a) It turns out the percentage of the globe that burns each year has been declining since 2001.
b) For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.
c) In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.
d) Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century.
e)Take the Canadian wildfires this summer. While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by the Global Wildfire Information System shows that more land has burned in the Americas than usual. But much of the rest of the world has seen lower burning—Africa and especially Europe. Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area.
f) The thick smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed New York City and elsewhere was serious but only part of the story. Across the world, fewer acres burning each year has led to overall lower levels of smoke, which today likely prevents almost 100,000 infant deaths annually, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford and Stockholm University.
g) Likewise, while Australia’s wildfires in 2019-20 earned media headlines such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Australia Burns,” the satellite data shows this was a selective narrative. The burning was extraordinary in two states but extraordinarily small in the rest of the country. Since the early 2000s, when 8% of Australia caught fire, the area of the country torched each year has declined. The 2019-20 fires scorched 4% of Australian land, and this year the burned area will likely be even less.
h) In the case of American fires, most of the problem is bad land management. A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires. Even so, last year U.S. fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century.
#2) The Canadian Take by LIFESITE News,Thu Aug 31, 2023
I think this story by the Associated Press deserves an award for maximum number of using “Trump-era” in one piece..the headline, the first line,and paragraphs 7, 9 and 14 (the last is a quote).
“We’re looking to create landscapes that withstand and recover more quickly from wildfire, drought and other disturbances,” Ochoco National Forest supervisor Shane Jeffries told Oregon Public Broadcasting at the time. “We’re not looking to take every grand fir and white fir out of the forests.”
The lawsuit, however, said the government’s environmental assessment didn’t adequately address scientific uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of thinning, especially large trees, for reducing fire risk. The groups said the thinning and logging of large trees can actually increase fire severity.
….
Rob Klavins, an advocate for Oregon Wild based in the state’s rural Wallowa County, said in a news release that he hopes the Forest Service will take this decision to heart and called on the Biden administration to stop defending the Trump-era rule change.
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Here’s a story from the Wallowa County Chieftain, originating with the Capital Press.
Oral arguments in the case were heard on May 1 in U.S. District Court in Pendleton, Ore. Magistrate Judge Andrew Hallman issued his findings and recommendations on Aug. 31, siding with the plaintiffs on three key claims.
First, Hallman agreed that the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to issue a full Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, reviewing potential environmental impacts of the amendment and alternatives.
Second, the agency violated the National Forest Management Act by not holding an objection process after the decision was signed.
Finally, the Forest Service violated the Endangered Species Act by not consulting on how the amendment will impact endangered fish, Hallman ruled.
Hallman recommended the court vacate the Eastside Screens amendment and order the Forest Service to prepare an EIS. Those findings will be forwarded to District Judge Ann Aiken, and defendants will have until Sept. 14 to file objections.
…
Nick Smith, public affairs director for the AFRC, said the ruling is “just the latest example of how anti-forestry litigants are preventing the Forest Service from implementing proactive forest management projects that reduce the risks of severe wildfire.”
It seems odd to me that the FS wouldn’t have a required objection process and didn’t consult on fish. My sensors tell me there might be more to this story. Hopefully, someone knowledgeable will weigh in.
Also I would think that the list of notable forest scientists who sent the amicus curiae (right language?)letter would have dealt with the scientific controversies adequately. So I wonder if the Judge’s idea was that these scientific issues should have more air time in the EIS? Since it’s Labor Day weekend, I’d like to give a shout out to all those who worked on this and may be dealing with the miasma of “bring me a rock” hood.
The Bitterroot National Forest is going to try out “condition-based” NEPA with the Bitterroot Front Project.
The project anticipates 54,046 acres of prescribed burning alone; 35,575 acres of non-commercial logging coupled with prescribed burning for whitebark pine restoration; 27,477 acres of commercial logging with prescribed burning; 16,019 acres of vegetation slashing and burning; and 3,163 acres of non-commercial logging and prescribed burning… It will take dozens of miles of roadwork to do all that.
The project is expected to take four years. “Condition-based” means they don’t know where any of these things are going to happen until they get there. From the EA, as the project proceeds …
Information about proposed activities, including maps, treatment unit tables, and the activities’ relationship to the Bitterroot Front project’s overall treatment thresholds, would be available on the Bitterroot National Forest website. The responsible official would finalize proposed activities only after field review of existing conditions. The responsible official would retain the authority to make final decisions about the location, extent, and types of activities planned and completed under the Bitterroot Front project.
