Air Board: GHG Sniffers for Research, Not Enforcement
This tower in Walnut Grove was first outfitted with equipment to detect and measure atmospheric gases by the CA Energy Commission, in 2003. Photo: Craig Miller
A companion radio piece to this post airs on The California Report Tuesday morning.
Scientists in California have begun setting up a statewide network of monitors to track California's greenhouse gas emissions. Similar equipment has been in place for years as part of a continental network established by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But officials at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) say this new system will be the first of its kind.
"The unique thing about this is that we're actually looking at the local emissions, rather than the global average, says Jorn Herner, who heads the Greenhouse Gas Technology & Field Testing Section of CARB's research arm. "Nobody has done that before."
Scientists have been systematically tracking atmospheric CO2 on a broad scale since 1958. California's network of GHG sniffers will be capable of tracking CO2, nitrous oxides and other known greenhouse gases, and will initially focus on methane.
But CARB officials say the network is not part of a "Big Brother" strategy for emissions compliance. "This is initially a research project," said Herner. He says the new network will provide a "second data point" to augment the state's current method of estimating GHG emissions. Currently California's current climate law, AB-32, relies on a "bottom-up" system of estimating emissions from individual sources, then adding them up to arrive at total emissions for the state.
"The modeling won't tell you each individual source but what you'd be able to do is develop a gridded inventory. So you'll be able to say in this square mile of land over here, it looks like emissions are much higher than in this square mile next to it."
The greenhouse gas analyzers are about the size of a desktop computer. Photo: Craig Miller
The Air Board has purchased seven "next-generation" analyzers from Picarro Instruments in Sunnyvale. Five will go to fixed locations, such as a tower on Mt. Wilson, above the Los Angeles Basin. The two others will be on "mobile platforms;" electric vehicles that can roam the state taking ground-level readings. The units cost about $50,000 apiece but Picarro executives say they are self-adjusting and require far less human intervention than previous models, which will ultimately make them more cost-effective.
Picarro's CEO, Michael Woelk, says a nationwide network of 500-to-700 detectors could yield a comprehensive GHG map of the US with resolution down to ten kilometers (a little more than six miles).
If California regulators are successful at putting in place a statewide or regional cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, industrial emitters will have to pay fees for the carbon they pump into the air. Horn agrees that at that point, some kind of check on the current system of self-reporting will "probably" be needed, but, he says, "that's not the goal of this monitoring network at this time."
"The science is really young," he explained. "We’re really just trying to find out the potential of what we can do with this network. How it’s used in the future is still up in the air."
…so to speak.
No Protection for American Pika
American Pika, Photo: Doug Von Gausig
The high-alpine rabbit relative, the American pika, does not warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act, according to a ruling Thursday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The decision was required by a court order stemming from a lawsuit brought by the San Francisco-based Center for Biological Diversity against the agency, for failing to respond to a petition submitted by the Center in 2007.
The CBD petition cited climate change as the cause for population decline in pika populations in the mountains of Nevada's Great Basin. Because the creatures can die from overheating at temperatures as low as 78 degrees, and research suggests that a warming climate has led to major losses in lower-elevation populations, pushing pika to migrate to higher elevations. Some biologists are concerned that if temperatures rise high enough, they may reach the mountain-tops and run out of hospitable habitat.
"By not listing the pika, the decision is not respecting the best available science," said Shaye Wolf, a staff biologist at the CBD. "The science is very clear. Scientists in the Great Basin will tell you that their research is showing that pika are disappearing and that the losses are linked to climate change: heat stress in the summer and loss of snowpack in the winter."
Wolf said that the federal agency is required to use the "best available science" in making its ruling. She said that the CBD may challenge the decision on this basis.
"The (government's) interpretation of the studies is that even though pika are disappearing and will continue to disappear, they will be able to cope," said Wolf. "That's not consistent with what we're seeing. It's a bizarre argument that pika will adapt. There's no basis for that claim.
Had the federal agency ruled the other way, the pika would have been the first animal to make the endangered list as a direct result of climate change. Last year, the Obama Administration denied a similar petition for the Alaskan spotted seal, Wolf said.
The scientific community itself is split about whether the pika warrants a federal listing. While research shows that some populations of pika are declining, such as in the Great Basin, not everyone agrees that the entire species is facing extinction.
The CBD also has a pika case still pending at the state level. The California Fish and Game Commission has twice denied CBD requests for a status review of the American pika. The organization is currently challenging the state's second denial.
