Jacquelyn Gill in 2009, examining a cylinder of mud from a lake bed full of clues to past climate and ecosystem conditions.Credit University of Wisconsin
But she’s arguably just as talented at communicating science and its significance in clear and compelling ways. I’ve gotten to know this through our chats on Warm Regards,
the new climate science podcast we co-host with the meteorologist Eric Holthaus, who’s now writing for Pacific Standard.
But don’t take my word for it. Just listen to the latest episode,
in which Jacquelyn explains the insights into past shifts in climate and ecosystems that have been gleaned by seeking and analyzing a host of indirect indicators — everything from pollen grains to
the spores of certain fungi that lived on mammoth and mastodon dung. Eric appropriately calls paleoclimatology “CSI Pleistocene.”
Eric, whose own specialty is today’s (and tomorrow’s) weather, leads Jacquelyn through an explanation of her work on such “proxies” of past environmental conditions. Her favorite,
Jacquelyn says, is a fungus that grew on the dung of big mammals. Its spores are incredibly durable and their comings and goings in layered lake mud reflect shifts in animal abundance over time. But then
there’s the magic of plant pollen, as well.
Here’s a snippet of their conversation: Read more…
Updated, July 26, 6:30 p.m. | Federal and state forest managers and firefighters are in whack-a-mole mode, trying to deploy limited resources as efficiently as possible as fires blossom around the
West (
all incidents are here) — with California in the headlines again because of a big fast-spreading fire in Monterey County. The Monterey Herald has the latest details and posted a remarkable photo on Twitter:
Top priority fighting #SoberanesFire today is Carmel Highlands because of number of homes https://t.co/WakOBDlPHi https://t.co/y2uqd3HYe5
Hopefully, unless people are at risk, the 2,000-plus firefighters deployed there will not risk their lives trying to protect any houses that failed to heed
guidelines published in 2010 by the Monterey Fire Safety Council (pdf).
It’s not as if the threat hasn’t been clear. (Track the fire on twitter using #SoberanesFire.)
Photo
A map showing the fire threat level around California’s Monterey County — from a 2010 community wildfire protection plan. Red is extreme danger.Credit Monterey Fire Safety Council
Photo
Firefighters battled a blaze called the “Sand Fire” as it moved toward houses in Santa Clarita, Calif., on Sunday.Credit Mark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Original post, July 25 | You may already have seen the apocalyptic vistas created across much of the Los Angeles area by smoke from the “Sand Fire”,
which explosively spread over the weekend in the dry, hot windswept combustible chaparral
around some densely developed communities in the Santa Clarita Valley. (Keep track of this incident, and 105 other active fires in the United States, via InciWeb.)
If you’ve been focused on the presidential race or turbulent world news,
this time-lapse video of the fire’s spread through Sunday night, shot by Mo Sabawi, a video and film editor with a spectacular view, effectively conveys
the stunning power of this fire:
I’m in the middle of writing a longer piece on proposed strategies for “living with fire”
in regions like southern California — which are inherently prone to fire and face a growing hazard under trends linked to global warming.
This new approach to fire, still more a goal than actual policy, represents a sea change from old strategies focused on suppressing fire —
many of which have demonstrably failed. With this shift in mind, I’ve been pitching the idea of a related change in the fabled Smokey Bear slogan. A previous change,
accounting for the reality that many devastating wildfires were in open grassy lands, took the message from “Only you can prevent forest fires” in 1947 to “Only you can prevent
wildfires” in 2001.
There’s little sign of a slowdown in development in forested and grassy regions in the West where fire is as innate an characteristic of the environment as, say, earthquake risk or flooding are there or elsewhere.
So, for those choosing to live in such places, a more appropriate Smokey Bear slogan for this “Anthropocene” era of human and earth history would
be: “Only
you can live with wildfires — and prevent arson and accidental fires.”
It’s clunkier, for sure, but far more reflective of what has to happen to avoid bankrupting federal firefighting agencies, let fire-dependent ecosystems function and limit unnecessary risk to firefighters.
Watch the video clip shot by a firefighter grappling to protect a house from the Sand Fire on Saturday to see what indefensible space (in every sense of the word) looks like: Read more…
Filing from Ethiopia, which is in the midst of a potent drought but — for a change — not a calamitous famine, de Waal made these core points: Read more…
Destruction left by a record-high flash flood along the Blanco River, west of Austin, Tex. on Memorial Day weekend.Credit Stephen Ramirez/ Birdsiview.org
Updated, 4:03 p.m. | As news spread of the devastating and deadly flooding west of Austin, Tex., last weekend (followed by so much more), I started exploring what’s known
about flood risks along the Blanco River and other waterways in Texas’s “Flash Flood Alley.” I came
across a 2007 modeling study by Joanna C. Curran, a hydrologist then moving from Texas State University to the University of Virginia, assessing how urbanization in the Blanco River watershed would affect
the river flows under various scenarios for growth.
A 2007 modeling study of development around the Blanco River projected impacts on water flows from light and heavy growth. Two percent of the watershed was urbanized at the time. The slides are at: j.mp/blancomodel.Credit Joanna Curran
The research focus was more on drought risk than flash floods, but in developing the model of the river and surrounding basin, Curran developed an intimate sense of the dynamics of the system.
