To Restore Salmon, Think Like a Beaver

Manmade “dam analogues” could help beavers recolonize former habitats — and help fish in the process.

In the 19th century, demand for North American beaver pelts lured trappers westward — and worldwide demand for fur set off a chain reaction that has reverberated across time. Overhunting led to the beavers’ near-demise on the continent, a loss that changed the hydrology of river systems. Previously wet and wild places became far less so with the loss of beaver populations and their dam-building ways.

Jump ahead 250 years, and several projects are underway in California to alter the future, both for landscapes and for beavers. In one project landowners and public-land managers have started building structures called “beaver dam analogues,” which are essentially starter kits designed help beavers recolonize rivers.

The premise is simple: Drive a row of narrow logs into a streambed and then weave the pilings together with cuttings sourced from nearby trees. The structure slows the pace of the water and traps sedimentation, allowing a small pond to form and creating favorable conditions for nearby beavers (Castor canadenis) to move in. Then the beavers can build their own homes and continue to modify streams to meet their needs.

Dam analogue being colonized by a beaver. Credit: NOAA.

Construction on these dam analogues began in earnest in Oregon in 2009 when a group of scientists affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration decided to find out whether the structures could add complexity to river systems and restore salmon populations in the process.

Their use has spread. In California Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, co-directors of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, facilitate the effort to introduce beavers to watersheds. Because the animals provide ecosystem services, Dolman and Lundquist see them as underutilized allies in watershed recovery efforts. Their handiwork transforms the landscape, creating a mosaic of habitats. First, beaver dams modify streamflow, creating slow and fast-moving bodies of water. This leads to an increase in the types of streamside habitats available to a variety of wildlife, boosting biodiversity in the process.

Lundquist says the North American beaver is the continent’s original water manager, renowned for storing and caching water for future use. Since beaver dams are temporary and permeable, she explains, the structures allow water to flow, thereby reconnecting mountain streams with the floodplains below.

As California looks for ways to become more resilient in the face of climate change and the prospect of prolonged droughts, the construction of these dams may prove to be advantageous. They could even buy more time for stressed aquatic species such as oceangoing salmon and steelhead trout, which have been left high and dry by California’s prolonged droughts, deforestation and water-diversion projects meant to help farmers.

In 2014 arid conditions compelled the residents within the Scott River watershed, in Northern California, to take action. When their rivers and streams dried up, local wildlife officials had few options but to truck out thousands of juvenile coho salmon to locations with adequate water. In response to the salmon crisis, the residents of the watershed banded together to build eight beaver dam analogues. Today six beaver families occupy eight of the structures, and according to published accounts, juvenile salmon in the watershed have rebounded.

The Scott River project was the first approved by California‘s Department of Fish and Wildlife, and several more pilot projects are underway. As the state seeks effective ways to restore river systems parched by drought and hurt by decades-long land-use patterns, natural resource managers may start looking to dam analogues and beavers for answers.

Unfortunately, prior to the deep drought that hit California beginning in 2012, beavers were an afterthought. “In California, no one was talking about beavers,” Lundquist says. “It was a missed opportunity.” She adds that there’s now been an uptick in interest as word spreads among rural residents about the success of the analogues and the benefits beavers can deliver. “We’re helping people connect the dots between the science of beaver restoration and implementation,” she says. Determining whether beavers can recharge groundwater is an open question and subject of ongoing debate. “It’s an evolving science,” she admits.

What remains unchanged is the beaver itself. “They are highly adaptable animals and able to persist,” Lundquist says. “What limits beaver are water and wood — period.” And that combination may be a damned good way to restore streams and solve water woes in California and other parched states.

© 2017, Enrique Gili, all rights reserved.

Kenya Makes Plastic Bags a Criminal Offense

Kenya this week made it official: Anyone manufacturing, importing, selling or even using plastic bags faces thousands of dollars in fines or up to four years in jail. It’s not just shopping bags; garbage bags also count. The ban could help reduce the hundreds of millions of plastic bags used in Kenya each year, but it’s also controversial, as many Kenyans rely on plastic bags to carry charcoal for heating and cooking, or even for sanitation. Still, the BBC reports that people are already adapting by wrapping goods in old newspapers or carrying them in their hands.

Is Hurricane Harvey a Harbinger for Houston’s Future?

Human-caused climate change and over-development enhanced some of the impacts of the storm.

Over the past week we have seen two major tropical storms devastate different parts of the world. First Typhoon Hato struck Hong Kong and Southern China killing at least a dozen people. And over the weekend Hurricane Harvey made landfall from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing extremely heavy rain to southern Texas and causing devastating floods in Houston.

Tropical cyclones are, of course, a natural feature of our climate. But the extreme impacts of these recent storms, especially in Houston, has understandably led to questions over whether climate change is to blame.

How are tropical cyclones changing?

Tropical cyclones, called typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and hurricanes in the North Atlantic, are major storm systems that initiate near the Equator and can hit locations in the tropics and subtropics around the world.

When we look at the Atlantic Basin we see increases in tropical storm numbers over the past century, although there is high year-to-year variability. The year 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, marks the high point.

There is a trend towards more tropical storms and hurricanes in the North Atlantic. US National Hurricane Center

We can be confident that we’re seeing more severe tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic than we did a few decades ago. It is likely that climate change has contributed to this trend, although there is low statistical confidence associated with this statement. What that means is that this observed increase in hurricane frequency is more likely than not linked with climate change, but the increase may also be linked to decadal variability.

Has Harvey been enhanced by climate change?

Unlike other types of extreme weather such as heatwaves, the influence of climate change on tropical cyclones is hard to pin down. This is because tropical cyclones form as a result of many factors coming together, including high sea surface temperatures, and weak changes in wind strength through the depth of the atmosphere.

These storms are also difficult to simulate using climate models. To study changes in tropical cyclones we need to run our models at high resolution and with interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean being represented.

It’s much easier to study heat extremes, because we can do this by looking at a single, continuous variable: temperature. Tropical cyclones, on the other hand, are not a continuous variable; they either form or they don’t. This makes them much harder to model and study.

Tropical cyclones also have many different characteristics that might change in unpredictable ways as they develop, including their track, their overall size, and their strength. Different aspects of the cyclones are likely to change in different ways, and no two cyclones are the same. Compare that with a heatwave, which often have similar spatial features.

For all these reasons, it is very hard to say exactly how climate change has affected Hurricane Harvey.

So what can we say?

While it’s hard to pin the blame for Hurricane Harvey directly on climate change, we can say this: human-caused climate change has enhanced some of the impacts of the storm.

Fortunately, in Harvey’s case, the storm surge hasn’t been too bad, unlike for Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, for example. This is because Harvey did not travel as far, and weakened rapidly when it made landfall.

We know that storm surges due to tropical cyclones have been enhanced by climate change. This is because the background sea level has increased, making it more likely that storm surges will inundate larger unprotected coastal regions.

Building levees and sea walls can alleviate some of these impacts, although these barriers will need to be higher (and therefore more expensive) in the future to keep out the rising seas.

Deluge danger

Harvey’s biggest effect is through its intense and prolonged rainfall. A low pressure system to the north is keeping Harvey over southern Texas, resulting in greater rainfall totals.

The rainfall totals are already remarkable and are only going to get worse.

We know that climate change is enhancing extreme rainfall. As the atmosphere is getting warmer it can hold more moisture (roughly 7 percent more for every 1℃ rise in temperature). This means that when we get the right circumstances for very extreme rainfall to occur, climate change is likely to make these events even worse than they would have been otherwise. Without a full analysis it is hard to put exact numbers on this effect, but on a basic level, wetter skies mean more intense rain.

Houston, we have a problem

There are other factors that are making this storm worse than others in terms of its impact. Houston is the second-fastest growing city in the US, and the fourth most populous overall.

As the region’s population grows, more and more of southern Texas is being paved with impermeable surfaces. This means that when there is extreme rainfall the water takes longer to drain away, prolonging and intensifying the floods.

Hurricane Harvey is likely to end up being one of the most costly disasters in US history. It is also likely that climate change and population growth in the region have worsened the effects of this major storm.

Andrew King, Climate Extremes Research Fellow, University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Climate: Riding the Chaotic Wave

We need new metaphors to cope with climate change.

There’s really no serious scientific debate about humanity’s contributions to changes in the global climate caused by increasing use of fossil fuels coupled with the deforestation and land conversion eating away at the planet’s lungs. Nor is there any immediate prospect of reining in the four accompanying horsemen of the ecological apocalypse: wholesale loss of biological diversity; transformation and loss of a diversity of ecosystems and the services they provide; environmental pollution; and human population growth and patterns of consumption.

At the same time, the weaving together of metaphors for our time — tipping points, regime shifts and the balance of nature — into a consistent narrative of environmental disaster that McKibben refers to in his book Eaarth (2000) as “collapse porn,” and which “[gives] us the slightly scary shiver of imagining our lives tumbling over a cliff” echoes the depiction of the sublime in late 19th and early 20th century landscape paintings. (For additional discussion of ecology, the sublime, and landscape art, see my 2013 paper “The suffocating embrace of landscape and the picturesque conditioning of ecology.”)

This new, contemporary sublime not only engenders feelings of awe in the face of forces larger than ourselves, it also threatens to lead us into a sense of powerlessness and paralysis when it comes to ameliorating or acclimating to these large changes. We need new metaphors — metaphors that embrace the chaotic dynamics of constant change, unsteadiness, and evolution — if we are to live on a planet that despite our wishful thinking about balance of nature to the contrary, has always been capricious, unpredictable and fundamentally uncaring. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1836 essay “Nature,” “[T]here is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us.”

In short, we may be on a new world, but this new world — McKibben’s Planet Eaarth — is still Hobbes’ nasty and brutish Planet Earth.

