino effect” and with greater spacing “you would not have had so many structures lost.”
**************
As you can see, managing people and fire is complex. Maybe AGW makes it more urgent or more important, and I’m fine with that framing. But as we’ve seen, the solutions are far more complex, and local, and less simplistic than some would believe. Certainly if we banned fossil fuels tomorrow (including fire and emergency vehicles, and air resources, of course), we would still need to deal with wildfires, grasses, wind and all that.
And then the next day it snowed. So there’s just plain old bad luck.
Good morning everyone! I had a great trip to the East Coast. More later on that.
I think Matthew was right about my calling particular kinds of statements “drive-bys”; as he said, that word has intimations of violence, and we don’t need that. I think “throwaway lines” might be in the same category. Or perhaps “generalized knowledge claims without invoking evidence.” These usually occur in an article or a talk as if they were something that everyone knows or believes. The thing is, writers don’t always have time to invoke evidence, so you see those GKCs thrown around a lot. The writers may think that they are true, because they read it somewhere, and it sounded plausible, and fits with a commonly accepted narrative. But often a GKC will lump apples and oranges and kumquats in such a way that the slurry is unrecognizable to people knowledgeable about specific places and practices.
Often it seems to me that a GKC will sprout from something that is true in certain places and situations, but has been generalized to the region/country/world. Who is generating the GKC, and to what end? Often GKCs seem to spread throughout certain media/academic worlds, and it’s unclear exactly where they started, so it’s hard to find the original evidence.
Here’s an example.
“Now fire seasons are all year, due to climate change. “
Many of us live in areas where fall and winter fires were never uncommon. Some of us live in monsoon country and when the grass dries out later in the year, especially if you have a wet year, there’s well, lots of dry grass (especially if not eaten by cows) and high winds.
If (1) ignitions aren’t gotten to right away (which our counties generally do) and (2) if the winds are so fierce that air resources can’t get into the air (and from what I can tell there is not a wind imprint of climate change yet), and (3) if there are people and their structures or animals around, you can get fires that are destructive.
I agree that (4) AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is part of the story.
But there seems to be a tendency, at least in some media, to blame everything (that is bad) on AGW. I’ll call that the Dominant Climate Narrative (your ideas for other names are invited).
The DCN is a problem for a number of reasons:
1. It’s not actually true;
2. AGW is much harder to get at than resilient communities and fire suppression (or other adaptive responses).
Which leads to bad psychological vibes to people who believe what is written. Note that I’m not the only person who has observed this. Our friends at Solutions Journalism are funding a Climate Beacon Newsroom effort:
The Solutions Journalism Network is leading a systems-level change in journalism so that all people – no matter how or where they get their news – have access to rigorous reporting not only about problems, but about promising and evidence-based responses to them as well. This is especially critical for the coverage of our changing climate, where apocalyptic, unsolvable, doom and gloom stories far outweigh those that examine meaningful efforts to advance environmental repair, resilience and adaptation. The news plays a pivotal role in making this information widely available.
3. It tends to promote fear (of our mutual future) and hate (of oil and gas people). Not only that, but I think each person who uses products derived from oil and gas (which is all of us) must sense a weird internal moral tension between “it’s OK for me to use these products” but “people who produce them are bad” and “unless they live in other countries, and we don’t want to look too deeply into the moral behavior of those countries.”
Scapegoating of others for bad things happening has a long and sordid human history.
4. People who don’t believe in the DCN often get labelled as “climate deniers” when we don’t deny climate change.. leading to unnecessary infighting among people of good will which distracts from… doing things to help the problem that we agree exists.
5. Since it is hard to decarbonize in physical world (as opposed to writing-about-it world) people are likely to despair if they believe this narrative. Hmm. Hate, fear and despair. The bad psychological trifecta. And not what we need to make progress.
Other writers have suggested that the DCN is ultimately partisan, or religious, or a plot by China, the WEF, or others, or simply a default to some apocalypticism neurons in the human psyche. I’m agnostic on all that.
Anyway, back to “fire seasons are now all year due to climate change.”
