Climate change has gotten deadly. It will get worse.

Researchers say they are ‘virtually certain’ that warming from human greenhouse gas emissions played a pivotal role in recent fatalities

By Sara Kaplan, The Washington Post, July 3, 2021

PORTLAND, Ore. — The emergency department at Oregon Health Sciences University had rarely been this busy, even during the worst stages of the covid-19 pandemic.

Physicians raced to provide fluids to patients who arrived breathless, dizzy and drenched in sweat. Others were brought in on stretchers, their body temperatures so high their central nervous systems had shut down. Those who could still speak told of stifling apartments and sun that made their skin sizzle. Some had tried to walk to county cooling shelters, only to collapse in the blistering heat.

“The system was overwhelmed,” said Mary Tanski, chair of OHSU’s department of emergency medicine, of the towering heat dome that toppled temperature records across the Northwest this week.

Some patients didn’t survive. In Oregon, Washington and western Canada, authorities are investigating more than 800 deaths potentially linked to the punishing heat.

It will be months before experts know precisely how many of those deaths can be specifically attributed to climate change. But researchers who specialize in the science of attribution say they are “virtually certain” that warming from human greenhouse gas emissions played a pivotal role.

It is a sign of how dangerous the climate crisis has gotten — and how much worse it can still become.

Here's what's causing the record-breaking temperatures in the Northwest

The heat dome was just one of a barrage of climate catastrophes that struck the world in recent weeks. Western wildfires are off to a scorching start, with firefighters actively battling 44 large blazes that have burned nearly 700,000 acres. Parts of Florida and the Caribbean are bracing for landfall of Hurricane Elsa, the Atlantic’s fifth named storm in what is one of the most active starts to hurricane season on record. Nearly half a million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as the country grapples with dust storms, locusts and its worst drought in decades. In Verkhoyansk, Siberia — usually one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet — the land surface temperature was 118 degrees.

“Climate change has loaded the weather dice against us,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.

“These extremes are something we knew were coming,” she added. “The suffering that is here and now is because we have not heeded the warnings sufficiently.”

Humans burning fossil fuels have caused the globe to warm roughly 1 degree Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the preindustrial era. It’s a seemingly incremental change, but it has led to disproportionately frequent and severe natural disasters.

Think of the climate as a bell curve, Hayhoe said, with temperatures distributed according to how common they ought to be. The center of the bell curve may have shifted just a couple of degrees, but the area of the curve now in the “extreme” zone has increased significantly.

Within the next week, researchers expect to publish a “rapid attribution” study that determines how climate change made the Northwest heat wave more likely. Yet precisely quantifying the role of climate change in the event has been difficult because the heat was just so extreme, said Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who is contributing to the attribution effort.

“It’s well beyond what straightforward statistical analysis would suggest. It’s well beyond what climate models suggest,” he continued. “But it happened.”

Studies show the chance of a given tropical storm becoming a hurricane that is Category 3 or greater has grown 8 percent every decade. The acreage of the West burned by wildfire is twice what it would otherwise be. The heat wave that struck the Northwest this week brought temperatures that were as much as 11 degrees above the previous all-time high.

Underpaid firefighters, overstretched budgets: The U.S. isn’t prepared for fires fueled by climate change

That increase in intensity is partly due to the fact that meteorological phenomena are occurring in a hotter world. Summers in the Northwest are about 3 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than they were a century ago.

“But there are other, nonlinear, things going on,” Wehner, adds.

For example, heat causes water to evaporate from vegetation and soil, which uses up energy and helps bring temperatures down — a phenomenon called evaporative cooling. But climate change has made the West both hotter and dryer. As the mercury ticks upward, the landscape becomes even more parched, which allows it to heat up even faster. Now, more than 93 percent of the American West is in moderate to severe drought, according to the U.S. drought monitor.

Another physical phenomenon, called the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, shows that for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture. This means that warm conditions make storms much wetter, leading to record-breaking rainfall events like Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Scientists have been aware of these phenomena for decades, and have long warned about the potential for even moderate amounts of global warming to trigger catastrophic weather extremes.

The heat being so devastating should be a warning sign for all of us. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement calls for humanity to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. A subsequent report from United Nations scientists found that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius would trigger catastrophic sea level rise, near-total loss of coral reefs and a calamitous increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters.

