Bruce Melton : Climate Change Texas: The Worst-Case Scenario is Happening

Austin, Texas, Late Summer 2011: This is not autumn in Central Texas. These are cedar trees (juniperus Asheii). The fall leaf drop does not begin here until about mid-October and extends through the first of the year. These cedar trees are dead as are countless others in the region. This photo was taken in the Barton Creek Greenbelt in South Austin. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

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Climate change Texas:
The worst-case scenario is happening now

An evaluation of recent academic work on ongoing and regional climate change impacts and the latest future projections.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / February 16, 2012

(This article is an expansion of and provides technical backup for Bruce Melton's three-part series, “Welcome to Climate Change in Texas,” published in December 2011 and January 2012 on The Rag Blog.)

AUSTIN, Texas -- If this is not dangerous climate change, then this is exactly what dangerous climate change will be like in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with its unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the climate scientists have been warning us about for over 20 years. We have been building up to this point since about the turn of the century, and now ecosystems have tipped over the edge. Climate feedbacks have kicked in hard.

The Texas Forest Service tells us that a half billion trees have died. The first of this series of droughts in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme -- the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great drought of the 1950s. This has been a $10 billion drought, with another $1 billion in damages from the fires.

Worse, it’s hotter now. This past summer was 5.4 degrees warmer than average. This may not seem like a lot, but think how sick you would be if you had a 104 degree temperature.

The reason that increased heat makes such a big difference in a drought is that extra heat greatly increases evaporation. Four percent more water evaporates for every degree of temperature increase. With 5.4 degrees of warming above average, summertime evaporation in Austin was more than 22 percent greater than normal. In other words, the same drought is much worse if it is only a little hotter.

In the same breath, even with normal rainfall, because of warmer temperatures, drought can persist because of much greater evaporation. The warmer temperatures are easy to see looking at the average August temperature for the period of record.

It is important to talk about the urban heat island effect here too. The chaos of information presented by our media today does little to shed light on the latest climate science. An evaluation of regional temperature departure from normal for 2011 shows the exceptional nature of this most recent in a string of droughts.

Urban heat island signatures are easily evaluated and constant correction is an integral part of climate work on global land/ocean temperatures. Corrections are made through the comparison of individually impacted weather stations and their normal neighboring rural weather stations.

Published work on the heat island effect shows that even without correction, the heat island’s influence on global temperatures is as yet inconsequential because of the relative size of the heat islands compared to the global surface.

The evaluations can also be visually confirmed looking at the temperature departure from normal for the region during the 2011 drought. Where the heat island effect looks to be dramatically visible in the Austin and San Antonio metropolitan areas, it is dramatically absent from the Houston and Dallas metro areas.

The total number of fires in Texas since November 2010 (through September 20, 2011) is 22,790, totaling 3,759,331 acres. This exceeds the previous record of 2.1 million acres, set in just 2005/6, by 80 percent. We almost doubled the last record, set just five years ago.

Thirty-three percent of U.S. wildland fires in 2011 were in Texas. This number is 61 percent greater (as of September 2011) than the 10-year national average for the entire United States. Six of the 10 largest wildfires in Texas history occurred in 2011.

Sure, there have been bigger droughts and bigger fires in the early 1900s or the 1800s or the 1300s, or 3,000 year BC, but our complicated society did not evolve back then. We do not have the water to support our region today. This is why we have water use restriction in effect now, and last summer and every summer since the turn of the 21st century.

It cannot be emphasized more that this is exactly what our climate scientists have been warning us would happen for the last 20 or 30 years. Only their warnings were generations distant from actual impacts happening today. The impacts happening now are far ahead of the projected schedule. The reason is that the projected future climate changes have always been based on the middle of the road “Kyoto” suggested emissions behaviors.

Our society has not limited our emissions as was suggested by climate scientists to be a prudent way of avoiding dangerous climate change. What should have been a global emissions path reduction to a few percentage points less than the emissions made in 1990 has instead seen emissions grow to 50 percent greater than they were in 1990.

Climate scientists warned us that if we did not significantly limit our emissions, our climate would change much faster, with much greater risks of even larger changes duo to positive feedbacks that we were just beginning to understand.

Since the IPCCC stopped taking papers for the 2007 report in 2005, we have learned a lot about these feedbacks. We have also been able to document changes to our climate happening much faster than previously projected and these two things are, as suggested by our climate scientists for a generation or more, intimately related.

In June 2009, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), founded by Ronald Reagan, published a report that tells us that by 2080, Austin will see an average of 90 to 120 days of 100 degree weather every year -- 10 times more than today’s average of 12 days per year.


Look Closely at Arizona. The area of the map with 100 degree day data from the 1961-1979 data can be considered to be representative of the average for the 20th century. What the USGCRP tells us is that enormous areas of the North American continent will see the same climate that has seen the evolution of the Saguaro Cactus, in the Sonoran desert of South Central Arizona or in many cases, a climate that is up to 50 percent more extreme than that of the Sonoran Desert today.

But the most mind-boggling part of this future projection is that it is based on the IPCC A1B scenario. This is one of the middle of the road emissions scenario families where our society makes a modest effort to reign in greenhouse gas emissions. It is loosely based on a path that could be represented by efforts with the Kyoto protocol where new efficient technologies are rapidly put into use and there is a balanced emphasis on all energy sources. For decades it has been considered to be the most likely scenario of actual emissions.

But this thinking is enormously dated. We are currently smack-dab in the middle of the worst-case scenario considered by climate models. Even with the economic recession, global carbon emissions in 2010 were double the recent average and as high as anything seen since the late 1970s/early 1980s.

Let me repeat one more time: The USGCRP projections are based on the middle of the road scenario. We are currently on the worst-case scenario path. This means that temperature change will be more to significantly more than we have been expecting for decades. And this is one of the main reasons why our climate has already changed so much, so rapidly and why future change will be even faster than projected.

This middle of the road scenario is also considered in the next two examples of climate projections as well. It is very clear from discussions of these results by the principal investigators in their research papers that these results are conservative and the future is very likely to see changes that are greater than what are indicated.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters in July 2010 by two researchers from Stanford and Purdue (Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq) tells us that climate conditions will continue to rapidly worsen in the interior of North America and especially the West. The worsening will be so rapid that in Central Texas the current decade of 2010 to 2019 will see two to three droughts as bad as or worse than the drought of the 1950s.

