Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo (the re-post)

The following was published August 30, 2016, 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.
-

On Aug. 4, 2016, the climate change communication NGO Climate Access launched a new project in San Mateo, California, on the San Francisco Bay, called Look Ahead - San Mateo. The project involves an installation in a popular bayside park, Coyote Point, to help people visualize future sea levels and approaches for adapting the shoreline.

Bay Area county map. © CC

The project uses a new technology called an OWL® that was piloted by Climate Access for sea level rise education last year in Mill Valley, Marin County, California (read a 4-page brief about that project). The OWL® was created by Owlized, a San Leandro-based tech start-up. The OWL, as described by its creator, is “a public, outdoor virtual reality viewer that shows users the future or history of a place.” An aside for grammar nerds: the word OWL is capitalized not because it is an acronym, but because using all-caps is “the easiest way to differentiate the (mouthful of) digital public information kiosk from our feathered friends,” as clarified by Nate Kauffman at Owlized.

An OWL looks like the coin-operated viewfinder you sometimes find on scenic shorelines, but operate by the push of a button on the side of the viewer and cost the visitor nothing. 

A girl and her family use the OWL viewer.
Photo: Sara S. Moore.

Public installations of OWLs include one at adult height and one at child or wheelchair-user height, in compliance with accessibility laws. Besides showing a 360-degree view of the landscape around the installation site under different scenarios of sea level rise and adaptation, it can collect input from visitors through a simple digital interface guided by an audio script. In Marin over 3,700 visitors gave input on different approaches to shoreline adaptation through the OWLs between June and September 2015. The Look Ahead - San Mateo organizers aim to boost participation by hosting weekend events with local community-based organizations at the OWL site over the five-month duration of the installation.

San Mateo is a place where residents should be looking ahead at sea level rise. According to a 2012 study by the Pacific Institute, of all California counties San Mateo is most vulnerable to sea level rise. That assertion is predicated on the presumption of 1.0 to 1.4 meters (3 ¼ to 4 ½ feet) of sea level rise along the California coast by the year 2100. It’s worth noting that those numbers might be understating the urgency of the situation. That Pacific Institute study was part of California’s Third Climate Assessment, which was delayed in its publication (something known to the author because of her own contribution to the Third Climate Assessment), so the climate scenarios for the report were actually run in 2009. Additionally, a footnote on those 2009 projections cautions that “most climate models fail to include ice‐melt contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and as a result, the potential increase in mean sea level may be much higher” (p. 1). 

Aerial view of the port of Redwood City in
San Mateo County, California, USA. © CC

Now, refinements in sea level rise projections indicate that sea level is rising faster than previously thought (see the Aug. 10, 2016, Washington Post article “Seas aren’t just rising, scientists say — it’s worse than that. They’re speeding up.”). Meanwhile, the launch press release for Look Ahead - San Mateo cites a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projection of 3 feet of rise by 2100: a number more conservative than the Pacific Institute’s low-end projection from seven years ago. Across the SF Bay from the OWLs, three runways at Oakland International Airport are already closed for some high tides (Janin & Mandia [2012], Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact). San Francisco International, within sight of the OWLs, is sketching out plans for floating runways, seawalls, and levees.

While communicating about sea level rise to San-Mateans is an urgent matter, using innovative technology to communicate about climate change has its trade-offs. While the OWLs do attract visitors—there was a steady stream of passersby lining up at the OWLs on the launch day—the OWLs are costly and breakable. On the launch day one of the two OWLs was not turned on (electrical connection issues), and a week after the launch both OWLs had to be removed for maintenance, returning a few days later.

The OWL installations are being backed by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region IX office through education funds made available after the recent release of updated flood maps. The Marin installation was funded with a 150,000 USD FEMA grant that ran the OWLs from May 2015 to September 2015 (only collecting useable survey data for four of those months). The current installation is supported with a 200,000 USD grant, which will run the OWLs from August 2016 to December 2016. Unfortunately, neither Marin nor San Mateo could afford to purchase and maintain the OWLs on a permanent basis.

