Climate Change Blog 39
Facts on the Ground:
Violent/deadly Storms Hit Southeast US and Colorado…
Storms battered and flooded parts of Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia in late March. At least five people were killed in Alabama as homes and businesses were destroyed. Several tornadoes hit Alabama, including one that traveled more than 100 miles from near Birmingham to the northeast corner of the state. More than 16,000 customers lost electricity mostly in Shelby and Bibb Counties, south of Birmingham. Strong tornados destroyed stretches of Georgia southwest of Atlanta which eviscerated homes, uprooted trees and tossed cars.
The National Weather Service issued tornado warnings in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, urging residents facing the most imminent danger to “TAKE COVER NOW!” Tornado warnings were issued in Tennessee and Mississippi as well. Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama declared a state of emergency in over 20 counties.
These storms followed one week after powerful storms swept through Mississippi and Alabama before moving on to Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia. There were reports of damaged homes and farms in Wayne County, Miss., and wind damage to structures and trees in Sumter County, Ala.. About 38,000 people lost power across Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.
The warning of a second day of powerful storms in mid-March came after the Weather Service had issued a “particularly dangerous situation” tornado watch for parts of Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi.
More than 2.7 million people had been at high risk from the storms, mostly in Mississippi and Alabama, with an additional 5.6 million people at moderate risk. The cities at risk of storm damage included Jackson, Miss.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Tallulah, La., the Weather Service said. In January, a tornado in Alabama led to the death of a 14-year-old boy in Fultondale, a suburb of Birmingham.
In 2020, the US had nearly 1,000 tornadoes and 76 tornado deaths, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Also in mid-March, a powerful snowstorm swept through parts of Colorado and Wyoming dumping as much as three feet of snow on some areas and leaving about 25,000 people without power. The storm brought heavy, wet snow and downed trees and power lines. More than 20,000 customers near Greeley, Colo., about 50 miles north of Denver, were without power. More than 3,000 people around Fort Collins, about 700 near Loveland and about 600 people in the Denver suburbs were also without power.
Over 27 inches of snow fell at Denver International Airport, making it the fourth biggest snowstorm in Denver weather history dating back to 1881, the National Weather Service said. Nearly 2,000 flights were canceled. Fort Collins received about 24” and the Aspens Springs area about 40.”
Parts of major roadways, like Interstate 80 in Wyoming and Interstate 70 between Denver and Silverthorne, Colo., near many of the state’s ski areas, were closed overnight for two days. The police department in Aurora, Colo., a Denver suburb, said that its SWAT team rescued people who had gotten stranded on the roads. The Colorado State Patrol said that snowplows were stuck or overturned on the roads.
Denver’s transportation authority reported that because of blizzard conditions, all of its bus and rail operations were experiencing significant delays. “All travel is discouraged at this time unless it is critical,” it said.
The avalanche danger on the Front Range was high, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center said, warning that “intense snowfall will cause large and destructive avalanches.”
…Flooding in Hawaii and Australia
Both flooding and draught/wildfire are expected consequences of global warming. As more heat causes more drying of vegetation and soil, more water vapor (a green-house gas) enters the atmosphere. Dried vegetation leads to wildfires and greater water vapor leads to more and heavier downpours than usual.
Last year Australia suffered from the worst wildfires in its recorded history, now it is facing the worst flooding in decades. Two massive storms in late March dumped more than three feet of rain in five days in the eastern part of the country. The storms are considered to be once-in-50-years event, or possibly 100. Nearly 20,000 Australians were forced to evacuate, and more than 150 schools were closed. The storms prompted at least 500 rescues and drowned roads from Sydney to Queensland 500 miles north.
New South Wales created a new position, resilience commissioner, filled by Shane Fitzsimmons. Scientists note that both forms of catastrophe, flooding and wildfires, represent Australia’s new normal. The country is one of many seeing a pattern of intensification — more extreme hot days and heat waves, as well as more extreme rainfalls over short periods.
“There is a very strong link between global warming and that intensification in rainfall,” said Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of New South Wales. “There’s good scientific evidence to say extreme rain is becoming more extreme due to global warming.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison remains resistant to aggressive action on climate change that might threaten the country’s fossil fuel industry which supports him. As does the news magnate, Rupert Murdoch.
The new Windsor Bridge, which opened just a few months ago as a “flood-proof” replacement for an older bridge, was completely under water. It was built 10 feet higher than the bridge it replaced, but the river flowed over it as if it did not exist.
Gov. David Ige of Hawaii on March 9 declared a state of emergency citing “extensive damage” across the state following torrential rain and flooding that prompted evacuations orders on the islands of Maui and Oahu and damaged at least a half dozen homes. The evacuation order affected people who live in about 150 homes downstream from the Kaupakalua Reservoir and Dam in the Haiku area of Maui.