Beginning in just 8 years, in the decade 2020 to 2029, Central Texas will see four to five droughts as bad as or more extreme than the drought of the 1950s. The implications of these projections are staggering. And remember, these projections are based on the middle of the road scenario. It is quite likely that changes will be even greater than what these Stanford researchers suggest.


A report out of the National Climatic Data Center in February 2011 (Dia) tells us that beginning in just 19 years (2030) Dust Bowl conditions will be the average climate condition across much of the interior of the U.S. By 2060, much of the interior of the nation will be two to three times as bad as the Dust Bowl with some areas four to five times more extreme than the Dust Bowl.

The 20-year projection is sobering. What is depicted here is the average condition. Across much of the United States, the average drought condition will be similar to that of the Dust Bowl. It is very important to understand that these findings indicate the average condition. Some years will be worse, but on average, it will be as bad as the Dust Bowl -- continually -- and in some areas four to five times as bad as the Dust Bowl.

What is most important to remember about exceptionally extreme events such as these is that it is the most extreme events that do the most damage. Climate change increases the occurrence of these most catastrophic of events. As the temperature increases, the number of extreme events disproportionately increases too. What this means is that a little warming increases the number of extreme events a lot, not a little.

By mid-century however, we reach completely catastrophic levels of continuous drought several times more extreme than the Dust Bowl. Implication of this type of non-stop drought and adaptation strategies for these extreme conditions have simply not been contemplated in the literature. Significant work is underway to gain insight into these situations that seemed so improbable just a few years ago.

Again, I must insist on repeating that this research, like that from Stanford and the USGCRP, looks at the A1B scenario or a middle of the road climate emissions projection. In reality we are now on the worst-case path. Climate changes are almost certain to be more extreme than these studies have shown.

This is no longer business as usual. Water use restrictions will not meet this challenge alone. We must act now to convince our leaders that this is not just another in a long string of extraordinary weather events that we cannot yet blame on climate change.

If we do not immediately change our habits and lifestyles, we will run out of water. Our forests are already dying because they have run out of water. The evidence supporting the relationship between this string of unprecedented droughts and climate change is overwhelming.

A paper by Kevin Trenberth and colleagues from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Scripps Institute, and The Weather Underground has summarized 61 different findings concerning climate changes already occurring and dating back to 1998. An example of these findings includes the Moscow Heat Wave of 2010 where over 60,000 died. The findings show that this heat wave was 80 percent likely to have been caused by climate change.

A draft paper by James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (the main U.S. climate modeling agency) tells us that the Texas drought in 2011 is significantly similar to the Moscow heat wave (only we have a lot more air conditioning in Texas, contributing to far fewer deaths). The Hansen paper speaks to the issue that, because our climate has so significantly changed, all weather now must be considered to have been caused by climate change.

Many of us have heard by now that it was much drier during the droughts of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s before reliable record keeping began in Texas. These droughts however, do not hold a candle to what scientists have discovered to be true “megadroughts.” Two of them happened between the 900s and about 1350. These droughts saw rainfall drop to 25 percent of normal and they lasted for centuries -- hundreds of years!

Water level changes of hundreds of feet in closed basin lakes of the Great Basin show that these droughts were widespread. Hundred-year old trees growing a hundred feet or more below the current water level attest to that.

The climate also likely changed quite rapidly when rain did begin to fall again because many of these trees remain intact with their branches, submerged and semi-preserved in the cold waters. One tree in Jenny Lake at the foot of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming still has a raptor nest in it, now about a thousand years old.

There is also evidence that large portions of the Great Plains desertified during these droughts. This is one of those big things the climate scientists have been warning us about now for decades. During these desertification events, much of the Great Plains actually changed to a sea of shifting sand. This desertification was much larger than that at the turn of the 19th century that fostered the term “Great American Desert.”

Sure, there have been bigger droughts and bigger fires in the past, but our complicated society did not have 1.7 million people in the Austin/Round Rock Metropolitan Area then.

Projections of climate changes from a few decades ago have been shattered. Future projections are exceedingly stark, and these projections are based on the middle of the road scenario -- far, far from where our emissions are today. Now the climate scientists are warning us of upcoming weather far more extreme than our civilization has ever experienced and to which our society will have difficulty adapting.

We must prioritize our actions towards immediate action and adaptation strategies far more rigorous than anything yet contemplated. Climate scientists continue to warn us, and their warnings continue to worsen.

Our State Climatologists has attributed only a small portion of our 2011 event to climate change. I have amassed a very large amount of data over the years looking at this issue in Central Texas and specifically the validity of the previous heat wave of record in the mid 1920s. The culmination of this work can be seen in a three part series published on an investigative internet journal the Rag Blog.

A summary of my reporting shows that the heat records of the mid 1920s are likely to be in error. This means that the 2011 heat wave was not an event that shattered the previous record by more than 30 percent. It means that the 2011 event likely obliterated the previous record event by over 100 percent. This of course means that our State Climatologists opinion of the science is significantly dated.

Even with the erroneous 1923 and 1925 heat records intact in the data, what we have just seen in Central Texas -- in combination with the warnings we have been given for over two decades and the evidence showing the global trend of climate change is much faster than previously assumed -- tells us that, scientifically and morally, there is no reason to doubt that climate change is not the cause.

The solutions however, will be nowhere near as expensive or “ruinous to our economies” as have been suggested by many voices reported by the media. The most recent academic evaluations of the solutions to the cleaning up climate change pollution have shown that costs will be exceedingly non-ruinous.

Many non-academic sources are also claiming that this “new energy economy” that we are embarking upon will not only be highly prosperous for humankind, but it will also be highly profitable for humankind as well. Historically, this kind of fundamental societal change is very well correlated with highly prosperous and highly profitable historic changes to our civilization. Much more on this topic is also included in the three part series mentioned above.

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, writer, and front man for the band Climate Change. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found, along with more climate change writing and outreach, critical environmental issue films, and the band’s original blues, rock, and folk music tuned to climate change lyrics at his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's December 30, 2011, Rag Radio interview with Bruce Melton.

