climate change

Climate Smart Farming, Ranching and Forest USDA Pilot Project Program

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It’s interesting that Jon posted on Oregon’s effort to determine what practices are climate-smart (possibly to regulate?).  While the USDA seems to figure that letting people innovate will produce the best ideas, technologies and ways to measure and verify.  Here’s the link. I’m a fan of the USDA approach.

USDA to Invest $1 Billion in Climate Smart Commodities, Expanding Markets, Strengthening Rural America

Madison, Wis., Feb. 7, 2022 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today the U.S. Department of Agriculture is delivering on its promise to expand markets by investing $1 billion in partnerships to support America’s climate-smart farmers, ranchers and forest landowners. The new Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities opportunity will finance pilot projects that create market opportunities for U.S. agricultural and forestry products that use climate-smart practices and include innovative, cost-effective ways to measure and verify greenhouse gas benefits. USDA is now accepting project applications for fiscal year 2022.

“America’s farmers, ranchers, and forest owners are leading the way in implementing climate-smart solutions across their operations,” said Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Acting State Conservationist Eric Allness in Wisconsin. “Through Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, USDA will provide targeted funding to meet national and global demand and expand market opportunities for climate-smart commodities to increase the competitive advantage of American producers. We want a broad array of agriculture and forestry to see themselves in this effort, including small and historically underserved producers as well as early adopters.”

For the purposes of this funding opportunity, a climate-smart commodity is defined as an agricultural commodity that is produced using agricultural (farming, ranching or forestry) practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon.

Funding will be provided to partners through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation for pilot projects to provide incentives to producers and landowners to:

  • Implement climate-smart production practices, activities, and systems on working lands.
  • Measure/quantify, monitor and verify the carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits associated with those practices.
  • Develop markets and promote the resulting climate-smart commodities.

 

Oregon legislation to define “climate-smart” forestry?

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I’ve been keeping my eyes open for how anyone is defining the management practices or outcomes that should qualify as contributions to carbon sequestration.  They usually seem to stop short of that level of detail.  This does, too.  However, it sounds like they are going to try to get there.  This is a 1/11/22 draft of LC 240, to be addressed at the legislative session beginning now. We would have an answer “no later than April 30, 2023.”

(2) The Institute for Natural Resources, in coordination with the Oregon Global Warming Commission, shall jointly with the State Forestry Department, the State Department of Agriculture, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, the Department of State Lands and the Department of Land Conservation and Development, and in consultation with federal land management partners, develop:

(b) Recommendations for activity-based impact metrics …

(3) Activity-based metrics must be designed to evaluate progress toward increasing carbon sequestration in natural and working lands and waters, as measured against the 2010 to 2019 carbon sequestration baseline. Activity-based metrics may include, but need not be limited to, acres of lands or waters for which certain management practices have been adopted or acres of lands or waters that represent an increase in natural and working lands and waters.

SECTION 8. (1) As used in this section: (a) “Climate-smart agriculture, forestry and conservation practices” means practices that protect and restore resilient carbon stocks in native ecosystems and increase resilient carbon stocks in vegetation and soils in natural and working lands and waters.

Snowless Western Mountains and Co-Design and Co-Production of Useful Scientific Knowledge

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This paper was excerpted by the WaPo here.

But a new study projects that in about 35 to 60 years, mountainous states may be nearly snowless for years at a time if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked and climate change does not slow. The resulting lack of water would be “potentially catastrophic,” according to the study’s authors.

It’s a really interesting paper with lots of great graphics and explanations of sources of uncertainty. For RCP watchers, it’s a review paper and there is some 8.5 and some 4.5 in the studies used, with a chart in the supplemental information page.
My favorite part was about planning, though. The numbers are citations.

Thus, at the same time that science evolves to increase predictive understanding of the mechanisms of hydroclimatic change, management practice must evolve to accommodate uncertainty regarding the changing patterns of current and future hydrologic variability. Developing a robust strategy and selecting investment options that balance competing societal objectives and multisectoral interactions (such as the interaction among water and energy 186 or water and carbon 207 reduction goals) requires new approaches to integrate water resource planning. Frameworks and planning methods for decision- making under deep uncertainty that acknowledge and accommodate imperfect knowledge regarding the probabilistic range of possible future conditions such as decision scaling 241, robust decision- making, dynamic adaptation pathways 242 and scenario planning can identify scientifically informed adaptive strategies that leverage best available science without overstating its confidence 243.