Tipping points are precarious and threaten our sense of balance. But what about the new regimes we enter after we pass tipping points? In the postcolonial world of the 1950s and 1960s, regime changes — after which newly emerging nations shifted their foreign alignments towards, for example, the Soviet Union or the nonaligned states — were cast in a negative light because they were antithetical to U.S. or NATO ambitions. The superpowers of the day did everything they could to prop up friendly regimes and maintain the stability of the status quo. In contrast, in our post-9/11 world, regime change has become desirable, especially when rogue states cross “red lines.”

But after what I recently dubbed “5/9” — that day in 2013 when we passed an atmospheric tipping point — regime change once again seem to be a bad idea. Although academics tend to use the more neutral term “regime shift” in an attempt to remove the value judgment inherent in “regime change,” regime shifts, such as the shift in global climate that we are undergoing now, are nonetheless generally seen as undesirable. Consequently, a large amount of effort, at least as measured by allocation of research dollars in the United States and European Union, continues to be focused on identifying early-warning indicators of impending regime shifts and developing strategies to avert them. (In the spirit of full disclosure, my own research on tipping points, thresholds, indicators of regime shifts and alternative states in aquatic ecosystems has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation.)

Where geopolitical actors look to regime change to re-stabilize a destabilized situation, ecologists and environmental scientists look for ways to maintain existing stability and avoid regime shifts. Common to both is an interest in stability — its continued persistence or its immediate return. When we think of stability, we think of equilibrium: a steady state in which interacting agents or forces balance each other, like equal weights on the scales of justice. For ecologists and environmentalists like Bill McKibben, a regime shift is undesirable because it threatens the “Balance of Nature,” the state in an ecosystem when the interrelationships of organisms are harmoniously integrated to a considerable degree.

The idea that nature is in balance has deep, rarely explored roots. In fact, the Balance of Nature is so deeply embedded in our discussion of these ideas that even in detailed analyses of environmental metaphors, the metaphor of a balance of nature itself is not even considered metaphoric. Rather, the focus is on if, and how quickly, social and ecological systems can return to a sustainable, equilibrium condition, albeit a new one, following some sort of “disturbance.” Equally penetrating is the idea — illustrated succinctly by the contrast between Edward Hicks’ 1830s painting The Peaceable Kingdom and Steve Sack’s 2004 updated version [both below] — that there is a prelapsarian, perfectly balanced nature out there, apart from people, and that human beings have destroyed this balance through science, technology, or, in fact, any activity beyond simple hunting and gathering.

Left: Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom (ca. 1830-1832; Metropolitan Museum of Art); Right: Steve Sack, The E.P.A.’s Peaceable Kingdom (2004), used with permission.

 

The Balance of Nature metaphor is completely at odds with the by now well-established facts of evolution: all life (on both Earth and McKibben’s “Eaarth”) is derived from a single common ancestor, and humans are as much a part of this continuously unfolding process as are all the other plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and viruses with which we share the planet. Evolution is a constant struggle for existence: More than 99 percent of all species that have evolved on Earth in the past 4 billion years or so have gone extinct, and there is no reason to presume that humans will, in the long run, fare any differently. Yet we persist in in removing humans from the natural world, which the Dictionary of Ecology defines as:

[a] term that is applied to a community of native plants and animals. ‘Future-natural’ describes the community that would develop were human influences to be removed completely and permanently, but allows for possible changes in climate or site. ‘Original-natural’ describes a community as it existed in the past, with no modification by humans. ‘Past-natural’ describes the condition in which the present features are derived directly from those existing originally, with relatively little modification by humans. ‘Potential-natural’ describes the community that would develop were human influence removed, but the consequent succession completed instantly (future changes in climate or site are not taken into account). ‘Present-natural’ describes the community that would exist now had there been no human modification. Because of the dynamic nature of any ecosystem, this condition may not be identical to the last original-natural state before human intervention began.

Climatologists, oceanographers, ecologists, evolutionary biologists and many others have repeatedly documented that nature is an ever-changing and at best ephemerally stable — on virtually any time scale — dynamical system, the state of which still can be reliably forecast only weeks in advance. In fact, as President Obama noted in his Georgetown speech, the most extreme scenario of climate change forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change significantly underestimates the dynamics and magnitude of climate changes we are currently experiencing. Our inability to forecast and manage regime shifts of the global climate system or to predict and direct regime changes using diplomacy or warfare spring from the same source: reliance on metaphors and derived models based on a Balance of Nature (or a Balance of Power).

So if the Balance of Nature is, and always has been, a will-o’-the-wisp, what do we do and how do we live? Many on both the extreme right and the extreme left would argue that the best path is laissez faire individualism, in which each of us builds the best fortress we can afford, complete with levees, storm shelters and well-stocked gun racks, and damn the consequences if the levees divert the floodwaters to our neighbors downstream, the storm shelters can only hold us and our close kin, and the guns keep spawning unforeseen chaotic events. A casual perusal of any daily newspaper, blog or Twitter feed suggests that this approach clearly has broad appeal. But after 5/9, McKibben’s prescription for living durably, sturdily, stably, hardily and robustly in small redoubts seems unlikely to work — and it didn’t work well in the past, either. Our best efforts to identify and forecast planetary tipping points in a world that isn’t now, and has never been, in a state of balance, can only fail while simultaneously raising unfounded hopes.