Nothing said here about the process they’ll follow to evaluate and disclose that new information they find when they get there, in particular about site-specific effects. They seem to be taking the position that “this is it” for NEPA compliance:
By preparing this environmental assessment (EA), the Forest Service is fulfilling agency policy and direction to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements and to determine whether the effects of the proposed action may be significant enough to require the preparation of an
environmental impact statement (EIS). (EA, p. 1)
The EA says, “if an EIS is required, the Forest Service will prepare an EIS consistent with 40 CFR section 1501.9(e)(1).” I know this is the theory, but how often does a draft EA get redone as a draft EIS after public comment makes the case for significant effects? Usually the agency makes that call early enough to not create the extra step of an EA. The agency has plenty of examples of timber sales much smaller than this that had “significant” environmental effects documented in an EIS, but they seem kind of committed to an EA.
This years-long project is being pursued under emergency authority, so there will be no administrative review. So if the Forest stays this EA course here, the emergency determination would allow local officials to make the call on whether they think this EA would hold up in court.
The “implementation plan” in the EA says that the obligation during implementation is to “Demonstrate that the effects of implementation would be within the scope of activities and the range of effects described in the EA and authorized in the Decision Notice.” This would be an effects analysis, which would trigger consideration of NEPA. It could answer the question of whether the effects have become significant (triggering an EIS for the whole project), but apparently is not intended to address the question of whether the site-specific effects have been accounted for pursuant to NEPA after the locations and treatments are known, and whether they are “consequential” (in a NEPA sense).
Where courts have approved of approaches like this it has been where the “conditions” are very specifically defined in the initial decision so that there is not much flexibility in implementation and the site-specific effects can be determined and evaluated. It doesn’t look to me like the Bitterroot Front is similar to the two favorable court examples I’ve read, but it does feel like the familiar pushing of the envelope to see how far they can take this approach.
So, while I think an EA (with no administrative review) in these circumstances seems like kind of an outrageous idea, I actually wanted to focus on another familiar issue this article brings up:
Critics of the proposal argue that the significant removal of vegetation — including live trees and brush and standing and downed dead timber — will actually promote wildfire spread by allowing uninhibited wind to whip flames through opened-up forest that’s been dried by more wind and sun penetration…
A body of science supports the idea that “forest treatments” — a regime of logging, thinning and burning — can reduce wildfire risk on a landscape and make firefighting efforts more successful. But critics of widespread forest treatments can point to other studies that cast doubt on their efficacy, and on the idea that forests in western Montana used to be dominated by spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire.
I hope the EA has a good discussion of the science on both sides. But that last point is a new one to me. Several national forests in Montana with dry forest habitats have revised their forest plans, and included desired vegetation conditions, which are supposed to be derived from historic conditions. I don’t think I’ve heard much disagreement with establishing “spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire” as a desired condition for places similar to the Bitterroot. Have I missed something? (Or did the author misinterpret something?)
Here’s what I find in the EA (based on “a geospatial analysis of the Bitterroot Front project area to prioritize communities at risk from large wildland fire growth”):
Modeling results of the current conditions within the project area show that the forest is at extreme risk of a catastrophic fire. The modeled outputs from the present fuel arrangement conditions do not mimic the natural fire spread type for sustainable ecosystem management in the Bitterroot National Forest.
Part of the proposed action is:
Restoring and maintaining ecosystem health by continuing to move the fire regime condition class toward the desired future condition through continued treatments that create disturbance.
Most of the discussion in the EA seems to be about the existing fire risk rather than whether that risk is “natural fire spread type.” According to the Vegetation Specialist Report, “Overall, the desired future condition includes forest structures, composition, and processes that would have been present historically. It proceeds to offer a description of “warm/dry” and “cool/moist” vegetation types. If there are truly disagreements about the desired condition of vegetation or fire regime for these types or areas, alternatives should be considered. (Under the 2012 Planning Rule, these desired conditions should be found in the forest plan.)
Then there is the question of, “whether the forest plan should be amended for elk habitat objectives, snags, old growth, and coarse woody debris standards to accomplish the project objectives.” This all comes off looking like they are revising their (very old) forest plan for half of the forest, with new desired conditions and standards, using a project EA.
(Photo: Ashley Harrell/SFGATE)More Wolves Return to California Story in the San Fran Chron. I excerpted quite a bit because I thought the DNA tracing and migration patterns were interesting.
Four new packs of wolves have established themselves in California in the past five months, bringing the grand total to eight new wolf packs since 2015 — and counting.
