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Climate Change and the North Fork Valley

August 28th, 2015

Filed under Community, Featured, Health & Wellness, News

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Climate Change and the North Fork Valley

By Thomas Wills 

Human Caused Climate Change impacts have been happening in the mountain regions surrounding the North Fork Valley for a while now.  Two visible examples of this during the past two decades are Sudden Aspen Decline (SAD) and the decimation of some areas of pine forest by the pine beetle. According to experts on the issue, the aspen decline appears to be connected to two climate-connected trends – more frequent drought years, and the general warmer temperatures at the elevations at which aspens dwell.  In other words, it has been too dry too often and the aspens need to move higher to cooler, wetter climes.

In a related issue, wildfire risk has increased dramatically in the area over the past couple of decades, making locals much more aware of fire safety and the siting of new houses. Emergency plans that detail risks have been drawn up.  For example, the domestic water for Hotchkiss is transported via Leroux Creek, which passes through an area of higher wildfire risk in dry years.  If such a fire occurred it could render the water unusable for a period.  Thus, the Town now plans to underground pipe water through the risk area at some time in the future.

In the case of the pine beetle, the same climate change conditions apply. The winters have been warmer more often than not, which allows the beetles, and/or their eggs, to over-winter in greater numbers.  Previously, outbreaks were naturally checked by winter temperatures low enough to kill many of the beetle eggs and adult beetles. At the same time, more frequent drought conditions have stressed trees making them more vulnerable to beetle kill.

In the short term, in both cases, there have been some benefits to the local/regional lumber and firewood industries in that beetle kill salvage sales are common and more dead aspen is available for firewood and other uses. One local firewood cutter working in the nearby forest in the fall of 2014 said that dead aspen located near to roads is now very plentiful, something that wasn’t true 20 years ago. Logging is seen by many as the most effective mitigation for the beetle problem as well as the related increase in fire risk.

Another local climate change example is more frequent dry years, which is especially worrisome in an area of high desert like the North Fork, where irrigation is necessary. The lack of water is being mitigated locally by agriculture’s adoption of conservation measures such as placing unlined, leaking ditches into pipes, and irrigation by sprinklers and drip systems rather that than common flood/row irrigation techniques. The reasons for such projects usually don’t mention climate change, but are an important mitigation in that direction.  There is also talk of increasing water storage, which will also be critical in meeting the challenges of more dry years, while taking advantage of extra wet years, too early melts, and wrong season moisture events. These are all examples of climate change impact “adaption.”

And, of course there is the decline of the local and national coal industry.  According to experts, climate change mitigation demands that we either stop burning coal, and eventually all fossil fuels, or figure out how to capture and store away the CO2 produced during combustion (and the methane produced during mining). For now, electric generation plants are switching rapidly to currently plentiful natural gas, which reduces CO2 emissions somewhat, but is not a long term solution.

A few years ago it was estimated that the North Fork has only about a decade of economically mineable coal (at the old prices) so it appears that pressure from markets (cheap natural gas) and the need for climate change mitigation may just reduce that timeline by a few years, having  a serious, local impact economically.

In the meantime, natural gas is being developed in the upper valley, but will probably be facing increased scrutiny in regards to limiting methane leaks as much as possible. Currently, the federal government regards natural gas as a sort of “bridge fuel” to be used while the world moves toward universal use of carbon neutral technology and renewables.  Inevitably, the price of energy will continue to rise but may be mitigated somewhat by greater conservation and efficiency.

In the meantime, business at the non-profit educational organization, Solar Energy International, with a Paonia campus, appears to be doing well.  The organization trains and educates people to install and use solar energy.  They recently installed the region’s first demonstration electric vehicle recharging station that uses only solar energy. The regional electrical grid currently receives 52% of its energy from coal although nationally the percentage is dropping.

The current SEI spark-plugged, Solarize the North Fork project hopes to retrofit a considerable number of Valley homes to solar power. This is an example of “mitigation” that will have a greater impact once solar PV panels can be produced with little or no fossil fuel inputs.

The most efficient use of solar energy is the oldest – and simplest – passive solar, such as allowing the winter sun to help heat your house.

There has also been talk of carbon-neutral bio-fuels in the valley but other than a few individuals that has not gone much further.

Not being a good place for the most efficient renewable, wind, much local discussion has turned to water, both falling and moving, to produce small-scale hydropower.  In light of a recent court ruling that allows DMEA to bypass contract limitations and purchase more locally produced renewable energy, local hydro-power might become a large part of the mix once legal problems and engineering challenges and seasonal  limitations (irrigation ditches and canals run only in summer) are dealt with.  But the latter might be tailored specifically to the energy needs of summer agriculture: powering sprinklers, pumping water, re-charging electrical agricultural equipment, etc.

Another advantage of moving towards a good percentage of distributed locally produced power is that local energy money would be staying local and creating quite a few local jobs.  Powering local agriculture, particularly the organic/natural produce and wine sectors with renewables would add an extra layer of salable “sizzle” to the products. If a farmer could claim that their organic tomatoes were produced with near 100% renewable energy that could be a huge sales point.

The Basics: What is Human Caused Climate Change?

Weather is what is happening outside right now. Climate is the average of everything that happens, weather and heatwise, over several decades.