For instance, the United States Bureau of Reclamation and water management agencies within the Colorado River Basin engaged in a robust decision- making study that identified a range of potential future climate conditions under which water delivery obligations would be vulnerable. Portfolios of adaptation strategies aimed at demand reduction (including agricultural, municipal and industrial conservation) and supply augmentation (including reuse, desalination and water import) were evaluated for their ability to alleviate these vulnerabilities and for their trade- offs in cost, yield, technical feasibility, legal risk and other criteria. The portfolios generally increase system robustness but have a wide range of implementation costs, especially under the declining supply conditions, and vary between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin 244. Making science usable for decision- making requires strong trust between the parties 245. This trust often develops over deliberate, long- term collaboration 246, with mutual understanding of the science, models and tools being discussed and demonstration of the credibility, saliency and legitimacy of the new approach(es) 247. Institutional, technical and financial capacity to implement these approaches must also be overcome 233. Scientists must also recognize that practitioners are often directly responsible, sometimes even personally liable, for the outcomes of decisions made, which makes them hesitant in the application of new climate science 236, especially if perceived as not fitting with existing knowledge or policy goals 233,248.A path forward can be made by including Earth scientists, infrastructure experts, decision scientists, water management practitioners and community stakeholders, in a collaborative, iterative process of scientific knowledge creation through a co- production framework 41,42,249,250. This process helps to ensure that new science is suited to challenges at hand and can provide meaningful input into decision- making processes.

My bold.

I picked out some interesting-looking citations below:

Arnott, J. C., Mach, K. J. & Wong- Parodi, G. Editorial overview: The science of actionable knowledge. Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 42, A1–A5 (2020).246.
Meadow, A. M. etal. Moving toward the deliberate coproduction of climate science knowledge. Weather Clim. Soc. 7, 179–191 (2015).247.
Cash, D. W. etal. Knowledge systems for sustainable development. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 100, 8086–8091 (2003).248.
Dilling, L. & Lemos, M. C. Creating usable science: opportunities and constraints for climate knowledge use and their implications for science policy. Glob. Environ. Change 21, 680–689 (2011).249. Lemos, M. C. etal. To co- produce or not to co- produce. Nat. Sustain. 1, 722–724 (2018).250.
Cash, D. etal. Salience, credibility, legitimacy and boundaries: linking research, assessment and decision making. SSRN https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.372280 (2002).251. Cash, D. W., Borck, J. C. & Patt, A. G. Countering the loading- dock approach to linking science and decision making: comparative analysis of El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forecasting systems. Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 31, 465–494 (2006).252.
Goodrich, K. A. etal. Who are boundary spanners and how can we support them in making knowledge more actionable in sustainability fields? Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 42, 45–51 (2020).

Climate Change: Does “No Seedlings” Really Mean “No Future Forests”?

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Matthew posted a link to this Grist article before, and I think it’s worthy of its own discussion.

 

The driving force here is that the rising global temperature is wiping out seedlings. In many spots around the U.S. West, summer temperatures are already high enough to cook young trees before they can develop thick protective bark. Others have become so dry that seedlings shrivel before their roots can grow deep enough to reach groundwater. Both circumstances can thwart forest regeneration. Mature trees can survive in these areas long after they stop reproducing. But when fires wipe out these forests and seedings can’t get a foothold, they are replaced with grasses and dense brush.

Some of us remember reforestation problems on dry sites before climate change (I think people would say it was occurring then, we just didn’t know about it.)  Here is what we thought then… first you need seed.  And ponderosa pines have intermittent seed crops.  So grasses/forbs/shrubs may have reclaimed the site (sucked up the sun and soil moisture) by the time Mom and Dad ponderosa got together, not leaving any openings for baby trees to take hold.  Then there are seed predators of various kinds.  Then there’s soil moisture at the right time.  And critters that munch on seedlings.  You can go out to various sites today and see a range of  ponderosa (and in my hood, Doug fir, regeneration) from none to lots.