There is also the practical problem of installing the OWLs in flood-prone areas. The installation in Marin was on the bayside coast near a hiking/biking trail that is already known to go underwater during some King Tides, putting the electrically powered OWLs at risk of damage: this new installation is on higher ground. Also, reducing the greenhouse gas footprint of the project, the San Mateo OWLs are solar-powered. Another lesson from the Marin pilot was that some people didn’t visit the OWLs because they appeared to cost money (resembling coin-operated viewfinders): a sentence about the viewers being free of cost was added to the signage at the San Mateo coast.

In January the OWLs will be removed and re-installed in San Francisco for a third iteration of the experiment.

Full disclosure: the author is volunteering for the Look Ahead - San Mateo County project doing local social media support. The opinions expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the partners or funders of the project (Climate Access, San Mateo County, Owlized, Dr. Susanne Moser, Antioch University, Nutter Consulting, the California Coastal Conservancy, or FEMA Region IX).

Learn more about the OWL installations and other sea level rise adaptation work ongoing in San Mateo and Marin counties:

• Watch the coverage by a local TV station (KPIX - CBS) of the Look Ahead - San Mateo launch,  August 4, 2016 (1m 48s)


• Read the Project and Research Summary for the OWL installation in Marin: Moser, S.C., Daniels, C., Pike, C. and Huva, A. (2016). Here-Now-Us: Visualizing Sea Level Rise and Adaptation Using the OWL Technology in Marin County, California. Susanne Moser Research and Consulting, Santa Cruz and Climate Access, San Francisco. (69 pages, accessed Aug. 14, 2016).


•  Keep an eye out for San Mateo’s Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment, expected to be released in September 2016 after a draft review meeting with stakeholders.


• Check out Sea Change San Mateo County for info on workshops planned for this October using the “Game of Floods” (a free open-source resource). Read more about the game and the planning award it won (Mill Valley Patch, July 20, 2016).


• You can follow Look Ahead - SMC on Twitter and Facebook.

The Internet of Water (the re-post)

The following was published Oct. 31, 2016, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which appears to have gone defunct. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.
-

The installation of a sensor at Ellsworth Pond.

 © 2016 Real Time Water Systems Lab

At the recent Great Lakes Adaptation Forum held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Oct. 5-7, 2016, I heard about an exciting new approach to managing stormwater runoff using remote sensing technology, called the “internet of water,” or “intelligent stormwater grids.” The presentation was about how data-gathering gadgets were installed this past summer around the catchment area of a pond in Ann Arbor by members of the University of Michigan’s Real Time Water Systems Lab, led by engineer Branko Kerkez. I believe I was the only current California resident in the room, so I might have been alone in having a lightbulb go on over my head as I listened to the description of the installations, anticipating Kerkez bringing up the possible applications of this technology for capturing the Los Angeles River runoff that infamously goes straight into the ocean. That water could, if captured and treated, provide the city with all the water it needs, relieving demand on Northern California’s water resources, which depend largely on meltwater from the Sierra snowpack, which is expected to disappear with climate change. It turns out Kerkez previously helped develop real-time remote monitoring of Sierra snowmelt as part of a UC Berkeley research team. California’s drought appears to be one of the initial inspirations for his remote sensing experiments (read more about his earlier work in California here).

This short video from Aug. 5, 2016, describes how the internet of water as developed by Kerkez’s lab might help Los Angeles. With the real-time water management technology, “you can strategically hold back certain portions of [runoff] water and potentially even reuse it,” says Kerkez in the video. By making aging infrastructure responsive to an influx of stormwater you could not only harness the water for other uses but possibly avert a flood by moving water to a less inundated neighborhood.

Still from 2016 video "Building the Internet of Water."
Sensor installation.

Still from 2016 video "Building the Internet of Water."
Remote readout.

On Oct. 1, 2016, California officially entered its sixth year of drought. The Sacramento Bee reported on Sept. 30, that forecasters are predicting “it’s going to take a long time before anyone declares California’s drought over.” Southern California is looking like it will continue to be particularly dry.

