updated information August 3, 2022
Western U.S. faces water and power shortages due to climate change, U.N. warns
The two largest reservoirs in the United States are at “dangerously low levels,” threatening the supply of fresh water and electricity in six states and Mexico, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned on Tuesday.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are both man-made reservoirs on the Colorado River, are currently at their lowest levels ever, in part because of an ongoing drought exacerbated by climate change=================
The Return of the Urban Firestorm
What happened in Colorado was something much scarier than a wildfire.
But what was unprecedented were the antecedent conditions leading up to the winds. So the winds themselves, yes. But usually they don’t occur when conditions are as incredibly tinder-dry as they are right now. I mean, the autumn and the early winter this year did not feel like autumn or early winter. There were a lot of days in the sixties and seventies in Boulder, overnight lows above freezing. And keep in mind Boulder’s over 5,000 feet in elevation.
Right.
So
that was extraordinary. And the summer before it was also really hot.
So the lead up to this was record warmth — and I’m not talking about a
couple days before, I mean like the whole half year before. A lot of
cumulative extreme warmth, and then also cumulative extreme dryness.
This is one of the top five driest such six month periods on record,
which notably followed a really wet period last spring, and so there was
a tremendously snowy and wet spring, which led to a ton of grass and
brush growth. And then we had record high temperatures and record dry
conditions that dried everything out. And then we didn’t get any of that
autumn precipitation. Normally Boulder would see at least a couple feet
of snow, by this point in the season. As of Thursday, we’d had about an
inch cumulatively for the season. Essentially nothing. And, obviously,
had there been snow on the ground, this wouldn’t have happened. And even
if there hadn’t been snow on the ground, but there had been more
precipitation and lower temperatures in recent months, there might have
still been a fire, given these extreme winds, but it very plausibly
would’ve had a very different outcome. .....
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It’s not like climate change is causing things to spontaneously ignite, but what it is doing is changing the character of wildfires. It’s expanding the window of what’s possible. It’s expanding wildfire season. It’s increasing the upper end of how intense fires can become — how hot they burn, how fast they move. And the faster moving and more intense they are, the more dangerous they are to us humans, the more, the more, you know, the more destructive they tend to be in terms of structures and homes lost. So it’s not that it would’ve been impossible for there to be a fire during an extreme wind event in December in this part of the world, because the winter here is the drier season — it’s not like California where the winter’s the wet season. But on the other hand, the record warmth and dryness leading up to this period definitely played a role in how dry things were. And we’ve kind of been seeing this time and time again.
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So in California, for example, you get these strong offshore down slope winds, mainly in autumn or early winter. You don’t get them in summer, the hottest time of year. That’s why autumn is peak fire season in California. It’s not because it’s the hottest season, it’s because the winds are most prevalent. And if you extend fire season by drying things out and warming things up later into the autumn, then you get the same season winds…............
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But instead of them coming during “fall” conditions, they’re effectively coming during “summer” conditions.
Because
now you have summer-like dryness conditions all the way into autumn
where you didn’t before. And that gives you a multiplicative increase in
risk, just from that seasonal shift — more than you’d expect just from
the increase in vegetation and dryness alone.
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You’ve
talked about these climate shifts, but there’s also the human
contribution, the way we choose to live in areas which we know have at
least some risk. Sometimes when we see a really devastating wildfire in
the California forest burning through some homes, it can be tempting to
think, well, we just shouldn’t build there. But when the homes
themselves are the fuel, and the fire isn’t burning primarily through
forest, it raises a different set of questions.
I think that
for a lot of those reasons, a lot of people here are shocked. I mean,
people who have lived here for a long time, they’ve seen extreme winds,
they’ve seen fires, but they’ve never seen the confluence of the extreme
winds in a fire that just burns right into the highly populated suburbs
and destroys a thousand homes. And I think that there’s a certain level
of disbelief that some of the places that burned did in fact. I mean, I
don’t think anybody would’ve been shocked had a fire burned hundreds of
homes in the foothills above Boulder. I mean, everyone would’ve been
horrified, but no one would’ve been shocked. Everyone knows it’s
obviously at very high fire risk, those houses nestled in the woods. It
wouldn’t come as a surprise to any of the people who live there.
,...
The other twist is that since Boulder is such a global hub for atmospheric science. And since Boulder is now so expensive, a lot of the scientists can’t live in it, so they live in the towns and cities immediately surrounding it. There were probably a lot of atmospheric and earth science people who were directly affected by this fire, much more than would’ve been the case had this occurred almost anywhere else in the world. So there’s going to be a lot of, I think, introspection. This has already kind of happened with scientists in California, but the expertise is more geographically dispersed there.