The four packs, announced Wednesday by state wildlife officials, were documented in Tehama County in central Northern California, Lassen and Plumas counties in the northeastern part of the state, and Tulare County in the Central Valley southeast of Fresno.
The Tulare County sighting of an adult female and four offspring was the southernmost report of any wolf pack in California’s modern history, hundreds of miles from the usual spots wolves have settled.
The sightings, and especially the presence in Tulare County, suggest that California is becoming a more habitable environment for its endangered species of gray wolves, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Holy smokes, what fantastic progress we’re witnessing in wolf recovery in California,” Amaroq Weiss, a senior wolf advocate at the center, said in a news release. “The homecoming of wolves to California is an epic story of a resilient species we once tried to wipe from the face of the Earth.”
Though the gray wolf is native to California, the animal was hunted to extinction in the 1920s, the Chronicle reported. It is now illegal to intentionally kill any wolves in the state.
Some ranchers and rural residents, however, remain uneasy over the wolves’ expanded range.
In May, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife announced it had expanded its Wolf-Livestock Compensation Pilot Program, through which ranchers can apply for compensation due to wolf attacks, or seek money for deploying nonlethal deterrents to keep wolves away from livestock.
In March, wildlife officials captured photographs of three wolves in Tehama County from a trail camera on private land. Little is known about the wolves’ origin or full number, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The Plumas County pack includes at least two adults and two pups. The breeding adults for that pair have been identified through DNA testing as partial siblings from a double litter in 2020.
The Lassen County pack has a minimum of two adults and an unknown number of pups. According to genetic analysis, the male is not from a known California or Oregon pack, but the female is an offspring from the Whaleback Pack’s 2021 litter. The Whaleback Pack is a group of wolves that has been seen in Siskiyou County.
DNA testing from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife suggested the Tulare County pack had contained at least five individuals not previously known to live in California, baffling wildlife experts who wondered how the wolves had managed to travel so far down the state.
The adult female is believed to have come from California from southwest Oregon’s Rogue Pack, while her male breeding pair originated from the Lassen Pack’s 2020 double litter.
Genetic testing also suggested that the female of the pair is a descendant of the first documented wolf to enter the state since the animals were hunted off in the 1920s.
That wolf, known to wildlife officials as OR7, migrated to the state from Oregon in 2011 and later returned, but is presumed dead, the Chronicle reported. OR7 traveled through seven northeastern counties in California before returning to his home state of Oregon, finding a mate, and building his Rogue Pack, according to officials from the Center for Biological Diversity.
Since then, several of his offspring have come to California and established new packs, including the breeding female of the new Tulare County pack and the original breeding male of the Lassen Pack, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
In any case, gray wolves occupy a small part of their historic range. Scientists say a comprehensive recovery plan encouraging their return is crucial to returning ecological stability across thousands of square miles of still-wild habitat.
Among them was ecologist Chad Hanson, who, in an interview, said the wolf pack has become, of all things, the beneficiary of wildfires that jump-started new generations of nutritious grass and shrubs that attract deer they prey on.
“Higher ungulate abundance provides prey for wolves,” he said. “Logging reduces habitat for deer, adversely impacting endangered wolves.”
That kind of talk leaves some federal forest managers and timber industry advocates quietly seething.
One wonders whether the reporter might have asked federal forest managers and timber industry advocates.. if the reporter spoke with them I’d be curious as to what they had to say. “Hey, I’m seething” doesn’t sound much like any Forest Service public affairs response..
Another obvious question is openings created by logging reduce habitat, but openings created by fire increase habitat. I’d be interested in how that works.
In a recent letter, a group of environmentalists urged the U.S. Forest Service to suspend post-fire logging operations in the region until it can “determine whether any activities associated with those and other projects could adversely affect the wolves.”
That’s because the environmental reviews for the projects have not considered the impacts of hand crews with chainsaws, bulldozers and trucks on endangered gray wolves and wolf habitat.
Environmentalists say their presence is vital to restoring the rhythms of life among countless other animal and plant species that evolved with them.
The story didn’t mention exactly what groups, so I couldn’t find the letter. Perhaps someone from California has it?
“Restoring the rhythm of life?””countless plant and animal species that evolved with them.” I’m not so sure about plants evolving with wolves. Holism sounds great.. but as usual mention of Indigenous folks.. who’ve been around also adapting to the glaciers retreating with organisms presumably co-evolving with them, doesn’t show up in this formulation. Wikipedia had this as part of its entry on “balance of nature.”