But the world is unlikely to meet either of those goals. Most countries have not reduced greenhouse gas emissions nearly enough to meet targets set in the Paris agreement. Even if they meet their existing pledges, researchers say the world has just a 5 percent chance of keeping warming “well below” 2 degrees.

If we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, studies suggest, the Earth could be 3 to 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the end of the century. The Arctic will be free of ice in summertime. Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from food shortages and extreme drought. Huge numbers of species will be driven to extinction. Some regions will become so hot and disaster-prone they are uninhabitable.

“It’s a very different planet at those levels,” Wehner said. “This is really serious. As a society, as a species, we’re going to have to learn to adapt to this. And some things are not going to be adaptable.”

Extreme heat is likely to be one of those things. Studies of heat waves suggest that a half a degree Celsius increase in summertime temperatures can lead to a 150 percent increase in the number of heat waves that kill 100 people or more. Research published last year in the journal Science found that the human body can’t tolerate temperatures higher than 95 degrees when combined with 100 percent humidity.

The scene in emergency departments across the Northwest this week underscores that science. Wait times at the OHSU emergency department were 5 to 7 hours, Tanski said. At Swedish Health Services — Cherry Hill in Seattle, doctors were seeing patients in hallways because all the rooms were full.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Markel, an emergency physician at the Seattle hospital. During an overnight shift on Monday, he treated 12 patients for heat illness. Some were so sick their kidneys and livers were failing, their muscles starting to break down.

“I don’t claim to be an expert in climate change or environmental science,” Markel said. “But I definitely care for people who are impacted by the extremes of climate. … And it’s like, the more crises we face the more clear it is.”

Jeff Duchin, Seattle and King County’s chief public health officer, put it more bluntly: “Climate change is a health emergency,” he said in a statement this weekend. “And reducing greenhouse gas emissions is literally a matter of life and death.”

The intensity of recent weather extremes — and the certainty of still worse events to come — weighs on scientists.

Speaking over the phone, Wehner’s tone was somber as he discussed the wildfire smoke that choked California last summer, people whose homes burned down, a friend whose 90-year-old mother was killed when the town of Paradise was consumed by flames. Haltingly, he recalled watching a newscaster interview a Pakistani man whose two children had died in a 2015 heat wave. When Wehner later investigated the event, he found that climate change had made the event 1,000 times more likely.

“It did not have to be this way,” he said. “We have known enough to take action for 20 years. And if we had taken action 20 years ago, it would be a lot easier.”

“But there’s no ‘I told you so,’” he continued. “I just feel bad. Just bad. I really wish we had been wrong. But we weren’t.”

The only comfort, said Hayhoe, is in knowing that action can still be taken. Though the world could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming within this decade, scientists say we can avoid crossing that threshold if we cut global greenhouse gas emissions by about 7.6 percent per year.

Such cuts would require an unprecedented transformation of human society. But look at the alternative, Hayhoe said.

“We have choices to make, she said. “And the quicker we make those choices, the better off we will all be. The future is in our hands.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/07/03/climate-change-heat-dome-death/

Earth is now trapping an ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, NASA says

New research shows that the amount of heat the planet traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land

By Tik Root, The Washington Post, June 16, 2021

The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to new research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The Earth is warming faster than expected.”

Using satellite data, researchers measured what is known as Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun, and how much it’s able to shed, or radiate back out into space.

When there is a positive imbalance — Earth absorbing more heat than it is losing — it is a first step toward global warming, said Stuart Evans, a climate scientist at the University at Buffalo. “It’s a sign the Earth is gaining energy.”

That imbalance roughly doubled between 2005 and 2019, the study found. “It is a massive amount of energy,” said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer for NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and co-author of the study. Johnson said the energy increase is equivalent to four detonations per second of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once. “It’s such a hard number to get your mind around.”

The Earth takes in about 240 watts per square meter of energy from the sun. At the beginning of the study period, in 2005, it was radiating back out about 239.5 of those watts — creating a positive imbalance of about half a watt. By the end, in 2019, that gap had nearly doubled to about 1 full watt per square meter.