It’s
interesting to hear you make the contrast with California. This is
gross regional stereotyping, but the culture of California seems in
certain ways to acknowledge and even celebrate the brutality of the
landscape of the state. Whereas the cartoon of Colorado is Patagonia
vests and hiking and everyone feeling they live in harmony with nature.
I don’t know if I necessarily agree that Coloradans live more in harmony with nature.
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The other twist is that since Boulder is such a global hub for atmospheric science. And since Boulder is now so expensive, a lot of the scientists can’t live in it, so they live in the towns and cities immediately surrounding it. There were probably a lot of atmospheric and earth science people who were directly affected by this fire, much more than would’ve been the case had this occurred almost anywhere else in the world. So there’s going to be a lot of, I think, introspection. This has already kind of happened with scientists in California, but the expertise is more geographically dispersed there.
It’s
interesting to hear you make the contrast with California. This is
gross regional stereotyping, but the culture of California seems in
certain ways to acknowledge and even celebrate the brutality of the
landscape of the state. Whereas the cartoon of Colorado is Patagonia
vests and hiking and everyone feeling they live in harmony with nature.
I don’t know if I necessarily agree that Coloradans live more in harmony with nature.
This map shows the perimeter of the Marshall Fire, which burned approximately 6,000 acres. https://t.co/FeohW2KY9g
— The Denver Post (@denverpost) December 31, 2021
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And it’s interesting that this happened right at the boundary, this fire literally started precisely at that geographic and cultural boundary, right at the base of the foothills and spread into this other world. This was a small fire that spanned a pretty wide and pretty unusual cross section of geography — physical and cultural and otherwise. But it’s also so recent. It’s still less than 24 hours ago that this started, so I think a lot of us haven’t processed it yet.
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But I think a lot of people underestimate risk. I’m someone who’s always partly, because of my job, hyper focused on risk. But we’ve been on that road so many times, it’s a pretty road, it’s a gorgeous landscape. So it’s obvious why people like to live there. But what are the risks that entails? And people say, oh, well, don’t live in a fire zone. Okay, well, what about the flood zones? You know, what about tornado alley? What about sea level rise? What about, you know, in New York City, people dying in their basement apartments because of the flash floods in the summer.
So when people say, where do we go? And I get this question all the time now: Where should we go? What’s the safest place? They ask. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer that question other than I definitely wouldn’t live along the coast anymore for obvious reasons. Other than that, I don’t really know how to answer that question. And even the immediate coast issue is not easy if you already live there.
It’s a question that frustrates me because people expect there to be an answer.
They expect there has to be a way to eliminate risk, that there has to be an exit from climate risk......
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The obvious line is that climate change is a global problem. But a more specific bit is that we keep getting surprised. I mean, I honestly don’t think any climate scientist would have honestly predicted that in 2021, the glacial valleys of British Columbia would see Death Valley-like temperatures. I mean, I’m still completely blown away by the fact that it was 120 degrees in British Columbia this summer. That’s just one example.
And I’ve heard people give British Columbia as the answer to the “where do we go” question. And those people probably weren’t thinking about fires, which have always been a problem there. But this year was an eye-opener nevertheless. It wasn’t just the Heat Dome, but the fires that followed, and then the mudslides and floods that followed that. Now they’re dealing with record low temperatures..........................
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The obvious line is that climate change is a global problem. But a more specific bit is that we keep getting surprised. I mean, I honestly don’t think any climate scientist would have honestly predicted that in 2021, the glacial valleys of British Columbia would see Death Valley-like temperatures. I mean, I’m still completely blown away by the fact that it was 120 degrees in British Columbia this summer. That’s just one example.
And I’ve heard people give British Columbia as the answer to the “where do we go” question. And those people probably weren’t thinking about fires, which have always been a problem there. But this year was an eye-opener nevertheless. It wasn’t just the Heat Dome, but the fires that followed, and then the mudslides and floods that followed that. Now they’re dealing with record low temperatures.
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I think about the story from the dust bowl, it’s told in [the Timothy Egan book] The Worst Hard Time. There was a guy who was the head of the soil conservation service at the time. There was this massive soil erosion because of agricultural practices, and the dust bowl was expanding and it was going to get to the point where it was just gonna turn the central part of the country into a permanent desert. And the soil scientist realized this. And I don’t know whether this was really the catalyst for what followed but it did actually happen. He traveled to D.C. and he was giving congressional testimony on how bad things were and what needed to be done to fix it from a land management policy perspective. And as he was about to enter the chamber, the sky got really dark outside. He realized it was a dust storm that had made it all the way to Washington from the Great Plains, the dust bowl region. And he dramatically opened the shutters and said, look outside, this is what it’s come to, it’s come for you here.