Despite being discredited among ecologists, the theory is widely held to be true by the general public, conservationists and environmentalists,[5] with one author calling it an “enduring myth”.[8] Environmental and conservation organizations such as the WWF, Sierra Club and Canadian Wildlife Federation continue to promote the theory,[17][18][19] as do animal rights organizations such as PETA.[20
I like that the reporter characterized this as being a view of environmentalists, not scientists.
Ranchers and Wolves in Northern Cal Getting Along With the Aid of Technology
And here’s a great story about ranchers and wildlife folks working together that I found in the Red Bluff Daily News but was written by a reporter for SFGATE.
Since September, wolves in the Whaleback Pack have killed more than 20 cows and injured another half-dozen across Siskiyou County. It’s the highest concentration of attacks on livestock since wolves first returned to California in 2011. In fact, after 23 years of working with wolves across the United States, this is the first time Laudon can recall a single pack being linked to so many attacks.
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Most of the calves targeted by the Whaleback Pack have been residents of Table Rock Ranch, a large cattle operation set squarely within wolf country. The ranch has been using many kinds of deterrents, including a watchman hired to drive around the range at night. But without knowing when wolves were nearby, it was a little like shooting in the dark.
Now, most mornings local ranchers get a text message letting them know the general locations of the two collared wolves. “I was optimistic that it would be helpful, as far as making our deterrents more effective, and being at the right place at the right time,” Table Rock Ranch manager Janna Gliatto told SFGATE.
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But in Siskiyou County, “ranchers have been a model of patience,” Laudon said. California’s compensation program will soon begin compensating ranchers who implement deterrents. But that money has been a long time coming; Gliatto says she was promised reimbursement for the range rider months ago, but has yet to see a dime. Still, she’s hopeful that the new data from the collared wolves will help with another aspect of the program called “pay for presence,” where ranchers are reimbursed for the impacts of wolves simply being around, such as stress on the animals.
Fuel Reduction Supports Firefighters, Protects Communities During Oregon’s Flat Fire
Fuel reduction projects are often maligned by those who oppose active forest management. Critics point to the fact that, during certain conditions, no amount of fuels reduction will stop large fires from burning out of control. Although evidence suggests that fuels-reduction projects and timber sales can have a moderating effect on fire behavior during even the largest conflagrations; it is true that when conditions become extreme, a 200-foot fuel break will have little ability to “stop” a fire.
Where anti-forestry groups miss the mark on fuel reduction projects is in judging their effectiveness where it counts – during active firing operations. Such is the case on the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest, where years of fuel reduction work and strategic timber sales have given firefighting personnel a leg-up in their effort to control the 2023 Flat Fire.
The Flat Fire started on July 15 in the Oak Flat Campground near the town of Agness, Oregon. Strong winds, hot and dry conditions, and an abundance of snags and brush leftover from the 2002 Biscuit Fire, enabled early growth on the Flat Fire. Within a week over 20,000 acres had burned and there was a real threat that the fire could push into Agness or Gold Beach if left un-checked. Snags not only provided easily combustible fuel for the fire, but they also complicate firefighting efforts as crews cannot mobilize where the risk of overhead hazards are too high. Simply-put: due to the fuel loads, the forecasted weather, proximity to communities, and the occurrence of the fire so early in the season, the Flat Fire threatened to become an historic conflagration.
Fortunately, the Flat Fire started near a ridgeline that the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest had long identified as a critical control point within their boundary. Wildhorse Ridge begins above the confluence of the Rogue and Illinois Rivers near Agness and extends south for about 19 miles, before terminating near the confluence of the Pistol and North Fork Pistol Rivers. As a strategic control point, Wildhorse Ridge is the first line of defense between fires coming out of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness and the town of Gold Beach.
The importance of Wildhorse Ridge played out in 2002 during the Biscuit Fire, where crews were able to contain the fire’s westward advance along Wildhorse Ridge, thus preventing continued destruction of public and private resources during what was (at the time) the largest wildfire in state history. Although much of the forested area between the Kalmiopsis Wilderness and Wildhorse Ridge had burned completely during the Biscuit Fire, many green islands of lightly burned timber remained.
Following the Biscuit Fire, the strategic importance of Wildhorse Ridge was increased as it now not only protected Gold Beach, but also an immense swath of unburned timberland of mixed public and private ownership. To bolster the ridgeline’s defense, and to impart greater resilience within the moderately-burned green islands, the Forest began a series of timber sales and fuels reduction projects along this ridgeline starting in 2006. The aim of these projects varied from non-commercial fuels reduction to conventional timber sales via commercial thinning. These projects were also designed to ensure that that roads across the ridge remained in drivable condition in the event of necessary emergency response.