References

A half billion trees:
Preliminary estimates show hundreds of millions of trees killed by 2011 drought, Texas Forest Service, December 19, 2011.
http://txforestservice.tamu.edu/main/default.aspx?dept=news
Urban Heat Island:
Hansen et al., Global Surface Temperature Change (heat island), Reviews of Geophysics, December 2010.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_etal.pdf
Jones and Wigley, Estimation of global temperature trends, whats imnportant and what isn't, Climatic Change, May 2010.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/74731m62483l72m7/
Menne et al., Homogenization of Temperature Series bia pairwise comparison, Journal of Climate, 2011.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/2008JCLI2263.1
Menne at.a l., The US Historical Climatology Network Monthly Temperature Data version 2, Bias Adjustment, 2011.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/
Deceitful propaganda campaigns similar to acid rain, smoking, pesticides and ozone depleting chemicals…
Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury 2010.
Billion dollar U.S. weather disasters 2011, National Climatic Data Center:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html
The Texas drought and future of drought in Texas:
Snapshot of the Texas Drought: Near-term and long-term, projections include more dry conditions in Texas, Texas Climate News, Houston Advanced Research Center, November 2011.
http://texasclimatenews.org/wp/?p=3548
Drought in Texas: Status, Future, Reinsurance, Willis Re, 2011.
http://www.willisre.com/documents/publications/Risk_Financing_Structuring/Resource/Property/TexasDrought_2011.pdf
August 2011 Weather Summary: National Climatic Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/8
Worst-case scenario:
Synthesis Report, Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, Climate Change Congress, International Alliance of Research Universities, University of Copenhagen, March 2009. http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport
Raupach, et. al., Global and regional drivers of accelrating CO2 emissions, PNAS, April 2007.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288.full.pdf+html
IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.htm
100 degree days:
USGCRP, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, Thomas R. Karl, Jerry M. Melillo, and Thomas C. Peterson,
(eds.). Cambridge University Press, 2009.Complete report available online:
http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/climate-impacts-report.pdf
2020 to 2029 will include three to five droughts as bad as or worse than the worst drought that we have seen since 1951:
Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq, Intensification of hot extremes in the United States, Geophysical Research Letters, August 2010. http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_GRL_10.pdf
Sixty-one examples of climate changes already happening:
Trenberth et al., Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Climate Communication.org, Science and Outreach, September 2011. http://climatecommunication.org/new/articles/extreme-weather/overview/
Hansen, Ruet and Sato, Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice, in-press Jan 2012.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120105_PerceptionsAndDice.pdf
Dust Bowl conditions will be the average condition beginning in 2020:
Dai, Drought under global warming - a review, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews - Climate Change, p 45-65, January-February 2011.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.81/pdf
Megadroughts of the last 10,000 years:
Cleveland, Extended Chronology of Drought in the San Antonio Area, 2006. Tree-Ring Laboratory, Geosciences Department, University of Arkansas.
http://www.gbra.org/documents/studies/treering/TreeRingStudy.pdf
Cook, et. al., Long Term Aridity Changes in the Western United States, Science 306, 1015, 2004.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5698/1015.short
deMenocal, et. al., Coherent high and low latitude variability during the Holocene warm period, Science, June 2000.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/demenocal2000/demenocal2000.html
Miao, et. al., High resolution proxy record of Holocene climate from a loess section in Southwest Nebraska, Paleoclimatology, September 2006.
http://snr.unl.edu/sandhills-biocomplexity/download/miaopalaeo2007.pdf
USGCRP History of drought variability in the central United States - implications for the future, 1999.
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/seminars/990120FO.html

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Bruce Melton : What Can Be Done About Climate Change in Texas?

What a mess. Even without the fires, our natural environment has been devastated by these droughts. This scene was taken in late August just around the corner from my house in southwest Austin. Fortunately I have only lost a handful of immature trees and a few 12-foot shrubs. -- B.M. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
What is to be done?
Welcome to climate change in Texas / 3

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2012

[This is the third in a three-part series.]

AUSTIN -- The Texas Forest Service tells us that a half billion trees are dead across Texas. The drought and heat that killed them was similar to the heat wave in Moscow (central western Russia) in 2010 that killed 56,000 and created $15 billion (US dollars) in damages. Academic evaluation of the (Russian) event shows it was 80 percent caused by climate change.

Damage to agriculture and from the drought tops $10 billion here in Texas with another billion and a half in fire damages. Thankfully, the deaths were not nearly as high here because of the predominance of air conditioning in the drought area in Texas and the Southwest.

As I have been saying in the first two installments of this series, climate change is already much more extreme than most scientists have been predicting. This is mainly because the majority of predictions are based on the “most likely” emissions scenario and because we have not reduced our emissions like climate scientists told us to do we are now on the worst-case emissions scenario path.

The bad comes with good though. The solutions to climate change are going to be much less difficult and costly than have been popularized. I will get to the cost and difficulty aspect in a minute but first: one of the biggest reasons that climate change is much more extreme than we thought it would be is that almost all of the predictions have been based on the “most likely scenario." This “most likely scenario” is just one of about 28 computer scenarios that climate scientists use in dozens of different climate models to look into the future.

The “most likely scenario” -- sometimes known as the “middle of the road scenario” -- is roughly based on Kyoto. In other words, if we would have started reducing our greenhouse gas emissions when the consensus of scientific knowledge said we should, these droughts and heat waves would not have happened.

Climate scientists began warning us in the mid-1970s about dangerous climate changes if we don't control our emissions levels. By the time the Rio Earth Summit happened, the modelers knew that the safe zone was likely one with a carbon dioxide concentration similar to that of
the 1980s at the most.

Instead of listening and acting though, our emissions have grown 50 percent greater than 1990 levels. And unexpectedly, in 2011 (climate scientists warn us that these unexpected things will happen more frequently) annual global emissions rose to six percent -- a level not seen since 1970. This is why we are on the worst-case scenario path.

Along this path we should expect weather to be much more extreme. We are nearing the point where our already-changed climate could be considered dangerous; maybe we have passed it.

The links to climate change are being made in the scholarly findings at an increasing rate. A summary of such works prepared by Kevin Trenberth and a roster of distinguished colleagues summarizes 61 scholarly findings since the turn of the 21st century. The conclusion of the paper reads:

Human-induced climate change has contributed to changing patterns of extreme weather across the globe, from longer and hotter heat waves to heavier rains. From a broad perspective, all weather events are now connected to climate change. While natural variability continues to play a key role in extreme weather, climate change has shifted the odds and changed the natural limits, making certain types of extreme weather more frequent and more intense.

It is no longer valid to say that we cannot blame any one individual weather event on climate change. From statistical evaluation of historic weather events to the results projected from computer climate models our scientists can now say that climate change is to blame for the ultra-extreme weather we have been having.

