Tipping points. A little difference has a big effect.
Summers in Southern Oregon used to be my favorite time. It is different now. Smoke.
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| Table Rock, one mile away |
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| View on a clear day |
I used to think that a two to four degree rise in world temperatures would simply be an up-shift of the temperature gradients. Americans could think of a town 100 to 150 miles south and imagine living there. I misunderstood tipping points.
Hurricane Ida that bashed New Orleans is in the news. Hurricanes happen when the water is 80 degrees or higher, when the humidity is high, and when there is limited "wind shear" in the column of air to interrupt the vertical flow of moist air. Rising moist air creates a giant cyclone.
When the temperature is 79 we don't get hurricanes, but at 80 we do. When the water is 82, the velocity of the moist evaporating air is much faster than at 80, and the hurricanes are monsters. At 85 degrees, the hurricanes are giant monsters. In New Orleans those degrees are the difference between a lazy, sultry summer afternoon and roofs being blown off houses.
Southern Oregon's summers are experiencing our own climate monster. The smoke isn't an event. Now it is chronic.
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| Air at my farm is hazardous--worse than Kabul. |
The dominant weather feature has changed, from temperature to smoke. Most days this summer have had chokingly bad air, with the AQI--the Air Quality Index--somewhere between Unhealthy and Hazardous, from 100 to 400 by the numbers, with 10 to 30 times the fine particulates the health authorities say is healthy. An AQI of 150+ is like being downwind from a campfire.
The hotter temperatures are resulting in lower precipitation from the storms coming off the Pacific in the wet winter months--meaning less water in the reservoirs. More critically, it means that the months of spring precipitation, when normally the grass stays bright green, are becoming rain-free, like always-dry July and August. Now we have dried-out vegetation combined with the hot temperatures of mid-summer. This changes everything about wildfires here.
The primary result of warmer climate is not experienced by me as pleasant shirtsleeve weather in March. It is experienced as choking smoke from July until the rains start in November. It is our version of the roofs blowing off.
There is plenty of finger-pointing politically. One school of thought is that if we just harvested more trees for lumber production we would have less fuel in the forest to burn. That is the voice of Republicans generally. Another school of thought is that if we just did a better job of managing and thinning forests of non-commercial brush there would be less to burn--the voice of Democrats generally.
I have a different observation, drawn in part from the fire last year that burned up over 2,000 homes along an urban strip of land next to a creekside wild area--the Greenway. It wasn't managed or mis-managed federal timberland. It was a park, backed right up to urban developments, inside some city limits. It is the same as the natural areas on my farm. Much of it is bone dry--by June.
The problem is only partially forest management. Everyone agrees we could do more and better. The nature of our land and climate here is that there will be forestland. Winter rains will grow trees, and if not conifers then broadleaf, and if not big trees then brush. If the vegetation is dry by June, with the hottest days still to come, we will have fires. Monster fires. Careless people or lightning will ignite them.
There is political consensus in Southern Oregon that the smoke is intolerable. Politicians must do something! There is no consensus on what to do nor is there consensus on why the spring rains aren't coming. There isn't consensus on whether the planet is really warmer than it was before, nor is there consensus on whether humans are causing the temperature to rise. Most of my readers think it is obviously human-caused, but there are doubters and deniers, and they represent about half of the American population, and they vote.
Little additions to the temperature can be the tipping point for life-changing consequences via hurricanes in New Orleans or forest fires here. That is how climate change shows up.
Humans will be slow to admit we are causing it. Creative people--artist, poets, writers--put ideas into the cultural environment that allow citizens to accept as plausible something we resist because it requires change and sacrifice. It may take centuries. In 1818 Mary Shelley created a fictional monster we call Frankenstein. A doctor was experimenting with something with consequences far greater than he understood. We give the name Frankenstein to the monster, but he was the creation of Doctor Frankenstein, a human.
12 comments:
Given that things are as bad as you say they are, given that CO2 emissions are a significant cause of this, and given that we are apparently unlikely to reduce CO2 emissions on this planet, perhaps it might finally be time to do something effective like:
* ocean fertilization, which has the potential of removing mass quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere, or
* injection of sulfates into the upper atmosphere to reflect more heat away from the planet
A large increase in the availability of nuclear power, especially the new safer designs, could also help.
Or we could just continue to complain ineffectively…
Climate change denial feels like vaccine denial. Go ahead and deny it all you want. Let’s see what reality has to offer. Fox News will do their best to twist reality until it is so obvious they can’t. Rural America is now getting vaccinated at an increased rate. I guess full hospitals and deaths have motivated them. Enough fires, smoke, lack of water, hurricanes, and excessive heat will do the same. It’s just a matter of when we have suffered enough that meaningful change will take place.
Since Earth Day in the 70s the environmentalists have been telling us to be careful in how we treat the resources of the Earth. There is no one cause to blame, rather a multiplying effect of both natural and human-made "contributions" to increasing the average temperature of the planet. Very subtle changes in moisture, temperature and nutrients affect the success or failure of a biological zone. Too much or not enough maybe all it takes to turn one biological niche from paradise to dessert. One early example of this fact came to light during our country's whaling days. The crew would take pigs, goats and cats aboard. Pigs and goats for food, cats to catch the rats aboard. The pigs and goats would be put off on remote islands to serve as a food source on later trips. In several reports from subsequent voyages the lush vegetation "disappeared" as did the native wildlife. The island had been turned into a desert. There are no quick fixes to our current situation and getting everyone to agree what needs to occur and the how and when is debatable. Trusting in a technical fix to cure the situation is just dreaming. Ten years ago my friends heavily involved in environmental gave up as no-one would listen to them and those that did felt the problem was global so there was nothing they could do to affect change. If the world reduces its carbon dioxide emissions we may limit the rate of temperature increase and slowly stabilize at a new higher average global temperature average. In short the Earth will survive but well we?
