Month: March 2021

Forests Struggle on New Planet

A boardwalk in the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite damaged by a fallen ponderosa pine during the Mono wind event on 19 January.
A boardwalk in the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite damaged by a fallen ponderosa pine during the Mono wind event on 19 January.Photograph: AP

In geological time, we’ve changed the climate in the blink of an eye – pulling the biological rug out from under forests around the planet.

Guardian:

Camille Stevens-Rumann never used to worry about seeing dead trees. As a wildland firefighter in the American west, she encountered untold numbers killed in blazes she helped to extinguish. She knew fires are integral to forests in this part of the world; they prune out smaller trees, giving room to the rest and even help the seeds of some species to germinate.

“We have largely operated under the assumption that forests are going to come back after fires,” Stevens-Rumann said.

But starting in about 2013, she noticed something unsettling. In certain places, the trees were not returning. For an analysis she led of sites across the Rocky Mountains, she found that almost one-third of places that had burned since 2000 had no trees regrowing whatsoever. Instead of tree seedlings, there were shrubs and flowers.

This shift – echoed across a warming world – is a distinct phenomenon from trees dying because of direct human intervention such as logging. These trees are dying without humans laying a hand on them, at least physically, and they are not resprouting. Forests cover 30% of the planet’s land surface, and yet, as humans heat the atmosphere, some locations where they would have grown now appear too dry or hot to support them.

In western North America, huge swaths of forested areas may become unsuitable for trees owing to climate change, say researchers. In the Rocky Mountains, estimates hold that by 2050, about 15% of the forests would not grow back if felled by fire because the climate would no longer suit them. In Alberta, Canada, about half of existing forests could vanish by 2100. In the south-western US, which is experiencing a “megadrought”, as much as 30% of forests are at risk of converting to shrubland or another kind of ecosystem.

“Now’s a good time to go visit national parks with big trees,” said Nate McDowell, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the lead author of a paper forecasting that in southwestern US forests more than half of conifers, the dominant type of trees, could be killed by 2050. “It’s like Glacier national park – now’s a good time to see a glacier before they’re gone.”

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Post Blackout: Rethinking Texas

More from my terrific conversation with Michael Webber at the University of Texas.
Michael is well known for having thought deeply about how the grid works and where it’s going. I’m pairing his insights with a long analysis from E&E News, which I excerpt here, but by all means go to the link and give it a scan.

E&E News:

Nearly a month after an arctic blast crippled Texas’ main power grid, questions continue to fly about how to prevent a similar disaster from occurring again.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has directed lawmakers to address the electricity crisis during their current session. He and others are also calling for power pricing errors to be corrected and for an overhaul of the grid operator.

Coordinate Gas and Electric Power:

Experts across the energy sector say natural gas and electricity interests simply must work better together. That means more coordination among the PUC, the RRC and energy companies.

They could, for example, improve lists of critical energy facilities and make sure one sector doesn’t derail the other’s ability to deliver energy.

“The gas industry feeds into a critical piece of power infrastructure,” said Pat Wood III, a former Texas and federal energy regulator who is CEO of the Hunt Energy Network. “And so you cannot look at one without looking at the other.”

Gas is an important source of home heating in Texas, and close to half of the energy provided on the ERCOT power grid in 2020 came from gas-fueled generation.

But gas wasn’t always available at the pressures needed for power plants during last month’s crisis. The fuel had the most capacity offline in terms of power generation in the ERCOT region during the winter event.

Cold-weather failures on the gas side and a lack of electricity to power elements of the gas system are among the reasons cited so far. Gas prices skyrocketed amid supply shortages.

Joshua Rhodes, a research associate with the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas, Austin, also suggested a look at moving power plants further up in line for natural gas during grid emergencies.

That could have reduced heating for homes during the recent crisis, he said, but it likely would have kept power flowing in more places. It’s also true that many modern gas furnaces can’t run without electricity.

Weatherize Energy Assets:

Having power plants unprepared for cold weather was a major reason the ERCOT grid came close to a catastrophic blackout in February.

While some assets had winter preparations, Abbott is calling for change. The governor has made winterizing and stabilizing power infrastructure a legislative priority to mandate and fund. The price tag for that could be substantial, though all plants may not require the same level of treatment.

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Intensifying Hurricanes are Real, not Artifact

KXAN:

In the year 2000, esteemed climatologist and geophysicist Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University coined a term he would come to loath. “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation”, or AMO for short, was used to describe an oscillation pattern between the North Atlantic ocean currents and the wind patterns above. Similar to the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), however the AMO lasting over the course of decades rather than a year or two like ENSO.

In an article recently published by Mann, he explains “back in the 1980s and 1990s, a number of articles pointed to a pattern of North Atlantic warming during the 1930s-1950s, subsequent cooling in the 1960s and 1970s, and warming thereafter, which seemed to resemble a natural oscillation in the climate system”.

At the time, Mann and his colleagues had mountains of data collected from the analysis of a long-term ocean-atmosphere model from the Princeton Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. This state-of-the-art (at the time) model processed data that expanded over a thousand years in the past and presented the conclusion that over time, the North Atlantic went through several internal warming and cooling periods. Basically, it was something that simply just happens. However, there was one major (unbeknownst) caveat to the model. It ran as a “control” model, meaning it did not factor in external “forcing” such as no greenhouse gas changes, no variations in solar output, no volcanic eruptions, etc.

In Mann’s article, he states “at times I feel like I created a monster when I gave a name to this putative climate oscillation in 2000. The concept of the AMO has since been misapplied and misrepresented to explain away just about every climate trend under the sun, often based on flawed statistical methods that don’t properly distinguish a true climate oscillation from a time-varying trend.”

Essentially, this was the fuel climate change deniers needed to fund a 20-year long campaign that involved a respected climatologist conducting a study that proves that climate change is not caused by humans (anthropologic forces), but rather a natural warming/cooling phenomenon that occurs every few decades.

CBS News:

The image below, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), shows how hurricane activity seems to flow in roughly 60-year waves — active for around 30 years when the Atlantic in its warm phase and inactive for around 30 years when in the cool phase.

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Wildlife Hammered by Texas Cold Wave

Still forensics to be done as to the culpability of climate in the recent polar vortex that famously battered Texas, but by all accounts, the cold snap was the coldest, longest, and most widespread in memory.
Wind turbines were falsely blamed for the collapse of the Texas grid, but subsequent reporting showed that it overwhelmingly the “reliable baseload” part of the Texas grid that collapses in the frigid weather.

Similarly, wind turbines are often critiqued for impacts on birds and bats, and indeed, there are impacts, but the experts at the Audubon Society and elsewhere overwhelmingly agree, that the threat of climate change, and in particular, the unpredictable extremes that come with it, is a far greater threat.

BBC:

Extreme weather appears to be disrupting the life cycle of Europe’s bats.

Scientists were alarmed to find that some bats in Portugal skipped winter hibernation altogether this year while others gave birth early. 

The findings add to growing fears that rising temperatures are having unpredictable effects on bats, birds and other wildlife.

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