Rather, we must re-envision the sublime and re-embrace the unpredictability unfolding daily around us. The real world, in which humans are just another organism, is a messy place, but messiness does not have to be bad, and we should celebrate its ever-changing tapestry. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described a struggle for existence between organisms and the world around them, a struggle that included not only the elements but other organisms. He concluded The Origin (6th edition) by writing:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

As Darwin knew, and as ecologists and evolutionary biologists have demonstrated time and again, although virtually all of the organisms that have evolved and lived on Earth have already gone extinct, evolution continues nonetheless. There are deterministic laws to evolution, but their actual operation leads to chaotic outcomes. But “chaotic” is neither chaotic nor unpredictable. Rather, in a chaotic system, fixed (deterministic) rules give rise to completely different, yet entirely predictable, outcomes depending solely on the initial state of the system. The real challenge is not in learning the rules, but in learning to ride the chaotic wave.

Perhaps we should stop pretending that we live in Dr. Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds and instead cultivate Candide’s garden. When we look around us, we will daily witness the ceaseless changes to our world where all the plants and animals, including us, are on chaotic stages — out-of-balance and just trying to survive. This dynamic, unpredictable and yes, unstable, ecological theater in which most organisms simply and indifferently eat other ones and push one another out of the way, is the decisive expression of the sublime — the terrible uncertainty and ultimate incomprehensibility of the world around us that includes us.

We can keep on trying to balance our unbalanced planet; tweaking, geo-engineering  and ultimately destroying what our metaphors do not allow us to understand, or we can construct new metaphors so that we can more quietly observe the world around us and more gently live in it, on it and with it.

Zinke Submits National Monuments Review Proposal

The Secretary of the Interior recommends reducing a "handful" of monuments.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke today submitted to President Trump his promised review of 27 of the country’s national monuments.

Exactly what that review contains remains a mystery. The contents of Zinke’s report were not disclosed and will apparently not be released to the public until after the president has himself reviewed them. Zinke did tell the Associated Press that he has not recommended any national monuments lose their status and that only a “handful” will be changed in any way.

A report summary issued by Zinke discussed the review’s methodology and said, “Existing monuments have been modified by successive Presidents in the past, including 18 reductions in the size of monuments, and there is no doubt that President Trump has the authority to review and consider recommendations to modify or add a monument.”

Legal experts, however, point out that the president has no actual authority to rescind or downsize any national monuments. That power, under the Antiquities Act of 1906, lies solely with the Congress.

As Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law, tweeted as part of a thread yesterday:

Meanwhile, however, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, held a press conference today to announce that he will seek to review and update the Antiquities Act, calling previous presidential national monument designations “abuses” of power and a “politically motivated” “gotcha grab” of land.

Bishop has previously declared that he wants Bears Ears’ national monument revoked. Bishop provided no timeline as to when he would make his recommendations for updates to the Antiquities Act and did not define what changes he would request.

Zinke’s report summary acknowledged that the comments received during the public comment period for the national monuments review were “overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments” but characterized that support as being the result of “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.” Bishop echoed that, calling efforts to conserve national monuments as something coming from groups that make “a nice income” through lawsuits, an obvious dig at organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, publishers of The Revelator.

Bishop also repeated a previously debunked talking point that the Antiquities Act was originally intended to protect lands of up to 320 acres. In reality, one of the earliest national monument designations was the 818,000-acre Grand Canyon in 1908. The Supreme Court upheld presidential authority to create the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1920.

Expect more on this story in the coming weeks and months.

 

Previously in The Revelator:

The Roots of the Antiquities Act? They’re in Bears Ears

Scientists: The Endangered Species Act Needs You

Got knowledge about endangered species? A new toolkit tells you how to put it to good use.

Scientists who want to support the Endangered Species Act, or the species it protects, have a new toolkit available to help them to do just that.

“Advancing Science in the Endangered Species Act,” written by experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists, offers a primer on the conservation law itself as well as a series of easy steps scientists and other people can take to advocate for strengthening its impact.

ESA toolkitThe toolkit — one of several published by the organization — comes in response to the dozens of legislative threats currently facing the Endangered Species Act, ranging from riders to reduce protections for certain species to attempts to gut the Act or kill it entirely.

“Everything’s kind of crazy under this current climate,” says the toolkit’s lead author, Charise Johnson, research associate with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science & Democracy. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, I’m just a wildlife biologist, I can’t do anything.’ Well, let me show you what you can actually do.”

For scientists the first steps in the toolkit involve familiar activities such as conducting new research, identifying species of concern, and gathering and submitting scientific evidence for plants or wildlife that are candidates for protection.

“We’re just encouraging people to do the things that they already do,” Johnson says. She adds that these are all actions which support the mandate for the Endangered Species Act to use the “best available science.”

