Collide-a-scape

Joe Romm never misses a disaster to beat the global warming drum. You name it– floods, fires, hurricanes–if they’re in the headlines, then he finds a way to connect them to climate change. It’s tricky stuff because he’s smart enough to know that no single climatic event or catastrophe can be pinned exclusively on greenhouse gases. Yet he always suggests that climate change is at least a contributing factor and that disaster X should be viewed like the proverbial “canary in the coalmine”–a warning of what’s to come if carbon emissions are not stabilized.

So it’s no surprise that Romm seizes on the latest California wildlfires in a recent post. He did the same with Australia’s tragic conflagrations last winter. Both times Romm also chastised the mainstream media for not playing up the supposed climate change link. That’s why I’ve taken to calling him a propagandist. To Romm, disasters are convenient “messaging” vehicles.

But it’s highly irresponsible to use wildfires in naturally fire-prone lands that also sit in the urban/wildland interface to dramatize concerns about global warming. Steven Pyne warned against this kind of “misdirection” after the Australia wildfires. So it is with the latest torching in California.

Here is Pyne again, over at Island Press’s blog, trying to educate us about fire:

In fire-prone public lands, where the setting will not convert to shopping malls and sports arenas, some fire is inevitable and some necessary. From time to time a few fires will go feral. Without fire some biotas will only build up combustibles capable of stoking still-more savage outbreaks, and equally, some will cease to function. Fire is a force of “creative destruction” in nature’s economy. Without it, particularly in drier landscapes, nutrients no longer circulate freely but get hoarded. It’s as though organisms hid their valuables in secret caches dug in the backyard or in socks under the bed. The choice is not whether or not to have fire but what kind of fire we wish.

You can listen to Romm or Pyne when it comes to wildfire. That’s also a choice.

This absurd post by Joseph Romm, in which he accuses The New York Times of “media malpractice” due to supposed errant climate change coverage in several recent stories, reveals a doctrinaire mindset on the relationship between global warming and natural disasters that is becoming all too common in environmentalists.

Romm is ticked off because, among other things, this front-page Times piece on California’s drought didn’t mention human-induced climate change as a “likely” factor and that another Times piece on Australia’s catastrophic fires (”Australia Police Confirm Arson Role in Wildfires”) was improperly headlined.  Regarding the latter, let’s remember that straight news coverage of major disasters tend to highlight the newsiest developments of the moment. To Romm, though, the Times headline was a missed opportunity:

Apparently, the editors believe that blaming individual bad guys is the best way to frame the story, not blaming us all for all our contribution to human-caused global warming.

So let me get this straight: Australia’s tragic fires shouldn’t be pinned on arson, or bad fire managment, or recent settlement patterns, or least of all, parched conditions resulting from cyclical drought, but rather all of humanity?

Romm is particularly histrionic over the Caifornia drought story (”Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California”) that appeared on Monday. The Times reporter, Jesse McKinley, writes that:

The country’s biggest agricultural engine, California’s sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms and towns.

To Romm, there is nothing “unlucky” about this drought. As he rightly points out, California is experiencing a record drop in snowpack and rainfall. But it is also true that California has a long history of severe, periodic droughts, some of which McKinley informs readers of later in his piece. Romm never acknowledges this larger perspective in his post. Instead, he claims there is “abundant science” that shows the currently reduced snowpack and rainfall to be “precisely what we would expect from human-caused climate change…”

Not exactly. There is good science and legitimate concern that climate change will exacerbate Western droughts this century–but no smoking gun for this particular drought.

That’s not to say McKinley’s story couldn’t have been leavened with a forward-looking graph on climate change and projected linkages to future California droughts.

Somehow, though, I doubt this would have satisfied Romm, who lately sees climate change behind every wildfire, drought and heat wave.

In his latest rant, Romm seems to argue that any story on extreme weather should amount to a story on climate change:

In the past, I think the media and scientists felt they had to bend over backwards not to attribute any single weather event 100 percent to human-caused global warming — but today there is no excuse whatsoever for a senior reporter at a major newspaper not reporting that what is occurring now is precisely what climate science has been predicting would happen.

Better yet, Romm advises, why even bother with mainstream newspaper reporters, when

if you want to find the best journalism now on climate — the most science-based, the most fact-based, the most integrated and comprehensive, the most relevant to your lives and the lives of your children and the people you care about and indeed all of humanity — you must go to the web, specifically the blogosphere.

I’m down with that. I just wouldn’t advise anyone to seek out Joe Romm as your fact-based, truth-seeking guide.

This story in the L.A. Times really bugs me. In an interview, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu predicts, or at least was paraphrased as predicting, that

California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming.

Nowhere in the story is drought mentioned, which I find astonishing, given that just a few days ago, a state water official said, “We may be at the start of the worst California drought in modern history.”  As I wrote here, even that statement fails to take into account a longer climate history of the West. The mega-droughts that occurred a millinium ago make the 1930s dust bowl look like childs play.

As the LA Times reported two years ago, scientists believe that the Southwest is about to enter a new cycle of severe aridity–a state of permanent drought–that will last for decades.

So now comes along a story that suggests global warming will bring California to its knees by the end of this century. But that’s only part of the story. Climate change is a force multiplier–it will undoubtedly exacerbate matters, making the West drier and for longer periods.

The natural cycles of drought and human-induced climate change will combine to write the future of the West.

Last Friday, Californians woke up to this cheery news on their climate front:

“State officials reported a Sierra Nevada snowpack smaller than normal on Thursday and said California may be at the beginning of its worst drought in modern history. Residents were immediately urged to conserve water.”

Okay, I realize this sounds bad enough, but I always have a problem when state water officials in the West compare their droughts to previous ones in “modern history,” which usually means the last hundred years or so. We really need to extend the timescale a bit–say by 1,000 years–if we want to grapple with drought as a cyclical weather phenomena.

Advances in tree ring science have revealed that numerous mega-droughts (lasting decades) hammered the West and Midwest 750 years ago.

Then factor in those pesky greenhouse gases, and the future of the American West looks like this, according to a 2007 Columbia University study published in the journal Science.

So yes, California, you may be entering what climate scientists are calling the era of “perpetual drought.”