Back in those days, it was OK, and even desirable, to assist seedlings in “getting a foothold.”  As I’ve said numerous times, in the 80’s, we learned about seed collection, nursery practices, seedling treatment in transit, vermiculite slurries, vexar tubing, and so on.  We used to travel around and examine cone crops and numbers of filled seed to select good sites to produce seed. The whole thing as down to.. dare I say… a science.

What was interesting to me is how different conceptions and research methods can yield the same, or different conclusions.
Here are some concepts (not observations):

(1) if forests won’t grow back without help, then we must just get used to fewer forests.

(2) the absence of natural regeneration (over some time period)  means that trees won’t otherwise grow well if planted.

What physiologists and silviculturists (applied forest ecologists) used to tell us through logic and observation (seeds must come from somewhere), we now can validate via regression models.

 

While annual climate was an important driver of postfire regeneration, our findings also highlight that the nature of a fire event strongly influences postfire regeneration. For example, the combined relative influence of annual climate variables on tree recruitment in our boosted regression tree (BRT) models was 24% for ponderosa pine and 34% for Douglas-fir (SI Appendix, Fig. S3), while the relative influence of distance to seed source, which is largely determined by fire severity, was 32% for ponderosa pine and 21% for Douglas-fir (SI Appendix, Fig. S3). The importance of seed tree availability in determining postfire regeneration has been demonstrated across forest types in the western United States (e.g., refs. 17, 20, and 46),

TSW readers tend to be out and about in the woods. Take a look next time (in a place where there are parent trees producing seed) and check out whether there is natural regeneration. I did that in my neighborhood and came up with the above photo. I also live in the fringe of ponderosa pine habitat on the Front Range of Colorado.  In this photo you can see parent trees, cones on the ground, and many seedlings. It’s something we can pay attention to, and maybe learn something by sharing what we see in different parts of the west.

Possible Salvage Strategy for Dixie and Caldor Fires

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Since a battle for salvage projects is brewing, I think the Forest Service and the timber industry should consider my idea to get the work done, as soon as possible, under the rules, laws and policies, currently in force. It would be a good thing to ‘preempt’ the expected litigation before it goes to Appeals Court.

 

The Forest Service should quickly get their plans together, making sure that the project will survive the lower court battles. It is likely that such plans that were upheld by lower courts, in the past, would survive the inevitable lower court battles. Once the lower court allows the project(s), the timber industry should get all the fallers they can find, and get every snag designated for harvest on the ground. Don’t worry too much about skidding until the felling gets done. That way, when the case is appealed, most of Chad Hanson’s issues would now be rendered ‘moot’. It sure seems like the Hanson folks’ entire case is dependent on having standing snags. If this idea is successful, I’m sure that Hanson will try to block the skidding and transport of logs to the mill. The Appeals Court would have to decide if skidding operations and log hauling are harmful to spotted owls and black-backed woodpeckers.

 

It seems worth a try, to thin out snags over HUGE areas, while minimizing the legal wranglings.

Custer-Gallatin Forest Plan: On Climate Models and Planting Trees

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This is an interesting article in the Bozeman Chronicle about their forest plan.

A slash pile near Fairy Lake Road can be seen below a recently logged section of the Custer Gallatin National Forest in the Bridger Mountains on Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2021.
Samuel Wilson/ Chronicle/ Report for America

Many points of interest here.. but I’ll call one out. There’s also an interesting discussion with Dr. Phil Higuera of U of Montana on fuel treatments.

Areas where ponderosa pine forests burned years ago east of Livingston are showing little to no signs of recovery.

That’s according to Cathy Whitlock, Regents Professor Emerita of Earth sciences at Montana State University and co-lead on the newly released Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment.

“There needs to be a seed-source for the forest to recover, and then those seeds need to become seedlings and develop into mature trees,” Whitlock said. “The concern is, at low elevations it’s just getting too dry for that to happen.”

Scientists predict that as drought and wildfire ramp up in the coming decades, forest ecosystems will change. In some parts of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, trees that die off may never grow back.

