A Change in the Wind

Daniel Patrick Moynihan warns Nixon White House of Global Warming

From September 17, 1969, a thoughtful and still largely accurate assessment of climate change risk.

Words that stick in the memory: in a memo to John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's henchman, who was later imprisoned for his part in Watergate, Moynihan wrote:

As with many of the most interesting environmental problems, we really don't have very satisfactory measurements of the carbon dioxide problem. On the other hand, this very clearly is a problem, and perhaps most particularly, is one that can seize the imagination of persons normally indifferent to apocalyptic change.

(Well -- not sure about that last bit.)

"All men are created equal," but what about endangered species? [Blogging Pope Francis' Encyclical]

On this July 4th, commemorating our national independence, famously built on individual rights, I'm struck by a passage of Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment on endangered species:

33. It is not enough, however, to think of different species merely as potential “resources” to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.

Who would have expected such powerful, direct, almost personal writing about little-known plants and animals from a man at the head of an institution overseeing billions of people? 

Brings to mind Gary Snyder's great pledge of allegiance For All, which concludes:

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

Blogging the Pope's "Praise Be": on Nature as a book

In Chapter 12 of Pope Francis' encyclical, "Praise Be," in our language, just before he launches into an appeal to all people to come together to save the world, the pontiff brings up the idea of nature as a book.

He writes (in a passage that is, may I say, too rich to be truncated):

12. What is more, Saint Francis, faithful to Scripture, invites us to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wis 13:5); indeed, “his eternal power and divinity have been made known through his works since the creation of the world” (Rom 1:20). For this reason, Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and those who saw them could raise their minds to God, the Creator of such beauty.[21] Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.

The metaphor of nature as a volume of writings has been with us long before the paperback -- since the Greeks. The Book of Nature, the idea was called, and (as usual) Aristotle has a lot to do with whipping it into a shape we can recognize. The metaphor/idea was inculcated in many of the Christian faith growing up over the centuries. To give an example John Muir grew up with the concept and in his youth likened Nature to a book, with Scripture to be revealed. He talked of glaciers writing their stories on the walls of Yosemite.

But as Muir grew older, and as he grew as a writer, he moved away from that metaphor. (As discussed in Frederick Turner's biography "Rediscovering America.") Nature was too fluid, too alive, to be likened to dead things, even if they were words on paper.

The pontiff doesn't directly confront this weakness in the thinking, but he has an answer for it. Because Saint Francis so loved wild things, and connected wild things with God, he reserved a part of the friary garden for that divine purpose. So the Pope sanctifies wilderness.

Here's Albrecht Durer's simply unbelievable watercolor of much the same idea, called, in our language "Great Piece of Turf." It's said to be painting's discovery of ecology:

 

Can Las Vegas grow without limits in a drought?

Abraham Lustgarten, a top-notch reporter for the public interest site Pro Publica, a couple of years ago wrote the toughest story on fracking ever, in my limited experience.

Here's the money quote from that piece from 2012:

...in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection [of oilfield wastes in underground wells] is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.

"In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted," said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA's underground injection program in Washington. "A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die."

Lustgarten's story won a number of awards, and was nominated for the biggest award in environmental reporting. Now he's shifted his focus to water in the West, and this week published by far the most critical story I've seen on Las Vegas water chief Pat Mulroy.

Mulroy is a legend among water experts, and much admired for her ability to talk tough and get results, be it "wet water" for Las Vegas, or conservation from that city. But Lusgarten is not impressed. He takes her on for never once daring to challenge Las Vegas' central creed: development.

...an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.

Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at the Water Authority, allowed Las Vegas’ metropolitan footprint to more than double. She supported building expensive mechanisms with which to extract more water for the city’s exploding needs – two tunnels out of Lake Mead and a proposed pipeline carrying groundwater from farms in the east of the state. Not once in her tenure did the Authority or the Las Vegas Valley Water District she ran beneath it reject a development proposal based on its use of water. The valley’s total withdrawals from the Colorado River jumped by more than 60 percent on her watch.

Yet even last summer — staring at the effects of growth and drought on the reservoir, where once-drowned islands were visible for the first time in as much as 75 years — Mulroy apologized for none of it. She bridled at the idea that Las Vegas or other desert cities had reached the outer edge of what their environments could support.

“That’s the silliest thing I have ever heard,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “I’ve had it right up to here with all this ‘Stop your growth.’”

It's a great story, and raises the question: How many California communities have dared to limit their growth, based on their water supply? Any?

Can't really accuse "the Water Witch" of short-sightedness and hypocrisy, of course, if she is only doing what every other thirsty community in the West is doing as well.

An example? How about growth in Phoenix, from l960 (in brown) to today (in orange). 

From an interesting and interactive set of graphics that goes with the Killing the Colorado series.

Blogging the Pope's Encyclical: Praise Be

Where do we start with a document as vast and thought-through as Pope Francis' "Praise Be?"

With listening, I think.

Try this, from the Vatican's translation into English, section 11:

If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.

Offers an excuse to republish yet another awe-worthy shot from the US Dept of the Interior's Twitter feed...the Great Smoky Mountains, which, yes, are not "an object to be used and controlled."