Constructed in 1885, the Kaupakalua dam is one of the oldest agricultural dams on Maui. It is 57 feet high and 400 feet long and can hold 68 million gallons of water. “While the levels exceeded peak capacity and caused over-topping of the dam yesterday afternoon, over-topping ceased in the early evening and has not reoccurred,” Shan Tsutsui, chief operating officer of Mahi Pono said.
Floodwaters destroyed one bridge in Haiku and heavily damaged a second bridge, Mayor Michael P. Victorino of Maui County said. He described the flooding as “unprecedented.” He noted that at least five people had been rescued. Some residents, he added, had told him that it was the worst flooding they had seen in 25 years.
Residents of Haleiwa Town, on the island of Oahu, were also ordered to evacuate immediately. In a statement posted online, Honolulu’s Department of Emergency Management warned of “catastrophic flooding” and said: “YOU ARE IN DANGER. LEAVE NOW.”
Loss of Tropical Forests Increased in 2020
If humanity has any chance of achieving the goals of the Paris climate accord to keep global warming below 1.5C or even 2C, we must remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere as possible. Currently, the only way to do that at scale is via the natural process of photosynthesis, which is performed largely by trees and primarily in the tropics. It is therefore profoundly concerning that even during the pandemic year of 2020, total lost acreage of tropical forests increased by 12% from 2019, according to the World Resources Institute.
More than 10 million acres of primary tropical forest were lost in 2020. The loss of that much forest added more than two and a half billion metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, which is about twice as much as is emitted by cars in the US every year.
“We’re still losing primary forest at an unacceptable rate,” said Rod Taylor, global director of the institute’s forest program. “A 12 percent increase year over year is too much when the trend should be going down.”
Brazil once again led the world in forest loss by a wide margin, due to the pro-development policies of the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro. Cameroon, in West Africa, also had increased forest losses in 2020. Colombia had a decreased rate of forest loss in 2019, but it too increased in 2020.
Indonesia and Malaysia had less forest loss in 2020 than in 2019. This was the fourth consecutive year of declines in Indonesia. A rare positive sign for the region following the horrific losses during the fire season in 2015.
Continuing the trend, agricultural development was the main driver of forest loss in the tropics, from the production of palm oil and cocoa and subsistence farming. In most cases, forests are clear-cut and then burned to prepare the fields. Often these fires grow out of control, resulting in greater forest loss. The warming and drying due to climate change increases the likelihood of forest fires.
Such drying led to fires not just in the Brazilian Amazon, but in the Pantanal, an enormous wetland in southern Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. This region experienced an historic drought and resulting devastating fire season, with 16 times more forest loss in 2020 than in 2019.
Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the institute, said that the unprecedented fires in the wetlands of the Pantanal was a dramatic example of the impact of global warming on forest loss. “The most ominous signal from the 2020 data is the number of instances where forests themselves have fallen victim to climate change,” she said. “Nature has been whispering this risk to us for a long time, but now she is shouting.”
If anything, the crisis and the resulting global economic downturn should have led to less overall forest loss, as demand, and prices, for palm oil and other commodities fell. While falling demand may have helped improve the situation in Indonesia and a few other countries, Ms. Seymour said that globally it was “astonishing that in a year that the global economy contracted somewhere between 3 and 4 percent, primary forest loss increased by 12 percent.”
She said the world has yet to see the greatest impact on forests from the pandemic, “which will probably come into play as economies start to recover.”
The concern is that governments, facing deficits, “will be tempted to cut the budgets of enforcement agencies and license new investment projects that could lead to more forest loss,” she said. “Unless we offer alternatives, it is likely that government will try to restart their economies on the backs of forests.”
During his presidential campaign, Biden said the US should mobilize $20 billion to stop the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and impose “significant economic consequences” if deforestation continued.
Brazil’s conservative populist president, Jair M. Bolsonaro, had an all-caps reply in Portuguese: “OUR SOVEREIGNTY IS NON NEGOTIABLE.” Brazil’s new leadership “no longer accepts bribes, criminal demarcations or unfounded threats.”
A bipartisan coalition of seven former cabinet secretaries and chief climate change negotiators urged Biden forward. “The Amazon rainforest is absolutely essential to the world. It stabilizes the Earth’s climate and rainfall, sustains many tens of millions of people and is home to more wildlife than anywhere else,” said Bruce Babbitt, a former Arizona governor and Interior secretary under Clinton.
Joining with Mr. Babbitt are two former EPA administrators from Republican administrations, Christine Todd Whitman and William K. Reilly; as well as Todd D. Stern, President Obama’s special envoy for climate change; Tim Wirth and Frank E. Loy, both former under secretaries of state for global affairs under Clinton; and Stuart E. Eizenstat, who led the US delegation in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations and climate accord of 1997.
The coalition called on Biden to expand “debt-for-nature” swaps and to negotiate such agreements with governments in the Amazon region. The heart of the initiative is to avoid deforestation and make it central to trade agreements and close loopholes in laws meant to deter forest crimes abroad.
Companies are already prohibited from importing timber from forests that are illegally cleared. But that does not extend to beef, soy or other agricultural commodities that may be raised or grown on illegally deforested lands.
“We are unintentionally creating a financial incentive for criminals to set fire to the Amazon and convert it into farmland,” said Nigel Purvis, a former US climate negotiator and chief executive of Climate Advisers, a Washington-policy group.
A spokesman for John Kerry, Biden’s international climate envoy, said the office will include deforestation experts, and protection of the Amazon “will be an important element of U.S. climate diplomacy.”
In a letter to Biden, Mr. Bolsonaro, after weeks of repeating the baseless claims of voter fraud espoused by his close ally, Donald J. Trump, expressed support for the idea of the US and Brazil entering into a trade agreement.
Mr. Babbitt said “meaningful environmental provisions in trade agreements” could be key to curbing deforestation. Scientists have long said that if we are to avoid catastrophic increases in global temperature we must restore the world’s degraded forests, especially the Amazon.
Under Bolsonaro, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon hit a record high last year when about 4,280 square miles was destroyed.
Biden embraces 30x30
To slow extinctions of roughly 75% of Earth’s species and fight climate change, Biden has embraced a plan to conserve 30% of US land and 30% of its ocean waters by 2030 (“30 by 30”). It may be the most ambitious commitment to conservation by a US president.
The US already protects 26% of its oceans but only 12% of the land. To conserve 18% more of the land within this decade means protecting an immense area, about twice the size of Texas. It will require assembling both public and private land. For public lands, Biden could invoke executive power by designating new national monuments and banning drilling, mining and timber harvesting on such properties. But the majority of country’s biodiversity and potential to store carbon are not on federal lands.
About two-thirds of species on the Endangered Species List reside on private land. More than half of the country’s forests, critical carbon sinks that that absorb more C02 than they release, are in private hands. Often, private lands connect with public lands, providing seasonal habitat for mobile wildlife and clean drinking water, crop pollination and flood control.
In the past, top-down declarations and land-use restrictions from Washington have alienated rural Americans who otherwise value healthy lands, waters and wildlife. Biden likely will work with state, local and tribal governments and the private sector to promote conservation.
Similarly, past efforts to protect land meant sealing it off as wilderness. But scientists increasingly recognize that wilderness areas were shaped over thousands of years by human activities. Modern conservation strategies avoid confining ecosystems within hard boundaries and instead seek to connect tracts of land with diverse histories of protection and ownership.
Conservation easements that allow tax breaks or payments to landowners who give up development rights is a useful tool in this effort. As is the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners annually to set aside sensitive habitats. Another model of large landscape conservation of both public and private lands is America’s Longleaf Initiative, involving a coalition of government agencies, nonprofits and corporate and family forest owners, restoring the longleaf pine ecosystem that once extended from Texas to Florida and north to Virginia. Since 2007 this work has aided the recovery of the longleaf pine ecosystem to 4.7 million acres from 3.4 million acres.
In the West, the Agriculture Department’s Sage Grouse Initiative has involved easements on nearly 700,000 acres of private land across 11 Western states, including areas of Wyoming and Montana and include part of the world’s longest-known mule deer and pronghorn migrations. This initiative has increased near threatened sage grouse habitat on an additional seven million acres by working with ranchers to restore grasslands, streams and wetlands.
Internationally, dozens of countries support the 30x30 concept. Native people, often among the most effective stewards of nature, have not been adequately included and consulted in past conservation efforts. With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries (but few, if any Indigenous peoples) will attempt to reach a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water.
Examples abound of Indigenous people in Brazil, Canada, Papua New Guinea, Guatemala and elsewhere preserving the land and resources they rely on. In the Amazon it is the protection of the forest from loggers and ranchers, in Canada, a First Nations group created a park to block mining, in New Guinea, fishing communities established no-fishing zones, and in Guatemala, residents within a nature reserve harvest high-value timber in sustainable quantities.
“If you’re going to save only the insects and the animals and not the Indigenous people, there’s a big contradiction,” said José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, who leads an umbrella group, the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin. “We’re one ecosystem.”
Numerous scientific studies have found greater biodiversity on more than quarter of the world’s lands owned or managed by Indigenous people compared with land set aside for conservation by federal and state entities.
This is the concern that many Indigenous leaders have when faced with programs such as 30x30 in Britain, Costa Rica and France. As with many past such efforts, these leaders fear being pushed out in the name of conservation. Biden has vowed to follow the science. That is a good start.
What to do about Bioengineering?
Many scientists see that the 196 nation signatories to the Paris accords are failing to adequately address the climate crisis and believe that research into other adaptive measures is needed. One controversial idea is to mimic the effect of volcanic emissions which block sunlight from reaching earth. To this end, the Swedish Space Corporation had planned to conduct a test flight of a high-altitude balloon as part of the Scopex (Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment) project led by scientists at Harvard University. The test flight would not have emitted anything into the atmosphere, it would have tested the experimental setup of large fans to create a short wake in the upper atmosphere where injection experiments might occur.
The test flight was cancelled after protests from environmentalists, scientists and indigenous groups. Solar geoengineering is the subject of intense debate among scientists and policymakers, viewed by opponents as a desperate and recklessly dangerous measure likely to have unintended consequences for regional climates. Scientists warn that once such cooling measures begin they can never be stopped or else the weather system will bounce back possibly with even greater warming. Plus, there are questions as to which countries could approve or block such an action with global consequences. And unanswerable questions abound such as how could corrections be made if certain regions suffered while others benefited? Even research on the subject is viewed as a harmful distraction from the goal of reducing GHG emissions.
“The mobilization against this project in Sweden has been remarkable, uniting scientists, civil society and the Saami people, against the danger of a slippery slope toward normalization of a technology that is too dangerous to ever be deployed,” said Niclas Hällström, of What Next, an environmental research group based in Uppsala.
In March, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, an influential scientific advisory body, called for the US to spend at least $100 million on such research. Geoengineering research has inched forward in the US. In 2019, Congress gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration $4 million to research the technology. Last year the nonprofit organization Silver Lining announced $3 million in research grants to Cornell University, the University of Washington and others.
A previous attempt in 2012 to conduct atmospheric research, a project called Spice that was scheduled in Britain was canceled and the target of public opposition.
Washington:
A less controversial way to fight climate change is to promote the development of technology that removes carbon from the air. Experimental technology has been developed that can do this on a small scale. In order to quickly get to commercial scale, Biden has included in the FY21 Omnibus budget bill language directing the Department of Energy and EPA to establish a Challenge and Prize competition related to Carbon Capture technologies (see section 5001, Division Z of the bill). EPA and DOE have begun to work on this.
Michael Regan, the newly confirmed EPA administrator fired in late March dozens of independent scientific advisers, many of whom were installed during the Trump administration. The scientists and experts sat on independent boards which play a critical role advising EPA on a wide range of topics including air quality standards and pesticide use.
Mr. Regan said “resetting” the Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee “will ensure the agency receives the best possible scientific insight to support our work to protect human health and the environment.”
The dismissals were criticized by the American Chemistry Council as “irregular,” and some former board members said the move was just as political as decisions made under the Trump administration.
Supporters of the firings noted that courts had found that Trump’s transformation of the advisory boards was illegal, and that he had packed the boards with industry-funded specialists.
Chris Zarba, a former director of EPA’s Science Advisory Board, said Regan’s purge was appropriate. “It has not ever been done before,” Mr. Zarba said, but, the advisory boards “have never been in this situation before, so I think it’s absolutely the right thing to do. I don’t see any other alternative.”
Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, barred anyone who had received grants from the agency from serving on its boards, leading to the firing of several academic researchers and shutting out others from applying. A court later ruled the policy was illegal, but the agency did not restore those scientists.
The Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have also fired Trump appointed advisory boards.
EPA also restored its climate change web page that had been taken down by Trump: https://www.epa.gov/climate-change
Biden has made climate change one of his key priorities. Much of his $1 trillion dollar infrastructure agenda includes conversion of fossil fuel energy to clean, green, sustainable, energy. He intends to build half a million charging stations across the country for electric vehicles, new grid structures to move energy generated by wind and solar and in the process create jobs.
On Earth Day, April 22, I will be hosting and moderating a program focused on Biden’s plans as well as developments under NY’s recently enacted Climate Leadership Community Protection Act. The program is free for NYSBA and NYC Bar Association members and the general public and $15 for non-member attorneys. I hope you can attend (we will record the program). Here is the link:
https://services.nycbar.org/EventDetail?EventKey=ENV042221&WebsiteKey=f71e12f3-524e-4f8c-a5f7-0d16ce7b3314
The views expressed above are my own.
Carl Howard, Co-chair, Global Climate Change Committee, EELS
Follow me on Twitter @Howard.Carl