This certainly could be true in some places, I’m not saying it isn’t. But let’s figure out where that is and talk about it.
The Hotshot Wakeup Person with his wildland fire experience also questions this claim on this podcast.
Check out the podcast around 19:02 (actually the whole discussion of the Outside article is interesting) for his discussion of “different regions have different seasons” and “why time until containment is not a good measure of seasonality”.
Finally, this doesn’t have to do with seasonality, but he also points out that if you have more managed fires and prescribed fires that get out of control, more acres doesn’t equal “worse due to climate change”. He is also concerned that the Outside story he looks at says that firefighter mental health issues are framed in the story as due to climate change and not pay and working conditions. Which perhaps should be added to my list of problems: 6. Interventions that will really help the problem will be overlooked, leaving people suffering and 7. DCN might be used as an excuse by people who don’t want to confront their own management mistakes, or ineffective or destructive policy calls.
You might have read this report from UPIs Science News that interestingly attributes tree problems from invasive insects and disease to… climate change.
The researchers point to climate change for the rise in threatened trees saying trees stressed by drought, wildfire, pollution, floods or other extreme conditions open the door for invasive insects or fungi.
Not surprisingly, though, many scientists feel that more invasives are actually caused by lack of appropriate regulation of international trade.
Important measures have been taken to prevent PIP introductions, and while vital, these efforts are insufficient. For perspective, the number of containers (20-foot equivalent units) entering the U.S. annually through 63 ports increased from just over 11 million in 2000 to well over 22 million in 2017 (Source: U.S. Department of Transportation, Maritime Administration). Approximately 75% of containers used in maritime trade include wood packaging, a well-known source of invaders (Meissner et al., 2009). The opportunity for biological invasions is constant and the threat overwhelming, even at our most regulated ports
One direct approach is to “not move firewood”. Many thanks to Faith Campbell for this timely post! Excerpt below, entire post can be found here.
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Clemson University have analyzed how to persuade people not to move firewood – and the tree pests that can accompany it. (Full citation at the end of this blog) Their study is based on five surveys conducted by TNC between 2005 and 2016. These surveys guided TNC’s “Don’t Move Firewood” campaign and its outreach efforts since the beginning in 2008
As Solano et al. note, wood-boring pests continue to enter the country and spread, causing immense damage. Firewood transport by campers is a significant contributor to that spread. Millions of individuals decide whether to move firewood. Yet the scientific literature is quite limited regarding their behavior and TNC’s survey data has never been published.
The patchwork of state and federal quarantines is largely reactive and has failed to prevent continuing spread. The regulatory regime has been further fragmented by APHIS’ deregulation of the emerald ash borer. As a consequence, limiting the spread of pests depends even more on educating campers to behave responsibly – voluntarily.
The TNC’s surveys each focused on different geographic areas and asked different questions in each. So their compilation cannot show trends in awareness or other measures. Nevertheless, the authors find:
Most people in the United States don’t know firewood can harbor invasive forest insects and diseases, but when targeted by effective education they can learn and are likely to change their behavior.
The two best ways to reach the public is through emails confirming campsite reservations and flyers handed out at parks. Web-based information seemed less effective. However, most of the surveys were done before 2011, the year when 50% of adults reported using internet media.
Forestry-related public agencies (especially state forestry departments) are the most trusted sources of information about forest health issues.
It works better to “push” information, not expect people to seek it on their own.
Messages should focus on encouraging the public to make better choices, including how they, themselves, will benefit. Positive, empowering calls to action, like “Buy it Where You Burn It” or “Buy Local, Burn Local” are better than negative messages, such as “Don’t Move Firewood”.
People respond to messages that emphasize protecting forest resources, e.g., ecosystem services like clean water. They response less to messages about forest threats.