The effectiveness of these projects was tested this summer during the early days of the Flat Fire, and it didn’t take long before the value of these treatments became clear. As the fire broke out, firefighting personnel were able to utilize the roadway to quickly gain access to the fire’s origin and establish an anchor point, preventing spread towards Agness. As the fire progressed south, Wildhorse Ridge became an invaluable resource to move personnel in and out safely. Treatments along the ridge made it possible for firefighters to safely backfire into the main fire and eliminate flashier fuels between the main fire and the ridge without the risk of putting fire into overgrown fuels.
The Forest was also able to take advantage of some breaks along the way. The 2018 Klondike fire afforded the Forest the opportunity to reopen containment lines along the fire’s eastern front, and weather moderated at pivotal points to allow firefighters to gain ground on the fire. But while good fortune can be a saving grace during fire season, nothing compares to hard work and preparation. The Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest was well-prepared to utilize Wildhorse Ridge during the Flat Fire because of their own hard work.
It’s still too early to predict the final impacts of the 2023 Flat Fire. The fire continues to burn, and there is no end in sight for the year’s fire season. But as of August 28, the Flat Fire is 34,242 acres, 58% contained and has grown very little in the past few weeks. This comes as a welcome relief as the Forest must divert resources to their Wild Rivers Ranger District, where the Six Rivers Complex along the OR/CA border continues to advance into Oregon.
If the Rogue River-Siskiyou can hold the fire in place through the season, the Forest should be a model for federal land managers who have been tasked with preparing their forests to withstand the effects of unprecedented global climate change. Fortune favors those who are willing to work for it. /Corey Bingamen
All: please continue to participate in the Climate Change discussion.. I’m hoping to continue that concurrently with our usual stuff and spend time listening and reflecting.
Anyway, back to the California Interagency Treatment Dashboard. There’s an E&E News story on this. It is a very cool dashboard, but it’s a beta so I recommend that people interested in California play with it and give feedback to them. It wasn’t really transparent to me how to get acres treated for fuels without also getting planting, but clearly the reporter on this E&E News story did, so it’s possible.
California is still far from its goal of thinning vegetation to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire on 1 million acres a year by 2025, according to a new tally that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration released Tuesday.
Just over 545,000 acres saw some kind of wildfire preparedness work in 2022, mostly mechanically cutting down brush and trees but also controlled fire and grazing, by the Forest Service, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, private timber companies, tribes, local governments, and nonprofits.
The numbers show that a sizable gap remains before California reaches its target of 1 million acres treated annually, despite the increases in funding touted by Newsom. The Democratic governor set the goal in 2020 to reduce damages and emissions from catastrophic wildfires.
“The only way we’re going to reach our target and reach it sustainably is to ramp up to do much bigger projects,” said Patrick Wright, the director of the administration’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. “You’re starting to see that in most areas of the state, but it’s challenging.”
The numbers released Tuesday mark the first time California has aggregated and detailed its data on wildfire prevention efforts. They were spurred in part by a round of bad publicity the Newsom administration received for the way it counted its fuel reduction work in 2021.
The administration’s wildfire task force sought transparency to avoid more negative headlines, said Wright. Its dashboard breaks out data by activity type, like controlled fire or grazing; by organization; and by type of landscape, in addition to project acres. The goal, Wright said, is to provide more information to firefighting and wildfire preparedness agencies.
But it also provides insights not previously tallied, including that private timber companies account for nearly half of the entire footprint of wildfire prevention efforts in the state.
The task force’s dashboard shows that Cal Fire is the largest user of prescribed fire, at 33,000 acres in 2021.
And while Cal Fire has already met its part of the goal after steadily ramping up its use of prescribed fire, the Forest Service must still roughly quadruple its efforts by 2025 to reach its target.
Also, note that (some targeted) grazing counts as a fuel treatment. It would be interesting to find out what qualifies, if someone wants to look into it.
Various folks on TSW have been having a discussion on their climate views, including what constitutes “denial.” I’m not sure that the folks who write about climate (or AGW anthropogenic global warming or whatever) have parsed out all the complexities of different views that human beings have, and try to understand why we disagree. Instead, some of our academics are more inclined to study how to convince us to think differently, as if it were simple to figure out what is the correct way to think on such an incredibly complex matter.