The models show that without our climate having changed already, the costly snowtastrophes in the Northeast and northern Europe would not have happened; billions of trees would not have died in the Rockies because of a native beetle infestation gone berserk; billions of trees would not have died in the Alaskan boreal forest because of extreme fires caused by warming; and billions of trees would not have died in the Amazon because of drought -- the results being annual greenhouse gas emissions from the Amazon alone equal to three-quarters of annual U.S. emissions.

Part of the reason that climate scientists can say this with certainty is that their computer models include these unprecedented events, whereas when they run the models without the extra greenhouse gases emitted by our civilization, these unprecedented events do not appear.

How do the scientists know their models are accurate when weather forecasting models so often fail after only four or five days? Climate models show us that they are much more accurate than weather models because climate scientists can start them up in the ancient past and recreate climate faithfully according to evidence from ocean and lake sediments, ice cores, stalagmites, tree rings, pollen records, fossil shells, soil carbon.

But climate models and weather models are basically the same aren’t they? Yes they are, but climate modelers run dozens of models for hundreds or thousands of years with varying input criteria and average the results all together to get climate. (These are called ensembles.)

The key here is that climate modelers average their results of many different model runs together. Weather forecasting models used by meteorologists in what is in reality a very different field of science than climate, only run one or a few models and then hope that by the fifth day the chaos has not left their seven day forecast in shambles. The two modeling techniques could hardly be more different. For climate, the averaging of so many different model running together makes the chaos (or inaccuracy) of weather models moot.

Our climate scientists have known since the beginning that climate change could certainly be as bad as it is now; this was evident from the results of their worst-case scenario model runs as well as the vast amount of evidence of radically abrupt climate changes in ancient history. To prevent these worst-case impacts from happening though, climate scientists expected us to take their sage advice and do something.

Instead we have done almost nothing. But with this realization we must understand that our innocence in this affair is real. The counterintuitiveness of climate change alone is enough to create a great debate, never mind the doubt spread by vested interests in the form of negative false propaganda about climate science, and even personal attacks against individual scientists.

These tactics are virtually identical to past deceitful propaganda campaigns concerning acid rain, ozone-depleting chemicals, pesticide reform, and smoking. In many cases these campaigns were perpetrated by the same institutions and individuals who are attacking climate science today.

So our climate scientists said that if we did nothing, things would be much worse, that our bread basket regions would change to deserts, that wildland fires would increase dramatically, deaths from heat would skyrocket, insect infestations would cripple ecosystems, feedback mechanisms would kick in and there would be war over resources. They told us these things would happen much sooner if we did nothing, whereas if we reduced our emissions we could likely forego these things altogether.

Surprise! All of this has now happened or is in progress. We did nothing and our emissions path is along the worst-case scenario. Civil war in Somalia has been the latest to be added to the lists of things that have been caused by climate change; so said the head of the African Development Bank last August.

Climate scientists have been telling us for a long time, and they continue to warn today, that it will get worse faster. They are now telling us that the threshold to dangerous climate change is no longer 2 degrees C of warming, but 1 degree C. Two degrees should now be considered the threshold to extremely dangerous climate change.

The 2001 IPCC report told us that 550 ppm CO2 was the safe limit in our atmosphere to hold our temperature down to 2 degrees C of warming. The 2007 IPCC report pushed that down to 450 ppm. Since the 2007 IPCC report, some of the most distinguished scientists in the world have been telling us that 350 ppm CO2 is the safe limit and now, the latest papers from the scholarly journals tell us that 300 ppm may be the safe limit. (We are currently at about 392 ppm and in preindustrial times it was about 280 ppm.)

Why? Because we didn’t do what the climate scientists told us we should do. We are on the wrong path.

What we are seeing across the globe today with these unprecedented and extreme weather events is the beginning of dangerous climate change. It is now indisputable and if we do not act fast, impacts will be unimaginable. Which leads me to my second message from the world of academia:


Fixing our climate will be no more difficult than installing toilets across the world like we have done over about the last 100 years. It will cost no more, and in what is becoming an indisputable truth, it will be vastly profitable for our society.

Why is this message so different from the one we have all heard? The answer rolls back to those moneyed interests and their propaganda. A few simple statements explain this conundrum clearly: The same voices that simultaneously bring us the radically different and designed to be confusing talking points -- that climate change is not real, that it is all just a natural cycle, that it is a scientific conspiracy and that it will be good for us -- are the same voices that tell us that the solutions to climate change will ruin our economies.

It is very simple. Not only are these voices telling us all of these vastly conflicting things at the same time, but they were wrong about the causes and effects of climate change. So given the conflict, and the accuracy of these voices and their “beliefs” about the sciences of climate, why would their “beliefs” about the solutions to the climate crisis be any less wrong?

Climate scientists are saying nothing about the solutions ruining our economies. The academic evaluations of the economics of the solutions to climate change do not tell us anything like what is so prevalent in the public’s understanding.

All of this darned propaganda and counterintuitivity is blotting out the truth. The climate scientists do not have the resources to mount an outreach campaign anywhere close to the size and extent needed to counter the efforts by the “voices.”

The most current assessments of the cost and scope of fixing our out-of-control climate tell us that it will take about one percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year for a hundred years to create the infrastructure needed to clean up our greenhouse gas pollution. This is very similar to the installed costs of toilets and wastewater collection and treatment systems around the world today.

Now listen up: it took me weeks for the reality of this statement to set in. Climate scientists are telling us that the solutions to the climate crisis are not really so different from the solutions to the toilet crisis.

Another excellent example of the scope of the challenge ahead is the Great Wall of China. Our civilization has built many things of the scope of what needs to be built to remove our greenhouse gas pollutants from our atmosphere. If it is hard to visualize all of the toilets, pipes and treatment plants, it is not too hard to visualize the Great Wall of China.

Willie Nelson’s Biodiesel Plant at Kline’s Corners, 80 miles south of Dallas. Biodiesel will play a role, just as solar concentrators, algae, tidewater generators, wind, hot/dry geothermal, wave power, photovoltaic, fuel cells, and goodness knows what else. -- B.M. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
A few simple chemical processes, based on those that are widespread in industry today and simpler than that used to create biodiesel, would be all that is needed. The technology is officially called air capture and mineral sequestration and it is really nothing more than mining carbon from the sky.

Think of thousands and thousands of railroad boxcars lined up end to end, something the size of the Great Wall of China (which was built by hand, over several different periods, totaling much less than a hundred years). Each one of these boxcar-sized processes would capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere.