Hungerford Lake Recreation Area at Equestrian Campground. Original public domain image from Flickr
Solano et al. describe the ways that different socioeconomic groups differ in their awareness of forest pests and in how they respond to various statements about forests, pests, and messengers. The focus is on how to overcome four psychological barriers to changing behavior that had been identified in a study of climate change. In the firewood context, those barriers were: 1) lack of awareness; 2) mistrust and negative reactions to the messengers; 3) habit; and 4) social comparison, norms, conformity, and perceived poor quality of purchased firewood.
From this work, the authors suggested further work::
Development of education and outreach programs that target those with lower education levels, since, on average, ~60% of people who camp did not graduate from college. Further research is probably needed to identify the most effective messengers and messages.
While 80% of the survey respondents were over 40, the proportion of campers made up of Gen X and millennials is increasing. Managers need to improve outreach for younger audiences. This includes engaging the messengers they trust: scientists, environmentalist politicians, peer networks, and social media.
While women trust the USDA Forest Service and conservation organizations, 55% of campers in a given year are men. Further research is needed to clarify the most effective messengers and messages for men. The outreach agencies should select the messengers that both sexes trust.
Levels of awareness should be assessed both before and after implementing new educational strategies so that the strategies’ effectiveness can be determined.
Here is John Oliver’s pop take on trees as carbon offsets. (23 minutes.) He basically says that they essentially useless for mitigating climate change because they rarely protect forests from any human threats, and certainly do not provide protection commensurate with the carbon they allow to be released (so they may do more harm than good). Rebuttal?
He also mentions that we could lose trees directly as a result of climate change, independent of any forest management (or lack of). Climate change is the #2 reason for loss of forests according to this research on at-risk tree species:
TSW Readers: I seem to remember a discussion here or on Climate Twitter or somewhere that the CARB numbers were wrong. I think it was in a discussion of R-5 using those numbers in a powerpoint.. Does anyone remember whether there are better numbers on wildfire emissions in various states/years?
California’s 2020 Wildfire Emissions Akin to 24 Million Cars
Jan. 5, 2021, 11:03 AM
California’s 2020 wildfire season thwarted the state’s fight against climate change, spewing enough carbon dioxide into the air to equal the emissions of millions of passenger vehicles driving over the course of a year.
Those roughly 9,600 fires burned nearly 4.2 million acres, killed 31 people, and emitted an estimated 112 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to a California Air Resources Board report released Dec. 31. The number is akin to the greenhouse gas emissions of 24.2 million passenger cars driving in a single year, according to a calculator from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
And the emissions figure is expected to increase as the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection calculates final wildfire acreage from the end of the year. An update should be released in March or April, said Dave Edwards, assistant division chief in the Air Board’s air quality, planning, and science division.
Increasing fire intensity and the health dangers of the accompanying smoke is California’s new reality and needs to be faced now, advocates and politicians say.
“We’re always going to have fire in California and, with climate change, we’re going to have more,” said Bill Magavern, policy director for Coalition for Clean Air. “We shouldn’t treat it like this is something that’s going to happen once in a while.”
Wildlife biologist Mike Lockhart admires a golden eagle after trapping, sampling and fitting the raptor with a GPS device in June 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
For years we have been told that oil and gas drilling on federal lands is bad because:
1*Federal land is abused for the profits of a few. (corporate profits)
2* Pristine landscapes are industrialized
3* Placement of infrastructure interferes with recreation
4* Bad for wildlife,
5* Roads bad for water quality, also increase human activity
6* Other environmental concerns
7*Methane leakage, chemicals onsite, and finally
8*Usage of oil and gas (not considering substitution from elsewhere)
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If you’ve ever been to a wind installation (whose footprint is much greater and, with proposed solar, is going to be gigantic), you’ll know where I’m going with this.
Some will argue that sacrificing concerns 1-6 are necessary for a low-carbon future. On the other hand, through time, there will be other choices (including in the new IRA) for low-carbon energy such as the nuclear plant being developed in Kemmerer, Wyoming that will use former coal plant workers and existing powerlines.
Anyway, I’m bringing your attention to three stories about this, two current stories one from Wyofile, one from the AP and one from 2019 from the Hill.
The Wyofile story is an interview with a retired USFWS wildlife biologist now doing resarch for USGS and Conservation Science Global.