The smoke from fires every summer has gotten old. It damages your health, and it makes going outside (in an outdoor paradise) unpleasant.
We didn't have fires every year when I was younger. This is the fault of poor forest management, particularly by Democratic governors.
Trees will eventually die from fires or insects, so it's better to harvest some of them before nature gets to them. Trees should be harvested just like other agricultural products, like Sage Melons.
The climate has been "changing" since BEFORE mankind. If every person in the world died tomorrow, then you'd still have climate change. To blame it on mankind (in order to gain power for communists) is ludicrous. Pollution in big cities in the 60's was ten-times worse than anything today, so if you want to blame climate change on pollution, then it should have happened in the 1960's when smog in L.A. was like pea-soup, you had "acid rain" in Pittsburgh, and Lake Erie was burning.
I don't subscribe to clear-cutting, but I do subscribe to regular harvesting of the forests, which will greatly reduce forest fires, and the nasty pollution that has become regular under Kate Brown's watch.
Unfortunately the stories we often tell ourselves are more persuasive than objective data, especially if there is any potential case of culpability. It's always easier to deny or shift blame to the "other" as Anonymous exhibits. Yes, "smog" was worse in the 60's and 70's and while adding flue-gas scrubbers "cleaned" the air and desulfurization ended acid rain, they also simply masked the fact that destructive "invisible" CO2 pollution was still happening.
The threshold of 400+ parts per million of atmospheric CO2 passed in 2017 is now 50% higher than it had been for at least the previous 1000 +years prior to the industrial revolution. (based on ice cores). And it continues to climb. https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-core-data.
Thee strong correlation between CO2 concentration and sea temperature rise getting harder to dismiss even by the most hardened skeptics. But there are always hold-outs.
What about the SUN, John C.? The SUN is the biggest driver of our weather. There's talk now that we will be going into a "cooling" period.
When you liberals all give up your cars and plane travel, and stop using oil-based products, and the jet-set elite stops flying around the world in their private jets, then we'll think that perhaps you're serious about the issue. As it stands now, it's all about CONTROL.
Kate Brown would make a great Nazi.
Unfortunately our current governor, as well as past governors, have had almost no impact on the fire situation in Oregon. almost all the biggest fires have started on USFS managed lands. The Governor can do almost nothing about National Forest land management. Federal forests comprise more than 55% of forests in Oregon. We used to, as a state, produce about 9 billion board ft annually in good years in Oregon from all sources (state, Native American, Industrial and Small non industrial private sources). Now we average around 5 billion bd ft annually. The drop off in entirely due to enormous reductions from fed lands. We currently in southern Oregon have an annual growth of well over a billion board ft on BLM and USFS lands combined. We also have a harvest target from both agencies combined at less than 8% of annual growth. That's been going on for almost 30 years. That's a huge increase in fuel in basically unmanaged lands. Northern California shows comparable reductions. Our fires (we don't have one in either Jackson or Jo counties currently) are going to get worse and worse. Also, there is no solution as there are no sawmills left to use any major increase in timber production from fed lands. Ergo, we're screwed. Welcome to the new normal which has been kindly bestowed on us by the erstwhile environmental industry. As a rather smart fellow once said something to the effect of "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it".
Trusting in a technical fix to cure the situation is just dreaming.
Given what I see the world doing and not doing, including China building new coal-powered electricity generation plants at a rate of one per week, it seems to me that anything but a tech fix is just dreaming.
I have an idea: let's just pretend it's a hoax, or that there's nothing we can do about it, and let our offspring deal with it - along with the debt we're leaving them.
Curious that one Anonymous assumed I was a "liberal" because I observed that the rise of greenhouse gases (CO2) correspond to the industrialization of the planet. Yes of course the Sun heats the planet (among other things) but before industrialization changed it, the atmosphere did a pretty good job of regulating the heat.
I wanted offer a thought on clear-cutting and CO2 since it was brought up in some comments. A lot of work has been done to quantify carbon sequestration by tree species, age, etc.. This article explains that younger, more dense trees sequester more carbon per acre because there are more trees per acre, but that larger, older trees sequester more carbon overall https://news.mongabay.com/2019/05/tall-and-old-or-dense-and-young-which-kind-of-forest-is-better-for-the-climate/ (but there are many more...just google it) The dilemma seems to be that restricting logging creates fuel for wild-fires, but clear-cutting eliminates carbon-sequestering capacity and actually releases more greenhouse gasses. I don't know the answer. Maybe selective logging of only younger trees and let the big guys do their job?
For some promising ideas about carbon reduction - visit https://drawdown.org/
Tree farms burn brightly. Old growth has proven genes against fire after fire but it’s wood is too good to resist the so called “forest management” boys. Man has never improved a forest only exploited it for his own purposes namely $ and use. The great caretaker of all things cannot resist his greed. Frog in the frying pan…we will slowly cook in our inertia sooner than later. We will never reverse our destruction. “It is written “ into our genes.
Agree Ralph, but isn't that a common human problem throughout history in almost every domain? Mono-culture crops and industrial pesticides and herbicides impoverish the soil; water extraction in industrial in California's central valley causing permanent aquifer collapse... the list goes on.
But there's also reason for hope I think. There are innovative and motivated people of good will, rising up and doing things to change the course of our self-inflicted demise. There is growth in regenerative farming, and products like Drawdown that can make a difference. Activist hedge fund Engine No.1's gain of seats at Exxon shows that clever people can use the tool of commerce to turn the rudder in the right direction. The question is, "is it enough and in time?". Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2011) is a discouraging read, but I refuse to throw up my hands in hopeless despair.
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