A couple of scientists from Columbia University, and Gary Comer’s foundation (Gary Comer was the founder of Land’s End), have developed and scale-tested a process to do just this. Another outfit called Carbon Engineering has done the same thing. Another called Global Thermostat has done the same. What’s more, these technologies can very easily be retrofitted onto existing coal-fired power plants or industrial processes creating a sequestration solution much less expensive than what ongoing developments in the energy industry suggest.

Global Thermostat is another start up that uses a proprietary fluid to create a more efficient process than traditionally has been available. The feasibility of these processes is certain. It is the motivation of our leaders that is uncertain. -- B.M.
All of these individual boxcar-sized processes, in another example, are probably no larger than the size of all of the chemical plant installations at the Ship Channel complex in Houston. These facilities could remove half of the total carbon dioxide emissions created by all of us earthlings every year.

(Why half? Efficiency gains and carbon source capture at power plants can be done, but point source capture from all transportation sources, or energy lost due to inefficient buildings, cannot yet be done on this planet. We must use air capture if we are to get our CO2 emissions down anywhere below about 50 percent of what we emit. This is a very simple piece of the puzzle that is taken into consideration almost exclusively by the politics of climate science.)

The final costs would be far, far less than the cost of building all of the coal-fired power plants on Earth alone, much less the vast network of hundreds of thousands of miles of power lines used to distribute the energy that we needed to achieve the greatness of our civilization.

Another comparison would be that the total disposal costs of all of this CO2 pollution would be far, far less than what were required to build all of our roads and gas stations.

But, what about that two-year study by the American Physical Society (APS) last summer? The press release, not typical of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called our air capture scientists “snake-oil salesman.” The APS’s widely publicized findings appear to show that air capture is actually 20 times more expensive than the air capture “snake-oil salesman” would have us believe (the press release actually said that.)

So the public now understands that air capture snake-oil salesman now have no more credibility than some product on the shopping network that promises to be both a floor polish and desert topping. At least, this is the reporting we get from the conservatively controlled megamedia conglomerates and from the “voices” that would have us believe that climate change is simultaneously “not real," a “conspiracy,” and “good for the planet.”

What "voices” and the media do not tell us however is that the APS study simply did not look at any processes other than traditional ones -- and the authors of the study tell us so. The study also falsely leads us to believe that there are no current pilot processes in existence, an observation easily countered with a quick Googling of the subject.

What the study should possibly have said is that there are no pilot study processes in existence that use the traditional costly process that they evaluated. The traditional processes use giant fans to move air, highly caustic lye or expensive synthetic chemicals to capture CO2 and 350 to 800 degrees of heat to regenerate the capture chemicals.

The alternatives used in the actual pilot processes already constructed and proven in the field often use the wind for moving air, require chemicals that are much less caustic and use room temperature reactions, or temperatures less than the boiling point of water to regenerate the absorbing materials.

The Lackner model, being developed by Kilimanjaro Energy, uses a simple everyday plastic material to absorb carbon dioxide and water to release the carbon dioxide from the plastic. These are all very simple ideas and they have been proven with scale tests to be affordable. The Lackner model for example costs about $30 to remove a ton of CO2 and this cost will likely fall drastically with massive industrialization.

So, just to be clear, why does this big two-year study tell us that the costs are $600 a ton? It is because the new air capture technologies have not been published in the peer review literature. The developers of these technologies are concerned that this would compromise their secret processes. The APS study simply looked at using the old highly caustic lye process, using big fans and 800 degree regeneration temperatures. But did the media tell us this? No. Did the “voices” tell us this? Certainly not!

There will be billions of dollars to be made from these processes in the very near future. Statoil in the North Sea has spent $80 million to build a plant to capture and inject supercooled quasi-liquid CO2 deep beneath the sediments of the North Sea to avoid a $50-a-ton carbon tax in Norway.

The CO2 is coming from natural gas Statoil is producing. The process sequesters a million tons of CO2 per year and its development and installation cost was paid back in less than two years. Another very important thing to remember is that Statoil uses the traditional expensive air capture process and 800 degree regeneration temperatures.

Once the CO2 is captured from the air it must be disposed of. How does one dispose of 10 gigatons of carbon every year? One of the best ways takes the solid carbonates collected with the new air capture techniques and piles them up in mountains at the collection site. This is an immense job, but one that is done every year at a coal mine near you.

In a little more detail, 10 gigatons of carbon turns into 30 gigatons of calcium carbonate or limestone. Changing carbon dioxide into limestone is also a much more permanent way to solve the problem than disposing of (or storing) the gas underground.

We mine seven gigatons of coal to feed our power plants every year. Much of this mining is from pits or mountaintops. The amount of rock and soil that must be removed to get to the coal is usually much more than the amount of coal mined itself, so the total amount of material moved is far larger than the seven gigatons that we mine. We would be coal unmining on a scale that at the most, is as large as the coal mining industry today.

A big job this certainly is, but comparing it to something known really gives us a sense that somewhere, somebody has been getting their facts confused. Another comparison is even simpler: Why don’t we visualize all of the CO2 pollution emitted by humans every year and compare it to all of the human waste pollution created every year? I am talking about those wastes from human bodily functions that go into our sinks and toilets and then miraculously and thankfully vanish from our lives.

The amount of carbon dioxide, converted to liquid that we emit globally every year would cover the island of Manhattan to the 85th floor of the Empire State Building. If we collected all of the toilet and other wastes that flow into our wastewater collection systems every year, just in the United States, the amount would be far above the top of the antenna on the Empire State building (eeeewe).

Real costs are hard to determine, sort-of like predicting the cost of wastewater treatment today as we sat in our outhouses a hundred years ago (eeeewe). The best knowledge we have though tells us that 25 to 50 cents per gallon of gas would do the trick. This would be $20 to $30 per ton of carbon. In the North Sea, Statoil has proven the feasibility and profitability of disposing of a million tons of CO2 a year to avoid Norway’s $50 a ton carbon tax which is equal to about 50 cents per gallon of gasoline.

Yet another example comes from one of the most important climate scientists of our times: Wallace Broecker at Columbia University. Broecker has been instrumental in explaining ocean current processes and their relationships to past abrupt climate changes.

Broecker is a great proponent of this process of mountaintop reinstallation called atmospheric capture and mineral sequestration. He says that if we used wind energy to substitute for coal, it would take an area of wind the size of a barn to provide enough electricity for the average family for a year.

Compare this to the cost of burning coal and then removing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The amount of energy needed could be thought of as being the same as the wind can generate through a barn window! The cost is something near 170 times less!