Part of me was thinking this past summer, when the sky got red across New York and D.C., that it was sort of a similar moment. But I’m not sure that there was any equivalent character. And there certainly is not an equivalent Congress.
This article was updated to more clearly state that the fire did not begin in a shopping center, but moved quickly there after ignition.
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How to Live in a Climate ‘Permanent Emergency’
In British Columbia, there were at least 486 “sudden deaths” in the midst of the heatwave — a number that is sure to grow many times over, since deaths from heat are rarely so obvious they can be identified in real time rather than statistical analysis. In Portland, at least 63 have died, and in Seattle, where less than half of homes have air conditioning, the extreme heat has put more than a thousand people in the hospital already. Local hoteliers were celebrating, however — their hotels full for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, with locals fleeing their homes in search of the relief of AC. “It’s been a blessing,” one said.
Elsewhere in Washington State, the roads were melting and agricultural workers as young as 12 and as old as 70 were starting their shifts at 4 a.m. to try to harvest the region’s cherries and blueberries before the fruit was fried by the heat. In Sacramento, residents complaining that the tap water tasted too much like dirt, thanks to the ongoing drought that may be the worst the American West has seen in millennia, were told to “add lemon.” In Santa Barbara, people have been advised to jerry-rig DIY “clean-air rooms” in preparation for the coming fire season, now already in full swing — months ahead of what used to mark the beginning of peak activity in the fall. Suppliers of sparklers were shuttered headed into the Fourth of July weekend. In Alaska, at the edge of the heat dome, the climate writer Eric Holthaus noted, “calving glaciers are producing ‘ice quakes’ as powerful as small earthquakes as they crumble into the sea.” It was hotter in parts of Canada and Oregon, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather pointed out, than it has ever been in the history of Las Vegas, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
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But as the climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis suggested, in a fit of justified despair, we have been here before — when last year’s fires turned San Francisco orange and produced an eerily biblical darkness at noon; when Australia’s “Black Summer” bushfires burned through 46 million acres and killed more than a billion animals; when deforestation fires tore through the Amazon and briefly inspired international outrage approaching levels reserved for genocide. That’s to name just a few recent local apocalypses and not even mention the many disasters that have not shaken American consciences, like the drought and famine unfolding today in Madagascar, putting 400,000 on the brink of starvation. Just try to watch this video all the way through.
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Earlier this month, a heat wave across the Middle East saw five countries hit temperatures above those seen in the western U.S. and Canada. In Pakistan, 20 children in a single classroom collapsed from heat stress and were rushed to the hospital. Already, scientists have discovered that across Pakistan and throughout the Persian Gulf, regions have reached combinations of temperature and humidity that are literally beyond the human threshold of survivability. The term for this measure is “wet-bulb temperature,” and it is sure to become terrifyingly more familiar in the years ahead, just as “red flag warning,” “fire tornado,” and even “carbon dioxide equivalent” and “1.5 degrees Celsius” have in the years just past.
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Agence France-Presse, which received the leak and has since guarded it quite closely, summarized the draft report in three striking paragraphs:
Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.
The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds … But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.
This is just the journalistic summary, of course, and journalists are always subject to criticism for hyperbole even when merely restating the findings of the most pedigreed science. Unfortunately, the quoted portions of the leaked report are just as grim as the write-through.
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And yet beyond the four corners of the climate world, it barely registered a peep, perhaps a sign that, as much as alarmism has achieved in recent years in activating genuine climate action, it has also acquainted us so well with apocalyptic premonitions that new ones glide by and the old ones, when fulfilled, manage to hold attention only briefly before the world snaps back into deadening complacency and a growing tolerance for the pains of warming. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” the draft reportedly concludes. “Humans cannot.”
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It is also especially striking as a statement of climate fatalism, given that the upcoming IPCC report is expected to devote considerable attention not just to the science of warming and the project of decarbonization but the urgent need for climate adaptation.
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This year suggests the possibility of a new arrival — the age of adaptation, or what climate-and-energy researcher Juan Moreno-Cruz yesterday called “climate realism.”
Alarmism, he said, was “useless,” and even efforts to decarbonize have served as a kind of distraction. “Stop dreaming up climate solutions, think of climate managing strategies,” he admonished.
Talking climate solutions has left us unprepared for actual climate change. We keep running models and fighting over which “solution” is the best, but we have done nothing to address the impacts of climate change.
Managing climate change is not as sexy as solving climate change, but it’s what we need. Yes, we need real action to achieve deep decarbonization in our economy. There is no amount of adaptation we can do if we don‘t get emissions under control. But we already baked in so much warming we need to deal with it now. We painted ourselves into this corner, and we need to navigate our way out of it. Dreaming about a future carbon-free system will do nothing for people in India and Pakistan today.
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