It’s interesting to me that when we were interested in reforesting dry ponderosa pine sites in the 80’s (that also had seed source, seed crop size, competition from other plants, munching by predators, mycorrhizae and all those associated variables)… we assumed we could overcome those things and worked on them by a considering it a technical challenge, messing with nursery practices, transportation practices, seedling storage, slurries, vexar and all that. As I’ve mentioned here before in Area 4 (then the Ochoco, Winema, Deschutes and Fremont) we hired a person just to work on that .. the Area Reforestation Specialist. On the west side, they had fewer challenges but even SW Oregon had a major investment in Fundamental Fir with OSU. I wonder how many academics and FS researchers specialize in reforestation nowadays?

Are we assuming that trees won’t live in the future because they’re not coming back naturally? Because in the past, we looked at “not coming back naturally” and said “guess we need to plant, they’re not coming back on their own”. The fact is that we don’t know how the climate of the future will affect the microclimates that trees experience, so my view would be “let’s not give up yet.” A few examples are that we know that aspect is important, as are soil type, competitors and so on. There’s a major scale differential between climate models and the environment relevant to a planting project or even a planting program. And local folks have knowledge of these local kinds of difference (where does the snow stay longest? what different soils are there?)

Now we have arrived in a puzzling philosophical eddy between “leave it alone because that’s natural” and “climate change isn’t natural so should we open up manipulation for various reasons?”
Certainly ESA, even without climate change, has led to an array of manipulations including captive breeding, reintroductions and so on. So perhaps the question isn’t “should we manipulate?” but “what’s a good enough reason?”. Which is definitely a values question, not a science question.

Do we want trees back? For wildlife, people, watersheds, carbon etc.
If so, what are we willing to do about it?

If we take the longer timescale view, the infrastructure that supported large and successful planting programs in the 80’s has gone away, and the people who were involved in these efforts are mostly long retired. And one of the Forest Service’s and partners’ current challenges is to crank back up to reforest after large fires. That time gap of infrastructure availability and knowledge transmission will also make new planting efforts almost starting from scratch again. My point being that I hope people don’t point to some lack of success and assume the reason is climate change. If we’d assumed that in the 80’s, there’d be a lot fewer ponderosa pine trees out there sucking up carbon. It was hard enough to reforest dry sites when we assumed we could, but hadn’t yet figured out how.

Reducing Carbon Demand From Federal Lands: A Modest Proposal

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There seems to be a full-court press by NGOs with the concept that President Biden should show his support for climate action (related to COP26) by shutting down oil and gas leasing on federal lands (without regard to its legality, apparently).  As we’ve seen with forest products, though, that actually doesn’t stop demand and use, and simply moves the environmental costs and social benefits of production to other countries.  What I’d like is to open up the question of ways we could instead reduce consumption, preferably while not affecting poor/working class/people of color disparately, using federal land policies, that is legally viable.

To start the discussion, I’ll start with a likely to be highly unpopular idea.. but hopefully this will trigger other, more likely to be popular, ideas.

Discouraging High Carbon Tourism

Having recently returned from visiting three National Parks in Alaska, with thousands of other folks who flew in, used boats, cars and RVs. I propose analyzing the carbon footprints of visitors and workers in heavily used National Parks and closing, or greatly restricting, visitation to the ones with the highest footprints (tourists from farthest away; air travel, non-resident seasonal employees).  Here are my arguments.

1. Heating, transportation of necessities, combines and snowplows, travel to work are necessities; “airplane level” tourism not so much. One view might be that If we as a country want to keep our footprint small, we should prioritize necessities, not luxuries. Many folks like this recent piece in the WaPo, recommend tourism close to home to reduce carbon footprints.

The farther from home you go, the more fuel you need to get there (unless you’re going by bike, on foot or via renewable energy, of course), says Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, professor, director of the Climate Center at Texas Tech University and author of the forthcoming book “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” Her advice for travelers is to explore your own backyard and opt for more domestic trips.

2. At Denali, I asked why their Visitor Center was closed (I assumed it was due to Covid). The Park employee told me that it was because the Park was not funded or staffed well enough to keep it open. By closing or reducing access, perhaps Parks could better match their finances with their services.