My story has strayed a bit from the current climate change impacts in Texas, but the solutions to the climate change challenge are just as important as understanding that climate change is real, that it is happening now, and that it is happening along the lines of the worst-case scenario. The reason the solutions are so important is the broad assumption that the solutions will ruin our economies.

To understand why the propaganda has been able to so heavily influence society is a topic that I have barely skimmed, but is well documented in many books (see references) and articles (my own and many, many others) citing public tax records from the Internal Revenue Service showing who donated how much to what institutes supporting beliefs contrary to the consensus of climate scientists.

And once again, understand that the vast majority of folks supporting the non-climate change position base their beliefs on the positions of their authority figures. These good folks, including most of their authority figures, are innocent.

Our great innocence in this matter does not change reality though. We are polluting, but we are not paying. One percent of global GDP per year is what the scientists and economists are focusing on as the cost of fixing climate pollution.

Professor Richard Alley of Penn State and one of the coolest ice science geeks on the planet tells us there are about 100 economic assessments of the solutions now. One percent of GDP is about $600 billion a year, or about as much as the annual U.S. military budget -- without wars. We simply need to help our leaders understand that the risks from climate change are at least as high as the risks from war. Having the courage to spend the money is easy once the real risks are known.

So make those calls and write those letters and talk with your friends and neighbors and get downtown and stand with the Occupy Movement. The only way to beat the propaganda, the counterintuitiveness, and the pure innocence of ignorance is through a groundswell of activism and a transfer of knowledge.

This is real, we are responsible, we must provide the solutions, the solutions are already devised and waiting for industrialization, and the costs and difficulty will be no greater than many other things our civilization has accomplished.

And always remember that these “easy” solutions to the climate change challenge do not give us the right to emit more pollution, any more than toilets and wastewater treatment systems give us the right to make more of that kind of pollution. One more thing: greenhouse gas pollution is very much like that “other” type of pollution. It is an intimate part of our lives and it will not go away by itself.

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, writer, and front man for the band Climate Change. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found, along with more climate change writing and outreach, critical environmental issue films, and the band’s original blues, rock, and folk music tuned to climate change lyrics at his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's December 30, 2011, Rag Radio interview with Bruce Melton.

Austin drought and fires, 2011:
Bruce's summer vacation with climate change



References:

Moscow and European Heat Wave:
Rhamstorf and Coumou, Increase of extreme events in a warming world, PNAS, October 24, 2011.
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_coumou_2011.pdf
Worst-case scenario:
Synthesis Report, Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, Climate Change Congress, International Alliance of Research Universities, University of Copenhagen, March 2009. http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport
Raupach, et. al., Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions, PNAS, April 2007.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288.full.pdf+html
IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.htm
Six percent CO2 growth in 2010…
Carbon Dioxide Analysis Center. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2008.ems
Sixty-one examples of climate changes already happening…
Trenberth et al., Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Climate Communication.org, Science and Outreach, September 2011. http://climatecommunication.org/new/articles/extreme-weather/overview/
Deceitful propaganda campaigns similar to acid rain, smoking, pesticides and ozone depleting chemicals…
Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury 2010.
Billion dollar U.S. weather disasters 2011, National Climatic Data Center
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html
The cost of burning coal and removing the CO2 is 170 times less than wind energy…
Broecker and Wang, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It, Hill and Wang, 2009.
Snowtastrophes, beetle infestations, Alaskan fires, The Amazon:
References are too numerous to mention here but can be seen in individual discussions of these topics at my Climate Discoveries Chronicles webpage on www.meltonengineering.com
Vested interest propaganda:
Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science, Columbia University Press, 2011.
Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt, Blomsbury, 2010.
Washington and Cook, Climate Change Denial, Rutledge, 2011.
Bradley, Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists As the Earth Heated Up, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.
Hoggan and Littlemore, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, Greystone, 2009.
CO2 emissions are worse than the worst-case scenario developed by the IPCC:
Synthesis Report, Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, Climate Change Congress, International Alliance of Research Universities, University of Copenhagen, March 2009. http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport
Raupach, et. al., Global and regional drivers of accelrating CO2 emissions, PNAS, April 2007.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288.full.pdf+html
IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.htm
Regions would change to deserts, wildland fires would increase dramatically, deaths from heat skyrocket, insect infestations would cripple ecosystems, feedback mechanisms would kick in and there would be war over resources: References are too numerous to mention here but can be seen in individual discussions of these topics at my Climate Discoveries Chronicles webpage on www.meltonengineering.com
2 Degrees C, 550, 450, 350 and 300 ppm CO2, Extremely dangerous climate change:
IPCC 2007, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,, B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, Chapter 13, Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements.
Morrigan, Target Atmospheric GHG Concentrations Why Humanity Should Aim for 350 ppm CO2e, University of California Santa Barbara, 2010. http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/papers/
IPCC 2001, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Technical Summary. http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
Ramanthan, On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the Untied States of America, 2008. http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full.pdf+html
Hansen et al., Target Atmospheric CO2 Where Should Humanity Aim, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, NASA, November 2008. http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html
The Toilet Crisis:
Alley, Earth: The Operators Manual, WW Norton, 2011.
Broecker and Wang, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It, Hill and Wang, 2009.
The costs of solutions to the climate crisis:
ibid.
American Physical Society Study:
Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals, The American Physical Society, June 2011.
http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/assessments/upload/dac2011.pdf
Evaluation of APS study by Nature:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/05/sucking_carbon_dioxide_from_ai.html
Disposal of 10 gigatons of carbon:
Broecker and Wang, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It Hill and Wang, 2009.
Atmospheric capture, mineral sequestration and the barn:
ibid.
Additional research and development costs:
ibid.
About 100 economic assessments of the solutions to climate change:
Alley, Earth: The Operators Manual, WW Norton, 2011.

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Rag Radio : Bruce Melton on the Real-World Effects of Climate Change

Climate change activist Bruce Melton, left, with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, Dec. 30, 2011. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.

Environmental activist Bruce Melton discusses
the real-world effects of climate change on Rag Radio
with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Tom Hayden, progressive political activist and SDS founder, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest in a New Years' Special on Rag Radio, Friday, January 6, 2012, from 2-3 p.m. CST on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live to the world.

Bruce Melton was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, December 30, 2011.

Melton is an Austin-based professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, writer, green builder, and front man for the band, Climate Change. His main mission is filming and reporting on the impacts of climate change happening now. Bruce Melton’s new book is Climate Discovery Chronicles. He is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and his Rag Blog articles about climate change can be found here.