The expansion, which energy experts believe may even accelerate further under the Inflation Reduction Act, could pose a serious threat to eagles and other wildlife in certain areas without field-data-driven information to guide avoidance and mitigation strategies, according to Lockhart. …..
This is probably one of the best places, that I know of anyway, for golden eagles in North America,” Lockhart said. “I am a big wind energy advocate and definitely a green energy supporter. But we can’t devastate one really critically important resource for another.”
Maestro has yet to file an official permitting request with the BLM and other permitting authorities. The company didn’t respond to WyoFile inquiries. To move forward, the BLM, which manages more than 80% of the project area, must conduct a full National Environmental Policy Act analysis with public comment.
The Maestro project isn’t the only wind proposal that worries Lockhart.
“I’m equally concerned about the ones that might impact breeding birds and kind of fill in those gaps between the existing wind [energy facilities],” he said.
Another field scientist concerned about modeling over field data (see, it’s not just me).
But Lockhart worries that the vital data from field research is emerging slower than encroaching wind turbines in southern and south-central Wyoming. Federal wildlife managers that can determine where and how wind energy facilities are configured to avoid threatening eagle populations are relying too much on modeling to fill in gaps between actual data, he claims.
“The data is just inadequate for making these [permitting] decisions,” Lockhart said…
Then there are cumulative impacts:
Of particular concern, he said, are proposed wind energy projects that will essentially fill in yet-to-be industrialized areas, such as the Maestro wind energy project in the Shirley Basin. Carlsbad, California-based Maestro Wind LLC proposes to construct up to 327 wind turbines spanning nearly 99,000 acres that straddle Highway 77 here. The project area essentially encompasses the heart of the Shirley Basin’s eagle habitat, according to Lockhart.
Wind energy developers, in the pre-construction federal and state permitting process, typically borrow from existing data on local nesting sites and eagle populations and hire consultants to conduct new surveys in the field. But that information isn’t typically compiled in a way that allows for a comprehensive count or region-wide database that could be used to analyze potential cumulative impacts.
Although the Wyoming Game and Fish Department reviews and comments on wind energy proposals in federal permitting, it doesn’t conduct comprehensive eagle field surveys and mostly defers to federal wildlife authorities, according to Public Information Officer Sara DiRienzo.
“There is a growing concern especially with raptors, such as the golden eagle or the ferruginous hawk, that there may be population impacts, especially when you look at locations that have multiple wind farms,” DiRienzo said. “Understanding the cumulative effects is still ongoing and not conclusive at this time.”
In the mid 90’s there were many Biodiversity workshops, and so I spent much time listening to presentations about endangered birds of various kinds (think owls and murrelets). I had to wonder whether populations go down partially because wildife biologists conduct activities that look like harassment, calling, baiting, trapping and so on. Maybe there are studies on this.
The AP (Matthew Brown) has a lengthy story about eagles and windfarms. I found it in the Colorado Sun. Hopefully it’s not paywalled or is available elsewhere.
The rush to build wind farms to combat climate change is colliding with preservation of one of the U.S. West’s most spectacular predators — the golden eagle — as the species teeters on the edge of decline…
Federal officials won’t divulge how many eagles are reported killed by wind farms, saying it’s sensitive law enforcement information. The recent criminal prosecution of a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the largest U.S. renewable energy providers, offered a glimpse into the problem’s scope.
The company pleaded guilty to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and was ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution after killing at least 150 eagles — including more than 100 goldens at wind farms in Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.
Government officials said the mortality was likely higher because some turbines killed multiple eagles and carcasses are not always found.
Prosecutors said the company’s failure to take steps to protect eagles or to obtain permits to kill the birds gave it an advantage over competitors that did take such steps — even as NextEra and affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits for wind power.
The company remained defiant after the plea deal: NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said bird collisions with turbines were unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized.
Utilities Duke Energy and PacifiCorp previously pleaded guilty to similar charges in Wyoming. North Carolina-based Duke Energy was sentenced in 2013 to $1 million in fines and restitution and five years probation following deaths of 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds at two of the company’s wind projects.