3.  Concessionaire employees are interacting with tourists (although Park employees, thankfully, are not).  There are mask mandates but, if employees would not be safe with these same restrictions, then concessionaire employees would equally not be safe. For example, at Denali, the visitor center was closed, and the store was open. Fewer or no visitors would mean less chances for Covid transmission.

4. People say that National Parks are the “highest level of protection”. Seems like they would be even more “protected” without thousands of visitors, or with many fewer.

5. Tourism is seasonal and often workers are not permanent residents of the state. Even more travel could be reduced by having no concessionaires’ employees, and those workers especially now, would be likely to find similar (relatively low-paying) jobs in their own communities.

6. For gateway communities, less traffic would also mean less congestion in their communities, saving even more fuel.

In this Wall Street Journal article, they talk about local businesses pushing back to efforts to restrict/manage entry. On the other hand, there may be local people who would support the idea fewer tourists.

Awhile back during both the government shutdown, and because of Covid, many folks were arguing that Parks should be shut down to protect the resource Maybe this would be a win/win for the Park environment and reducing carbon impacts.

Other ideas?

Biden Administration Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Moratorium/Delay/Analysis/Appeal: E&E News

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If you haven’t been following the Biden Administration federal lands oil and gas leasing situation, there was a promised oil and gas review due in “early summer”  that hasn’t come out yet.  Meanwhile a federal judge told the Administration that legally couldn’t hold up leasing indefinitely.  Today there was a balanced and comprehensive story in E&E News that covers it. Best of all, there’s no paywall.

The Interior Department raised anxieties on all sides last night when it announced plans to resume oil and gas leasing on public lands while it appeals a court ruling that banned the Biden administration’s earlier leasing moratorium.

But Biden officials offered few details on where, or when, new leasing might occur — typically muted messaging for the administration on the fraught battle over the future of the federal oil program. That reticence has left lingering questions from oil allies, conservation groups and politicians interested in Biden’s management of the country’s stores of crude oil and natural gas.

The White House froze new oil and gas lease sales shortly after President Biden took office. That order was part of a larger plan to do a comprehensive review of the federal oil program in light of its contribution to climate change, potentially raising royalty rates to offset climate costs.

Biden officials promised an interim report on that review by early summer but failed to follow through. The delay has stoked further tension with Republican lawmakers opposed to the leasing freeze.

Interior’s announcement that it plans to fight the judge’s ban on the moratorium irked the Congressional Western Caucus, whose members accused Biden of “failing the nation” for the leasing freeze after recently asking OPEC to increase oil production to depress gasoline prices.

I do think the Congressional Western Caucus raises an interesting point. So far there have been two national “no”s to oil and gas, Keystone Pipeline, that impacted Canada (an ally), and oil and gas leasing on federal lands. And there have been two international “yeses”; the Nordstream 2 Pipeline from Russia to Germany and to OPEC to increase production. It seems like the Keystone and federal land ban were mostly symbolic in comparison, and response to pressure to do so from some ENGO’s. The environmental upside of higher gas prices is that they would decrease demand, but the social justice downside is that people with less money would suffer.

Governor Newsome made this statement last year:

“As it relates to managing decline, we’ve got to address the issue of demand. California since 1985, has declined its (oil) production by 60 percent, but only seen a modest decrease in demand, 4.4 percent,” Newsom said. “And that means were making up for a lack of domestic production from Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, and Colombia, and that’s hardly an environmental solution when you look globally.”

And yet in April decided to phase out oil and gas extraction in California “as part of nation-leading effort to achieve carbon neutrality.” All very puzzling. Anyway, back to federal leasing. Also puzzling to me was this response:

For many environmentalists, Interior’s announcement that it would continue leasing represented a capitulation on the one firm action Biden had taken to curb federal drilling.

“With the climate crisis smacking us in the face at every turn, it’s hard to imagine a worse idea than resuming oil and gas drilling on federal lands,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, in a statement last night.

But the Biden Administration is under a court order to.. follow the law. I’m sure there are very smart lawyers advising appointees about exactly how far they can go (or how long they can wait) before being in contempt. And the Administration appealed the decision. So not sure exactly what Weissman expects them to do.

A spokesperson for Interior declined to provide a time frame for new lease sales.

Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians, said the agency seems to be saying that it will lean on its discretionary authority under federal law around leasing decisions to address these issues before leasing resumes.