Some LA River stormwater runoff is already being captured and used to recharge groundwater, but the LA Department of Water and Power is looking to step up those efforts significantly and introduce direct reuse of runoff with a Stormwater Capture Master Plan, now in its third year of development. Read a PowerPoint from the Plan’s final public hearing in June 2015 describing its scope and ambitions. What the internet of water offers will not revolutionize this project, but it could make the project much more effective.

The goal of the Ann Arbor pilot presently is to demonstrate real-time adaptive management for stormwater. The remote sensing instruments deliver to the internet measurements of the flow in open channels, soil moisture, rainfall, and water quality. Microcontrollers and wireless communication detect and transmit the information at a one-minute resolution. For the demonstration project, ten devices were deployed within a three-square-mile catchment called Ellsworth Pond, selected because the county allowed the team access to it. At this stage, the technology is relatively inexpensive, using data analysis algorithms and hardware platforms custom-made in Kerkez’s lab.

Some of the barriers to using these devices for management that were discussed at the GLAF presentation are the challenges of identifying and reducing errors in the data, and vandalism of the instruments. So far the lab has not had to deal with the latter problem, but it may arise as more instruments are installed in more densely populated areas. Also, a May 2016 article in Environmental Science and Technology (Kerkez et al.) states that the research on how to create a smarter stormwater system is not limited by technology, but “rather by a much more fundamental need to understand the complex spatiotemporal dynamics that govern water flow and quality across large urban areas.”

Before moving on to helping solve Los Angeles’ stormwater runoff problems, these water management gadgets will be piloted further in Ann Arbor, Toledo, Milwaukee, and Fort Worth-Dallas, using real-time data from the water system to paint a better picture of how stormwater behaves and how we might use it more wisely.

--

Learn more about the smarter stormwater management pilot projects by the University of Michigan’s Real Time Water Systems Lab: 

• Open Storm, the Real Time Water Systems Lab's "smart" water system project web site:  http://open-storm.org/
• Kerkez’s bibliography of articles on “smart” water systems: http://open-storm.org/read/
• Check out the lab’s DIY instructions for “simple-to-assemble controllers” you can attach to ponds, rain barrels, green roofs & etc. to control the flow of stormwater before and during storms: http://open-storm.org/procedure/control/

The Sea Level Rise Solution that is as Charismatic as Mud (the re-post)

The following  was published Feb. 17, 2017, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which appears to have gone defunct. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Photo by Agnali. CC0/Pixabay License.

This past fall, when soon-to-be President Trump used “drain the swamp”  as an anti-corruption rallying cry, some biologists and wetlands advocates pointed out that swamps are actually quite useful. Also called wetlands, swamps can be a critical part of natural infrastructure for the purposes of protecting the shoreline from storm surge and sea level rise, in addition to providing habitat and improving water quality.

Sediment, matter that settles to the bottom of a body of water, nourishes wetlands. Sediment, literally as charismatic as mud, is not given the same attention as a natural resource as fresh water or plant life. It is not photogenic. It is out of sight and out of mind. It is a waste product, an impediment to shipping traffic. But in areas where wetlands have been identified as strategically valuable in the defense against rising sea levels, sediment’s star is rising.

One of these areas is the San Francisco Bay, where sea level has been measured as rising steadily since its first tide gauge was installed in 1854. Numerous wetlands restoration projects are underway to help protect the bay shoreline, and sediment is in demand to nourish them. Right now, there is a shrinking supply of sediment in the SF Bay. According to Bodega Marine Laboratory oceanographer Doug George, the primary culprit is dams trapping sediment, but also the petering out of the large pulse of sediment that came with placer gold mining during the Gold Rush, and current sand mining practices. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), responsible for dredging to maintain channel depths for ship navigation at U.S. harbors, is dumping dredged materials from the bottom of the bay—useful but uncharismatic mud—outside the Golden Gate Bridge. ACE is bound by federal statute to do the least-cost disposal method, and it costs more to reuse sediment for wetlands.