This is Bruce Melton’s second visit to Rag Radio. (Listen to our first interview, on December 3, 2010, here.) On the show we discuss the current real-world effects of climate change and global warming, including events like the great Texas drought, wildfires, and tree kill of 2011; the North American Pine Beetle Pandemic; the Arctic "icequakes"; and the effect of global warming on the Amazon Rain Forest.

The program includes recorded music by Bruce Melton's band, Climate Change.

Ah, irony! In an AP story run in the Houston Chronicle, climate change activist Bruce Melton is shown wetting down the roof of his house during wildfires in Central Texas earlier this year. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.
Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

• Jan. 6, 2012: New Years Special with progressive political activist and SDS founder Tom Hayden.
  
• Jan. 13, 2012: UT-Austin government professor David Edwards on transformative trends in international relations.
• Feb. 3, 2012: Historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism.

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Bruce Melton : Welcome to Climate Change in Texas

Tree Kill in Central Texas, drought of 2011. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
Drought and wildfires:
Welcome to climate change in Texas

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / December 29, 2011

Environmental researcher and climate change activist Bruce Melton will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Dec. 30, from 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live on the web. (The show is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. [Eastern] on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.) Also, listen to our Dec. 12, 2010, interview with Bruce Melton at the Internet Archive, and read more articles by Bruce Melton about global warming on The Rag Blog.

[This is the first in a three-part series.]

AUSTIN -- If this is not climate change, then this is exactly what climate change will be in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with these unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the climate scientists have been warning us about for over 20 years. We have been building up to this point since about the turn of the century, and now ecosystems have tipped over the edge. Climate feedbacks have kicked in hard.

The Texas Forest Services tells us that a half billion trees have died. Many more will die in the next five to 10 years from disease and insect infestation allowed by the damage that has already been done. These are the trees that have died in the drought, not the fires.

The first of this series of drought in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme -- the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great drought of the 1950s. This has been a $10 billion drought, with another $1 billion in damages from the fires.

Worse, it’s hotter now. This summer was 4.9 degrees warmer than average. This may not seem like a lot, but think how sick you have been in the past if you have ever had a 102.9 degree temperature. The reason that increased heat makes such a big difference is that extra heat greatly increases evaporation intensifying the effects of drought. In other words, the same drought is much worse if it is only a little hotter.

Trees started dying from the drought in 2005/6. The die-off became really bad in 2009 when broad swaths of the countryside west and east of Austin turned brown and failed to turn green again in the spring. Trees damaged from just one of these droughts can remain weak and susceptible to disease or dieback for a decade or more after the drought. The little root hairs on tree roots that soak up water take a long time to grow back.

West of Fredricksburg for 100 miles to the edge of the forest the desert has arrived. Fully half of the trees in that region are defoliated from drought (only a small amount is from oak wilt). The fate of many of these trees is sealed, but there is hope that rain will return fast enough to make a difference for some.

The total number of fires in Texas since November 2010 (through September 20, 2011) is 22,790, totaling 3,759,331 acres. This exceeds the previous record of 2.1 million acres, set in just 2005/6, by 80 percent. We almost doubled the last record, set just five years ago.

Thirty-three percent of U.S. wildland fires this year have been in Texas. The number of Texas fires this year is 61 percent greater (so far) than the 10-year national average for the entire United States. Six of the 10 largest wildfires in Texas history have occurred in 2011.

Sure, there have been bigger droughts and bigger fires in the early 1900s or the 1800s or the 1,300 hundreds or 3,000 year BC, but our complicated society did not evolve back then. We do not have the water to support our region today. This is why we have water use restriction in effect now, and last summer and every summer since the turn of the 21st century.

Do those bigger droughts in the past matter? Not one bit unless one uses that knowledge to understand the droughts and other really serious impacts allowed by drought that will happen right here, starting now. This is exactly what our climate scientists have been doing for these last 20 or 30 years that they have been warning us that these things would become the normal on a warmer planet.

In June 2009, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), founded by Ronald Reagan, published a report that tells us that by 2080, Austin will see an average of 90 to 120 days of 100 degree weather every year -- 10 times more than today’s average of 12 days per year. And this evaluation was done based on one of the middle of the road scenarios.

We are currently smack-dab in the middle of the worst-case scenario of the climate models. FYI: the Sonoran Desert Research Station in Arizona, the one with the giant Saguaro cactus, has an average of 87 days every year where the temperature tops 100 degrees.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters in July 2010 (Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq) tells us that climate conditions will continue to rapidly worsen in the interior of North America and especially the West. The worsening will be so rapid that the decade 2020 to 2029 will include three to five droughts as bad as or worse than the worst drought that we have seen since 1951 (like what we just had).

A report out of the National Climatic Data Center in February 2011 (Dia) tells us that beginning in just 19 years (2030) Dust Bowl conditions will be the average climate condition across much of the interior of the U.S. By 2060, much of the interior of the nation will be two to three times as bad as the Dust Bowl with some areas four to five times more extreme than the Dust Bowl.

If you think I am trying to scare you, you are wrong. Projecting the second year of this current drought similar to or worse than what we have just experienced, with a growing La Nina and Lake Travis at 38 percent of capacity right now -- that’s scary.

Lake Travis was 100 percent full just 16 months ago. Travis is at its third lowest level or as low as it has been in 47 years. The only reason that it is not the lowest level ever though, is that prior to 47 years ago Lake Travis was used extensively for hydropower generation. This has not been done since that time.

What are we gonna do? Getting through the drought and fires is very important. This situation is extremely dangerous. Trim your trees, police your underbrush, move that firewood pile away from the house, get your valuables together in a “go-bag.”

The threat of suburban and even urban firestorms, as demonstrated recently in Bastrop and accidentally predicted, to the weekend -- by our State Climatologist -- is real and it is not likely to get better for another year. The future is here now. We must change the evolution of our society fast, before we run completely out of water. Prehistory tells us that these abrupt climate changes can be exceedingly violent.

This is no longer business as usual. Water use restrictions will not meet this challenge alone. We must act now to convince our leaders that this is not just another in a long string of extraordinary weather events that we cannot yet blame on climate change. If we do not immediately change our habits and lifestyles, we will run out of water. Our forests are already dying because they have run out of water.

Now: if you have read this far, you deserve a break. The bigger picture is a little more comforting than what is happening in our region today. I just finished another book by Dr. Richard Alley, one of the pivotal climate scientists of our time. Professor Alley tells us in Earth, the Operators Manual, that fixing our climate will be no more difficult or costly than creating our society’s wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure.