Climate science begins with basic physics. The sun shines on the earth, warming it with radiant energy. Most of the energy of the sun is reflected back into space, but some is retained by heat trapping gasses (Think of them as insulation that allows heat in, but not out.) in the atmosphere: water vapor, CO2, methane and others. Without a certain level of heat trapping gasses the Earth would be a frozen ball of ice. With too much of these gasses the Earth could be a bit like Venus, which is pretty darn warm due to high levels of CO2 and sulphuric acid gas. So CO2 is not bad, in itself, since we all exhale it and plants need it, but too much causes problems. And “too much” is a surprisingly small amount.

Despite major shifts in climate in the past, due to well-understood forces, such as variations in the earth orbit and tilt, major volcanic activity, etc., over the past 10,000 years (since the last ice age), a nice balance of solar energy received versus reflected, had been reached allowing humans to flourish and develop agriculture, which in turn led to our current level of civilization.  During that period there were ups and downs in the climate and weather, but there was also a steady average when the large picture is examined.  Imagine a zig-zag pattern through which a straight, level line can be drawn.

Early on, mankind’s energy sources consisted of human and animal labor, wind, running water and burning wood – none of which added anything much to the earth’s long term greenhouse gas blanket.  Then we discovered fossil fuels, made up of organic matter that had been buried and encased in rock, or in other words naturally sequestered carbon from past warmer periods.  We began to dig it up and burn it, which in turn has made our present level of industrialization, cars, TVs, aluminum and vinyl siding, and i-Phones possible.  Cheap energy and lots of it.  But…

But now we know that digging up naturally sequestered carbon and setting it on fire was probably not the best idea since that carbon, even if we put scrubbers on smokestacks and catalytic converter on cars, put a lot of very old carbon back into the air as CO2, and CO2 is very effective as a heat trapping gas.  Once in the air it will take thousands of years for it to be naturally removed. The more CO2 in the air, the warmer the earth will eventually become.  We are also responsible for a lot of methane (natural gas) being released, which has 20 times the heat trapping effect of CO2 but has a shorter life. And we might also be seen as responsible for rising levels of water vapor (the most common greenhouse gas) since as temperatures rise more water evaporates, which causes temperature to rise further (and more rain to fall in certain areas).  This is an example of what is known as a “positive feedback loop.”

Since the mid 1800’s, the average temperature of the atmosphere has risen by about a degree and half Fahrenheit or .78 degree Celsius, due mostly to the release of new-old carbon from the burning of fossil fuels. (It hasn’t risen further since so far oceans have absorbed a good portion of both the CO2 and the heat—up to about 90% of the total).  Scientists know this for a fact due to a variety of factors including combining data from the simple bookkeeping of taking how much carbon from fossil fuels has been released against a physics calculation to see if that increase in CO2 matches the predicted temperature rise including the buffering of the world’s oceans. And it matches.  Other factors have also been accounted for: natural variability, solar activity and cycles, etc. and there is no doubt among legitimate climate scientists.  It’s us. Ooops.   Now, imagine the same natural zig-zag climate pattern but with a decidedly upward tilt due to steadily rising temperature. Over the past 150 years that upward tilt of what was one a level line of average temperature has steadily become more pronounced.

There is no longer a steady average to which things return.  With each year the atmospheric CO2 concentration increases by about 3 ppm, recently passing 400 ppm (pre-industrial levels were about 250 ppm), and the planet steadily warms, triggering other positive feedback loops, most dramatically in the northern arctic region.  It is predicted that even if tomorrow we stopped emitting the “excess” CO2 from burning fossil fuels the temperature would continue to rise at least 2 degrees.  That is because there is a lag between the CO2 being added and the heating, and the C02 we have added so far will remain in the atmosphere for several thousand years.

None of this is controversial in any way among the general scientific community, despite noises made by professional contrarians, special business interests, and some politicians who pander to an ill-informed public. The main things that science hasn’t decided is how bad is it going to be and when. They know it will be pretty bad by century’s end (sea level rise, etc.) no matter what we do and they know that we are seeing some effects now, most notably in the Arctic region. The scientific community has agreed upon 2 degrees Celsius as the number to keep below, but most now admit that this probably will not be achievable.  Anything higher than that would probably have degrees of catastrophic consequences.  At 6 degrees C. most agree that it is ‘game over’. All of this is covered in the International Panel of Climate Changes (IPCC) scientific assessment reports that are updated every few years. There have been five of these so far spread over the last 25 years.

The science and hard data supporting its conclusions is developing rapidly, but in the United States and other countries, politics is slow in responding to the science, due to a willful flood of disinformation, which in turn is making many scientists very, very cynical. Climate scientist and highly respected science communicator, Katherine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech, is fond of quoting a former government science expert who says that we have three choices regarding climate change: mitigation, adaption and suffering.  She says that we will be doing all three but the choice of the percentage of each is still up to us depending upon the actions we are willing to take and how soon we begin in earnest. The more immediate mitigation (switching to renewables, conservation, capturing carbon from coal burning etc.) we do, the less adaption and suffering we will need to do. And the poorer a country is the more suffering will take place.  Hayhoe, who is also an evangelical Christian, points out that those who will suffer the most from developing climate change are those who had the least to do with causing the problem, the 6  billion people in Third World or developing nations. She suggests that we obey the commandment to “love our neighbors” by mitigating the problem as much as we can.  She is part of a movement among Christians called “creation care.”  And should one be inclined to shrug off concern since some of the more devastating effects are likely to be felt first in the Third World, it is prudent to remember that those suffering tend to try to migrate to where the problems are less severe, causing displacement and disruption for all involved.

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