There is an extremely diverse range of views about different aspects of climate change and, for some reason, it seems like the Powers That Be that shape our discourse haven’t given us the words to discuss it. Rather, it seems they prefer to lump us into large groups “warmists” “deniers” and so on. So let’s work the other way, and assume we’re doing a survey of different knowledge claims around climate change. We can jointly develop a landscape of views, and after we have done that, we can discuss our own experiences with the climate and climate science literature and use those stories to help understand each other. Because it could be argued that raising the level of hype and calling each other names has not been effective in moving climate policy forward.
I’ve been following climate science and politics for around thirty years in various venues, so I think I can safely say that if we want to talk to each other across our disagreements, we need to do something differently. To my mind that starts with developing our own terminology.. designed to clarify, not to disrespect, nor even dissuade. Personally, I’m not trying to convert anyone to my point of view but I’d like to understand others’. And we don’t have to argue evidence right now either (or ever, it seems like that ends up being a rabbit hole), we can just see where everyone is.
I’d like to start with our own abbreviation for this topic. How about CC for talking about “the issue around different concepts about the sources, intensity and impacts of human-caused changes to the climate and what are the best strategies, time-frames, adaptation and energy technologies to deal with those changes.”
So I’ll start with two approaches and then move on to some others.
The Five Claims: Where Do You Stand?
1. The climate is changing. (1)Strongly Agree, (2)Agree, (3)Neutral, (4)Disagree, (5)Strongly Disagree
2. Humans have never influenced the climate and aren’t influencing it now. Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree
3. Humans have influenced the climate in the past and are doing it today in many ways including greenhouse gases, land use, irrigation, wildfire suppression or not, smoke of various kinds. Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree
4. Humans are influencing the climate and we need to focus on reducing greenhouse gases, notably carbon and methane. Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree
5. Humans are influencing the climate and if we don’t stop fossil fuels apocalyptic things will happen. This view is held by Antonia Guterres, the current Secretary-General of the United Nations and was stated in July of this year.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that it is not too late to “stop the worst” of the climate crisis, but only with “dramatic, immediate” action. “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,
On the five claims, I’m a 1(1),2(5),3(1),4 (1.5),5 (5). What are you?
To my mind, a climate change denier is a 1 4 or 5- that would be the plain English read. But I (and others) have been called deniers because we agree all the way up to 5. In fact, some people have been called climate deniers for being anything other than a 5(1). So the term “climate denier” has basically lost all meaning in my opinion.
The CC Ship Analogy
I haven’t decided yet whether this analogy works, so let me know what you think, or if you can think of another.
It seems like people on the CC Ship spend a fair amount of time determining who belongs on it. If you spend time on Climate Twit-X, as I do, you’ll notice there are many discussions around Groups That Don’t Belong There. One week everyone’s ganging up on nuclear, the next week carbon capture. I imagine them trying to throw them overboard. Ironically, the Ship itself is powered by diesel (because there are no alternatives), but the oil and gas people were thrown off a long time ago. Since funding, honors, professional standing, and an unruffleable sense of rectitude are the joys of being on the ship, most people who work for a living don’t want to be tossed off.
This leaves a bunch of us watching the Ship cruise along, watching people, ideas and groups that seem reasonable get thrown overboard. In patterns that can be baffling. I have two problems with the Ship. The solutions to CC don’t seem rational and coherent or based on any kind of physical or engineering reality.
Some areas of science have more representation on the Ship than others, which don’t have to be tossed off the Ship because they are mostly ignored as long as they give lip service to the dominance of the prevailing sciences. That’s where our traditional forest sciences are.
Is anyone steering this thing? We don’t know. And if there is, and one watches carefully the dynamics of who is on and who is off, many get the feeling that the Ship is not really about decarbonization at all. As soon as the Ship gets closer to what we thought was the target (decarbonization) it seems to change direction. Or perhaps it originally was about decarbonization, but is now about prolonging the time the Ship continues to sail, rewarding the same folks and with the same folks in charge.
So I am both agnostic (I don’t know) and skeptical (dubious) about the nature of the Ship, its passengers, and the less-than-transparent decisions being made on the bridge. My skepticism is based on their behavior over the last 30 years that I’ve been watching. Does that make me a “climate” skeptic, or a “Ship” skeptic? But I’m generally skeptical, as a scientist was trained to be back in the day. I’m pretty much skeptical of any claims that seem based on authority, be it religion or science, if those claims don’t agree with other information I have, including personal experience.
Doomberg on Substack had an interesting observation on language last week..maybe Doomie is oversensitive, but at least they are observing the ship. Many of us are only aware of its vague outlines.