“Leasing will only happen once Interior chooses to exercise its discretion to lease and accounts for the myriad shortcomings of the onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing programs,” he said in an email.

That stance promises to rile the opposition, which has been steadfast in insisting that the White House must lease under federal law, as well as under the judicial mandate to lift the moratorium.

“The Interior statement was revealing,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, the first group to sue over the Biden leasing moratorium in January. “Apparently, Interior leadership thinks they are above the law.”

Among the things I don’t understand is why it is taking so long to come up with the “early summer” report..the Biden Admin has many smart, knowledgeable, and experienced people who have been thinking about this for years. They can call on anyone in the country. They have all the lawyers you could want to check on the legality. As Secretary Haaland said in May, “Everyone’s been working really hard on it. We expect to have it released in early summer.”

They don’t have to do an EIS or get public comment. So what’s holding it up?

And Mark Squllace’s take:

Mark Squillace, a natural resource law expert at the University of Colorado Law School, said the administration is going to increase royalty rates and fees, alongside other drilling restrictions. That will increase revenues in the near term while depressing some public oil development in the long term.

But the administration has bigger fish to fry when it comes to climate action, he said, noting that the industry is overwhelmingly located on private land and there isn’t much to be done about the large amounts of public land held by industry already.

“I don’t think that oil and gas development on public lands will be the sword that the administration is prepared to die on,” he said.

But back to the domestic oil and gas workers.  The fine folks of OPEC countries (of questionable human rights, and environmental regulations) are preferable to our own workers and regulations for producing the oil and gas products we use everyday? Not a socially just, nor environmentally beneficial, solution.

Science Friday: More Climate Model Innards and Critiques

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This is an interesting article in Science Magazine leading up to the upcoming IPCC report.  This one looks at some of the reasons and the “poorly understoods” that are causing models to run hot.

The models were also out of step with records of past climate. For example, scientists used the new model from NCAR to simulate the coldest point of the most recent ice age, 20,000 years ago. Extensive paleoclimate records suggest Earth cooled nearly 6°C compared with preindustrial times, but the model, fed with low ice age CO2 levels, had temperatures plummeting by nearly twice that much, suggesting it was far too sensitive to the ups and downs of CO2. “That is clearly outside the range of what the geological data indicate,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the work, which appeared in Geophysical Research Letters. “It’s totally out there.”

To find out why, modelers probed the guts of the simulations, focusing on their representation of clouds, long the wild card of climate change. The models can’t simulate clouds directly, so they rely on known physics and observations to estimate cloud properties and behavior. In previous models ice crystals made up more of the low clouds in the midlatitudes of the southern Pacific Ocean and elsewhere than satellite observations seemed to justify. Ice crystals reflect less sunlight than water droplets, so as these clouds heated and the ice melted, they became more reflective and caused cooling. The new models start with more realistic clouds containing more supercooled water, which allows other dynamics driven by warming—the penetration of dry air from above and a subduing of turbulence—to thin the clouds.

But that fix has allowed scientists to spy another bias previously countered by the faulty cooling trend. In both the old and new climate models, the patchy cumulus clouds that form in the tropics thin out in response to warming, allowing in more heat than satellite observations suggest, according to a study by Timothy Myers, a cloud scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Even though one feature of the climate is now more realistic, another that’s persistently biased has been revealed,” Myers says.

 

But this part brought back a memory from the 70’s…

So the IPCC team will probably use reality—the actual warming of the world over the past few decades—to constrain the CMIP projections. Several papers have shown how doing so can reduce the uncertainty of the model projections by half, and lower their most extreme projections. For 2100, in a worst-case scenario, that would reduce a raw 5°C of projected warming over preindustrial levels to 4.2°C.

Our silviculture professor at Yale, Dave Smith, had a skeptical view of forest vegetation models.  We were also, as graduate students, learning FORTRAN as a programming language (history, this was actually a graduate level course!). Dave told us something like “when trees grow too tall, they just put in a card that says “if the modeled tree height value is greater than 90, tree height equals 90″”. I don’t know if that was actually true about the JABOWA model, but this climate modeling intervention sounds a bit like the same thing.

The modelers hope to do better next time around. Lamarque says they may test new simulations against recent paleoclimates, not just historical warming, while building them. He also suggests that the development process could benefit from more time, with updates every decade or so rather than the current report interval of every 7 years. And it could be helpful to divide the modeling process in two, with one track focused on scientific experimentation—when a large range of climate sensitivities is helpful—and the other on providing a best estimate to policymakers. “It’s not easy to reconcile these two approaches under a single entity,” Lamarque says.

A cadre of researchers dedicated to the task of translating the models into useful projections could also help, says Angeline Pendergrass, a climate scientist at Cornell University who helped develop one technique for weighting the model results by their accuracy and independence. “It’s an actual job to go between the basic science and the tools I’m messing around with,” she says.

For now, policymakers and other researchers need to avoid putting too much stock in the unconstrained extreme warming the latest models predict, says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and one of the leaders of CMIP’s climate projections. Getting that message out will be a challenge. “These issues don’t translate very well in practice,” she says. “It’s going to be hard for people looking to make some projection of a water basin in the West to make sense of it.”

Maybe people who manage resources like water just acknowledge “we don’t know, but things could be somewhat, very, or terribly much worse in a variety of ways due to climate change and a variety of other factors that may interact” and then see how the responses would play out, and what would be key decision points. It seems like that’s actually what they are doing, at least, as I recall Denver Water, ten or more years ago. Here are some examples.

Science Friday: Turning Wood Into Plastic

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Our discussion about the Bootleg Fire reminded me of the mountain pine beetle outbreak in the 80’s and the desire to use some of that material. The idea then was a waferboard plant in Chiloquin, Oregon.  But the FS couldn’t guarantee supply and it was a large investment and no one stepped up.  Forty years later, people in various parts of the West still don’t have markets for what I call FRR (forest restoration residuals).  4FRI has a guaranteed supply, and still has trouble finding purchasers.  Finding products that will use this material and businesses that will pencil out has been a bit of a Holy Grail.

Here’s another possible use for fuel treatment and forest residuals..

To create the slurry mixture, the researchers used a wood powder — a processing residue usually discarded as waste in lumber mills — and deconstructed the loose, porous structure of the powder with a biodegradable and recyclable deep eutectic solvent (DES). The resulting mixture, which features nanoscale entanglement and hydrogen bonding between the regenerated lignin and cellulose micro/nanofibrils, has a high solid content and high viscosity, which can be casted and rolled without breaking.

Yao then led a comprehensive life cycle assessment to test the environmental impacts of the bioplastic against commons plastics. Sheets of the bioplastic were buried in soil, fracturing after two weeks and completely degrading after three months; additionally, researchers say the bioplastic can be broken back down into the slurry by mechanical stirring, which also allows for the DES to be recovered and reused.

“That, to me, is what really makes this plastic good: It can all be recycled or biodegraded,” says Yao. “We’ve minimized all of the materials and the waste going into nature.”

The bioplastic has numerous applications, says Liangbing Hu, a professor at the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland and co-author of the paper. It can be molded into a film that can be used in plastic bags and packaging — one of the major uses of plastic and causes of waste production. Hu also says that because the bioplastic can be molded into different shapes, it has potential for use in automobile manufacturing, as well.

One area the research team continues to investigate is the potential impact on forests if the manufacturing of this bioplastic is scaled up. While the process currently uses wood byproducts in manufacturing, the researchers say they are keenly aware that large-scale production could require usage of massive amounts of wood, which could have far-reaching implications on forests, land management, ecosystems and climate change, to name a few.

Yao says the research team has already begun working with a forest ecologist to create forest simulation models, linking the growth cycle of forests with the manufacturing process. She also sees an opportunity to collaborate with people who work in forest-related fields at YSE — an uncommon convenience.

Perhaps this could be simplified by establishing a third-party certification system for residuals; then you wouldn’t have to speculate as to “far-reaching implications.”

As to automobile manufacturing, there’s a 2016 paper on wood in car manufacturing. And history wise , during WWII there’s wood gas for cars. In 1924, Upson and Eriksen of the FS Forest Products Laboratory wrote an article in SAE Transactions on wood for automobile bodies.