Oceans absorb most of that heat, about 90 percent. When researchers compared satellite data to temperature readings from a system of ocean sensors, they found a similar pattern. The agreement between the data sets surpassed expectations, Loeb said, calling it the “nail in the coffin” for the imbalance results.

“The fact that they used two different observational approaches and came up with the same trends is pretty remarkable,” said Elizabeth Maroon, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison unaffiliated with the study. “It lends a lot of confidence to the findings.”

The biggest outstanding question is what is driving the acceleration.

The study points to decreases in cloud cover and sea ice, which reflect solar energy back into space, and an increase in greenhouse gases emitted by humans, such as methane and carbon dioxide, as well as water vapor, which trap more heat in the Earth, as factors in the imbalance. But it is difficult to discern human-induced changes from cyclical variations in the climate, the researches said.

“They are all kind of blended together,” said Loeb, who added that further research is needed to determine the factors.

The period studied overlapped with fluctuations in the climate that may have played a significant role in the acceleration, including a strong El Niño event from 2014 to 2016, which led to unusually warm waters. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a longer-term, El Niño-like fluctuation, and around 2014 that also switched from a “cool” phase to a “warm” phase.

But, Johnson says, that doesn’t let humans off the hook. “We’re responsible for some of it,” he said. It’s just unclear how much.

Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center of Atmospheric Research, said the results of the study aren’t particularly surprising given these climactic variations. But 15 years is not enough time to establish a trend, he said.

“Certainly you’d like to see another 10 years or something like that to see how this behaves,” he said. “The question is: Will this continue?”

That too is unclear, Johnson said. The imbalance could shrink in some years compared to others, he said, but the general trajectory appears to be upward, especially if the Pacific Decadal Oscillation stays in a warm phase.

“The longer we observe it,” he said, “the more certain we become of the trend.”

Tracking Earth’s energy imbalance will also help scientists better understand climate change, Johnson said. Other common metrics, such as air temperature, only catch a fraction of the effect of the sun’s heat. The imbalance, he said, measures “the full amount of heat that goes into the climate system.”

Regardless of the magnitude or reasons for the accelerated imbalance, the fact that it is positive is crucial, said Trenberth. “It’s the sign that matters here,” he said. “The fact that it’s positive means that global heating is happening.”

That extra heat, especially in the oceans, will mean more intense hurricanes and marine heat waves.

“I hope the heating doesn’t keep going at this clip,” Loeb said. “It’s not good news.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/06/16/earth-heat-imbalance-warming/

Biden should impose a carbon fee immediately

Under the Independent Offices Appropriations Act, the president retains authority to direct the Environmental Protection Agency to impose a fee on greenhouse gas emissions.

Op-ed by James E. Hansen & Daniel M. Galpern, The Boston Globe, June 1, 2021

President Biden has inherited a welter of urgent challenges, which he and his team are confronting with alacrity and skilled professionalism. In this moment, he has an exceptional opportunity to address, as he so aptly put it, the “existential climate crisis.”

Prior presidents, even those who recognized the climate threat, did not exercise their full statutory authority to restrict greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. As the public experiences an increased frequency of extreme climate events, as young people worldwide cry out against the threat to their future, and as the United Nations approaches a major climate conference in November in Glasgow, Biden has the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a rapid phasedown of United States and global emissions.

Under the Independent Offices Appropriations Act, the president retains authority to direct a relevant federal agency (here, the Environmental Protection Agency) to impose a fee on GHG emissions. The fee can be collected efficiently from the about 200 oil, gas, and coal companies that produce, refine, and distribute fossil fuels in the United States.

This is a crucial clarification to executive authority, because EPA has labored for decades under a presumption that it lacked authority to impose such fees. That assumption derived in part from an aside in a legal memorandum by then-EPA General Counsel E. Donald Elliott. Elliott had reviewed economic incentives available to the agency to restrict pollution but, by his own later admission, Elliott at that time was “woefully ignorant of the IOAA and related jurisprudence.” Writing in 2019, Elliott sought to “set the record straight that EPA does have existing authority to impose a reasonable user fee on releases of carbon dioxide and other GHGs . . . any time that it has the political will to do so.”

All nations are committed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to stabilize GHG concentrations at a level that prevents “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” However, UN efforts to limit emissions with voluntary goals, including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement, simply have not sufficed. The principal GHG — carbon dioxide — will continue to increase rapidly as long as the price of fossil fuels does not even begin to include their ultimate costs to society.

Economists agree that a rising carbon price covering all fossil fuel uses is essential for rapid phasedown of emissions. More than 3,500 economists — including 28 Nobel Prize laureates, all four living former chairs of the Federal Reserve, and 15 former chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers — issued a statement endorsing a carbon fee and dividend. More than 400 student body presidents, representing more than 4 million college students across all 50 states, support a carbon fee and dividend as well.

The collected fee could be returned equally to all adult legal residents of the nation, with a half-share for each child, up to two children per family. People without a bank account would receive a debit card. Seventy percent of the public would receive more in their carbon dividend than they pay in increased prices. True, wealthy people tend to have a larger carbon footprint and would lose money, but they can afford it. Fee and dividend thus will help address wealth disparity.

Carbon fees and dividends support all other actions to phase down carbon emissions. They spur economically efficient energy investments, and provide essential economic guidance if we are to “build back better.”

The International Monetary Fund advises that the carbon price must rise to at least $75 per ton of CO2 emissions. That is a reasonable estimate, though the fee can be raised further if emission reduction targets are not timely achieved.

The United States is the nation most responsible for historic emissions and thus for global climate change, but China is most responsible for current emissions. Both nations have much to lose from growing climate change, and their cooperation is essential for success in stemming the threat of irreversible impacts such as devastating sea level rise. If China and the United States agree on meaningful carbon fees, they can readily make it near-global via border duties on products from countries without carbon fees; that would encourage most nations to adopt the policy, so as to retain such revenue for their own people. And that would help to further Biden’s goal of addressing the “existential climate crisis.”

James E. Hansen is director of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Daniel M. Galpern is general counsel of Climate Protection and Restoration Initiative. 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/01/opinion/biden-should-impose-carbon-fee-immediately/?et_rid=1745350245&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter

Big Setbacks Propel Oil Giants Toward a ‘Tipping Point’

A surprising mix of environmentalists, pension fund managers and big money investors have scored startling victories against oil and coal, opening new battle fronts in the climate fight.

By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, May 29, 2021

A nun, an environmental lawyer, pension fund executives, and the world’s largest asset manager. These were among the unusual collection of rebels who claimed a series of startling victories this week against some of the world’s biggest and most influential fossil fuel companies.

From Houston to The Hague, they fought their battles in shareholder meetings and courtrooms, opening surprising fronts in an accelerating effort to force the world’s coal, oil and gas companies to address their central role in the climate crisis. And even as they came with strikingly disparate points of view — corporate shareholders, children’s rights advocates, environmentalists, thousands of Dutch citizens — they delivered a common underlying message: The time to start retreating from the fossil fuel business is no longer in the future, but now.

“These companies are facing pressure from regulators, investors, and now the courts to up their game,” said Will Nichols, head of environmental research at Maplecroft, a risk analysis firm. “That’s a big chunk of society, and it’s not a great look to be pushing back against all of that.”

The most dramatic turning point came in the Netherlands, where a court instructed Royal Dutch Shell, the largest private oil trader in the world and by far the largest company in the Netherlands itself, that it must sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions from all its global operations this decade. It was the first time a court ordered a private company to, in effect, change its business practice on climate grounds.

The symbolism was inescapable: The Netherlands, famously built on land reclaimed from the sea, faces the immediate threat from a warming climate caused by the burning of Shell’s own products — oil and gas.

In another example this week, at the annual shareholder meeting of Exxon Mobil, the biggest American oil company, the message was framed sharply in terms of profits: A tiny new hedge fund led an investor rebellion to diversify away from oil and gas — or risk hurting investors and the bottom line.

Chevron’s shareholders voted to tell the company to reduce not only its own emissions, but also, remarkably, the emissions produced by customers who burn its oil and gasoline. And in Australia, a judge warned the government that a proposed coal mine expansion, a project challenged by eight teenagers and an 86-year-old nun, would need to ensure that it wouldn’t harm the health of the country’s children.

The timing was significant. This week scientists also concluded that, in the next five years, the average global temperature will at least temporarily spike beyond a dangerous threshold, climbing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than in pre-industrial times. Avoiding that threshold is the main objective of the Paris Accord, the landmark global climate agreement among the nations of the world to fight climate change.

Of course, none of these actions represents an immediate threat to the fossil fuel industry. For a century and a half, the global economy has been fueled by oil and coal, and that won’t change immediately.

Nevertheless, rulings like the one in the Netherlands could be a harbinger for similar legal attacks against other fossil fuel companies and their investors, experts said. Kate Raworth, an economist at Oxford University, called Shell’s loss in court “a social tipping point for a fossil-fuel-free future.”

Shell said it found the ruling, by a district court in The Hague, “disappointing” and intended to appeal. That process could take years to reach the country’s supreme court, delaying action but also drawing continued public attention.

If the ruling of the lower court stands, though, analysts said, Shell would most certainly have to reorient its business to reduce oil in its portfolio and halt its growth in liquefied natural gas, in which Shell is an industry leader. That is a matter of concern for the investors who have their money in the oil and gas reserves of companies like Shell, said Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School. “A decision telling a company, ‘You’ve got to get out of the oil business.’ For cautious individuals within the financial community, that’s got to cause them serious concerns.”

Dangerously for Shell, the national judiciary of the Netherlands in the past has shown itself to be among the most out-front on climate litigation. In 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions because of a lawsuit filed by Urgenda, an environmental group. It was the first case in the world to force a national government to address climate change in order to uphold its human rights commitments.

That case, too, began in a district court in The Hague, before making its way up the judicial ladder. The lawsuit against Shell marked an escalation in that strategy.

Having sued the government and won, environmental advocates decided to take on one the country’s most influential companies. The case was brought in 2019 by Milieudefensie, the Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth, as well as Greenpeace and 17,000 residents of the Netherlands. The complainants argued that the company has a legal duty to protect Dutch citizens from looming climate risks. The district court agreed.

“The consequences of this case for the fossil fuel industry will be systemic and immediate,” Tessa Khan, the lawyer who had sued the government on behalf of Urgenda, said on Twitter. She predicted that it would spur other cases and “escalate the perception of risk among investors.”

Shell had already begun to see the writing on the wall. It said earlier this year that global oil demand had likely reached a peak in 2019 and would slowly wane in the coming years.

And at least compared to some of its American peers, Shell had set relatively more ambitious climate targets. It had already promised to reduce the carbon intensity of its operations, which means that it could still continue to expand oil and production, but with lower emissions for every barrel it produced.

The district court on Wednesday instructed the company to cut its absolute emissions by 45 percent by 2030, relative to its 2019 levels. The ruling applies to Shell’s global operations. But, that said, even if it is upheld on appeal, enforcing it, say, in Nigeria, where Shell is the biggest oil producer, could prove to be “impractical,” said Biraj Borkhataria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, an investment bank.

“However,” he said separately, in a note to clients on Thursday, “it is another example of society asking more from oil companies.”

The Shell ruling is particularly notable because private companies have been targets of climate litigation in the United States and elsewhere, but courts have rarely ruled against them.

The Dutch case opens a potentially new front, emboldening climate advocates to pursue more cases in a wider variety of countries, particularly where national laws enshrine the right to a clean environment. Several European and Latin American courts, including in the Netherlands, have interpreted their national laws in this way.

A farmer in Peru is suing a German energy giant over the effects of global warming on a glacier in his country. About 20 American cities, counties and states have sued the fossil fuel industry since 2017, seeking damages for the local costs of climate change.

Governments are also on the hook.

Germany’s highest court recently told the government to tighten its climate targets because they did not go far enough to ensure that future generations would be protected.

In the Australian case, eight teenagers, joined by Brigid Arthur, the nun, went to court to stop the government from expanding an enormous coal mine called Whitehaven. The court on Thursday stopped short of issuing an injunction against the mine, as the plaintiffs had sought.

But in ordering the government to take “reasonable care to avoid personal injury to the children,” it recognized climate change as an “intergenerational crime,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University and a lawyer who represents several U.S. cities and states suing fossil fuel companies.

“The actions we take today with respect to climate change can consign our children, our children’s children, and other future generations to a world that is fundamentally livable or a world that is not,” he said. “Courts recognize that.”

The most closely watched case in the United States, filed on behalf of young people against the United States government, seeks to establish a constitutional right to a sound environment. After recent setbacks in the federal courts, a federal judge has ordered the parties to enter settlement discussions.

The actions against Chevron and Exxon are notable because they reveal the extent to which shareholders are quickly awakening to the risk that their investments if energy companies don’t dramatically start changing their business models.

A significant chunk of shareholders demonstrated that they were increasingly distrustful that the companies could deliver the financial performance they expected without diversifying away from oil and gas.

Exxon this week lost a battle against a small new hedge fund, Engine No. 1, which rallied big investors like Blackrock and the New York state pension fund to force the company to change course. The hedge fund won at least two seats on Exxon’s 12-member board.

Tensie Whelan, director of the New York University Stern Center for Sustainable Business, called it “a pivotal moment for board accountability.” Activist shareholders have traditionally taken on company executives over financial issues, not social issues like climate change, she said. “Shareholders are deeply concerned about the financial risks posed by climate change and increasingly willing to hold the board to account,” Ms. Whelan said.

Stanley Reed and John Schwartz contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/climate/fossil-fuel-courts-exxon-shell-chevron.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

Severe Drought, Worsened by Climate Change, Ravages the American West

Heat and shifting weather patterns have intensified wildfires and sharply reduced water supplies across the Southwest, the Pacific Coast and North Dakota.

By Henry Fountain, The New York Times, May 20, 2021

ALBUQUERQUE — This year, New Mexican officials have a message for farmers who depend on irrigation water from the Rio Grande and other rivers: Unless you absolutely have to plant this year, don’t.

Years of warming temperatures, a failed rainy season last summer and low snowpack this winter have combined to reduce the state’s rivers to a relative trickle. The agency that controls irrigation flows on the Rio Grande forced the issue. To conserve water, it opened its gates a month later than usual.

Severe drought — largely connected to climate change — is ravaging not only New Mexico but the entire Western half of the United States, from the Pacific Coast, across the Great Basin and desert Southwest, and up through the Rockies to the Northern Plains.

In California, wells are drying up, forcing some homeowners to drill new ones that are deeper and costlier. Lake Mead, on the border of Arizona and Nevada, is so drained of Colorado River water that the two states are facing the eventual possibility of cuts in their supply. And 1,200 miles away in North Dakota, ranchers are hauling water for livestock and giving them supplemental forage, because the heat and dryness is stunting spring growth on the rangelands.

The most significant, and potentially deadly, effect of a drought that is as severe and widespread as any seen in the West is the wildfires that are raging amid hot and dry conditions. And this is well before the full blast of summer’s heat arrives.

California, Arizona and New Mexico have each had two large blazes, unusual for this early in the year. None has been fully contained, including the Palisades Fire, which has burned 1,200 acres on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Officials are predicting when the fire season ends — if it ever does, as warming conditions have made fires possible year-round in some areas — the total could exceed last year’s of 10.3 million acres.

“The signals and indications are that we are heading for another very dangerous fire year,” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, whose department includes the Forest Service, said last week after he and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland were briefed by experts from the National Interagency Fire Center. “We’re seeing a higher level of risk and an earlier level of risk than we’ve seen in the past.”

Many factors contribute to the frequency, intensity and duration of wildfires, including forest management practices and development. And water shortages are affected by population and economic growth, as well as pumping of groundwater for agriculture and other activities.

Legal constraints play a role, too. One reason for the squeeze on New Mexican farmers this year is that the state owes Rio Grande water to Texas under a 1938 agreement.

But at the root of the drought are warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, which are linked to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, where they trap the sun’s heat. The result has been extremely dry conditions that have persisted across much of the Southwest and California for years, and that are spreading throughout the West.

According to the United States Drought Monitor, 84 percent of the West is now in drought, with 47 percent rated as “severe” or “extreme.”

The situation in some states is particularly dire. In Utah, 90 percent of the state is in the two most severe categories; in Arizona, 87 percent; North Dakota, 85 percent; New Mexico, 80 percent; and California, 73 percent.

Experts do not see much prospect for improvement, as another hot and dry summer is forecast. Rather, they expect conditions to worsen.

“We’re entering the climatologically dry period of the year,” said Adam T. Hartman, a meteorologist with the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “That’s a lot of the reason you see drought conditions start to deteriorate.”

The Southwest had its chances to improve starting last summer, a season when atmospheric circulation patterns typically bring tropical moisture to Arizona, New Mexico and parts of nearby states. But these so-called monsoon rains never materialized, and no one is sure exactly why. “It’s a bit of a mystery,” Mr. Hartman said.

This winter’s snowfall, or relative lack of it, didn’t help either. Snowpack totals across the West have been far below normal. In California on April 1, the date when the snow is normally deepest, statewide snowpack was just 59 percent of the historical average.

Relative to the often-soggy conditions in the East, much of the West is normally relatively dry. But with warming, precipitation has become less reliable, said Keith Musselman, a snow hydrologist at the University of Colorado. “These are regions that regularly go weeks without precipitation,” he said. “And now we’re talking in some cases about months.”

In the Southwest, especially, the drought has lingered for so long — since 2000, with only a few wet years sprinkled in — that climate scientists now talk of an emerging “megadrought,” one that may rival those that occurred periodically over the past thousand years. Those Southwestern megadroughts, which were discovered by analyzing ancient tree rings, lasted decades — in one case, 80 years.

California and other Western states rely on the melting of snow for much of their water. Snowpack is essentially a frozen reservoir that is released over time in spring and summer. But that, too, is changing as the West warms.

“There’s two things going on,” Dr. Musselman said. “First, there’s less precipitation. But on top of that there’s this backdrop of warming. That’s altering the delivery of that water.”

More meltwater runs off the mountains sooner, wreaking havoc with the ability to store proper amounts in reservoirs for use during the dry summer. Too much runoff too soon also eventually causes stream flows to drop rapidly.

And low stream flows can lead to a number of other problems, given that shallower water warms more rapidly. In California, for instance, some salmon hatcheries are trucking young fish directly to the ocean this spring, fearing that they wouldn’t survive swimming in the warmer water of rivers that have been affected by drought.

Heat and dryness have a particularly strong effect on the conditions that lead to wildfires, decreasing moisture in the soil and drying vegetation so that it ignites more readily and burns hotter. That can make fires spread more easily.

Severe drought can also result in mass die-offs of trees, providing enormous quantities of fuel for any potential fire. The Forest Service reported one such die-off in April in Arizona, where up to 30 percent of the juniper trees across about 100,000 acres had died from the drought.

Dry conditions can also make warming worse, said Amir AghaKouchak, who studies climate-related and other water resource issues at the University of California, Irvine. Warming causes soil to lose moisture through evaporation, which has a cooling effect on the surface of the ground, much as evaporation of sweat from skin causes a person to cool down. But eventually so much soil moisture is lost that the process stops.

“During droughts, moisture levels become very low, so evaporation doesn’t happen,” Dr. AghaKouchak said. “The skin of the earth warms up, and that warms the atmosphere.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/climate/drought.html

Bipartisan duo reintroduces carbon tax legislation

By Nick Sobczyk, E&E News, May 11, 2021

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers have reintroduced the carbon tax bill first drawn up by former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.).

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) last week announced the latest version of the "MARKET CHOICE Act."

The last version of the bill would have imposed a $35-per-ton tax on carbon emissions — rising 5% per year — with revenues funneled to infrastructure investment to replace the federal gasoline tax (E&E News PM, Sept. 26, 2019).

Neither Carbajal nor Fitzpatrick responded to a request for the text of the latest version of the legislation, H.R. 3039.

"Climate change demands our immediate attention and the Market Choice Act is a crucial way to move the ball forward while enhancing our crumbling infrastructure," Carbajal said in a statement.

When Curbelo introduced the legislation in 2018, it was seen as a milestone, the first GOP-backed carbon pricing bill in years.

Fitzpatrick could be a key moderate as Democrats and the White House forge ahead this year on infrastructure and climate legislation, but the bill may struggle to gain a foothold, with President Biden resistant to raising user fees to pay for roads, bridges and highways.

The bill is backed by a variety of advocacy groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy.

https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2021/05/11/stories/1063732201?utm_campaign=edition&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eenews:eedaily