For decades, we were told that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels were dooming the planet and that we needed to slow and then eventually eliminate the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Now, with industry on the cusp of validating carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies at commercial scale—an advance that would theoretically allow humanity to benefit from the life-nourishing energy fossil fuels provide while minimizing global emissions of CO2—environmentalists are throwing everything they have at stopping such developments in their tracks. As part of this coordinated effort, the word “emissions” is being purposely de-emphasized in Newspeak, replaced instead with “burning.” Read how YouTube currently contextualizes all videos on its platform that mention climate:
Funny, we thought emissions were the problem | YouTube
To discover that emissions emanating from the burning of fossil fuels is the real issue to be dealt with, one has to click through to “learn more,” something we presume precious few people do.
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Here’s an illustration of the “we know best so we can change the language”. The problem with this is that many of are sensitive to changes in language and manipulation thereby. Not a way to build trust.
The words we use to talk about climate change and its effects are essential to make sure we’re communicating the right message, Hassol said. But this also means we should choose our words carefully.
When discussing climate change, Hassol recommends referring to it as human-caused climate change to specify that the effects we’re seeing today are not natural, and instead brought on by human action.
“Some people hear climate change and they think, ‘oh, well then, the change we’re seeing now could be natural,’” she said. “But the science is very clear that this current warming is not natural.”
There are also a few phrases she’d recommend over global warming, which can be confusing and inaccurate when used in conversation.
“[The] problem with global warming is that it sounds nice to some people, right? Warmth is generally a positive thing.,” Hassol said. “Another problem is that it speaks mainly to rising temperatures, and it doesn’t invoke all the other things that come along with the rising temperatures: heavy rainfall that causes flooding, stronger, more destructive hurricanes [and] larger, more intense wildfires.”
Instead, Hassol recommends phrases like climate disruption, global heating and global weirding to cover all the bases of climate change and its effects.
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So what do you think? Where do you stand on the Five Claims? Do you think the claims should be expanded to different views on what to do about climate change? Does the Ship of Climate make sense to you? I’m going to moderate this a little more intensively than usual as I think I know the common discussion rabbit holes after much time on Climate Twit-X.
The summits of 14ers Mounts Democrat, Lincoln and Bross are on private property. Landowners have prohibited access to the peaks over liability concerns. A new QR code waiver program will allow hikers to summit Mounts Democrat and Lincoln. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)
Thanks to TSW readers who submitted this piece for discussion. It’s an essay that touches on some of our usual topics.
MONTEZUMA COUNTY, Colo. — Hunters and backcountry enthusiasts celebrated in May when a federal district judge in Casper, Wyo., ruled in favor of four hunters, dismissing the civil case brought against them by a wealthy landowner from North Carolina.
The hunters had “corner crossed.” Like checker pieces on a game board, they had moved diagonally from one public land parcel to another. They didn’t touch the North Carolina financier’s 22,045-acre ranch land, everyone agreed, but he maintained that they had entered his airspace and therefore trespassed, to the tune of $7.75 million in damages.
For a moment, it seemed the little guy and advocates for public land access had won. But wait.
In Colorado, an angler lost a similar public/private battle in June when the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the landowner. The Arkansas River might seem like a historic public way in Colorado, but when a river or stream flows through private land, the court ruled, wading by members of the public is not okay. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, it is okay. In Utah, it depends.
Across the West, courts are reflecting the struggles that residents and visitors face in trying to balance public trust and private land ownership. Some cast it as simple battles of rich vs. poor, or of locals vs. out-of-towners. But it’s not so simple.
As outdoor recreation increasingly fuels economies here and as landowners assert their rights, the clashes — not just in courts but also across streams, fence lines and dirt paths — will continue.
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This summer, the county’s newly created Outdoor Recreation Industry Office hosted public workshops to share their findings. Turns out, some 2 million visitors spend more than $100 million annually in our little corner of the West, according to RPI Consulting, the firm hired to do an economic assessment.
While real estate agents, backcountry outfitters and bike shops are celebrating, many of us here struggle to roll with the triple influx of transplants, second-home owners and visitors. Like the courts, when we consider the multifaceted impact of this population flow, we’re conflicted.
While newcomers are nothing new in the West, I feel for communities such as Gallatin County in Montana and Weld County in northern Colorado, whose populations have swelled more than 30 percent between 2010 and 2020, according to the Census Bureau.
My thought. Gallatin County is a different kettle of fish than Weld County, parts of which are expansion of the Colorado Front Range Megalopolis. But maybe not.