We don’t have to go too far back in time, though, to get a different take. From a news piece on The Hill.
Shawn Smallwood, a California ornithologist, told PolitiFact that about 100 eagles die each year due to impacts with wind turbines…
In truth, wind turbine collisions comprise a fraction of human-caused eagle losses,” Obama-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe wrote in 2016. “Most result from intentional and accidental poisoning and purposeful shooting. The majority of non-intentional loss occurs when eagles collide with cars or ingest lead shot or bullet fragments in remains and gut piles left by hunters. Others collide with or are electrocuted on power lines.”
I think Ashe’s argument is interesting. If x, y and z contribute to decline of a species, when do we try to shut down x, y, and z, and when do we determine that if the majority of the loss is due to x and y, we aren’t concerned about z. Is the way we think about this inconsistent?
Finally, these articles are about collisions. Noise may also interfere with a variety of bird activities. For example, the highly political dramatized sage grouse..from a BLM document:
Recent research has demonstrated that noise from natural gas development negatively impacts sagegrouse abundance, stress levels and behaviors (Blickley et al. 2012; Blickley & Patricelli 2012; Blickley et al. In review). Other types of anthropogenic noise sources (e.g. infrastructure from oil, geothermal, mining and wind development, off-road vehicles, highways and urbanization) are similar to gas-development noise and thus the response by sage-grouse is likely to be similar. These resultssuggest that effective management of the natural soundscape is critical to the conservation and protection of sage-grouse.
TEHRAN – Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh has issued an order, paving the way for women with high capabilities to boost presence in the oil industry
..this is what is wrong with the conservation movement. It has a clear conscience….To the conservation movement, it is only production that causes environmental degradation; the consumption that supports the production is rarely acknowledged to be at fault. The ideal of the run-of-the-mill conservationist is to impose restraints upon production without limiting consumption or burdening the consciences of consumers.
— Wendell Berry
This is a great gig. You can use mega-amounts of fossil fuels in your products (like, say the Outdoor Recreation industry) and pretend you have the moral high ground if you are against production in our country. You can make zillions of bucks of people offshoring manufacturing of your products- and then critique “greedy” producers of the material you use. I still don’t get “domestic oil and gas hate”.. who’s behind it, and what it’s really about. There seems to be a steady stream of “they are bad” articles coming out, especially from sources allied with a certain political party. So yes, there seems to be some kind of organized campaign against these folks. But just the domestic ones (seems equally true in Britain). So a person has to wonder what the end game of this is really about.
I don’t want to be accused of listening to Fox News (the horror!) but I had read somewhere about the idea that Russia had been funding some ENGOs in Europe with the idea of making them more reliant on Russian sources of energy. And Fox News had a story so here it is.
So I said to myself “how could I ever figure out the truth here? Did they or didn’t they?” And then I had a revelation… it doesn’t matter who funds groups if their goals are the same. Keep it in the ground (here) is fundamentally the same as extract it (there). Who wins? other countries of Questionable Human Rights and Environmental Records. Who loses? Our workers and communities. Or is it just that if the environmental and human rights impacts occur elsewhere, we can ignore them more readily? I hope that is not the case.
On thing we learned from Covid is that some things are more essential than others. So let’s take a look at where the fundamentals of our economy (fossil fuels) are currently coming from.
In the every-handy EIA information, we can find a list of countries we import oil from. This Politico story from March talked about outreach to Venezuela, the Saudis and Iran (see the nice ladies in the photo above), due to the desire to stop Russian imports. As the story says,
“The U.S. has long had complicated and tense relationships with all three countries, which in recent years have been accused of everything from election fraud to human rights atrocities.”
Given all that, and the fact that imported oil has arguably a larger environmental impact, why wouldn’t we want to produce as much domestically as possible and import the rest from the most agreeable and socially and environmentally responsible countries? It seems logical to me. We don’t seem to try to offshore other industries due to their impacts on the environment.. in fact, there is a Buy America push by the Biden Administration. So what did the oil and gas workers do to get left out?