More broadly the toolkit recommends actions such as providing expert testimony, conducting peer-review of scientific assessments, reaching out to legislative representatives to advocate for science-based decision-making, collaborating with other scientists, writing op-eds, and even using social media to promote broader knowledge of at-risk species.

“Small things like that really add up,” Johnson says. “Even using social media to educate others is a huge thing that you can do as a scientist. You already know these things. By talking to other people in your community, you’re already making a little bit of a difference.”

All of this comes at a time when many scientists feel their collective work on climate change and other topics is under attack and needs to be defended. “Right now we see a lot of scientists actually wanting to engage in advocacy, which is something they normally stay as far away from as possible,” says Johnson. “We have people stepping up, saying ‘I can call my local elected representative, or write a letter to the editor, or sign a comment.’ We have scientists saying, ‘Not only am I an objective scientist, I’m also a citizen and I’m concerned and there are things that I feel I should be doing as a citizen, as my civic duty.’ ”

The toolkit focuses on two main areas of the Endangered Species Act where people can participate: the listing and delisting processes for threatened species. “The ESA is a huge statute,” Johnson says. “We realized how daunting it would seem for people who wanted to get involved. We’ve made this to help people who don’t know where to start and help them find a place to start, to get their feet wet.”

Johnson says the toolkit could serve as an effective set of guidelines for anyone, regardless of their field of expertise. “It’s not just for wildlife biologists or plant biologists or ecologists,” she says. “It’s for any scientists, or any experts, whose work would inform part of a species listing.”

Nonscientists can participate, too. Johnson says people can find helpful tips in the toolkit, regardless of their professional expertise. The webpage for the toolkit also offers a letter anyone can send to his or her senators, asking them to support science-based safeguards to protect the Endangered Species Act.

“Everybody has their place,” Johnson says. “Everybody has something that they can do. We’re just trying to give people the tools they need to do that.”

Trump Has Broad Power to Block Climate Change Report

Advisers press Trump administration to subject report to controversial “red team” review.

Earlier this month, someone involved in the government’s latest report on climate change provided The New York Times with a copy of the version submitted to the Trump administration for final approval. The main intent of the leak, according to several people tracking the report, was to complicate any attempt to suppress the study or water down its findings.

Publication of the document inflamed an already-fraught debate about climate change. Administration officials and Republican lawmakers accused the leaker and journalists of manufacturing a dispute. They said the report, which was required by law, was moving through a normal process of White House review.

The report was submitted in late June and the Trump administration has broad authority to review its findings. Any one of a number of government agencies can block its release, which is ultimately subject to presidential review.

Some of the scientists involved in preparing the document expressed concern that it might never see the light of day. Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of the report and director of Texas Tech University’s Climate Science Center, said the motivation of its 50-plus authors — mix of government and academic researchers — was to convey to the public and government officials the scope of a building crisis.

“As a climate scientist, I feel communicating this science is a moral responsibility,” she said, noting that the contributors from academia were working without pay and taking away time from their teaching and scholarships. “We are the physicians of the planet,” she added. “Climate change poses risks to people and our economy.”

Several people involved with the study said the heat drawn by the early disclosure of the document might well have the opposite of its intended effect. They said there are signs that the Trump administration would subject the draft climate report to a “red team” vetting process in which a group of scientists would be invited to vigorously question its premises.

Government officials in intelligence and national security have long used the “red team” approach to stress test policy and intelligence conclusions about issues like Russian military strength. Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has called publicly for a “red team” review of the government’s position on climate science.

Sobering Science

In many ways, the 669-page “Climate Science Special Report” is utterly unremarkable. It is a review of existing science that concludes human activities are largely responsible for the warming of the planet. Worsening climatic and coastal impacts are almost inevitable unless the world’s industrial nations significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Its contents came as no surprise to foes or supporters of polices aimed at cutting climate-warming emissions. Earlier drafts, with the same basic conclusions as those in the submitted document, had been publicly posted and in wide review since January.

What makes the report significant now is the challenge it poses to a White House that has been moving aggressively to reverse the Obama administration’s policies and rules on climate change. So far, the Trump administration has begun withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement, cut relevant environmental agency budgets and removed from some government websites language describing the risks of unabated global warming.

The science report, due out in final form late in the year, is actually just one component of a much bigger, and congressionally mandated, document, the Fourth National Climate Assessment, scheduled for publication in late 2018.

A 1990 law has required such assessments every four years by an office — the U.S. Global Change Research Program — created in 1989 by Republican President George H.W. Bush to coordinate research on climate change and other global environmental issues across more than a dozen government agencies.

There have been tussles over these assessments from the start. In the final years of the Clinton administration, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which advocates for limited regulation and is heavily supported by industry groups, filed a legal challenge to aspects of the climate assessment process. The George W. Bush administration was accused by whistleblowers of blocking federal agencies from citing the 2000 report, which had been prepared under the Clinton administration.

That climate assessment projected temperatures in the U.S. would rise “more rapidly in the next one hundred years than in the last 10,000 years” and described “widespread water concerns,” but said agriculture could likely adapt while coastal regions faced rising danger with rising seas.

An “interim” version of the second climate assessment was published by the Bush administration in May 2008, but only after pressure from a critical Government Accountability Office report requested by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, and a successful lawsuit filed by environmental groups to force action.

It’s notable that the three full assessments produced so far — in 2000, 2009 and 2014 — were all published under Democratic administrations. More than a few analysts and experts involved in this arena suspect the next assessment will not appear before a Democrat wins the presidency.

Despite the requirements of the 1990 law, the White House has substantial power to derail such assessments, said Nicky Sundt, who managed communications for the global change program office through most of the two terms of George W. Bush. The law, for instance, doesn’t specify the scope or nature of the periodic assessments, said Sundt, who is now a senior fellow for climate at the Government Accountability Project, which in 2005 released documents showing that a political appointee had edited a different government climate report to soften its findings.

The climate science report at the center of the current dispute is being managed by a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council, a body established in 1993 by President Bill Clinton through an executive order to coordinate science policy.

That body, in theory, is chaired by the president or a designated proxy, Sundt said. The subcommittee managing the report, she said, operates by consensus, with anyone from a host of agencies able to block approval. “That opens up the possibility of all sorts of delays and changes,” she said.

And the president has the final say on what goes forward.

Another issue at the moment, she said, is simply transparency, describing the administration’s actions so far on this report as “troubled and opaque.”

Trump administration officials declined to comment on the climate science report as long as it is in draft form.

In an interview last week with a morning talk show on WBAP radio in Dallas-Fort Worth, Pruitt criticized efforts to publicize the draft findings and described next steps.

“This is a report that’s issued every four years — it’s just an assessment,” he said. “We’re going to review it like all the other twelve agencies and evaluate the merits and demerits and methodology and efficacy of the report,” he said, adding, “Science should not be politicized. Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”

In the interview, Pruitt appeared to offer conflicting signals on the climate issue. He hailed “what we’ve achieved in our country in reducing our CO2 footprint.” Then, seconds later, he questioned the science that has identified greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels as the prime driver of global warming.

Red Team, Blue Team

Trump administration officials focused on climate remain in close touch with groups challenging global warming science and determined to undo climate polices adopted by President Obama. According to both the Washington Examiner and the news section of the journal Nature, the administration has been weighing lists of skeptical climate scientists provided by the Heartland Institute, an industry-backed group that has for years run conferences aiming to cast doubt on climate change research.

In a blog post in late June, Patrick J. Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, a think tank that advocates for reducing government regulation, argued that the government’s climate assessments were driven by a mix of politics and self-interest.

He pointed to the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which described the Third National Assessment as “a key deliverable in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan’.” He added this quip: “No politics there, just science (sarc).” Then he asserted that hundreds of government officials and academic researchers make a living from the perennial reviews and research budgets on climate change. “It has always been in their interest to portray global warming as alarming, and therefore in need of even more federal research dollars,” Michaels wrote.

His post laid out several options for Trump, including replicating the Bush-era delays. He added, “If there is going to be a 2018 version, it had better be at least a 2018red team/blue team report.'”

The national assessment process has other influential critics, including Steven E. Koonin, who for two years was undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy in Barack Obama’s second term. Koonin now directs the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University and has periodically criticized what he sees as oversimplifications of climate findings.

An op-ed article by Koonin in The Wall Street Journal in April was the inspiration for the plan by EPA’s Pruitt, first reported in late June by ClimateWire, to develop an adversarial “red team — blue team” exercise to probe climate change conclusions.

In a phone interview last week, Koonin said government reports like the national climate assessments could benefit from this kind of scrutiny, no matter who is in office, to separate spin from substance.

He said issues can arise as authors choose which papers to include or exclude, and even in phrasing, especially in the summaries most people pay attention to. “You can look at the same data and say 2018we have low confidence hurricanes are increasing’ or you can say 2018we have high confidence hurricanes are not increasing,” he said. “I would like to have that discussion.”

This proposal has been widely pilloried by scientists, including John P. Holdren, who was science adviser to Barack Obama through his two terms. In a recent Boston Globe op-ed, Holdren compared the “red team” notion to a “kangaroo court.”

Koonin said he was not calling for a reassessment of scientific findings that were published by reputable scientific journals. “I don’t think this is the kind of review that should be applied to the original scientific literature,” he said. “We have peer review for that. It’s not perfect tool, but it works.”

He said he’s spoken about participating in such an exercise with Pruitt and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (who has endorsed the idea).

Asked about the potential for politicization, he said: “I would not become engaged in this myself unless I could do so with integrity, thoroughness and transparency. But if I can do that and it aligns with the administration’s plans, that’s fine.”

Can Climate Science Survive the Political Climate?

Prediction is inadvisable. But there still is a chance the report could survive relatively unscathed, according to interviews with a range of people involved with the process, or closely tracking it.

For one thing, while the report reaches conclusions at odds with the views of Scott Pruitt and others in the administration, it also contains long sections on the scientifically established uncertainties that surround critical questions. Given the longstanding and bipartisan Washington tradition of highlighting findings that suit some agenda, there’s plenty for everyone.

Here’s a look at the clear and murky.

Drafted and reviewed by dozens of scientists within and outside government and endorsed earlier this year by the independent National Academy of Sciences, the report details findings drawn from a host of studies that are as close to certainties as science can produce.

One example is a section on human-driven trends in extreme heat and rainfall. It includes these points:

“The frequency and intensity of extreme temperature events are virtually certain to increase in the future as global temperature increases (high confidence). Extreme precipitation events will very likely continue to increase in frequency and intensity throughout most of the world (high confidence).”

Many findings directly contradict assertions of top administration officials. Here’s what the draft says about evidence for a human role in recent warming:

“[I]t is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation … Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible for the observed climate changes in the industrial era.”

In an appearance in March on CNBC, Pruitt emphatically disagreed with that assertion.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet … We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

The report also lays out in detail sources of uncertainty around some of the most critical questions for the intended audience: institutions and individuals in the U.S., from the local to national scale, charged with protecting coasts, cities, croplands and other areas at risk from rising seas and disrupted weather patterns.

After noting three different sources of uncertainty about the pace of warming in the 21st century, the report says that changes in precipitation  — often the critical interface between climate and human welfare — are even harder to predict:

“Due to the greater level of complexity associated with modeling precipitation, uncertainty tends to dominate in precipitation projections throughout the entire century, affecting both the magnitude and sometimes (depending on location) the sign of the projected change in precipitation.”

In a section on how the frequency of hurricanes and cyclones is likely to change, the report cites what’s been called a “hurricane drought” — a remarkable gap, “unprecedented in the historical records dating back to the mid-19th century” — in the U.S. being hit by storms category 3 or higher.

“In this case the assessment reaches conclusions inconvenient for political advocates on both sides — but that is how science works,” said Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who’s been writing on the evolution of the global change research office since its early days and has frequently been called on by Republicans in Congress to testify about climate policy.

He said concerns about possible suppression were “misplaced,” noting the science report is being produced under procedures laid out in the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which includes transparency provisions that make it difficult to disrupt.

“As we’ve seen, the report couldn’t be suppressed even if they wanted to,” Pielke said. “It has been public, it is public, it will continue to be public. There are plenty of things to be concerned about — this report not seeing the light of day or somehow being reclassified is not one of those things.”

The best defense of the climate report’s integrity going forward may simply be how it reflects the scientific process itself, said David Hawkins, who directs the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council and worked at the EPA during the Carter administration.

“Thank goodness we have science-based institutions and dedicated professionals who work there,” he said. “Absent a dark ages, science is relentless. Trump may be able to sit on a report that the government is required to issue but he can’t issue a report with alternate science — at least not one signed by credentialed scientists.”

For her part, the report author Katharine Hayhoe has been busy on Twitter trying to cut through the noise:

 

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National Monuments: “The Teddy Roosevelt Cure”

A healing visit to America’s public lands reveals their history – and their continued importance.

As I slouched against the trunk of an old juniper tree in the heat of the afternoon, I thought of that Seinfeld episode when George Costanza announces his idea for Jerry’s new sitcom. “It’s about nothing,” he says. I was a few yards off the Continental Divide Trail in northwestern New Mexico, and that was not nothing. But I was pretty sure that for most people, my 10-day escape would appear a bit, well, lacking.

I was taking a long-needed respite from a stressful couple of years: moving from a beloved community in West Virginia to New Mexico, starting a new job, mourning the death of my father, and through it all, dealing with a complicated health condition not easily resolved. “Take half a tablet twice a day for a month, then get your labs redone,” my specialist in Roswell had said a few weeks earlier. “Then start the nasal spray, four times a day immediately after that. We’ll talk a few weeks later.”

Fine, I thought, but I’m also going to take the Teddy Roosevelt cure.

Teddy Roosevelt, known as our first conservation president and a robust outdoorsman, was sickly as a child. As a young man, he traveled west from his home in New York to build his strength and recover from the tragic same-day deaths of his wife and mother. In the Dakota Territories, he felt rejuvenated and fed his deep love of the outdoors with riding, roping and living in the wilderness. Later he reportedly claimed he never would have become president if he hadn’t gone West.

Like Roosevelt I was a health refugee from the East. Over several years my body had quietly developed a sensitivity to mold in a home built in a perpetually humid environment and then damaged by a major plumbing leak. Late one summer those once-silent symptoms emerged with a bang. It took months to diagnose the problem, even longer to remediate and sell the house, and longer still to find a safe place to live. My sensitivity appeared to be genetic, dormant until triggered by an extreme event. Apparently, my doctors told me, it even made me susceptible to chronic Lyme as well.

That news was enough for me — I was outta there. Lyme disease had exploded in the Mid-Atlantic over the previous decade, spreading from its initial stronghold in New England and New York down to the forests (and lawns) of Virginia and West Virginia. I’d known too many people with Lyme and heard the horror stories of chronic cases. Virtually free from that threat in New Mexico, it was a relief to be able to hike again with little fear of infectious, nearly invisible ticks secretly burrowing their way into my skin. Rattlesnakes I could deal with, I decided; at least I’d know when they bit me.