I delved into the comments on the piece; there was some thinking that private landowners are protected from liability by recreational access laws. I think this reporting piece by Jason Blevins in the Colorado Sun gets at some details of real-world problems with existing recreational use law in Colorado. As usual, it’s more complicated than many seem to think.
The legislation was in response to a 2019 federal appeals court decision that awarded $7.3 million to a mountain biker who sued the federal government after crashing on a washed out trail at the Air Force Academy. That decision has pushed many landowners to close access, fearing the decision would lead to more lawsuits from injured visitors.
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The group is fine with the statute’s exceptions that do not protect landowners who display “gross negligence” or “malicious intent” with dangers on their property, said the coalition’s chairwoman, Anneliese Steel. The group is concerned that the decision in the Air Force Academy case could lead to a lack of protection for landowners who might be aware of hazards but a jury could find they failed to adequately warn visitors about those hazards.
“That is too low of a bar and it has led to a significant chilling effect among landowners that we are seeing right now with these closures,” Steel said. “It’s an unnecessary barrier to access. What’s going on at the Leadville 100, for example, is untenable.”
Trial lawyers who testified against the recreational statute reform legislation in March argued that a single award for an injured visitor in the 45-year history of the law shows that the statute is working. There has not been a surge of lawsuits from injured people suing landowners.
Depriving western old-growth forests of fire brought them to the brink. Now the fire they need also threatens them. To fix this, parks are returning to mechanical forestry methods.
“As shown by our pilot study, in these situations, mechanical thinning can mimic some effects of prescribed fire. This is increasingly supported by science, which has demonstrated that thinning can reduce air quality impacts, increase water yield, reduce tree stress, and improve tree health. The goals of these thinning treatments are to retain and recruit old-growth and large, vigorous, mature trees and allow the subsequent use of low-intensity prescribed fire to maintain the stand in perpetuity.”
Les Joslin collecting campsite data in Three Sisters Wilderness.
By Les Joslin
My first summer in the Three Sisters Wilderness included several days locating and surveying campsites along the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, a dozen or so miles of which I accessed via bumpy old Road 600 that took me to the trailhead on the southwestern bank of Irish Lake. Despite that famous trail’s popularity, public contacts proved far and few between.
The only person I met on the Pacific Crest Trail one of those 1990 summer days made an immediate impression on me. Why? The first thing I noticed about him was the big pistol he packed on his hip. “Do you know where Dennis Lake is?” he asked. “My name is Dennis and I want to camp at Dennis Lake.” I got out my map and showed him how to get there. “Thanks,” he said. And that was that.
Another day that summer, I met a young couple camped along that stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail at Brahma Lake. I introduced myself and explained my purpose before I began to collect the data I needed at their campsite. “Do you know where Bristah Lake is?” the young woman asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s along the trail about h
alf way between the Mirror Lakes Trailhead and the Mirror Lakes.” I’d already surveyed that area.
“Do you know how it got its name?”
“No, but I think I’m about to find out.”
“My name is Cheryl Bristah,” she continued. “”I have two sisters. My husband—my fiancé at the time—took me to a charity ball in Portland and made the winning bid on a prize offered by the publisher of the Three Sisters Wilderness map.” That was Geo-Graphics in Beaverton, Oregon. “The prize was naming that little lake.” Apparently her fiancé saw a certain symmetry in naming the little unnamed Three Sisters Wilderness lake for the three Bristah sisters, and did so on the next edition of the map.
Some years later I amazed a friend who served on the Oregon Geographic Names Board with that story. “They can’t do that!” he and, later, the whole board said, and so advised the map publisher.
A couple I met one September 1991 evening on the Pacific Crest Trail stretch between the Wickiup Plain and Sisters Mirror Lake—where I’d just finished my survey of the many camping sites around that lake and its several sister lakes—made my day when, after a brief discussion, they expressed appreciation at meeting a wilderness ranger on the trail. “We’ve hiked up here for years, and you’re the first ranger we’ve ever seen!” Just my presence, they said, assured them the Forest Service really cared and affirmed their faith in the government.
I felt good, even as I felt concern for the Forest Service’s minimal presence in this most visited unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System in Oregon noted for its scenic trails that included something over forty miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. A good encounter with a ranger should be part of a visitor’s wilderness experience, it seemed to me.
As it happened, my feeling for the land and the people kept me serving as a friendly face and a helping hand in the Three Sisters Wilderness—albeit in many ways I didn’t anticipate—for many summers to come even as it opened doors to other unexpected opportunities.