For more background on the CBD's efforts to list the pika, see Craig Miller's blog posts from May 2009.
Climate Concern Flags Amid Support for Policies
One possible outcome "badge" from KQED's Facebook survey, "A Matter of Degree"
Despite being far less concerned about climate change than they were a year ago, a large majority of Americans supports the the passage of federal climate and energy policies, according to a national survey released last week by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities. (The full survey is available as a PDF on the Yale Project on Climate Change website.)
More than 1,000 adults were surveyed in late December and early January, and their responses compared with the results of a similar survey from the fall of 2008.
Key findings include:
- Only 50% of Americans now say they are "somewhat" or "very worried" about global warming, a 13-point decrease
- The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has dropped 14 points, to 57%
- The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by humans activities dropped 10 points, to 47%.
These results echo a similar survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, which found that between April 2008 and October 2009, the proportion of Americans who believed there was solid evidence for global warming dropped 14 points, from 71% to 57%.
While both reports indicate a flagging of public concern about climate change in general, the Yale/GMU report finds that public support for the passage of federal climate and energy policies is strong, even across party lines. Majorities of Republicans and Democrats surveyed support renewable energy research, tax rebates for people buying fuel-efficient vehicles or solar panels, and regulating CO2 as a pollutant.
"The good news is that even though some Americans are becoming more skeptical that global warming is happening, nevertheless, there is still support for some of the basic climate policies," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and one of the study's principal investigators.
But the poll also revealed low levels of awareness about the policy debate in general: 60% of Americans surveyed said they'd heard "nothing at all" about cap-and-trade legislation, while just 12% said they'd heard "a lot." When the concept of carbon permit trading was explained to survey respondents, 58% supported the policy, but that support dropped to 40% when respondents were told that one hypothetical outcome would be to drive up household energy costs by $15 a month. Support rebounded to 66% if a yearly household bonus of $180 were supplied to offset higher energy costs.
Bipartisan support for some climate-related policies amid fading concern about climate change, is not as contradictory as it might seem. While some respondents approve of supporting research funding for renewable energy technologies as efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, others support this policy on national security and energy-independence grounds. Leiserowitz noted that while support for renewable energy research has been high for years, the current public support for cap and trade could "go either way" in the near future, depending on how the public debate plays out.
Climate Watch has partnered with the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication to create our climate survey A Matter of Degree, which is available on the Climate Watch website and on Facebook. A Matter of Degree uses data from the Yale and GMU researchers' Global Warming's Six Americas survey to help survey respondents determine where they fall on the spectrum of American beliefs about climate change.
Storms Offer Big Boost to Sierra Snowpack
For a more expansive analysis of California's current water picture, and an interactive map of current reservoir conditions, see Dan Brekke's drought update, posted earlier this week.
State water officials expressed “cautious optimism” after the season’s second survey of the Sierra snowpack.
After a series of Pacific storms dumped several feet of fresh snow on the mountains, today’s (officially the "February") survey reveals that the snow’s average water content is 115 percent of “normal” for this date (compared to 61% of normal at this time last year).
Water managers say even so, there’s more catching up to do and they still can’t rule out a fourth consecutive year of relatively dry conditions. Nor have they re-evaluated earlier tight allocations planned for agricultural water this year. With a lot of the recent precipitation still locked up in the state's "frozen reservoir," Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville are both still hovering around half of their normal levels for this date.
According to today's release from the Dept. of Water Resources:
"DWR’s early allocation estimate was that the agency would only be able to deliver 5 percent of requested SWP (State Water Project) water this year, reflecting low storage levels, ongoing drought conditions, and environmental restrictions on water deliveries to protect fish species. The agency will recalculate the allocation after current snow survey results and other conditions are evaluated."
By the way, if you've never had the chance to see how the "manual" component of the monthly snow surveys are done, take about four minutes and watch this video from 2008, when I joined surveyor Frank Gehrke at the Tamarack Flat survey site, off of Highway 50. This is not the site you usually see on the local news. That's Phillips Station, chosen for media photo ops because it's right off the highway. Getting to this site takes a little more doing, as you'll see.
EPA's New Regional Chief: Act Locally
New EPA regional chief Jared Blumenfeld. Photo: EPA
Yesterday I spoke with Jared Blumenfeld, the former head of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment–aka the guy who brought mandatory recycling to San Francisco and banished the phrase "Paper or plastic?" from the city's supermarkets–by banning the plastic.