I reached out to Curran on Tuesday and she sent a fascinating reflection on what transpired in relation to her understanding of the hydrological dynamics of the region (She now works at Northwest Hydraulic Consultants and is a researcher at the University of Tennessee): Read more…
Agricultural runoff heading for the Salton Sea in Coachella Valley, Calif.Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
Updates in brackets | You don’t know you’re in a megadrought until you’re many years, if not decades, into one. So conditions in California could still turn around (which could lead to a “shock to trance” effect on water conservation efforts).
Of course drier conditions, including protracted intense drought, are nothing new on a longer time scale, as scientists have been pointing out for decades. More on that below. Read more…
Drought in the West as of Aug. 26, as mapped on the Drought Monitor website. Dark brown is "exceptional" drought.Credit U.S. Drought Monitor
Doyle Rice has an invaluable piece in USA Today placing California’s persistent
and exceptional* drought in the broader context of a very dry West — and the even broader context of the last 1,000 years or so.
Here’s the core point in Rice’s story:
The dryness in California is only part of a longer-term, 15-year drought across most of the Western USA, one that bioclimatologist Park Williams said is notable because “more area in the West has
persistently been in drought during the past 15 years than in any other 15-year period since the 1150s and 1160s” — that’s more than 850 years ago.
“When considering the West as a whole, we are currently in the midst of a historically relevant megadrought,” said Williams, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia
University in New York.
Megadroughts are what Cornell University scientist Toby Ault calls the “great white sharks of climate: powerful, dangerous and hard to detect before it’s too late. They have happened in the
past, and they are still out there, lurking in what is possible for the future, even without climate change.”
Please read the rest and pass to folks out west. Read more…
A crew on a rig drilling a water well in Pixley, Calif. Farmers in California have turned to such services to unearth water in a time of severe drought. A new law seeks to regulate the activity.Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
I encourage you to read Felicity Barringer’s article on California’s effort (finally!) to exert some control on groundwater pumping.
On July 29, the U.S. Drought Monitor website had nearly 80 percent of California in either extreme (red) or exceptional (brown) drought.Credit U.S. Drought Monitor
It’s way past time for California to come to grips with the possibility that its extraordinary water woes are the new normal — and essentially the return of the old normal given the state’s
climate history, in which drought has been the rule and the verdant 20th century the exception. In the weekly update to the U.S. Drought Monitor site yesterday,
nearly 80 percent of the state was in extreme or exceptional drought conditions.
Hoping for the best works fine if it’s combined with planning for the worst. And the worst is years, even decades, of dry times. Global warming from an unabated buildup of greenhouse gases could drive conditions in the drier direction.
Can economic vitality be sustained if that’s the case? A lot would need to happen that isn’t yet happening, led by a spreading ethic of conservation and efficiency, as described in “The Untapped Potential of California’s Water Supply,”
a recent report from the Pacific Institute and Natural Resources Defense Council. Here’s the bottom line: Read more…
A woman harvesting corn in Malawi, an African country that is already prone to drought and faces grim prospects under global warming.Credit Joao Silva for The New York Times
I hope you’ll read Tina Rosenberg’s latest Fixes post — “A Green Revolution, This Time for Africa.” The first Green Revolution, in Asia, was centered on rice and wheat. Rosenberg
lays out the case for an African focus on corn (known as maize almost everywhere else in the world):
The high-yield wheat and rice of the Green Revolution produced dramatic gains in harvests in Asia and Latin America. But not in Africa. There, the climate was too varied, the soils too degraded.
Africa lacked infrastructure such as roads, or India’s railway system, that helped farmers to commercialize their grain. It did not have a network of companies to sell farmers the hybrid
seeds for the high-yield varieties, nor the fertilizer and pesticides necessary to take full advantage of those seeds.
Asian governments had large programs to provide credit, extension agents to teach new farming methods and subsidized inputs; the Food Corporation of
India bought surplus grains at a guaranteed price.
African governments, for the most part, did not do these things. And today Africa’s agricultural yields are less than half the global average, and about 25 percent of what they could potentially
yield. Agricultural productivity in Africa is growing at about half the rate the population is growing.
Africa has long been a continent of small farmers, half of them women, raising maize with no fertilizer, pesticide or irrigation, on a tiny plot with a hoe. Now the little these farmers have is endangered
by drought. Climate change is making Africa’s weather more extreme and erratic. Africa loses about a fifth of its maize crop because of drought. In many years, the loss is near-total. A
survey of farmers in 12 countries found that in the last decade, they averaged about three wipeout years.
Maize is the natural focus for a Green Revolution in Africa, as it is the poor person’s crop, and the most widely planted in Africa.
Rosenberg notes that the issue is not just better crop varieties: Read more…
Joe Romm, the Center for American Progress climate blogger who’s also one of two chief science advisers for the forthcoming Showtime climate series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” sent a query last night after seeing a Twitter note I posted.
My note was about an Op-Ed article in The Times by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough
Institute.
