Fires ravaged parts of Southern California in December 2017, unusually late for fire season

HOST: Steve Curwood, Public Radio International, Living on Earth.

DATE: January 12, 2018, WEB-SITE: www.loe.org

CURWOOD: From PRI, and the Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.

NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – tells us America suffered a record amount of damage in 2017 from natural disasters, with a tab of more than 306 billion dollars. And to put that 306 billion in perspective, consider that it’s more than the interest on the US national debt, and twice the federal budget for health, Medicare, and education. Extreme weather hit almost every state this year: wildfires out west, Hurricanes Irma, Maria and Harvey in the South, and disasters that got less press coverage but still cost of over a billion dollars — events like the Minnesota hailstorm and drought in the mid-west. Here to discuss these steep costs and how they relate to climate disruptions is Kendra Pierre-Louis from the New York Times Climate Desk. Welcome to Living on Earth Kendra!

PIERRE-LOUIS: Thanks, Steve. I’m so glad to be here.

CURWOOD: So, 2017 was only the third hottest year on record in the US, but at 306 billion dollars, disaster damage broke all records.
PIERRE-LOUIS: When you go back to 1980 when they first started keeping records, there were only 3 natural disasters that topped a billion dollars. This year it was 16. The only other year where there are 16 events that topped a billion dollars was in 2011. So what we’re seeing is it’s not just that we’re having severe weather events, we’re having more of them.

CURWOOD: So, $306 billion dollars. Just how unprecedented is this figure record-wise compared to previous years?
PIERRE-LOUIS: Yes, it’s record-breaking. The next closest disaster year was in 2005, and that was the year of Hurricane Katrina and that was $91 billion dollars less.

CURWOOD: Now, of course, we’re not saying that climate caused all of this, but climate amplifies these disasters.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Right. We can definitely say that climate change amplified these disasters, and that we can see especially when it comes to, like, the western fires or the hurricanes that happen this year, we can definitely see the fingerprints of climate change. Researchers found that when it came to Hurricane Harvey that 38 percent of the rain can be attributed to climate change. That means in some places where as much as 50 percent of the rain fell, almost 20 of those inches you can blame on climate change.

The Tubes Fire, the most destructive wildfire in California’s history, destroyed parts of Napa, Sonoma, and Lake Counties in the Northern part of the state.

CURWOOD: Now, what kinds of natural disasters account for the largest portion of these costs?
PIERRE-LOUIS: Hurricanes account for the largest portion of these costs, but it was also the most costly fire year on record as well. And then when you start digging into the data it’s just the sheer number of incidences. When you go back to 1980 when they first started keeping records, there were only three natural disasters that topped a billion dollars. This year it was 16. The only other year where there were 16 events that topped a billion dollars was in 2011. So, what we’re saying is it’s not just that we’re having severe weather events. We’re having more of them.

CURWOOD: It seems that there are many disasters that cost a billion dollars or more that didn’t surface in the national consciousness in a big way this year, but nonetheless had a fairly staggering impact collectively. Talk to me about some of those.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Sure, you have the Missouri and Arkansas floods and severe weather. That was $1.7 billion dollars. You have hail storms and high winds in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee…that was $2.6 billion dollars. One of the ones that I think did not get a ton of attention was the drought, for example, in South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana. And droughts are really tricky because there are so slow moving that we don’t notice them. But for the farmers who it impacted, a lot of them like cattle ranchers, it caused them a tremendous lot of financial loss.

CURWOOD: Talk to me a bit more about how climate change may have aggravated all this damage.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Yes, so it was unusually warm across the country. NOAA came out with that release the same day they came out with the disaster data, and so it’s a threat multiplier. A really good example is the hurricanes. The oceans were warmer than usual, so that warm water fed the hurricanes. The wildfires out west, California was wetter in the winter and then it was really really dry, so all of that moisture created a ton of grass that grew really quickly, then the grass died off because it was so dry and then when the fire started it fed on all of that dry grass, and so that was all amplified by climate change.

A hailstorm in Minnesota racked up $2.4 billion in damage for the state.

CURWOOD: And how does 2017 figure on warming … on the warming record?
PIERRE-LOUIS: It’s the third warmest year in the United States on record. The global data isn’t out yet, but it should be out next week.

CURWOOD: So, things are really heating up.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Yeah, the Earth has a fever.