A Lawsuit over Mud

Some of the dredged material is being redistributed to nourish bayside wetlands, but not enough. A 1998 environmental impact statement (see the Long Term Management Strategy [LTMS] for the Placement of Dredged Material in the San Francisco Bay Region) indicates that 40% of that dredged material should be put to “beneficial reuse,” including wetlands nourishment. However, in 2016 ACE allocated less than 40% of its dredged materials to reuse. According to the Bay Conservation and Development Commission  (BCDC) Executive Director, Larry Goldzband, and Sediment Program Manager, Brenda Goeden, other dredgers in the bay are keeping up with the 40% reuse policy, but ACE, the largest dredger, has been falling short.

BCDC, formed in 1965 in response to heavy shoreline development on the SF Bay, is the agency tasked with keeping the bay from shrinking in size. So, in theory, it would be all in on dredging. However, BCDC is concerned about the bay’s landward-shifting shoreline. It was one of the first government agencies in the U.S. to issue guidelines responding to sea level rise. Its staff report, Living with a Rising Bay (2011), informed SF Bay Plan revisions, including the assertion that “[a]n adequate supply of sediment is necessary to ensure resilience of the Bay ecosystem as sea level rise accelerates.”

ACE has worked closely with BCDC for years on the question of sediment management in the SF Bay.  ACE carries out its responsibility regarding navigation channels in compliance with the Coastal Zone Management Act which gives BCDC its accreditation. BCDC reviews ACE practices and determines whether they are consistent with that federal act. Now, BCDC, chafing under the shortfall in beneficially reused sediment, on Sept. 22, 2016, filed a lawsuit against ACE to force it to stop dumping good mud. While ACE falls back on the federal requirement of using a least cost disposal method as a rationale for its shortfall, the lawsuit focuses on the full language of the regulation, which dictates that the disposal method be “environmentally acceptable” (per L. Goldzband). The lawsuit was filed after months of discussions and attempts at mediation. In late March 2017 representatives of ACE and BCDC will attend an “Alternative Dispute Resolution,” a last-ditch attempt to avoid the courts.

A SF Bay Wetlands Restoration Project Roll Call

There are many pilot projects involving sediment in various stages of development in the SF Bay.

Bel Marin Keys/ Hamilton Airfield

This ACE/ California Coastal Conservancy project is celebrated as a successful transformation of a military site into a wetland. Click here to see a 1:38 video with images of the breaching of the levee, opening the land to the SF Bay waters in 2014. This project benefited from beneficially reused sediment.

Oro Loma Horizontal Levee Project

This, the first horizontal levee in the SF Bay, using vegetation on a slope to slow waves rather than a vertical wall, was set to be fully operational in 2016. It might be the first levee of its kind in the world. After more than four years in the permitting process it took six months to build (per Nate Kauffman in Save the Bay, 2016).

Cullinan Ranch

This project in the North Bay, now near completion in the Napa River Delta, came out of a movement to block fill and residential development on the former wetlands. Read about its return to recreational use in “Into the Breach: Paddlers and Ducks Return to Cullinan Ranch” (2016).

South Bay Salt Ponds

This is “the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast.” It is fully underway, and will convert 15,100 acres of commercial salt ponds at the south end of SF Bay into mud flats and tidal marsh. It will rely mostly on natural sedimentation processes rather than reused dredged material.

Montezuma Wetlands Restoration Project (Suisun Marsh)

Now completed, this is an interesting project because it used “slightly more chemically challenged” dredged material than what is usually used in restoration projects: it is designed to safely make beneficial reuse of material that otherwise would be dumped in the open ocean. Scroll to the bottom of this page for a brief description of this project by the SF Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. A 3-page description of the project written during its initial stages.

Living Shorelines

This subtidal restoration demonstration project in San Rafael and Hayward was begun in 2012, is ongoing and now expanding to a new location in Richmond, California. It focuses on eelgrass and oyster habitat restoration.

Bothin Marsh

This project is intended to enhance Bothin Marsh for habitat and sea level rise protection through beneficial reuse of dredge sediment from Coyote Creek. Although Marin County has received a grant to develop a feasibility assessment, it remains in the conceptual design stage.