For a long time, some groups have been pushing the Biden Admin to stop oil and gas leasing on federal lands. In fact, he felt the need to commit to that during the campaign, despite the fact that many argue that it is illegal. As part of that campaign, this USGS study, often mischaracterized (even by an E&E News headline in Scientific American; I expect better from them) as “Fossil Fuel Extraction on Public Lands Produces One Quarter of U.S. Emissions” played a large role, so much so that it is frequently used in news stories as if it were a fact that everyone understands.
Whereas the study actually studies emissions not just from extraction but from use, see page 3 under introduction.
Emissions are produced through two processes: (1) the combustion of fuel for electricity generation, mechanical work, heating, or use as a feedstock and (2) the fugitive emission of gases during the processes of extracting and moving fuel.
Which we can imagine would have more or less the same effect (or possibly greater?) to the atmosphere from other countries, depending on the various attributes of the resource, extraction technologies and regulations, and transportation to the US. Because if it’s about carbon emissions, the atmosphere there is the same one as here.
One of the first symbolic actions in the new Administration was to stop the Keystone Pipeline from Canada (from whom we import oil and uranium). It’s almost as if part of that symbolism was pledge of fealty to party investors by dissing a partner vital to our own energy security.
And what technologies exist to reduce climate change? Those requiring uranium (also imported) and other rare earths, often found on federal land in the US. For example
Uranium originating in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan accounted for 47% of total uranium purchased by U.S. COOs in 2020. Canadian-origin uranium and Australian-originan uranium together accounted for 34% (Table 3).
Many of these minerals occur on western federal lands, potentially running into obstacles in the efforts to “conserve” them. That means that it’s OK to encourage thousands of tourists to come to a new “protected” area, but not OK to mine, or have drill rigs. Personally, drill rigs don’t bother me when I recreate. Crowds are much worse in my opinion. Unleashed dogs chasing wildlife and all that- seem to bother say, deer or antelope, more than drill rigs (which tend to stay in the same place over time), from what I’ve observed.
It seems to me that there are certain projects like the Keystone Pipeline, Bears Ears, and the idea of stopping oil and gas leasing on federal lands (I think mostly onshore, but who knows?) that from my environmental perspective, have mostly symbolic value. So.. who determined that these specific issues were so important? And what does that portend for domestic production of necessary post-fossil fuel material? Is “protecting our landscapes” more important than national security, and whose interests does that calculation serve? Because I don’t remember being asked.
Next Post: Are (Domestic) Oil and Gas Folks Really That Bad?
Proportion of variance explained by top-ranking multiple regression models of seasonal climate influence on annual fire activity for (A) federal lands and (B) NEON domains in the continental United States. Fig. 4 in Syphard et al. 2017 paper.
A while back I thought I had linked to this WaPo story “Massive wildfires helped fuel global forest losses in 2021” but I got totally sidetracked and so am posting it now. I’m sure it’s an interesting story. But this is how I got sidetracked.
The article said:
In a recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that human-caused emissions have significantly increased the area burned by wildfires the American West and British Columbia.
So I wrote the reporter,because the link wasn’t to the IPCC, and the reporter replied that the link is the study that the IPCC referenced. So let’s take a look at that study.
First, the study was of BC, not BC and the American West. The authors don’t make that claim, as far as I can tell. It’s about weather (affected by climate and AGW) and how that impacts fires. And I think it’s worth looking at the authors’ own set of caveats.