Blumenfeld now occupies a vast corner office in the EPA’s Region 9 headquarters, overseeing a territory that includes four Western states and 20 of the country’s largest cities. Born 40 years ago, just as Region 9 came into being, this week he was briefing reporters on his plans to “revolutionize” the region with a tighter focus on environmental justice, enforcement, and making small businesses more efficient.
What do these things have in common? For one thing, they’re all pretty local: specific communities with specific complaints and needs (a profile, incidentally, that fits Blumenfeld’s first initiative to a "T").
So what about more sweeping changes on, say, climate? You could argue that it’s not the job of a regional head to get mixed up in Beltway politics. But given all the recent drama in Washington around cap and trade, maybe Blumenfeld’s local focus is intentional.
How, I asked him, has the mood in Washington affected his ambitions for EPA Region 9?
“I was looking at a recent poll that showed how many fewer people understand climate change last year than this year," he replied. "I think the environmental movement has gotten away from the people. We’ve become overly specialized, jargony, focused on large problems no one person can solve.”
Having made San Francisco a considerably "greener" place, maybe Blumenfeld's first task is to export small initiatives that–for the moment at least–make environmental problems feel local and solveable.
Amy Standen is the lead radio reporter for Quest, KQED's multimedia science initiative.
California Storms: A Dent in the Drought
Spillway at Alpine Lake on Mt. Tamalpais. File photo: Marin Municipal Water District
A version of this post also appears on Dan Brekke's personal blog, Infospigot. Also see our updated map of reservoir conditions at the end of this post.
By Dan Brekke
Is California's drought over? OK, let's take a step back. Yes, I realize one could debate whether the last three years in California actually constitute a drought. But that's a discussion for another time. For now, I think everyone can agree that we've had lower-than-average precipitation for the past three years.
The only reason to ask the question is that, after the first half of the wet season delivered only spotty rain, we've had a pretty solid week of downpours. Water is sluicing into our reservoirs, and the hills are greening up. Some counties, like Marin, have water tumbling down the spillways. All of that is a sign of what we think winter should be here.
My favorite water statistic from last week: when the storms were at their heaviest around Lake Shasta, California's biggest reservoir, water was flowing into the lake at about 500,000 gallons per second. That's 1.5 acre feet, or about enough for two-to-three "average" households for a year, every second.*
Amazing numbers like that aside, the people who get paid to think about whether the drought is over say "not yet." Last week, Quest managing editor Paul Rogers wrote a good summary of the situation, for The San Jose Mercury News.
Rogers' story does contain one bit of quirky California thinking about rain and water, though. He quotes a well established local meteorologist, Jan Null, about where we stand in terms of normal rainfall, saying: "This is a great start, but we need to keep it going."
Of course, Null recognizes better than most that the amount of rain we get and when we get it is out of anyone's control. But once you understand the importance of water in California, once you get how crucial the winter rains are, there's a score-keeping aspect to weather-watching here. It becomes second nature to study the rain gauge and the seasonal precipitation table as an index of performance, a reflection on whether a great collective goal is being attained. Lots of rain means we're doing well (and that we can put the complexities of water supply out of our minds). A dry spell means we're failing (and the prospect of hell to pay, or at least the strong possibility of stringent conservation measures).
But in reality, there's no performance going on. The rain is the rain, and the climate is the climate. California's rainfall is famously variable. Dry spells can be counted on and the current run of dry years is the third we've had since I arrived in Berkeley in the 1970s.
My first California winter, 1976-'77, was bone-dry and was in fact the second year of the driest two-year period ever recorded here. A decade later, from roughly 1986 through 1992, we had another run of dry years. And if our winter rains were to stop now, we'd be in the fourth year of drier-than-normal years. In between these periods we've had average years and very wet years and years that didn't quite hit the average. That might not be too different from anywhere else. The reason it's a bigger deal here than it might be in, say, Wisconsin, is that we have a six-month dry season. We need to store water to get through that. We have 37 million people and millions and millions acres of farmland that need water, whether it's falling from the sky or not. Thus the need to believe we can wish the rain to keep going during the wet season and the tendency to feel disappointment when the winter turns into a string of dry, sunny days.