Sediment self-distribution in the South Bay?

A 2014 study (Bever et al.) showed through modeling that dredged material dumped south of the southern-most bridge across the SF Bay (Dumbarton) could result in the nourishment of “mudflats, marshes and breached salt ponds through natural sediment redistribution.” Any actual experiments with this kind of dumping would have to wait for BCDC to change its bay fill policy.

What’s Next for the SF Bay?

There’s no time to lose

While BCDC and ACE are locked in a legal battle, the Pacific climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has shifted as of the beginning of 2014 according to NOAA Fisheries: the switch brings a wind pattern that warms surface waters, causing seas near the West Coast to expand and rise according to NASA (2015). It may bring a rapid increase in sea level rise, and one NASA climate scientist, Josh Willis, says “we could be in for wild ride over the next 20 years or so.”  

Funding is on the horizon

In 2016 the SF Bay Area passed Measure AA, providing the first funding for the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority. While a good first step to sustained sea level rise preparation, the funding falls far short of the need. There is some hope (according to L. Goldzband of BCDC) that Measure AA funds could be augmented by the 2016 Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN Act), which includes the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), providing funding for 10 pilot projects to maximize beneficial reuse of sediment. These projects would not be subject to the “least cost” regulation that currently poses a barrier to beneficial reuse. ACE should announce the locations of these projects by mid-March 2017.

Sedi-Match!

In 2013 BCDC facilitated “speed dating” sessions between dredgers and restoration project managers to see where dredged material could be beneficially reused. This turned into the development of a simple online tool called Sedi-Match. It was scheduled for release in January 2017. Read more about its development.

Rethinking fill policy

BCDC is about to launch a series of public meetings to discuss whether the agency should change its bay fill policy to prepare for sea level rise. If you are local to the SF Bay, you can attend these meetings beginning on April 20, 2017, from 1-4 PM at 375 Beale St., San Francisco.

Resilient by Design

This competition—aimed at “design[ing] solutions that protect the bayshore and mak[ing] us more resilient”—received a $4.6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation on January 31, 2017, and should be ready to roll in April 2017. It is modeled after the “Rebuild by Design” Hurricane Sandy Design Competition.

More reading

See the full text of the Sept. 22, 2016, lawsuit filed by California Attorney General Kamala Harris on behalf of BCDC against Army Corps of Engineers.

Rising Reality, Part 4: The Shorelines (“Battle on Many Fronts”) – a November 2016 article by the SF Chronicle’s John King from a series on the SF Bay’s sea level rise problem.

New Hope for a Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund for California?

Back in July I wrote an "RIP" post commemorating the death of the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, scuttled on June 8, 2018, during California state budget negotiations.

With the advent of a new governor, this fund has found new life.

Gavin Newsom budget calls for drinking water tax to help poor communities
(D. Kasler et al., Sacramento Bee, Jan. 10, 2019)

Applause for this initiative came from the Community Water Center, a proponent of the fund, per their Jan. 11, 2019, press release.

However, the opposition has not gone anywhere.

Despite record surplus, Gov. Newsom wants new water, phone taxes
(C. Reed, Cal Watchdog, Jan. 14, 2019)

Californians with bad water ask for help while opposition mounts to Newsom’s proposed tax
(M. Ashmun, Sacramento Bee, Feb. 7, 2019)

Neither have the proponents.

Read a Jan. 13, 2019, post "Shared interest in universal safe drinking water" by Dr. Jay Lund on the California WaterBlog, a blog maintained by the UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences. Dr. Lund, Director of that center and UC Davis Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, doesn't explicitly promote the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, but does lay out the argument for having such a fund:

Prosperity and democracy together seem almost essential to having near-universal safe drinking water supplies.  Prosperity and democracy together bring effective social organization and resources needed to deliver safe and affordable drinking water. [...]  California’s failure to provide safe, affordable drinking water to the remaining roughly 1% of residents is probably the most solvable and affordable of California’s many difficult water problems.  There will always be isolated small systems with vexing problems, but the number of Californians currently without access to safe affordable drinking water is embarrassing and irresponsibly high.