The result is dependent on the regression model being realistic. Our regression model assumes that nonclimatic variability in the natural log of area burned is stationary in time and does not account for the possible influence of human factors such as changes in forest management or human ignition sources. Humans have long had a direct influence on fire activity (Bowman et al., 2011), and trends in some regions have been strongly impacted by human intervention (Fréjaville & Curt, 2017; Parisien et al., 2016; Turco et al., 2014). Syphard et al. (2017) demonstrated that climate influence on fire activity becomes less important with a strong human presence. We also do not consider directly the impacts of repeated suppression over time, which could result in larger fires, nor do we consider the pine beetle infestation that has affected BC (Kurz et al., 2008), although such a disturbance did not impact large-scale area burned in the United States (Hart et al., 2015). Nonetheless, consistency of our finding with attribution of an increase in fire risk and previous studies demonstrating that climate change is an important driver of changes in fire behavior in many regions of North America (Gillett et al., 2004; Littell et al., 2009; Morton et al., 2013) supports the finding of a substantial contribution of anthropogenic climate change to the risk of a burned area as large as that in 2017.
My bold. It appears the links to the cited papers in the paper itself work, but not from this excerpt. So if you want to go to a cited paper you have to go back to the original paper . This from the conclusions was also interesting:
While we find no evidence that anthropogenic influence contributed to the risk of extremely dry conditions, we find that it has substantially increased the risk of warm conditions, elevated wildfire risk, and large area burned comparable to those observed.
The Syphard et al paper (2017) I hadn’t seen before (or have forgotten?) and was interesting.. here’s an excerpt from the results:
Of the 10 different variables we explored to explain the variation in the strength of fire-climate relationships, none were statistically significant at P ≤ 0.05 except for the anthropogenic variables (Table 1 and Figs. S1 and S2). In the federal data, regions in close proximity to either roads or developed areas had weaker fire-climate relationships; and in the FPA FOD data, regions with a higher mean human population and proportion of developed land had weaker fire-climate relationships.
More folks around, less direct relationship between climate and fire. It raises many interesting questions, as the authors say in the discussion. Hopefully the authors are continuing to explore them.
Humans can affect wildfire patterns in a number of ways, from starting fires to managing fires (e.g., prescribed fire or fire suppression) and via changes in the abundance and continuity of fuel through land use decisions. For example, humans alter native vegetation through agriculture, urbanization, and forestry management practices. Although their geographical subdivisions were coarser than those used here, regions where lightning-started fires dominated in a recent nationwide analysis (27) show some alignment with areas here where fire-climate relationships were stronger, largely in the interior, northwestern part of the country. Nevertheless, although human-caused ignitions predominate across most of the country, there are also regions like the interior Southeast where fire-climate relationships were relatively strong but the cause of ignitions was nevertheless dominated by humans.
This suggests that human influence goes beyond just starting fires, and there is some combination of factors that leads to a dampening of the effect of climate on fire activity. This may be due to effective lengthening of the fire season (27), or starting fires in areas where naturally occurring fires are rare. On the other hand, fragmentation of fuels via land use and urban development may interrupt the spread of fires that would otherwise occur in a less human-dominated landscape. In this case, the climatological factors that might otherwise lead to fire spread are overridden by human-created landscape patterns. This dual effect of humans either increasing fire where it would not otherwise occur, or decreasing it where it would occur, may be why the overall amount of fire in a region was not significantly related to the importance of climate. A couple of other studies performed at smaller extents also suggest that human influence [i.e., suppression policy (40) or land use (33)] in addition to fuel quantity or quality (31, 33) can potentially mediate or dampen fire-climate relationships across different temporal scales.
One of the most consistently important variables for explaining strong fire-climate relationships was prior-year precipitation, which is similar to results in other studies (e.g., refs. 28, 30, and 35). This relationship is often found in grasslands and savannahs where fire activity is fuel-limited. High precipitation appears to have a dampening effect on current-year fires but leads to high fuel loads in subsequent years, and the production of fine-fuel biomass that dries by the following year is conducive to fire spread (41). In forested ecosystems, this relationship has been shown to be present in forest types with herbaceous understories and absent in ones with understory fuels comprising litter and other downed material (42)
An important caveat to this study is the fact that the variance explained for the differences in strength of fire-climate relationships was not particularly high, and there was substantial variability in the data (Figs. S1 and S2). Therefore, despite evaluating the role of climatic or topographic variability, or variation in vegetation or forest biomass, differences in strength of fire-climate relationships may be due to additional factors. For example, temperature or precipitation patterns may be less variable in some regions than in others, meaning there is less annual variability in fire activity due to these variables. Another reason may be that the fire-climate models do not include essential factors such as localized fire-weather events, long-term drought, or lightning density, nor do they account for variable interactions or more complex variable combinations.
Maybe “fire activity” and “acres burned” are different measures?
****************
If for some reason you are still interested in this topic. I went to the 3500 or so page IPCC report and searched on Kirchmeier-Young, the first author of the paper. And much to my surprise and delight, I found these paragraphs (page 2-53) which summarize how sure the IPCC is, and which sources they cited. I’m fascinated by how the authors got from the caveats in the KY et al. paper to robust evidence- high agreement. Plus the differences in dryness as a factor. I suppose it’s mostly a function of different conditions in different places.
Since the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report and the IPCC Special Report on Land, published research has
24 detected increases in the area burned by wildfire, analysed relative contributions of climate and non-climate
25 factors, and attributed burned area increases above natural levels to anthropogenic climate change in one part
26 of the world – western North America (robust evidence, high agreement) (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016;
27 Partain et al., 2016; Kirchmeier‐Young et al., 2019; Mansuy et al., 2019; Bowman et al., 2020b). Across the
28 western United States, increases in vegetation aridity due to higher temperatures from anthropogenic climate
29 change doubled burned area from 1984 to 2015 over what would have burned due to non-climate factors,
30 including unnatural fuel accumulation from fire suppression, with the burned area attributed to climate
31 change accounting for 49% (32-76%, 95% confidence interval) of cumulative burned area (Abatzoglou and
32 Williams, 2016). Anthropogenic climate change has doubled the severity of a southwest North American
33 drought from 2000 to 2020 that has reduced soil moisture to its lowest levels since the 1500s (Williams et
34 al., 2020), driving half of the increase in burned area (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016; Holden et al., 2018;
35 Williams et al., 2019). In British Columbia, Canada, the increased maximum temperatures due to
36 anthropogenic climate change increased burned area in 2017 to its highest extent in the 1950-2017 record,
37 seven to eleven times the area that would have burned without climate change (Kirchmeier-Young et al.,
38 2019). In Alaska, USA, the high maximum temperatures and extremely low relative humidity due to
39 anthropogenic climate change accounted for 33‒60% of the probability of wildfire in 2015, when the area
40 burned was the second highest in the 1940-2015 record (Partain et al., 2016). In protected areas of Canada
41 and the United States, climate factors (temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, evapotranspiration
change accounting for 49% (32-76%, 95% confidence interval) of cumulative burned area (Abatzoglou and
32 Williams, 2016). Anthropogenic climate change has doubled the severity of a southwest North American
33 drought from 2000 to 2020 that has reduced soil moisture to its lowest levels since the 1500s (Williams et
34 al., 2020), driving half of the increase in burned area (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016; Holden et al., 2018;
35 Williams et al., 2019). In British Columbia, Canada, the increased maximum temperatures due to
36 anthropogenic climate change increased burned area in 2017 to its highest extent in the 1950-2017 record,
37 seven to eleven times the area that would have burned without climate change (Kirchmeier-Young et al.,
38 2019). In Alaska, USA, the high maximum temperatures and extremely low relative humidity due to
39 anthropogenic climate change accounted for 33‒60% of the probability of wildfire in 2015, when the area
40 burned was the second highest in the 1940-2015 record (Partain et al., 2016). In protected areas of Canada
41 and the United States, climate factors (temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, evapotranspiration)
accounted for 60% of burned area from local human and natural ignitions
1 from 1984 to 2014, outweighing
2 local human factors (population density, roads, and built area) (Mansuy et al., 2019).
3
4 In summary, field evidence shows that anthropogenic climate change has increased the area burned by
5 wildfire above natural levels across western North America in the period 1984-2017, at global mean surface
6 temperature increases of 0.6ºC -0.9ºC, increasing burned area up to 11 times in one extreme year and
7 doubling burned area over natural levels in a 32 year period (high confidence).