Cleaning up human waste took about 100 years and so will fixing our climate. It took about one percent of global GDP to install our wastewater infrastructure and this is close enough to the latest economic analyses of dealing with climate change to make the comparison valid. One percent of global GDP is almost exactly the same amount of money as the U.S. spends on its military every year, not counting wars.

But please understand that our climate scientists have been warning us for more than 20 years that if we do not act now, the costs and impacts will only become greater.

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, writer, and front man for the band Climate Change. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found, along with more climate change writing and outreach, critical environmental issue films, and the band’s original blues, rock, and folk music tuned to climate change lyrics at his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]


References:

A half billion trees:
Preliminary estimates show hundreds of millions of trees killed by 2011 drought, Texas Forest Service, December 19, 2011.
http://txforestservice.tamu.edu/main/default.aspx?dept=news

The Texas drought and future of drought in Texas:
Snapshot of the Texas Drought: Near-term and long-term, projections include more dry conditions in Texas, Texas Climate News, Houston Advanced Research Center, November 2011.
http://texasclimatenews.org/wp/?p=3548

Drought in Texas: Status, Future, Reinsurance, Willis Re, 2011.
http://www.willisre.com/documents/publications/Risk_Financing_Structuring/Resource/Property/TexasDrought_2011.pdf

August 2011 Weather Summary: National Climatic Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/8

Billion dollar U.S. weather disasters 2011, National Climatic Data Center:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html

USGCRP, U.S. Climate Change Science Program Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region, U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Department of Transportation, 320 pages, November 2009.
Complete report available online: http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/saps/302

Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq, Intensification of hot extremes in the United States, Geophysical Research Letters, August 2010. http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_GRL_10.pdf

Dai, Drought under global warming - a review, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews - Climate Change, p 45-65, January-February 2011.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.81/pdf

Alley, Earth: The Operators Manual, WW Norton, 2011

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Dallas Darling : Austerity and the Bastrop Wildfires

Getting the larger picture. Wildfire in Bastrop, Texas, Sept. 5, 2011. Photo by Phil Ostroff / Truthout.
Another view:
Austerity and the Bastrop wildfires

By Dallas Darling / Truthout / October 4, 2011

BASTROP, Texas -- I knew the economic and political situation in Texas was dire, but I was completely unprepared for just how appalling conditions have become. As an emergency medical technician (EMT) from a large city, I volunteered to go to rural Bastrop, Texas, to assist the residents who were fleeing from the wildfires raging there; many of them had been injured.

I was looking forward to working in a small community for a change. As an urban EMT, I have witnessed too many drug and alcohol overdoses, stabbings, beatings, and shootings, along with vehicular fatalities.

On the drive to Bastrop, I learned that the town was originally a small Spanish fort. It came under Texas' control when Texas fought a secessionist war against Mexico. Overlooking Bastrop is the Lost Pines Forest, which contributed to the local economy by supplying Austin and San Antonio with large supplies of lumber.

A fire destroyed Bastrop during the Civil War, but the town was soon rebuilt. Bastrop has only 5,000 residents, while Bastrop County's population is over 70,000. Many people commute to work in Austin, making Bastrop a wealthy county. Hollywood filmmakers shoot in Bastrop when they need to create historically accurate footage of the old frontier.

When I arrived in Bastrop, I encountered a second set of wildfires: angry, bitter citizens. At one meeting, residents -- who had spent nearly a week wondering if their homes had been destroyed by the fire or remained standing -- shouted questions at county officials. While some of the Bastrop homeowners demanded an immediate return to their properties (even making threats to state and federal authorities), others were paying "smugglers" to drive, undetected, into off-limits areas in order to retrieve their valuables and keepsakes.

Frustration rose again at the meeting after an announcement that, due to some type of administrative confusion, some of Bastrop's evacuees would have to reapply for hotel vouchers.

Most Bastrop residents did not make the connection between Gov. Rick Perry's deep budget cuts to local police and fire departments and the chaos they were facing, or criticize the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) stripping of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of funding and staff to address national disasters (nor did they mention the ongoing wars around the globe sucking money from domestic programs).

Meanwhile, dozens of impersonators traveled hundreds of miles to claim their moment of fame. Individuals dressed as firefighters, medical personnel, and police officers were eager to be interviewed by television crews.

Adding to this circus-like atmosphere were looters who drove into restricted and off-limits areas to pillage and plunder other people's belongings. Fortunately, several of them, their vehicles filled with weapons, money, jewelry, big-screen television sets, small appliances, and other valuables and keepsakes, were stopped and arrested.

I was treating one man for burns on his arm when he heard about the looters. He had to be detained by police and was threatened with arrest if he attempted to return to his home. Still, other people had willingly set fire to their homes to avoid foreclosures or to collect homeowners' insurance.

What happened in Bastrop is a microcosm of a national epidemic. When then-senator Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency in Texas, he quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and evoked the "fierce urgency of the now." Obama stated -- accurately -- that, "Texas sent more troops to fight in foreign wars than any other state" and that, "the state's economy was in shambles."

He campaigned to end the wars and to "stop leaving military children behind" while properly funding public education. He promised to create millions of new jobs and reform banking institutions. Evidently, such goals were not that urgent.

Meanwhile, the ranks of the nation's poor have swelled to 50 million. Texas is no exception. Perry's Texas now lies near the bottom of the country when it comes to the well-being of its residents. Millions of adult Texans are uninsured, and millions of the state's children lack adequate healthcare.

More people work for minimum wage in Texas than in any other state, and it has the highest infant mortality rate, as well. It was recently reported that, since January 1, and in the midst of a multibillion-dollar revenue shortfall, Perry billed Texas taxpayers $294,000 in security details for vacations to the Bahamas, Amsterdam, and Madrid, as well as for other out-of-state trips to promote his book.[1]

On my drive home, I wondered about these other wildfires that need to be extinguished -- wildfires such as crime, dishonesty, the need for grandiose media attention, and a dysfunctional state and federal government. Perhaps one person I treated for burns was the most perceptive. He said, "I dreamed that our house was still standing, but it wasn't. There was only smoke and ash everywhere."

[1] Fikac, Peggy, San Antonio Express-News, Sunday, Sept. 18, 2011, p. 1.

[Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism and Consumerism in the Context of John's Apocalyptic Vision and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Dallas' writings at www.beverlydarling.com and wn.com//dallasdarling. This article was published at and distributed by Truthout.]

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