Dr. Lund's Tweet promoting that blog post gives the moral of the story:

All water systems suffer when any drinking water system is unsafe.

The idea of "the human right to water," meanwhile, is progressing toward meaningful implementation in the state. This is taking form partly through a state report following on AB 685, asserting the human right to water in California. When Governor Brown signed AB 685 in 2012, California became "the first state in the nation to legislatively recognize the human right to water" per the California Water Board's web page "Human Right to Water Portal."

Comments on the draft report "A Framework and Tool for Evaluating California's Progress in Achieving the Human Right to Water" are due to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment  (OEHHA) by 5 PM Feb. 19, 2019. The deadline was extended from Feb. 4 to Feb. 19 at the request of some of the opponents to that original Human Right to Water Bill, a water utility and the professional organization for California water utilities, the Association of California Water Agencies.

I'm pleased to see that comments are to be sent to:

HR2W
Attn: Carolina Balazs
Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
1515 Clay Street, 16th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612

I saw Carolina Balazs present her impressive research on water quality issues in the San Joaquin Valley when I was a policy Master's student and she was a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. She worked with the Community Water Center during her research, and then was a staff research scientist at the CWC starting in 2012. Her research was used to support the CWC's campaign to pass the Human Right to Water bill (AB 685). She is uniquely well-suited (well-trained and well-informed) to be the broker of the process by which that bill turns into action.

What is the human right to water? 

The United Nations General Assembly recognized "the ‘human right to sanitation’ as a distinct right, together with the ‘human right to safe drinking water’" on Dec. 18, 2015 (per UN High Commissioner for Human Rights press release). There is an interesting 2016 PowerPoint titled "The Human Rights to Water and Sanitation : Progress in theory and practice" on the website for the High Commissioner for Human Rights. It appears to be from a presentation by Léo Heller, Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, including slides on the legal basis for the human rights to water and sanitation, and where they stand in regard to the various related UN development goals (MDGs, SDGs).

See my previous post on the passage of AB 685 in 2012.

Grasslands, Kelp > Trees: my parking lot of helpful threads and papers

I've now twice had to go rummaging around on Twitter for these helpful threads and links to help me back up a claim that trees are not a good global panacea for climate change. Today yet another person in my friend circle saw a scary climate change article (in her case right after reading about how mass genocide of Native peoples led to afforestation and global cooling in the 15-16th c.) and responded with "plant trees!" So I had to go spam her with links. And then realized, oh, this seems to be a recurring event.

Welcome to my parking lot of helpful threads and papers to support the idea that grasslands and other non-tree carbon sinks like kelp forests are better than trees for slowing climate change.

Native grassland/prairie restoration project by CAFNR, U Missouri (CC BY-NC 2.0) 

~A paper out of UC Davis last year:

Grasslands More Reliable Carbon Sink Than Trees: In Wildfire-Prone California, Grasslands a Less Vulnerable Carbon Offset Than Forests - Article by Kat Kerlin (July 9, 2018, UC Davis), describing the findings published in this paper:

Grasslands may be more reliable carbon sinks than forests in California (2018) by Pawlok Dass (UC Davis) et al. Environmental Research Letters. 

- And it doesn't appear to be behind a paywall! 

~December 2018 Twitter threads by crop scientist Dr. Sarah Taber:

Dec. 10, 2018: Responding to a question about the carbon footprint of pasture-raised burgers, and then going on a wonderful GIF-rich rant about the cultural biases behind tree-centric climate change/land management research and policy. Excerpt:

The other thing is that "How much carbon can we lock up in trees?" is a lot better researched than "How much carbon can we lock up in grasslands?"

Because northwest European land management is more about forests than grasslands, so that's where rich countries' grant $ goes.

Dec. 11, 2018: Thread about "blue carbon" and the potential of kelp forests to act as carbon sinks. Excerpt:

Most importantly- unlike trees that can burn in wildfires or grasslands that can be plowed up, carbon locked in the deep ocean is not prone to any known human or natural interference. It's the most secure place we know of to sequester carbon.