*500,000 gallons per second. Here's the arithmetic: California Department of Water Resources figures show that in the hour between noon and 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 19, net inflow into the lake was 66,288 cubic feet per second. That's the highest inflow figure for any single hour that week. One cubic foot equals 7.48 gallons. 66,288*7.48 = 495,834.24 gallons. One acre-foot = 325,851 gallons. And 495,834.24/325,851 = 1.52 acre-feet. Per second. For the entire 24 hours of the 19th, Lake Shasta's inflow averaged just over 1 acre-foot a second.
View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map
Santer: "Loss of Innocence" for Climate Scientists
The Dana Glacier, outside Yosemite, CA, September 2008. Photo: Gretchen Weber
Yet another climate controversy has revived what have become increasingly common attacks on scientists' credibility. The latest flap arose when the IPCC admitted on Wednesday, that its 2007 prediction that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 was unfounded.
Attacks on the integrity of scientists have brought about a "loss of innocence" in the climate science field, said Ben Santer, a Research Scientist for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
On a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Santer lamented that "Fourteen or fifteen years ago, it was possible to do science and not be too worried about being the subject of Congressional investigations, Freedom of Information Act requests, and very personal and very public attacks. Those innocent days are over now."
Santer, who's been a key author of some IPCC reports, said the science that goes into those reports is the most rigorous that he's seen in his career."If your research suggests that humans are having a pronounced effect on climate," he continued, "I think the expectation is that you will be subjected to tremendous scrutiny. And some of that is appropriate, certainly in terms of the science and the integrity and credibility of the science, but unfortunately, that scrutiny is moving to very unwelcome areas, and it's also focusing on individuals and motives, and all of this stuff is very distasteful," he said.
Santer was joined on the call by Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center , who raised concern that the intense and personal nature of much of the criticism climate scientists have been facing (most recently in response to the East Anglia hacked email incident, now widely known as "Climategate") may be keeping promising young scientists out of the field at a time when they are most needed. In the wake of the East Anglia emails, a blizzard of accusations of data manipulation blew through the blogosphere and in certain corners of the Senate.
"It does make it difficult to bring young scientists into the field," Santer agreed. They look at what has gone on and there is genuine concern there. They must be asking themselves, 'Do I really want to get involved in critical but possibly contentious issues if there is the possibility that I will spend months or even longer dealing with questions not about the science that I have done, but about my own personal integrity?'" said Santer.
Thompson affirmed that while it's difficult to put a specific timetable on the disappearance of glaciers, the scientific evidence documenting glacier recession is overwhelming. Research indicates that more than 90% of the world's glaciers are receding, he said, including approximately 95% of the glaciers in the Himalayas.
"Glaciers do not have any political agenda," said Thompson. "They just sum up what's happening in the environment and they retreat or react to that en masse."
The conference call was organized by the activist Union of Concerned Scientists.
UPDATE 1/25/10
The London tabloid, the Daily Mail, reported yesterday that a lead author of the Asia chapter of the IPCC's 2007 assessment admitted that he knew the 2035 claim was unsubstantiated, but he approved including it in the report anyway. Murari Lal reportedly said in an interview with the Daily Mail that he knew the 2035 number came from a report that was not peer-reviewed, but that the claim of imminently disappearing glaciers would, "impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."
Michael Schlesinger, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences and director of the Climate Research Group at the the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign responded to the Daily Mail report with dismay.
"I am greatly saddened and deeply offended by this person's behavior," he wrote in an email. "A scientist does not lie nor change the facts to suit an agenda. Rather s/he tells it as it is, as best as it is known to her/him."
[Lal] He said these were “the most vilest allegations” and denied that he ever made such assertions. He said “I didn’t put it [the 2035 claim] in to impress policymakers…. We reported the facts about science as we knew them and as was available in the literature.”
MAP: California's Climate Lobby
Climate Watch now features a new page that brings together all of the interactive maps we've created so far. For the launch we've added an interactive map to our coverage of climate lobbying efforts in Washington. See our recent blog post, "The Climate Lobby Bulks Up" for more on who's been spending big to influence climate legislation on Capitol Hill.
View KQED: Climate Lobbying in California in a larger map
The data for the map is from the Center for Public Integrity's The Climate Change Lobby project. CPI tracks money helping to fuel the climate change legislation debates and maintains a database compiled from lobbying disclosure reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate’s Office of Public Records. (Read about the project's methodology here.) The data does not include lobbying activity aimed at state laws and regulations, or dollars spent on advertising campaigns.
Climate Watch intern David Ferry combed the data and mapped the lobbying efforts based in California. Chevron and PG&E top the list with $36 million and $34 million spent since 2003, respectively. Intel ranks third with $12 million. Our map skims the top of the database, showing only those organizations with more than a half-million dollars in spending.