CURWOOD: How are insurance companies dealing with this? How much of the damage are they paying for?
PIERRE-LOUIS: A lot. This was a very expensive insurance year. It was the most expensive disaster year on record for insurers according to Munich RE, one of the world’s largest reinsurers. They’re recently the insurers of insurance companies. A lot of it was fueled by the disasters in United States, but there was also significant flooding in Asia. Obviously, what they’re going to do is they’re going to start passing those costs on to people. So, if you’re living in places that are at high risk for flooding or high risk for fires, you’re going to end up seeing increased costs because that’s the only way that they’re doing it. The one exception is in Florida because a lot of Florida flooding insurance and hurricane insurance is backed by the federal government. So, actually taxpayers are on the hook for those costs, and so there’s going to be sort of a reckoning when it comes to Florida about how they handle the insurance.

CURWOOD: Beyond the bottom line, what kind of toll is this taking on people’s psychological well-being?
PIERRE-LOUIS: There was a study that basically suggested that when these kinds of disasters happens, it’s actually really psychologically traumatic because not only do you lose your home in many cases, but you also lose your social connections, you don’t have your neighbors, you don’t have this breadth of support system. How you’ll deal with it really depends on whether it’s the first time you’ve gone through this or if it’s multiple occurrences. But basically it’s really traumatic and that’s ignoring, for example, the death toll rate. Like, if you’ve lost a loved one in one of these disasters that’s obviously going to be even permeate even further.

CURWOOD: So, does it get worse the more times you go through it or do you become more resilient…you say, ‘Oh all right, here it is again.’
PIERRE-LOUIS: It seems like people get worse. The one researcher that I talked to that looked at the flooding in Lafayette, I believe in 2016, said that after the rains happened in Lafayette the children whenever it rained a little bit too hard, the children would freak out. They really thought they were going to lose their homes again, they thought the floods were coming back. They really didn’t know how to deal with it.

CURWOOD: Kendra, what’s the lesson that we should be taking from this?
PIERRE-LOUIS: The lesson is two-fold. The first is that we should be taking steps to reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we’re releasing into the atmosphere so we can stave off the worst effects of these natural hazards. The other thing is we need to go deep into planning for the future, which is to accept that these kinds of occurrences are more likely to happen. When you look at Harvey in particular, we have people who are moving into flood zones, moving into places that were designed to flood and so it’s hard to say that that’s natural, right? We need to think really through in terms of where we are putting our communities and how we’re planning our communities, so that we are more resilient when these kinds of weather events happen.

CURWOOD: Kendra Pierre-Louis is a Climate Desk reporter for The New York Times. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Thanks so much for having me.

The proposed ACP route through North Carolina

From an EDITORIAL of The Editorial Board, Raleigh News & Observer, November 18, 2017

More renewable energy, not a new Atlantic Coast Pipeline, is the best path for energy development.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is being touted as a vital supply line for economic development in eastern North Carolina, but it also would contribute to a major threat to the flood-prone region by exacerbating climate change.

The 600-mile natural gas pipeline is planned to run from West Virginia’s natural gas fields through Virginia and North Carolina. The $6 billion project backed by Charlotte-based Duke Energy and Richmond-based Dominion Resources is moving steadily through a thicket of federal and state requirements and its developers expect to complete the permitting process by mid-December. But disputes over access to local property and legal objections from environmental groups could still stall the massive tree cutting, tunneling and trenching needed for the pipeline.

Such obstacles may be temporary given the resources and political clout of the developers, but they are necessary and welcome. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission failed to allow for a full public assessment of the pipeline before it granted approval. Appeals of that decision by various environmental and consumer advocacy groups will buy time for a fuller assessment of the need for the pipeline, its impact on the land and waterways and the risks it poses to residents who would live near it.

These practical and immediate concerns need to be addressed, but the overarching reason to oppose a new pipeline that would carry 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day is that it takes North Carolina’s and the nation’s energy development in exactly the wrong direction. Money should be poured into the development of renewable energy and the generation of power on site rather than into the pumping in of fossil fuel from hundreds of miles away.

Methane hazards

Representatives of Duke Energy and Dominion Resources acknowledge the need to reduce carbon emissions and say their companies are doing so. They note that coal-fired power plants have been converted to facilities fueled by cleaner burning natural gas, and Duke Energy has made large investments in solar power.

That’s fine, but it’s hardly enough. Natural gas is a cleaner source, but extracting it through hydraulic fracturing leads to extensive leaks of methane, a far more potent heat-trapping gas than than the carbon dioxide that coal plants emit. And while Duke has invested in solar power, renewable energy provides only a small fraction of its overall power generation. Allowing Duke to tap into a huge new supply of natural gas with the costs passed on to ratepayers will only increase the utility’s dependance on natural gas when it should be weaning itself off fossil fuels.