~Around the same time, on Dec. 9, 2018, a grassland scientist Tweeting as Pastures Politic responded to someone posting "Spoiler alert: it's trees," referring to the Scientific American article "The Best Technology for Fighting Climate Change Isn't a Technology" (Dec. 5, 2018), with "NOPE. It's grasslands. Trees are dorks who put loads of their carbon aboveground." Here's the helpful thread supporting that nope.

After the "trees are dorks" comment, my favorite quote in that thread, by a plant scientist I follow on Twitter, posting as Itati Vasquez Chavez Santamaria:

Savannas and grasslands are basically underground forests which regenerate their top layer content due to fire and grazing. 

(See original Tweet)

~I first got hip to the importance of native perennial grasses in carbon sequestration and soil water retention hearing presentations by Wendell Gilgert, Working Lands Program Director at Point Blue. He was talking about some remarkable rangeland restoration projects he's done (the projects are now collectively called the Point Blue Rangeland Monitoring Network, I think). He left the impression on me that California could turn its water problems around across the state if these native perennial grass pilot projects could be scaled up.

There are a whole lot of interesting articles and threads out there discussing the importance of nomadic herding and pastoralist culture to maintenance of healthy grasslands, but I'll save those for another future parking lot post.

At the Confluence of Two Oceans - Report-back from Adaptation Futures 2018, Cape Town