Click here to view a larger map and to see a list of the CA lobbying efforts.
View KQED: Climate Lobbying in California in a larger map
Don't forget to visit the new Climate Watch Maps page, where you'll see this map as well as all of the interactive maps we've created to illustrate data from various sources, including the Department of Water Resources, the California Air Resources Board and The Center for Public Integrity.
NASA: 2009 Tied for Second-Warmest Year
Parts of the northern hemisphere may have had an extremely cold December, but nevertheless, last year tied for the second-warmest in 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, according to the latest surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The analysis finds that global temperatures were so similar in 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2009, that they are all tied for second place. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 set the record as the warmest year, according to this report.
James Hansen, head of NASA's GISS, and his team have released their end-of-year summary for 2009, initially posted on the Real Climate blog. It's pretty dense, but here are some additional highlights:
- The scientists offer an explanation for an apparent data discrepancy over whether 1998 or 2005 was the warmest year. In short, it comes down to the difference in the way GISS and HadCRUT (Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit) assign or do not assign temperature data for areas without observing stations. (HadCRUT leaves them out of the analysis, while GISS assigns values based on various factors outlined in the summary.) GISS maintains that 2005 was the warmest year.
- According to the report:
"There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as ‐8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C."
In other words, 2009's cold December in certain areas of the planet, as well as an unusually cold 2009 summer in the United States and Canada, do not reflect overall global temperatures nor signal a cooling trend:
"It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and mid‐latitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia, and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes. The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns…"
According to GISS data, December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s.
- The report underscores that monthly temperature anomalies tend to be greater than seasonal anomalies and that the the mean temperature of a particular month might not be the best way to identify global warming. Instead, one needs to look at measurements over the long-term, which, according to GISS data, indicate general warming over at least the last 50 years, just about everywhere on the planet.
The summary concludes with a sort of admonishment:
"The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales."
Nature Always Bats Last
Cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico Photo: Craig Miller
Mike Newland is an archeologist at Sonoma State University's Anthropological Studies Center. A version of this essay was originally broadcast as part of KQED's Perspectives series.
Nature Always Bats Last
By Mike Newland
I’ve been pondering a 3,000 year old mystery that makes me uneasy about our current plight. Starting around 2,000 B.C., people in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert really got into big-game hunting. We see this in the archaeological record—all of this big-horn sheep and antelope bone shows up in larger quantities. Up in the mountains, great panels of rock art are chock full of hunters chasing sheep, and evidence of their hunting camps is tucked in shelters and around springs.
Big-game hunting isn’t that efficient. You’re better off going for a wide range of edibles close by. You get more food for less work. This is an important point, because after 3,000 years of this big game hunting, this culture died out, and was replaced by folks that hunted and collected a broader range of food.
Bill Hildebrandt and Kelly McGuire, two archaeologists from Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Davis, have made a compelling argument about why people were so obsessed with hunting—they did it for status.
Good hunters were revered for their abilities to provide food and hunting trips could serve political and social functions. But big game hunting was eventually done at the expense of the rest of the population: archaeologists still discuss whether the bow and arrow, probably introduced to California by groups coming out of Oregon, was such an effective hunting tool that the hunters wiped-out most of the big game, or whether the devastating effects of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, which caused major droughts throughout the Great Basin and desert areas, pushed these people over the edge. But it is clear that serious changes took place, and big game hunting became unsustainable. By the time the next group of folks came along, the big-game hunters were on the verge of collapse.
This is one of the reasons why archaeology is important—we can look at past cultures and see how we, as a species, have dealt with big problems.
This research makes me uneasy because archaeology has shown repeatedly that cultures not in balance with nature die out. For millennia, people have sat around campfires debating whether to make the changes necessary to adapt to a shifting climate or depleted resource base, and invariably they said no. As a result, the graveyards of history are full of the corpses of cultures that failed to change when they needed to.
Now it’s our turn. History shows that nature won’t hesitate to take us out. We’re lucky in that we have probably one of the most adaptive cultures in history: we’ve made major changes—abolition of slavery, passing of environmental legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment—when we thought it was in our collective best interest. Even still, these landmark changes required decades of hard work and dedication to educate the broader population. We have our work cut out for us. We can either rise to the occasion, and make the investments necessary to stem climate change, or we can take our place with the rest of the dead in the graveyard.
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