FERC is contributing to this backward path in energy development by allowing rates of return up to 14 percent on the construction of gas pipelines. That means ratepayers could be paying not only for the natural gas, but also for the pipeline that carries it. That makes building the ACP pipeline more attractive to utility shareholders, but it could make ACP gas more expensive than gas from existing pipelines.

Delaying conversion

Representative of Duke Energy and Dominion Resources are pushing the pipeline as a tool for economic development in economically struggling parts of eastern North Carolina. But so far the main customer for the gas in North Carolina would be Duke power plants. By 2032, Duke projects the need for eight additional power plants fueled by natural gas delivered by pipeline to North Carolina.

The pipeline will not be a lifeline for eastern North Carolina. It will instead delay Duke from more urgently converting to renewable sources. This is not a theoretical issue. Eastern North Carolina has felt the flooding from hurricanes intensified by global warming, and it is feeling the encroachment of rising sea levels.

What’s in eastern North Carolina’s best interest with regard to energy sources is the same as what’s in the world’s best interest. Build more wind turbines and solar arrays and encourage the rapidly improving battery technology for storing solar power. Those steps – not running a 50-foot wide swath through eastern North Carolina for the pipeline – represent the best path for the state’s energy future.

Springtime was Wonderful, but ....

Northern Hemisphere Sees Spring a Month Early Due to Global Warming

From an Article by Tim Radford, Guardian UK News Service, March 1, 2017

Spring is sprung 26 days earlier than a decade ago, causing problems for the natural cycle of plants and wildlife, Climate News Network reports

Spring is arriving ever earlier in the northern hemisphere. One sedge species in Greenland is springing to growth 26 days earlier than it did a decade ago. And in the US,spring arrived 22 days early this year in Washington DC.

The evidence comes from those silent witnesses, the natural things that respond to climate signals. The relatively new science of phenology – the calendar record of first bud, first flower, first nesting behavior and first migrant arrivals – has over the last three decades repeatedly confirmed meteorological fears of global warming as a consequence of the combustion of fossil fuels.

Researchers say the evidence from the plant world is consistent with the instrumental record: 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded, and it was the third record-breaking year in succession. Sixteen of the hottest years ever recorded have happened in the 21st century.

The most dramatic changes are observed in the high Arctic, the fastest-warming place on the planet, according to a study in Biology Letters. As the polar sea ice retreats, the growing season gets ever longer and arrives earlier.

The pattern is not consistent: grey willow sticks to its original timetable, and dwarf birch growth has advanced about five days earlier for each decade. But the sedge, almost four weeks ahead of its timetable in a decade, holds the record, according to a study that observed one plot at a field site in west Greenland, 150 miles inland, for 12 years.

“When we started studying this, I never would have imagined we’d be talking about a 26-day per decade rate of advance,” says Eric Post, a polar ecologist at the University of California, Davis, department of wildlife, fish and conservation biology, who has been studying the Arctic for 27 years. “That’s almost an entire growing season. That’s an eye-opening rate of change.”

Caribou come to the study site during the calving season, to graze on the rich plant life of the brief Arctic summer. The caribou set their migration calendar by day-length. But some of the plants prefer to respond to temperature, which means that by the time the caribou arrive, the plants have flourished and the pickings are not as nutritious. So fewer calves are born and more die.

“That’s one example of the consequences of this for consumer species like caribou, who have a limited window to build up resources before going into the next winter,” Post says. “With the most recent study, we’re taking a step towards understanding how extensive and cryptic the effects of sea ice loss might be in the Arctic.”

Further south, spring keeps on springing, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which has just published a new set of maps based on phenological observations. And, once again, an early spring doesn’t mean a sunnier, kinder world for everybody. Ticks and mosquitoes become more active, pollen seasons last longer. Crops could flourish or be at risk from a sudden late frost or summer drought.

Plants could bloom before the arrival of the birds, bees and butterflies that feed on and pollinate the flowers, with consequences for both the plant and the pollinator. “While these earlier springs might not seem like a big deal – and who among us doesn’t appreciate a balmy day or a break in dreary winter weather – they pose significant challenges for planning and managing important issues that affect our economy and our society,” says one of the authors of the report, Dr Jake Weltzin, a USGS ecologist and national director of the USA National Phenology Network.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net