My ongoing struggle had left people worrying about me. “How are you even awake?” my sister had asked me the week before when I shared my lab results with her over the phone. Like me she suffers from thyroid problems, and my numbers were off the charts, a likely complication of my mold woes. “I am pretty exhausted,” I had to admit. The months of constant packing, moving, working and medical appointments had caught up with me. So what would she think if she knew that instead of napping for a few weeks, I went camping and hiking instead?

Each day on my trip I would hike in the morning to avoid the unrelenting heat and sun of June afternoons in the high desert. I rested and read in the afternoons. Gradually, my energy improved, my symptoms declined, and even my back pain — earned through long days propped at the computer on harsh dining-room chairs — magically dissolved. I was alone most of the time, with joy, relief and luxurious lethargy intermingling as I reveled in the wild isolation. I encountered almost no one else on the trails, and the modest campground where I planted my tent remained underused, housing a small, transient community of (mostly) quiet campers.

Despite the soothing calm of my trip, I couldn’t fully leave the rancor of America’s divided politics behind. As I hiked and camped on federal lands — at two national monuments, a designated wilderness area, and a national conservation area — I knew what was going on back in Washington. The secretary of the Interior was slashing his own department’s budget and reevaluating the designation of more than two dozen national monuments across the country.

This felt so contrary to the intentions of that past president who had traveled to the West more than a century earlier. After those life-defining experiences, Teddy Roosevelt established the first national monuments soon after Congress passed the Antiquities Act of 1906; the law that gave presidents the power to protect sites of historic, prehistoric or scientific interest. In fact, I was camping in one of Roosevelt’s first designated sites — El Morro — marveling at the ancient ruins at the top of the mesa, pondering the petroglyphs etched in stone at the base of the cliff, and deciphering the signatures of Spanish explorers and American pioneers who passed by centuries later.

Over time national monuments have proven to be popular with Americans, and studies show that they help drive local economies. Now the Trump administration was claiming that past presidents had locked up lands and failed to consult properly with the public. Progressives believe that mining and drilling interests are behind the review, and that ideological conservatives want to open up more public land for oil and gas drilling. Although El Morro wasn’t on the administration’s hit list, I couldn’t help feeling angry. The breathtaking landscape around me suggested a compatible mosaic of public, private and tribal lands supporting conservation, tourism, ranching, housing and small businesses. What exactly was the problem? And could the stroke of a pen preclude future escapes elsewhere?

“Just like old times,” my husband commented when he visited one weekend night, leaving his work in the city behind. He studied me intently as I relaxed in a canvas camp chair, my dusty legs crossed lazily in front of me. He was referring to our graduate school days. Back then we’d rent a cheap house or apartment for the summer and spend much of our time in the searing plateaus of central Wyoming while he mapped rocks for a geology thesis. Now we were back in a similar situation: We’d given away most of our belongings to rid ourselves of any lingering mold spores, and we were living temporarily in a furnished apartment in Albuquerque while we sorted out a more permanent home.

For the moment, the difficult years slipped away and the world consisted of just us, stripped down to our most basic needs in a landscape that had sealed us as a couple so long ago.

Soon after he left, I had to face my own return to civilization. I hated the thought of leaving the peace and safety of the desert for the uncertainty of modern life again. The doctor’s primary prescription for my recovery was to avoid contact with any water-damaged building so that my hyped-up immune system could calm down. That was proving unreasonably difficult to do when surrounded by countless unfamiliar buildings. A leaky roof, a broken pipe — all hidden from view — could set me off again.

Hence the nothingness of my vacation, an escape from the invisible detritus of the built environment to the vast emptiness of wild places. Roosevelt’s escape to the West set the stage for his presidency, which allowed generations of Americans like me to find relief on our public lands. I was grateful for his foresight, and for our common experience. Like him, from the nothingness of wildness, I hoped to recover everything.

© 2017 Amy Mathews Amos. All rights reserved.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.

Previously in The Revelator:

Does Trump Really Have the Authority to Shrink National Monuments?

Trump Fires Climate Change Advisory Committee

The Trump administration this weekend announced it has disbanded the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, the 15-person panel responsible for long-term climate-change planning. The committee’s responsibilities include the National Climate Assessment, next due for publication in 2018. NOAA told the Washington Post on Saturday that the updated assessment would not be affected by the committee’s dismissal, although the report has already been a hot-button topic inside the administration.

Algal Blooms Threaten Economies

Toxic algae can threaten our drinking water, but a new study also reveals that it causes economic harm. According to The Toledo Blade, research from Ohio State University reveals that algal blooms in two of the state’s lakes over the past six years have cost homeowners an amazing $152 million in property values. The blooms have also had an impact on recreational fishing, affecting not just the fishing industry but nearby businesses that rely on the tourism. A summer-long bloom could cause more than $5 million in economic harm to the angling industry, according to the researchers.