The climate "pause" that didn't refresh: Tom Toles

This month has seen a number of studies showing that the much-discussed "hiatus" or "pause" in global warming reported by the IPCC two years ago was a misreading of the data.

In the words of Nature:

“The bottom line is that the IPCC reported that the rate of warming was less in the last 15 years than it was in the previous 30–60 years,” says Tom Karl, the study's lead author and the director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. “That is no longer valid according to our data.”

The analysis follows a raft of papers that seek to explain why global temperatures seemed to level off around the turn of the millennium. NOAA's updated temperature record still shows cooler observed conditions than those projected by most climate models for the same period. But Karl says that the warming trend is clear up to the end of 2014. That holds true even if researchers choose 1998, which saw extreme heat associated with an El Niño weather pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean, as the starting point for such an analysis.

In other words, even if you cherry-pick the data, you still can't find the "pause." But Tom Toles can!

Tom Toles publishes more editorial cartoons on climate than anyone else and it's not close. 

Global warming gas tax fails to outrage Californians

Don't tell anyone, but the California plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is working. So writes business columnist Michael Hiltzik in today's LATimes. He begins by quoting the leading state official on the subject of air pollution.

"We think we do have a good story to tell," says Mary D. Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board.

The program's quarterly auctions of emissions allowances have gone on largely without a hitch. The program has fit in, as was expected, with other emissions reduction programs implemented under AB 32, the state's landmark greenhouse gas legislation, including mandates for renewable fuels sources for electrical utilities and emissions standards for new cars and trucks.

It has done so without a measurable drag on economic growth. The program generated $969 million in revenue for the state through the end of 2014, and is expected to generate $2 billion a year or more in the future. The money must be spent on efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Hiltzik also points out that before passage of Fran Pavley's AB 32, fossil fuel interests predicted gas price rises of 16 to 76 cents a gallon. An anti-tax campaign attempted to stir outrage about the program, making no apparent impression.

One positive aspect of the state's lengthening experience is that it has "drained away some of the fear-mongering" about cap-and-trade, says Severin Borenstein, an energy expert at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Only a column could a newspaper editor get away with a headline like this:

Emissions cap-and-trade program is working well in California

Global weirding, vol. 9031

A big story from the Associated Press:

Torrential downpours in Texas that have whiplashed the region from drought to flooding. A heat wave that has killed more than 1,800 people in India. Record 91-degree readings in Alaska, of all places. A pair of top-of-the-scale typhoons in the Northwest Pacific. And a drought taking hold in the East.

"Mother Nature keeps throwing us crazy stuff," Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis says. "It's just been one thing after another."

So writes Seth Borenstein, who has been reporting on science at a national level for decades, and knows how to get a story, no doubt. I've heard him call-in to numerous locales -- from Vandenburg AF base in Lompoc, to the AGU science conference in San Francisco -- with questions. Often he's the first reporter to ask a question in these national press conferences.

He goes on to detail some of the climactic weirdnesses, and, just as interesting, some of the reactions of research climatologists to the weirdness they're seeing, Giving the experts researchers the chance to speak to the question in plain English. 

Jerry Meehl, an extreme-weather expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that May is usually a pretty extreme month, with lots of tornadoes and downpours. Even so, he says, this has been "kind of unusually intense."

The word "stuck" provides one possible explanation.

Francis, Meehl and some other meteorologists say the jet stream is in a rut, not moving nasty weather along. The high-speed, constantly shifting river of air 30,000 feet above Earth normally guides storms around the globe, but sometimes splits and comes back together somewhere else.

A stuck jet stream, with a bit of a split, explains the extremes in Texas, India, Alaska and the U.S. East, but not the typhoons, Francis says.

[ -- which is interesting, on a level of character, because Francis is something of a crusader for the theory that the jet stream gets stuck in a meander mode, and is considered an innovator, where Meehl, a super-nice individual in my experience, is much more of the scientific mainstream --]

No one newspaper story will resolve  this question, no matter how well placed, but it's interesting to see that the long association between climate change and weather extremes, which has been showing up in the global climate change statistical models since the l990's, now has a mechanism that appears increasingly accepted in the research community.

It's not a surprise to Tom Toles:

Baseball manager and Twain on global warming

It's kind of random, but that's the uncanny nature of pop culture -- when one looks for developments and change about an issue, you never know what you will catch. 

From the LA Times, the manager of the LA Dodgers, Don Mattingly, wonders if drier air, due to the drought in California, could be affecting the anomalous number of home runs early this season. 

Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly has, at times, hypothesized that the especially dry weather means less drag on the balls. Maybe, he pondered, global warming is behind it?

"I don't know," Mattingly said. "But it was good to get a few [home runs] tonight."

It's worth noting that the California drought/global warming connection is suspected but not proven. 

In this context, there's also the impossible-to-forget Mark Twain remark -- and an interesting hint from cartoonist Kevin Siers of the global warming/Middle East crisis connection:

 

 

GOP takes climate change denial to the next level

The GOP's war on science gets worse, writes Elizabeth Kolbert, noting that the House GOP cut $300 million from NASA's budget for earth sciences (including climate) on the childish old theory that ignoring a problem will make it go away.

That same week The New Yorker, for which Kolbert writes, came up with an even wittier version of the same basic argument: