Thankful for that Thing with Feathers (Thoughts on the NorCal Climate Mobilization)

I thought about writing this post about all the good new climate change reports that have recently come out. The top two in my mind:

• "The Baylands and Climate Change: What We Can Do" (AKA the Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals Science Update 2015), a massive multi-multi-party collaboration three years in the making, released on October 19th, 2015, with the main takeaway that we have time to do what needs to be done to preserve important marshland for wildlife habitat and human community protection if we act now; and,
• "States at Risk," a co-production of ICF International and the illustrious and media-savvy Climate Central, released on Nov. 18th, 2015, giving scores to U.S. states for their climate change readiness, with the main takeaway being that almost no state is preparing anywhere near adequately for extreme heat events.

...Both are highly promising in their readability and practicality of approach. I could go on.

But instead I'd like to write about a moment that happened on Saturday morning as I entered the crowd at the Nov. 21st NorCal Climate Mobiliation, a march starting by Lake Merritt and ending in a rally at city hall in Oakland, California. This was the first of many marches organized by 350.org around the country to bring attention to the 10 days of climate negotiations in Paris called COP21 (the 21st meeting of the "Conference of the Parties" to international negotiations on limiting climate change), starting Nov. 30th, 2015.

This, above, is Samba Funk, a carnaval drum/dance corps, entering the street at the start of the march. It's not a great photo, but if you look you can see the leader-- King Theo (Theo Aytchan Williams)-- pointing at someone behind me to my right with his red-ball-tipped drumstick. (Read more about this group at their under-construction website, hear them here). 

As I stood there, I was struck all at once with the energy of their drumming and the sight of the banner-flags flying, and the "Carbon Tax Me" stickers on everyone around me-- and a lump formed in my throat and a tear came to my eye. It felt like a sob rising in me. I didn't recognize it at first. Yes, that was the "thing with feathers," as Emily Dickinson says.

No number of scientists and media experts sitting in front of their laptops in florescent-lit offices will save us if there isn't also HOPE. Hope, expressed in music, collective dancing in the streets, prayer, high-flying banners that say "Water is Life," and the inclusion and support of movements tangential to the climate change awareness movement-- such as support for refugees:

And support for all the ways and reasons to move away from a fossil-fuel economy:

We need all hands on deck, and that moment, being washed in drumbeats, was the first time I thought-- REALLY THOUGHT-- yes, we might be able to get all hands on deck. With the strength of a multi-level/media/cultural/lingual, intersectional movement we might get there.

At least one friend who helped organize the event corroborated my thoughts, that this was a much stronger showing with better representation of different kinds of activists than previous climate marches. She said, "it's catching on." 

Especially after the recent series of catastrophic strikes by the Islamic State, this Thanksgiving I am thankful for this past weekend's march and the profound moment of hope it gave me. It will carry me.

I hope my friends and colleagues who are traveling to COP21 in Paris go safely and hold on to their own sense of hope, and dance in the street every chance they get, despite the government's ban on the Nov. 29th Global Climate March.

Some coverage of the Nov. 21st NorCal Climate Mobilization march and rally in Oakland:

• The event page on Facebook has photos and video taken by participants
• You can search Twitter and Instagram for the official hashtag #NCCM and unofficial hashtag #ClimateMarch. On Twitter go to "Live" to see the most true accounting of events for each hashtag -- here's the Live view for #NCCM -- and here's the Live view for #ClimateMarch plus Oakland.
• "Oakland: Hundreds rally for global action on climate change" Contra Costa Times article on the march. 
• "Show Up, Stand Up." - a blog post at the Green Phone Booth about how to get involved in your local climate march, and what to expect.

Note that estimates of Saturday's attendance varied from this "hundreds" to "thousands" to a specific number I saw on a Tweet somewhere-- 2,450?-- to 5,000 (that from an organizer who said their goal was 10,000). The Contra Costa Times says over 100 groups were represented.

Lastly, a favorite sign from the march:

...a basic tenet of my life. (Photo credit: Green Bean.) With flowers and hearts, I also give thanks to you my readers. Hope you have a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving.

Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change (the re-post)

The following was published March 19, 2015, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Also: I followed up this piece for WWF with  posts here in March and April 2015 about some new instances of  folly -- governments constraining their own climate/environmental scientists in Florida and Wisconsin.

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The great historian Barbara Tuchman took a hard look at governmental policy missteps in her 1984 book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. As someone studying modern climate change policy, it is hard not to draw parallels to her definition of folly: The pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.

She uses these criteria to zero in on the most serious instances of government folly:

1. The policy must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not just in hindsight.
2. A feasible alternative course of action must have been available.
3. The policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and persist beyond any one political lifetime (“collective government” folly is the more significant problem).

How is hiding climate change science “folly”?

Many governments are acknowledging climate change, even creating new positions to work on the problem. Governments taking slow and measured steps—perhaps too slow and measured—can be viewed as insufficient action, but it is not folly; governments ordering their scientists to study climate change and then burying the results? I call that a classic example of Tuchmanesque folly, and the U.S. federal government and three U.S. states— Nebraska, South Carolina, and North Carolina—have all done it. The press and science-friendly politicians have widely called out the counter-productivity of governments burying climate science. Incorporating the science into planning is (to some degree or another) feasible, since other governments are doing it. The subterfuge is not being done by one person, but government decision-making bodies. Governments burying their own climate science is the definition of folly.

When did the U.S. government bury climate science that it itself ordered?

The details about three states’ climate follies were recently published by the Business Insider’s science desk (read: These States Have Reportedly Tried to Hide Scary Climate Data from the Public [Oct. 30, 2014] and This Is the Climate Report South Carolina Spent Years Hiding [Dec. 29, 2014]). The author points out that “good climate reports were ultimately made public in the above three states, even if the reports are not currently being utilized to their full potential.” While that is true, North Carolina’s infamous official denial of sea level rise data will hamper planning for at least another year.

North Carolina’s House Bill 819, passed in June 2012, prevents the state from basing coastal policy on anything but historical data, ignoring any emerging climate change science through 2016. The governor failed to veto the bill, and it became law in August 2012. Almost simultaneously, in June 2012, a scientific article by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) placed North Carolina’s coast within a 600-mile “hotspot” for sea level rise. North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, had the input of the legislature and the USGS put in front of her at the same time, and she let the political current pull state policy away from where science was pointing. Meanwhile, in 2013 she was replaced by a Republican, Pat McCrory, who installed an oil developer as head of the state’s Coastal Resources Commission and believes in responding to climate change by “cleaning up the environment in a cost-effective way.” Besides this, coastal Carolinians might also worry about the lagging constraints on public safety planning caused by the May 2014 vote by the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission to ignore sea level rise impacts projected too far out. Adaptation to sea level rise will—by collective government vote—only prepare for the next 30 years of impacts.

What about the U.S. federal government? Didn’t official climate science denial get voted out in 2008?

There are many ways government can delay or bury the release of inconvenient scientific findings. Many are familiar with the second Bush administration’s direct censorship of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the topic of climate change. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was also censored, leading to its senior official Rick Piltz turning whistleblower in 2005. He founded and directed the Government Accountability Project’s Climate Science Watch initiative from 2005 until his death in October 2014 (read his obituary from the NYT). In March 2013 Mr. Piltz told students during a speaking tour that:

[T]he chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a former energy lobbyist, would hand-edit reports, deleting references to the ecological impact of climate change and adding passages that exaggerated the uncertainty of climate-related findings.

In January 2009, Barack Obama promised in his inaugural speech, “We’ll restore science to its rightful place,” and two months later issued a memorandum to agency heads to improve scientific integrity. Under his administration, the direct White House interference with the EPA and USGCRP may have stopped, but Congress has found ways to delay action on EPA findings about dangerous chemicals, and in the same manner may be playing shell games to delay action on rational, climate change science-based adaptation planning.

Case in point: according to a Center for Public Integrity 2014 report, the EPA has been prepared since 2008 to assert that arsenic is 17 times more potent as a carcinogen than it now reports. However, its arsenic report was delayed procedurally at the Office of Management and Budget for two years. Then, in 2011, Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, with arsenic-laden pesticide companies among his campaign donors, ordered the EPA to have its findings reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences within a House Appropriations Committee report. In 2015 the review is still ongoing, and nothing has changed in federal regulations regarding arsenic in drinking water.

Eventually the “safe” levels of arsenic may be adjusted and avoidable cases of cancer duly avoided. But evidence is mounting that there is no way to be adequately conservative in our emissions of greenhouse gases or adequately liberal in preparing for climate change hazards. According to a Princeton study published in 2013, even if we halted all greenhouse gas emissions today climate change would proceed unabated for centuries—not decades, as previously thought— because of the ocean’s decreasing ability to absorb heat. And this is not accounting for intersecting hazards and feedback loops causing exponential worsening of conditions, difficult to project with today’s climate models.

The EPA’s arsenic case is awful, but the burial of scientific findings about climate change is potentially catastrophic.

Are there any cases of the U.S. government actually adapting to climate change, despite political pressure to delay?

The U.S. Navy has been at the forefront of actually adapting to climate change since before Obama’s restoration of “science to its rightful place.” A Feb. 12, 2015, article by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone describes how the military has long seen the security threat represented by climate change and taken measures—as long ago as 2003, when the report “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” (by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, downloadable here) was published by the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, then President George W. Bush’s defense secretary. The home of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, Norfolk, VA, is within the sea level rise “hotspot” called out by the USGS in 2012 (running from Cape Hatteras, NC to north of Boston, MA). So the Navy has been busy planning for climate change, despite occasional Obama-era interference from Congressional climate denialists. The Navy started with replacing critical piers that were becoming submerged in the late 1990’s. Goodell asks the officer in charge of mid-Atlantic Navy facilities, Capt. J. Pat Rios, about the rationale for replacing them:

“We didn’t raise the piers because of climate change” […]. He doesn’t quite wink, but almost.

“Then why did you raise them?” I ask.

“Because we needed new piers. And as long as we were building them, it didn’t cost much more to build them higher.”

Thus, the Navy’s climate change adaption planners find their ways to work around a government bent on folly.


Photo: Capitol Building, Washington, D.C. © U.S. Government

Red-Letter Day for California Adaptation Planning: SB 379 is Law (and Some Other Good Legislation, Too)

Yesterday (Oct. 8, 2015) California's Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 379, requiring cities and counties to include planning for climate change impacts in their general plans starting in 2017.

• Fact sheet about SB 379
• Text of SB 379

SB 379 was proposed by Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson of the 19th Senate District (including all of Santa Barbara County and western Ventura County).

The title of the bill reads like a strange little haiku:

SB-379
Land use: general plan: 
safety element.

Last night I attended a sea level rise planning discussion (part of the Here. Now. Us. project) in Marin County, a county where you could say the default political persuasion was left of "Hippie," and found myself sitting next to not one but TWO climate change denialists. These people spent every minute of airtime they were allowed expressing concern that people are concerned about climate change (because of its illegitimate science, it is too expensive, we are already doing enough to respond to flooding, etc.). So I think this bill takes a bold stride forward. It explicitly uses the words "climate change" and "climate adaptation" -- phrases that provoked loud scoffs from the vocal duo I met last night. Let me offer the strangely titled-with-a-haiku SB 379 my own haiku in thanks:

With a clear task list
you ask us for foresight so
our children are safer.

The Governor also signed two other bills by the same senator yesterday, both concerning oil spill protections: SB 295 Pipeline safety: inspections  and SB 414 Oil spill response.

These other two good bills were also signed over the last two days, upping the ante on the state's GHG reduction goals and inaugurating representation of vulnerable populations on the board that oversees the state's main GHG reduction measures:

• SB 350 (De León and Leno) Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015 (Also see the Governor's Oct. 7, 2015, press release about it)
• AB 1288 (Atkins and Pavley) Air resources (to ensure the California Air Resources Board "is more representative of the state's diversity and those most impacted by pollution" according to Governor Brown's Oct. 8, 2015, press release about it)

So now in the article of California's Health and Safety Code that deals with the make-up of the Air Resources Board, Section 39510 (e) reads:

"The Senate Committee on Rules and the Speaker of the Assembly shall each appoint one member to the state board who shall be a person who works directly with communities in the state that are most significantly burdened by, and vulnerable to, high levels of pollution, including, but not limited to, communities with diverse racial and ethnic populations and communities with low-income populations."

That is indeed another step in the right direction. Part of my 2009 Master's thesis was devoted to the "lessons learned" from the failed Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC) mandated by AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. That committee's participation in the initial roll-out of AB 32 resulted (as of 2009) in a lot of anger on both the EJAC and the ARB. A lot of the roll-out process was already determined by the time the EJAC was formed, setting the committee up for failure. Having actual front-line community representation on the ARB should improve trust, and hopefully the health outcomes of our state's most vulnerable populations.

Other legislation of note signed this week:

• AB 1482 (Gordon) Climate adaptation, requiring the state to update the state's adaptation plan every three years (which was already being done by Executive Order, but now it's a law)
• AB 1496 (Thurmond) Methane emissions, supporting monitoring and reduction of emissions of this extremely dangerous greenhouse gas.
• SB 246 (Wieckowski) Climate change adaptation, setting up a "Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program" at the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, which has been the lead agency on climate planning under this governor, and tagging it with responsibility for updating the state's Adaptation Planning Guide (published in 2012).

Also noteworthy in state adaptation news-- today the California Natural Resources Agency released the 199-page draft document "Safeguarding California: Implementation Action Plans" for which it is holding public comment sessions in Oakland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

Mon. Oct. 12: Bay Area Listening Session on Climate Adaptation

6-8 PM, MetroCenter Auditorium, 101 Eighth Street, Oakland (right above the Lake Merritt BART Station). 

Mon. Oct. 26: Sacramento Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans

10 AM- 12 PM, Rosenfeld Hearing Room, California Energy Commission, 1516 9th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814

Tues. Oct. 27: Los Angeles Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans

1:30 - 3:30 PM, Carmel Room, Junipero Serra Building, 320 W. 4th Street,, Los Angeles, CA 90013

In the Heat of the Moment (the re-post)

The following was published Dec. 2, 2014, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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Photo by Kim Seng © Creative Commons

Many of us are versed in the primary hazards of climate change – from the cost of disasters in lives and resources to the disappearance of low-lying island nations. Something we hear about less often is the direct influence of climate on human behavior, and the implications for the future under climate change.

Climate change and civil conflict

Academics have only been putting the climate change-conflict link to close examination for about five years. Solomon Hsiang (UC Berkeley), Marshall Burke (Stanford), and Edward (Ted) Miguel (UC Berkeley) are pioneers in this field. Last year they unveiled the results of an analysis of 60 studies using 45 data sets from all regions of the world showing a correlation between heat, rain, and conflict. Last month they released a refinement of this study. In their working paper “Climate and Conflict” (summary here) they show significant increases in both interpersonal and intergroup conflicts (e.g., fist fights and wars) with greater heat and more extreme rainfall.

Some of the background studies cited by these researchers include a 2011 study that shows major league baseball pitchers are more likely to retaliate for their teammates being hit by the rival pitcher when it’s hotter. In their talk “Quantifying the Impact of Climate on Human Conflict” at UC Berkeley in April 2013, Miguel and Burke described fascinating experimental psychology studies showing that police are more likely to shoot at a simulated intruder in higher temperature rooms, and people are faster to lean on their horns behind a car stopped at a green light on hotter days.

Climate change and crime

In February of this year a journal article by Matthew Ranson described a correlation between crime and weather and speculated on the potential impact of climate change on crime. The author looked at 2,997 U.S. counties’ monthly crime and weather data over 30 years. He looked at FBI statistics for murder, manslaughter, rape, aggravated and simple assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft. He states bluntly, “[a]cross a variety of offenses, higher temperatures cause more crime.” His rich data set appears to have established a strong link between heat and violent crime. Specifically, he shows a linear relationship between heat and violent crime and a nonlinear relationship with non-violent crime (property crime, e.g., burglary): he doesn’t see heat affecting property crime in any consistent way. Heat specifically exacerbates violence.

Measuring vulnerability to climate-related violence

Some analysts are trying to map out the world’s general vulnerability to climate-related violence. On Oct. 29, 2014, the 2015 “Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas” was released, naming 32 “extreme risk” countries where climate change might increase violence. Bangladesh was named most at risk. The author of the report, UK-based Maplecroft Global Risk Analytics, has produced this atlas annually since 2008. In 2011, its report included results of an analysis of 42 factors using the Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), intended to help corporations and governments identify vulnerabilities in their operations, supply chains, and investments. (Note: it is not to be confused with the tool of the same name launched by the Nature Conservancy in 2009 to evaluate wild species’ vulnerability.) Maplecroft’s tool incorporates social, economic, and environmental factors to assess vulnerability both at a national level and down to a resolution of 22km², looking 30 years out (as described in the 2014 Risk Atlas).

Over recent years other indices of vulnerability have been created (check out an annotated list of indices of climate change vulnerability from WeAdapt.org). Other institutions have taken other approaches to identifying climate-driven violence risks.

The Pentagon and the Institute of Peace agree: climate change is bad for peace

As reported by James West in Mother Jones, the U.S. Department of Defense (in its 20-page Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap released Oct. 13, 2014) and the U.S. Institute of Peace (in a 2011 report on Nigeria) are both worrying about weak governments, already fostering terrorism, being further weakened by impacts from climate change. While lacking adaptation policy recommendations, both institutions clearly and concisely describe the “threat-multiplier” facet of climate change.

What can we do?

People developing climate impact response plans in the security, defense, and risk management fields should take into account the results of recent studies linking climate change and conflict. Extreme climate events can be tracked and direct and immediate security fallout projected. Also, the still under-researched indirect and long-term impacts of climate on conflict—such as a heat wave destroying a farming community’s livelihood, driving the community’s young men to migrate, potentially inflaming territorial and sectarian violence— can also be projected and anticipated by security and defense forces.

A very readable 2007 journal article by Barnett and Adger discusses the underlying causes of conflict and how climate change could drive conflict. They propose a basic 3-prong research regime of identifying livelihoods vulnerable to climate hazards, examining the consequences of damage to these livelihoods, and understanding the role of institutions in managing climate hazards so that they do not become security problems (e.g., by protecting livelihoods).

Who else should pay attention to climate’s link to conflict?

Those working on economic, social and international development policy, human rights organizations, and those working in the capacity of a negotiator should anticipate the impact of extreme heat and other climate stressors on their constituents, both individuals and communities. People working in the field of restorative justice and other disciplines focused on reducing violence and criminalization of historically disadvantaged communities should also track the effect of climate stressors on their project outcomes, and adapt programs accordingly. Those working for non-violent solutions within urban conflict zones might ramp up their mediation efforts in particularly hot summers.

You also can watch your own behavior in response to climate-induced stress. On the next hot day you might take a second to breathe before honking at a car stopped at a green light… you might just be behind an experimental psychologist with a stopwatch.

Some Good News from the Southern Ocean, the Arctic, and Republican Pollsters

Since most news about climate change falls in the two categories of "confirming our worst fears" and "creating new, more depressing fears" I thought I'd share a few tidbits of recent good news.

• Southern Ocean Showing 'Remarkable' Revival in Carbon Absorption Ability (Sept. 10, 2015, The Guardian) about a new report of results from a 30-year study, The Reinvigoration of the Southern Ocean Carbon Sink by Landschützer et al. (Sept. 11, 2015, Science)

The downside mentioned by one of the study's lead scientists, Nicolas Gruber - "One has to recognise that despite this remarkable increase in the Southern Ocean carbon sink, emissions have gone up even more."

• Survey of Republican Voters Shows a Majority Believe in Climate Change (Sept. 28, 2015, NYT)

The downside of this good news is that it describes the attitudes of potential voters, not Republican elected officials or candidates for the top office of the country. Potential voters are not the same as political party influencers, unfortunately. The more extreme voices are appearing to win the day in terms of how the elected/ would-be elected leadership is positioning itself on climate change.

• Shell Exits Arctic as Oil Slump Forces Industry to Retrench (Sept. 28, 2015, NYT)

I don't see any downside here!

This Sept. 28, 2015, BBC article has some helpful maps illustrating the location of the Shell test drilling site with respect to the ice extent and international boundaries.

The Arctic will never be safe from the threat of oil drilling as long as we use oil in our energy stream, but for "the foreseeable future" it is safe from Royal Dutch Shell.

Meanwhile, the Russian oil production project by Gazprom Neft is still active in the Pechora Sea, drilling at the Prirazlomnoye Arctic field, apparently unaffected thus far by sanctions, unlike the Rosneft/Exxon joint drilling project in the Kara Sea.

Still further north from the Gazprom Neft project, the "Goliat" platform, owned by the Italian energy group Eni and Norwegian company Statoil, is in place at the border of the Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea. According to the BBC article cited above, it "could soon start producing oil ... within weeks." So, the Arctic Oil Rush is underway, just without one of the world's biggest oil multinationals.

California’s Adaptation Clarion Call (the re-post, with updates)

The following was published Sept. 2, 2014, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Two updates on the content of this article:

First: the California Adaptation Forum that I am reporting on below is scheduled to be held again September 7-8, 2016, in Long Beach, California. To subscribe to get updates on the conference go here. Find the presentations from the 2014 conference here.

Second, Alicia Torregrosa (USGS), the convener of the panel that I moderated at the 2014 California Adaptation Forum, and our two other panelists, Travis O'Brien (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Ian Faloona (UC Davis), have since published an article encapsulating the topic of our panel: Coastal Fog, Climate Change, and the Environment (Dec. 2014, Eos Earth and Space Science News). Not behind a paywall!
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"Decision makers must expect to be surprised with increasing frequency."

- National Research Council 2009 report, Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate, as paraphrased by Alice Hill, Senior Advisor for Preparedness and Resilience, White House National Security Council.

“Plan for surprises” is a sentiment I’ve seen expressed in various contexts regarding climate change, and it was repeated last week at the California Adaptation Forum’s second day opening plenary by Obama adviser Alice Hill. It was a laugh-line. Surprises, by definition, can’t be planned for.

In a graduate seminar on climate change adaptation in 2010—amid complaints about the popular denial of climate change—I asked my classmates: who has an earthquake kit at home? Two out of ten. I would revise the National Research Council’s order: “decision makers must expect human denial of the element of surprise.”

The California Adaptation Forum (CAF) was a clarion call organized in Sacramento (Aug. 19-20, 2014) to shake California’s political decision makers out of denial and into action.

California has been a world leader on climate change mitigation, aggressively regulating and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a push initiated by State Senator Fran Pavley with her landmark bills in the Assembly, AB 32 (2006) and AB 1493 (2009). I visited Senator Pavley in her office in 2012 to ask her if she had heard anything from her constituents about climate change impacts or was otherwise aware of these impacts and considering any legislative responses. From her response, I got the impression she is still at square one fighting the “climate change is real” battle in her political circles.

So, two years later at the CAF, a few blocks from Senator Pavley’s office, I was pleased to hear eminent state leaders on greenhouse gas reduction like the California Air Resources Board’s Chair, Mary Nichols, and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research Director, Ken Alex, talk about the importance of preparing for climate threats. The 816 registrants from a breadth of sectors and local to international-level organizations attended 38 sessions and four plenary panels over two days, organized by the Local Government Commission, a private non-profit, in partnership with the State of California. One third of the attendees represented either local or state government offices. Another third represented nonprofit organizations, many of which work closely with local government. Academic representatives came in at 5% of the attendees.

Of the four large adaptation-specific conferences I’ve attended in recent years this was the first emphasizing local solutions at every opportunity. The others I’ve attended (Three Degrees in 2009; the Second International Climate Change Adaptation Conference in 2012; the first U.S. National Adaptation Forum in 2013) all featured an initial presentation of the scariest, latest scientific findings with the bottom line “Did you think we were screwed? Well now you know we are.” We dwelt in the shadow of those projections through the rest of the conference.  Rightly or wrongly, the CAF downplayed the role of climate science.

An aside: there was one science-focused session in the program— I was proud to be the moderator of a panel on the connection between fog and climate change, focusing on its importance as a source of water and cooling. The four scientists on the panel were determined to keep the mood light and positive, featuring fog special effects from a block of dry ice and carafes of hot water, but still got down to the question of whether winds driving upwelling and intensifying fog will outrun climate warming, which may be reducing fog (a trend that has been traced over the past 50 years on the California coast by Johnstone and Dawson, 2010).

Mainly, the CAF sessions presented stories from the field—active projects, lessons learned. The sessions I attended were accessible and interactive, all allowing between 10-30 minutes for questions. Colleagues echoed my impression that attendees had their ears open, were using their beginner-mind (not expert-mind), and didn’t push individual agendas. Their attitude was “I’m here to learn if I can. I’m here to help if I can.”

The California Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird’s morning address on day two was the highlight of the conference for me. Secretary Laird described specific situations from his past as a local politician when he had to push back against angry constituents to make the right decision for the long-term health and safety of his community, such as closing a structurally vulnerable community services center in anticipation of a storm despite strong protests; the storm caused the roof to collapse and his constituents thanked him for not backing down. Laird also communicated a vivid framework for organizing in anticipation of climate change by talking about his time as executive director of the Santa Cruz AIDS Project in the early 1990s, having to assemble resources in advance of things getting worse. Think about it: what did community organizers do in the AIDS crisis? They did mass, urgent, public education targeted to the most vulnerable; created a professional specialization to push research to the edge; made community art—like the AIDS Quilt—displaying visible, clear, accessible representations of the losses already happening, warning against complacence; and aggressively raised funds to create institutions to support the victims and their loved ones. What if we did the same for climate change? What would our quilt look like?

As for what’s next for California, Michael McCormick from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, one of the state partners who developed the CAF with the Local Government Commission, reports:

…[t]he State will be working with the Local Government Commission to distill what we heard into some near term actions that focus on cross-sector/cross-organizational strategies. We’ll also continue working together to ensure the momentum started here will continue towards the 2015 National Adaptation Forum and the 2016 California Adaptation Forum.

Read the Twitter stream from the CAF (#CAF14), and check out the CAF presentation PowerPoint slides. The presentations are listed in alphabetical order, so you’ll find the California Coastal Fog presentation under “C.”

Feature photo by TD Tillman - the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta at flood stage (2009). © Creative Commons

Farmland in Flux (the re-post)

The following was published July 8, 2014, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
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Photo by Neil Palmer (CIAT). From Two Degrees Up,
a 2012 series of case studies on the effect of climate change on agriculture.
© Creative Commons.

Farming may be the most adaptable industry, but are farmers reacting to the right signals?

“I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone through a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.”

– Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

I don’t know all the reasons why people go into or stay in farming. I grew up in a rural, isolated farming region of Northern New York where dairy farming was a family tradition, providing a stable (not booming) income for many. It isn’t my impression that farmers go into farming for the large profit margins. But neither do farmers farm in order to stay poor: they are market-savvy. They respond—perhaps first and foremost— to price signals. For example, right now almond prices are soaring because of increased demand (especially from China) and the collapse of bee colonies: even with the ongoing threat of bee colony collapse, the increasing price of almonds translates to fields of row crops being converted to almond orchards.

The other main signal that governs decisions is weather. Farmers watch weather, or the present condition of climate variables and their interactions over the short term, measured in minutes to months; but not necessarily climate, the pattern of weather over the long term, often measured in 30-year averages. Right now the main source of almonds for the world, California, is experiencing an epic drought. 2013 was the driest year in the state’s recorded history. As a result, almond trees are being turned into wood chips. And yet where irrigation is possible the transition from row crops to almond orchards continues, such as in the north of California’s Central Valley, according to Eric Parfrey, Yolo County’s principal planner. It’s a constantly shifting balance of variables, with long-term climate considerations given relatively little weight.

Constantly playing the short game, weighing a spiking price against a diving water table and disappearing pollinators, may leave farmers unprepared for long-term climatic shifts.

That is where government might step in. Governments could provide guidance and protection for farmers wanting to take risks in the interest of preparing for future climate, perhaps acting counter to their short-term interests.

However, one researcher, UC Davis’ Meredith Niles, finds that in California’s Central Valley some farmers consider “climate policy risk,” or possible losses from government policy intervention, a greater threat to their way of life than physical climate risk (Niles, Lubell, & Haden, 2013).

In fact, Niles’ study shows that past negative experiences with government environmental policies affecting their farms is highly correlated with farmers’ skepticism about climate change. Even if they have seen evidence of climate changing, negative past policy experience makes some farmers more concerned about climate change policies than climate change impacts.

Given the fact that farmers are primarily engaged in autonomous or spontaneous adaptation (because of the relative strength of short-term price and weather signals), how can farmers be encouraged to prepare for the long-term climate future? Given farmers’ resource constraints it may not be possible.

Photo by Ainhoa Goma, Oxfam International. Candelario Beh,
a farmer from Tabi, an indigenous Mayan community affected by climate change.
© Creative Commons.

But things might not be as bad as they seem. The ongoing adaptation required of farmers may be enough to carry them successfully into the future, as long as they are willing to plan flexibly, transition crop type and variety, change irrigation practices, and otherwise change practices in response to conditions. An empirical study published in May 2014 shows that over the long-term farmers’ autonomous adaptation may be sufficient to maintain or even increase profits in some cases (Moore & Lobell, 2014). Stanford researcher Frances Moore looked at profit and yield reports in Western Europe (12 countries) between 1989 and 2009. She and her research team studied five crops (wheat, maize, sugarbeet, barley, and oilseed), comparing fluctuations over the short term versus the long term, presuming that the long-term period would capture the effect of more permanent adaptations (such as selling off increasingly unproductive land or investing in new irrigation technology), and considering projected climate change with and without those long-term adaptation effects. In all cases, yields show a decrease under climate change, even with all adaptation options in play. Adaptation moderates the negative impact of climate warming on yields, but doesn’t completely erase it. However, farmers respond more to price signals than yields, and in the projected future climate, average farm profits are shown to decrease 2.3% without adaptation – and increase 1.5% with adaptation. Farmers may not be farming for the large profit-margin, but they should be influenced by news of the possible increased profits from long-term adaptation.

Talking to Frances Moore about her results, I gathered some of her “take-aways” and thought about them in the context of California:

Farmers are interested in profit more than yield, so if the wheat yield goes down because of climate change, that doesn’t mean they will stop planting wheat (reminiscent of the phenomenon of the almond orchards in the Central Valley); costly adaptation actions or costly losses from heat will balance out if the price of the crop is high enough;
Farmers generally are more accustomed to adapting to rainfall fluctuation than long-term rising temperatures;
Whatever farmers say they believe about climate change may not line up with actions they take in response to climate change.
“Farmers are sensible people. They are going to respond to changes,” states Moore, “and to the extent they do, that’s adaptation.” But will they anticipate change enough? Will climate projections bear enough weight for them (relative to price and weather) for them to keep their farms going over the next fifty years of climate disruption?

The answer will not likely come in the form of a desktop study, but in farmers being engaged in the process of assessing climate risk and ways to act in anticipation of losses or opportunities for gain. If farmers are shown ways to increase long-term profits through long-term adaptation, it may avert costly investment in crops that cannot survive under the future climate. They just—somehow— have to be allowed to come to those conclusions on their own terms.

The California Climate and Agriculture Network, which works closely with Central Valley growers, has issued a set of comments in response to the state’s draft climate adaptation strategy Safeguarding California, imploring the state to shift its emphasis from research to outreach and technical assistance. You can read their recommendations here.

California: The Rebeavering (the re-post)

The following was published May 21, 2015, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

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Beaver at Montreal Biodôme. © CC/Márcio Cabral de Moura

The California case for beaver reintroduction is picking up steam.

Specifically, the case is being made for the benefits of beaver dams and their ponds to California’s high Sierra, where a disappearing snowpack is threatening the state’s summer water supply—and overall economy.

Not all beavers build dams, and not every place beavers go is a suitable location for dams. However, where beaver ponds are found, there are higher water tables that benefit grazing animals like cattle, deep, cool ponds that benefit juvenile fish, and, when people are present, the aesthetic benefit of “watchable wildlife,” according to Brock Dolman, Director of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, and advocate for the strategic fostering of beaver populations in California.

California faces peculiar beaver-reintroduction barriers not faced by other western states where people are starting to think of beaver ponds as a landscape restoration and surface water retention tool, like Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. And drought-plagued California might gain particular benefit from a new surface water retention tool. Hydrologist Suzanne Fouty, of the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon, said in the 2014 PBS Nature documentary “Leave it to Beavers:”

The bottom line is, [beavers are] your ace in the hole. […] If the snowpack’s coming off earlier and ranchers want water, then we’re going to have to figure out how to keep it on the landscape, because it’s no longer going to be stored as snow in the mountains, and what beaver do […] is they create these little savings accounts, […] no longer as snow, but as surface and groundwater.

Beavers? In California?

Joseph Grinnell (in a 1937 University Press publication) and then Donald Tappe (in a 1942 California Department of Natural Resources publication) brought in the idea that the mid-1800s “fur rush” had pared back a beaver population that was limited to inland valleys. Then, in 1988, evidence of ancient beaver dams was found in the high Sierras that carbon dated back to 580 CE (Novel physical evidence that beavers historically were native to the Sierra Nevada, C. James and R. Lanman [2012]).

Further research, including a 2012 California Fish and Game piece by Lanman, Dolman and others, is showing evidence of beaver range extending across most of California, but what Dolman calls the “beaver blind spot” remains thanks to Tappe and Grinnell. Researchers working on the new maps of beaver range in California speculate that coastal and high Sierra beaver populations were smaller and easier to trap due to topography, so their populations were wiped out 100 years before Grinnell’s seminal work.

Before capitalizing on those precious “savings accounts” of water that high Sierra beaver could give California, the people of California have to buy the idea that beaver were here. They have to believe that supporting the expansion of their numbers and range is restoration instead of a new invasion, a la the 1946 experiment in Patagonia (Chile and Argentina), which has been an unmitigated disaster, the North American beaver being completely foreign to South America.

Varmints!

The second problem is the belief that beavers do more harm than good. The animal has been framed as vermin for 100 years. In some California counties there is no limit to the number of beavers you can kill in season. This is a public perception problem.

Beavers undoubtedly cause flooding where they build dams, and valuable property can suffer: orchards can suffer from both flooding and girdling by little teeth. Infrastructure can be put at risk if beaver populations are not managed. Advocates say there are remedies for most beaver/human conflicts. For example, it’s easy to protect valuable trees with fencing or painting the base with latex paint mixed with sand. The animal is tarred with stigma through the common name of Giardia: beaver fever. In fact, “it has never been demonstrated that the type of giardia beavers carry causes giardiasis in humans,” according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Although individual cases of conflict can be solved (as they did famously in Martinez, CA, now the home of an annual Beaver Festival), there is a lack of information in favor of beavers as a way to solve problems. There is a need for more data supporting the benefits of beaver dams to watersheds for surface water retention, water quantity and quality, and benefits to endangered species. There are loads of observations of these things, but a lack of rigorous research to support it. According to Dolman, scientists need to tease out the “beaver signal” between watersheds with and without beaver ponds.

In My Own Dam Backyard

A third problem specific to California is that beavers were introduced or reintroduced in a widespread, haphazard way as a way to combat erosion in the period after the Tappe report. Other western states also reintroduced beaver, including using parachutes, but they did it on the scale of 200-300 animals. Dolman says the exact figure is unknown, but it is believed that around 1,200 beaver were released in California in that period. Looking back, it appears to have been irresponsible rebeavering. Besides bringing in beaver from other states (instead of sustainably cultivating local populations), it contributed to the confusion about what constituted native habitat for beaver and created conflicts with landowners.

So, What Next?

Besides publicizing the evidence that beavers are native to most of California, quantifying the benefits of beaver ponds for surface water retention (particularly interesting in the current historic California drought), changing public perception of beavers as vermin, and convincing people that beavers will not be parachuted into your backyard, wildlife managers need to get a fix on the current status of beavers in California.

A recent meeting between California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) staff and beaver advocates started with the staff asking the advocates how many beavers are in the state, according to Dolman. The last state-issued report on the matter was by Tappe: the current condition of the beaver in California is unknown. An online Beaver Mapper has been created to help with this problem.

The CDFW, the agency responsible for beaver population management in the state, is not about to start moving beavers around. But they also don’t want to ignore what beaver advocates are saying about their value for surface water retention and with the state’s old water retention system—snowpack—on its way out. Also, there’s legal liability to consider. It’s possible that in one hunting season, in a county where there is no limit on beavers killed for recreation, an entire beaver family maintaining a pond on which federally and state endangered species depend for survival could be lost. This would put the CDFW in the position of defending an “incidental take” of endangered species in a court of law.

So, the CDFW is cautiously showing interest in what the beaver believers have to say. There appears to be momentum behind locating and evaluating populations for possible increased protection. Sierra mountain meadows and their far-downstream neighbors, thirsty ranches and farms, may eventually see the benefits.
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More information:

The Beaver Believers: A Film About Passion and Perseverance in an Era of Climate Change – the website for the film, scheduled for completion in November 2015, has useful background information and references.

Leave it to Beavers – a 53 min. video that premiered May 14, 2014, on PBS Nature, available streaming online. Besides giving a basic history of the animal in North America, it addresses the growing belief by scientists and environmentalists that beavers have been overlooked as a tool for reversing harm done by climate change. It illustrates how beavers have kept ranchers going through drought, as beaver ponds raise water tables on grazing lands.

The Martinez beaver story – a 14:50 video, by Heidi Perryman of “Worth a Dam.”

Beaver and Climate Change Adaptation in North America: A Simple, Cost-Effective Strategy – A 58-page report by scientists and advocates from the WildEarth Guardians, Grand Canyon Trust, and the Lands Council (2011).

California Climate Change Symposium Parking Lot

I was unable to attend the California Climate Change Symposium (#CCCS15) in Sacramento on Aug. 24-25, 2015, so I'm creating a parking lot here for links that can help a non-attendee get acquainted with what happened there.

It was put together by the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR), the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA), the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal-EPA), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main topic of the event was the state of climate science in California (the URL for the event is "californiascience.org"). The Daily Breeze (LA County) does a nice, quick, accessible summary of the take-aways of the science presented at the CCCS15, if you can get past the demotivating headline: California climate researchers sound the alarm at symposium: ‘There’s no way out’ (Aug. 25, 2015).

That "no way out" quote is attributed to the wise and esteemed Susanne Moser, who I greatly admire, but who definitely tends towards the "stick" more than "carrot" approach to delivering climate change information, at least when she is talking to her peers-- scientists and climate change planners. Another stick-upside-the-head pronouncement I wrote down once while listening to her speak is "we can't save everything we love." She's good at "stick" delivery. Another So-Cal journalist who appears to be repacking the Daily Breeze take-aways but with maps, seized on the "no way out" quote, putting it in bold under another "stick"-y headline: The Many Terrifying Ways Global Warming Will Soon Be Ravaging California (Aug. 26, 2015).

FYI -- if you, like me, missed the event because you didn't find out it was happening in time to attend, the event was first announced May 21, 2015, by the CNRA via its climate change list-serve (which you can join here). The call for posters only went out on July 8. Since the short lead-time on the event probably excluded a lot of people who have to plan ahead more than a few weeks at a time, it's nice that the event was live-webcast. However, I don't think the videos are available online (or, aren't yet online).

Despite the short notice, it was a sold-out 600+ crowd, from one friend's account. I'm skimming through the Twitter feed of top tweets on the event for other insights.

If that's too much heavy lifting, LA-based Climate Resolve has just published a curated selection of CCCS15 tweets.

If you are looking for MORE heavy lifting here's the "live" feed for #CCCS15, the whole slough of tweets with that tag, uncurated.

Honest Conversations: Climate Change and Uncertainty (the re-post)

The following was published Dec. 12, 2013, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org.

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Uncertainty is hard. Planning for uncertain events, particularly highly uncertain and dangerous events, is even more difficult. Even certain events with uncertain timing, like an earthquake on a fault line, can stop people in their tracks. People don’t want to plan for terrible things. I once attended a doctoral seminar at UC Berkeley (on the Hayward Fault) on climate change adaptation and asked the room, in the middle of complaining about the stubbornness of climate change denialists, how many had earthquake preparedness kits at home. The answer: less than a third. We all live in some degree of denial about highly uncertain, dangerous events. They are just too scary to think through.

Those of us who are trying to move governments to plan for climate change need to understand the roots of denial. One of those roots is fear. There is fear surrounding the uncertainty of climate change. What if the sky isn’t falling? What if the sky is falling, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it? As an astute climate change planner, you might say: you don’t need to have certainty of a future fire before buying a fire insurance policy. Why would you wait for perfect certainty to plan for climate change? However, governments around the world still point to the uncertainty of the timing and severity of climate change as a reason to avoid committing scarce resources to climate change preparedness.

I recently attended a conference held by the Institute at the Golden Gate [Nov. 6-9, 2013] on using parklands as a venue for climate change communication. We were told to find people where they are, create opportunities for two-way conversations, and hear their concerns and observations. I would add to that the importance of acknowledging the uncertainty of climate change, not to overstate (or understate) the science. So how do you engage with people, acknowledging their fears, in a way that helps us start planning for climate change?

Back in June [2013], WWF’s Shaun Martin wrote on how uncertainty can be a barrier to climate change planning, and how the scenario-development exercise he led helped people get past uncertainty paralysis. Scenario planning, pioneered by the U.S. military and developed for wider use in the 1970’s by the Global Business Network, is being used more and more to create a space to talk about climate change. Scenario planning provides a framework for a group to develop multiple plausible futures based on discussion of relative certainties, including many kinds of information, from quantitative scientific projections to personal observations about the changing land. This way, communities can talk through responses to worst case scenarios that feel plausible and imminent, grounded in scientific knowns and unknowns, defining our nightmares to move forward into envisioning solutions.

People plan around uncertainty all the time, but we don’t stop to consider the kinds of uncertainties we negotiate. In typical planning, one focuses on the certainties and goes from there. With climate change, nothing is 100% certain regarding severity or timing (or both). However, some situations are more certain than others, and therefore easier to plan for. In scenario planning, participants are asked to focus on the factors with the highest uncertainty (also called “deep uncertainty”), where the direction of change or the point at which a critical threshold will be exceeded is unknown. Then, of these, participants are asked to focus on the highest-consequence factors. This allows people to enter the imaginary space of a range of futures which would be ignored in a common planning process focusing on certainties. Playing this out, participants can envision the interactions of multiple factors (such as a future with decreasing rainfall, increasing severe wind storms, and chronic budget shortfalls). The scenarios are built correctly, engaging with the right amount of deep uncertainty, if the participants come up with solutions that surprise them, or give them ‘aha’ moments.

In January 2011, I organized a scenario planning workshop for 35 resource managers in Marin, California. The participants came from the public and private non-profit sectors, representing local, county, and national landscape management institutions. There were water district managers, fire district managers, invasive plant detection experts, researchers, and more. At the end of the day, we had our ‘aha’ moment: fire and water managers need to work more closely across a larger region to plan for long-term change. Two years later, I’m working with the North Bay Climate Adaptation Initiative and North Bay Watershed Association  to make these cross-sector, multi-county planning discussions happen. The managers we engage in planning these discussions continue to affirm that we can no longer plan for one natural system separate from another.

The dream is certainty; the reality is that we can’t always reduce climate change uncertainty, and the fear that stems from this can paralyze us. However, we can define our worst-case scenarios, thinking through the consequences of the most critical uncertainties (and how the consequences interact). Scenario planning is not a panacea for all the barriers to climate change preparedness, but it can help us address our biggest nightmares, and hopefully navigate past uncertainty.

Feature Photo © Fred Hasselman

A "Blob" Blog!

Check it out -- the Alaska "Blob" Tracker -- for all the Blob news that's fit to print!

It was established at the end of July by the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS), the Alaska branch of a non-profit, the Integrated Ocean Observing System Association, which supports coastal marine data gathering around the U.S.

This Aug. 11, 2015, article from the Alaska Dispatch News explains how the AOOS came to realize the need for a Blob blog.

In case you missed it when I posted about it earlier, check out: El Niño vs. the Blob: which will win out this winter? a 1:24 animation by KPCC's science desk that helped me understand how the Blob is not El Niño. And how it may thwart the efforts of El Niño to bring rain to parched California.

Batten Down the Hatches: Double El Niño is Trouble for Public Health

Since January I've been seeing articles about a second El Niño forming in the Pacific, expected to bring buckets of rain to the U.S. west coast this winter. The historic drought we're having here in California makes this sound like a godsend. I only hear the coming deluge discussed in positive terms. Or a marketing opportunity: a friend moving out of the area just posted her rain boots for sale with the tag "El Niño is coming!"

Obviously natural disasters like immense storms and floods pose a direct physical threat to people and their homes. For a risk-minded person, an image like this might come to mind at the mention of the upcoming intense El Niño:

Source: U.S. Navy. Hurricane Katrina rescue.

But there are less obvious dangers from the oncoming Double El Niño that should be included in risk calculations. First, let's remind ourselves the defining characteristics of this phenomenon.

El Niño is just a rainy winter, right?

El Niño is when the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean water gets warmer and air pressure gets lower, part of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which alternates with La Niña (when the eastern equatorial Pacific waters cool and air pressure gets higher). Usually, as the water warms more moisture goes into the atmosphere and creates more storms. So, the primary impact associated with El Niño in the U.S. is more storms on the west coast.

An El Niño was declared in 2014, but the warm water/more storms connection turned out to be weak. The energy from the warm water is just "sitting there," according to Kevin Trenberth of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in a March 2015 "Living on Earth" piece from PRI.

The NOAA Climate Prediction Center declared in July:

There is a greater than 90% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16, and around an 80% chance it will last into early spring 2016.

Trenberth said in the PRI piece of the pending Double El Niño: "this could mean more than a few months of odd weather, but instead usher in a new phase of climate change."

Perhaps as a result of the congestion from not releasing the energy from the 2014 warming cycle, current sea surface temperatures indicate an El Niño as strong as the record-breaking one in 1997-1998. However, NOAA meteorologist, Michelle L’Heureux, points out that the two El Niño's early indicators don't line up exactly ("Keep calm and stop obsessing over weekly changes in ENSO" - July 7, 2015), and in a July 23 Scientific American article she is quoted as saying "we cannot find a single El Niño event that tracked like another El Niño event."

But even if this El Niño doesn't live up to the hype, meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote last October "a longer-term climate signal is beginning to point in the direction of more frequent bursts of warming over the next several years."

On top of that, a parallel system, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), is warming the northeastern Pacific. (Look at the bottom of this University of Washington chart of sea surface temperature anomalies in the North Pacific and it looks like the PDO is in full swing.)

Will California be Singing in the Rain?

Who knows? No two El Niños are the same, as pointed out by meteorologist Michelle L’Heureux above. 

We might have yet another dry winter because of "the Blob": a warm water/high pressure ridge combination lingering off the coast of California blocking incoming storms. (For more info read El Niño vs. the Blob: which will win out this winter? - from the KPCC science desk, Aug. 10, 2015, including a 1:22 animation explaining their different effects.)

Then there is the salient point that "El Niño rains can come like a wrecking ball," brought up in a July 30, 2015, opinion piece by one climate change adaptation planner, AECOM's Josh Sawislak. He questions the readiness of the state's infrastructure if the predicted floods do come.

While California hopes for and dreads a winter of floods, other places will have to brace for drought and fire. In the southwest Pacific, they await dry conditions. East Australia is expecting dangerous bushfire conditions (check out this Sydney Morning Herald article from May 2015 describing expected El Niño impacts in Australia this winter, with a bonus 2-minute cartoon explaining the phenomenon).

Beyond the direct public safety risks from wildfire and flood, why should people worry about El Niño's impact on public health?

El Niño and Disease

Drought and Meningitis

Historically, a strong El Niño has brought drought and famine to the Sahel region of Africa, and researchers are now drawing connections between the weather pattern and specific diseases. In July 2015, a Nigerian doctor O. Oluwole published findings correlating the increase of meningococcal meningitis epidemics in the Sahel with strong El Niños. This supports previous findings that high dust and wind (which accompany drought) correlate with meningitis outbreaks in the so-called "meningitis belt" (stretching across the Sahel from Senegal to Ethiopia) where "major epidemics of lethal meningitis are routine" (The Guardian, March 25, 2014). With these findings, vaccination campaigns can be stepped up in preparation.

Floods and Stunted Growth

In November 2014, researchers at Johns Hopkins published findings showing that children born during and shortly after the 1997-1998 El Niño event in Northern Peru, which brought heavy coastal flooding, were "on average shorter and had less lean mass for their age and sex than expected had El Niño not occurred."

The study's lead researcher, William Checkley told Mother Jones magazine that the findings align with previous findings about El Niño's public health consequences: increased risk of infection, social and emotional stress, and increased risk of contracting infectious diarrheal and respiratory diseases from flooding and heat. All of this combined could easily harm a child's development.

El Niño and War

Solomon Hsiang, an economist who studies the impact of climate change on conflict, together with  K. Meng and M. Cane, found "the probability of new civil conflicts arising throughout the tropics doubles during El Niño years relative to La Niña years" according to data from 1950 to 2004 (Nature, 2011). Another researcher who looks at the connection of weather and conflict, Marshall Burke, suggested that the findings could lead to governments of countries with high risk of extreme heat or drought during El Niño "putt[ing] in place measures and safety nets to try to reduce the risk of conflict in that year." Or, the approach of El Niño could at least put international rescue and refugee organizations on notice to step up their fundraising efforts in advance.

All I can say is batten down the hatches.

More information:

• Is my country at risk from El Niño?

This October 2012 Daily Mail UK piece shows historical global distribution of flood damage from El Niño, using maps from the Global Change Institute in Amsterdam.

• NOAA's real-time sea surface temperature maps

El Niño and "the Blob" are both visible in the Pacific if you look at the anomalies map-- the second map down. 

• NOAA's El Niño Portal

With a link to the ENSO Blog.