I started writing this post shortly after I returned to California from this conference in Cape Town, but now (in January 2019) the time is dragging on and I'm not sure I'm going to get back to developing this post more, so I'm going to publish it as a half-finished stub to commemorate the event and move on.
~~~

In June 2018 I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the 5th International Climate Change Adaptation Conference Adaptation Futures. This time Adaptation Futures was held in Cape Town, South Africa.

The conference website has links to videos of the plenary sessions, presentation abstracts, and other content reflecting the activities of the conference.

For followers of this conference, the last one was in Rotterdam in 2016, and the next one is in 2020 at a location yet to be announced. Typically the conference rotates Southern Hemisphere to Northern, so I expect a northern location in 2020.

Stepping up on a soapbox for a second: I regret that I am hoping nobody is considering a site in the U.S. The last time it was held in the U.S. was in 2012 in Tucson (see a Jan. 2013 snapshot of the conference website). Since then, things have changed on the U.S. visa/immigration front. We want our Muslim colleagues to be able to attend. So we should not hold it here.

While I was in Cape Town, the thought kept occurring to me that the U.S. Earth science and political science thought-communities are impoverished by the policy barriers keeping foreign scholars and frontline practitioners from crossing easily and securely into our country. (Just sayin.')

But back to the 2018 International Adaptation Futures conference.

A highlight of the conference was the pre-conference field trip to Franschhoek, Western Cape wine country, to visit  the Water Hub water quality field research site and the adjacent Langrug informal settlement, where they are using biomimicry to try to improve the quality of runoff from the settlement (which was polluting nearby farmers' fields).

The Water Hub - https://www.thewaterhub.org.za/

Langrug informal settlement - https://www.flow.org.za/portfolios/genius-of-space-gos2/

The settlement, first formed in the early 1990's, is home to thousands of people and growing every week, with homes appearing further and further up the side of a mountain ridge. The ridge's streams provide clean water to those who harvest it sufficiently high up the slope. We were there in a steady rain and the roads were mostly holding their own thanks to anti-erosion improvements, but water run-off into the shacks looked like a persistent problem.

On the way back to Cape Town we stopped at the famous Theewaterskloof Dam to take in the low water level, recovering from an historic drought.

See its depletion and partial recovery through satellite imagery (July 2018): https://www.thesouthafrican.com/nasa-timelapse-theewaterskloof-dam-july-2018/

On the causes of the drought:

"Was the water shortage caused by farmers, city dwellers or drought?" Piotr Wolski    (19 July 2018)

TL,DR: "[T]he water shortage in 2015-2017 occurred mainly because rainfall was low."

The conference that followed this day of site visits presented fewer novel ideas or dispatches from the field than previous Adaptation Futures conferences I've attended, but that might speak to my growing experience in the field of adaptation more than anything else. The program was also poorly designed (spread out over two programs that were only accessible in PDF form), so it was hard to figure out what was going on much less be strategic in my choices of sessions. My schedule was dictated somewhat by word of mouth advice from friends I ran into in the hallways. The few sessions I found on scenario planning were worthwhile. I might write more on the projects I learned about in those sessions in a later post.

Weirdly, the 2020 conference hosts were not decided by the end of this conference. As of this post's publication (January 2019), there is still no news on the hosts for 2020.

I expect the news to be announced on the 2018 conference's Twitter feed.

"If I were you, that is a question I would have" - Quotes & Resources from Katharine Hayhoe, Climate Communicator Extraordinaire

Atmospheric scientist Dr. Katharine Hayhoe has long been recognized for her skills at climate science communication. This post is just a parking lot for some of her quotes, presentations, and articles for future reference.

On July 13, 2018, Dr. Hayhoe posted on Facebook a snippet from a new interview with her in the July 7, 2018, edition of New Scientist, illustrating her unique approach to addressing proponents of climate change myths:

New Scientist: It must be annoying to hear sunspots and solar cycles cited as evidence that climate change isn’t real, but you are always respectful in how you respond to these claims. Does that come naturally? 

Me: No! The response that comes most naturally to me is what comes naturally to a lot of us scientists: 

"Do you really imagine I’ve spent more than 20 years studying climate science and never heard that one before?!"

But the Bible says “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control”, and I consciously practise those things. It enables me to say, “I understand where you’re coming from. If I were you, that is a question I would have, and it deserves a respectful answer.”

I want to share not just my head with people, but also my heart. 

~ If you don't have a subscription to New Scientist, she posted a JPG of the article on her FB feed.

On July 12, 2018, Dr. Hayhoe gave a 40-minute presentation on the National Climate Assessment for NOAA (part of their 8-part Climate Science Special Report webinar series, which is part of the OneNOAA Science Seminars).

In that presentation, she quotes John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. 

At the end of the presentation she (and some other participants) posted a bevy of helpful links for people trying to improve outcomes from their climate communication efforts. Here are some:

Dr. Hayhoe's recent articles/presentations:

• If I just explain the facts, they'll get it, right? - Jan. 2017 episode of Dr. Hayhoe's "Global Weirding" series - addressing why facts don't necessarily change people's mind about climate change (~7 1/2 min.)
• When facts are not enough - June 2018 editorial in Science by Dr. Hayhoe
• Yeah, the Weather Has Been Weird - May 2017 article in Foreign Policy by Dr. Hayhoe

Groups that are doing good work on climate communication or the reframing of climate science:

• Climateinterpreter.org
• Framework Institute - Science Translation: Climate and Ocean Science
• Earth to Sky Calculus

For the completist, see Dr. Hayhoe's:

• Private website
• Youtube Channel
• Twitter feed
• Facebook feed
• Professional webpage at Texas Tech

On her professional webpage she refers people to the following websites (in addition to her Youtube channel, linked above) featuring videos of her talking about climate change:

• PBS Digital Series: Global Weirding (25 videos of 6-9 min. from Sept. 2016 to March 2018 and ongoing)
• TEDx talk "What if Climate Change is Real?" (May 2015, 18 min.)
• Bill Moyers episode "Climate Change Faith and Fact" (Sept. 2014, 25 min.)
• American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) interview "What We Know" (2014, 5 min.)

Back in 2014 she gave an interview to Guernica ("God's Creation is Running a Fever"), where she said this quotable quote:

It’s a common perception that science and religion are mutually exclusive. But there are many scientists who would consider themselves to be spiritual people. Not only that, but in the case of climate change—a scientific issue with strong moral implications and difficult decisions to be made—it’s essential to connect the science to our values. And for many of us, our values come from our faith.

This and other quotable quotes can be found at Dr. Hayhoe's page on AZ Quotes.