Climate-Related Disasters

NYTimes article on Arizona desalinizing seawater and pumping it uphill across Mexico:

As the state’s two major sources of water, groundwater and the Colorado River, dwindle from drought, climate change and overuse, officials are considering a hydrological Hail Mary: the construction of a plant in Mexico to suck salt out of seawater, then pipe that water hundreds of miles, much of it uphill, to Phoenix.

The idea of building a desalination plant in Mexico has been discussed in Arizona for years. But now, a $5 billion project proposed by an Israeli company is under serious consideration, an indication of how worries about water shortages are rattling policymakers in Arizona and across the American West.

On June 1, the state announced that the Phoenix area, the fastest-growing region in the country, doesn’t have enough groundwater to support all the future housing that has already been approved. Cities and developers that want to build additional projects beyond what has already been allowed would have to find new sources of water.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/climate/arizona-desalination-water-climate.html

 

Yeah, no.

There's no doubt wildland fires are incredibly complex--a collision between highly complex natural systems and highly complex human systems. Wind, temp, humidity, slope, aspect, time of day, time of year, fuel types, fuel moistures, soil moisture, snowpack, timing of spring rains, settlement patterns, transportation networks, past management practices, human activity, and many other factors influence wildland fire. However, there's little doubt that climate change is now the main driver. None of those other things lengthen the number of days (by almost 3 months) that we have fire conditions in the Western US. None of those other things can explain the increase in large fires that are on the landscape longer (from 6 days in the 1970s to well over 50 days now). None of those things explain why in the 1970s we had on average a little over 120 days of Western US fire activity from first large fire detection to last large fire control but now that covers over 250 days on average. None of those things can explain why we see large wildland fires popping up in places they traditionally have not.

It's anecdotal, but I can't tell you how many times in my career I've had people say some variation of "we just don't get fires like that here." Well, now you do and you better prepare for it. It's anecdotal, but when I first started going to fires, 7,500-10,000 acres was considered large. In the last decade of my career, I don't think I went to a fire under 35,000 acres and most were above 100,000, some 500,000+--and I went to OR, WA, CA, WY, ID, MT, NM, AZ, UT, CO, TX, and AK (missed NV). Proportionally, all that goes for many other parts of the world too. I can tell you that Finland, Sweden, and Norway are freaking out right now and trying to quickly build a robust wildland fire response organization even though they have never needed one before and don't have the experience to train properly. They see what's coming and it could arrive any spring--and it won't be surprising if it's next year.

Still, all that complexity makes it easy to cherry pick data that discredits the obvious, but all fires and all acres are not equal. Globally and in the US, fires have indeed decreased in number. Part of that is prevention, but a good chunk of it is a reduction in grass fires because as a result of drought, grasslands are becoming devoid of continuous fuels--literally too dry to burn. Globally, about 70% of fires traditionally occur in grasslands.

However, large fires in more dense fuels are larger and last longer. Here's a quote from a recent study:

Some more facts:

>Globally, fire season has lengthened across 11.4 million square miles, roughly the size of Africa.

>For much of the U.S. West, projections show that an average annual 1 degree Celsius
temperature increase would increase the median burned area per year as much as 600 percent
in some types of forests.

>Temperatures are increasing much faster in the Western U.S. than for the rest of the Earth.
Since 1970, average annual temperatures in the Western U.S. have increased by 1.9° F, about
twice the pace of the global average warming.

>Since 1984, the area annually burned by wildfire in the US has doubled. The Forest Service
estimates that area may double again by 2050. Some scientists now say 50% or more of western
forests could burn in the next three decades.

>In the Western US, fires greater than 1,000 acres have increased almost 600% since the 1970s
and fires over 10,000 acres are up by over 700% for the same period.

>Since the 1980s, the area burned annually in the Pacific Northwest has increased 5,000 percent.
In the Northern Rockies, it’s a 3,000 percent increase over the same period.

I could go on, but let me close by saying it's been years since I was pleasantly surprised by a scientific study that ran counter to my observations. What we're experiencing on the fireline and what scientists are coming to understand are in sync and it's frightening on many levels.

 

Largest crab processing facility in North America is not doing well:

In early October 2022, for the first time ever, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game canceled the Bering Sea season for snow crab (also known as opilio crab) after an annual survey revealed an almost total population collapse. No Bering Sea community was hit harder than St. Paul, whose economy relies almost entirely on snow crab, thanks to Trident, whose plant there is the largest crab processing facility in North America. Most of Trident’s some 400 workers are seasonal and come from outside St. Paul, but the facility generates millions for the city through a “landing tax” imposed on commercial fishing boats, a tax on crab sales, and fees for fuel, supplies, and support services for the snow crab fleet.

Heather McCarty, of the Central Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association, which manages community fisheries allocations for St. Paul, said in February that the city’s tax revenues went from about $2.5 million two years ago to approximately $200,000 this year. “It was all snow crab all the time,” she said at the time. “[Now] they have about a year’s worth of reserves that will allow them to survive with the municipal services relatively intact, but, after that, it’s anybody’s guess how they’ll actually pay for really basic things.”

https://e360.yale.edu/features/snow-crabs-alaska-bering-sea-climate-change