Harvey, Irma and the GOP

Irma has now developed into a category 5 hurricane and is almost certainly going to hit somewhere in the US. Hopefully, it will weaken before it gets there and won't be as devastating as Harvey was for Houston. Still, it's a worrisome weather event, which brings to mind a couple of things.  

Republicans basically have one of three approaches to climate change.  

1. It's not real. Trump himself said it was a Chinese hoax. Ergo, no need to reduce carbon emissions.  

2. It's real, but it's not man-made. In other words, we puny humans can't do anything about it. Again, no need to reduce carbon emissions.  

3. It's real, and it may be (partly) caused by human activity, but trying to reduce carbon emissions would hurt the American economy. It's better to mitigate the effects of climate change. Be re-active, not pro-active. Don't worry if it breaks -- just pay for it later.  

If increase levels of carbon start to cause more extreme weather and rising sea levels, so the GOP would say, it's better for the economy to build things like sea walls (make the hurricanes pay for it!) to protect coastal cities.  

Now, with Harvey and maybe with Irma we may start to see what that third approach looks like in practice.  

The recovery from Harvey is estimated to cost taxpayers at least $150 billion, beyond the human costs, which are heartbreaking in themselves. That's not even talking about the cost of building "mitigation" infrastructure against future storms and rising sea levels (though that could be a good works program -- put the 4% of unemployed Americans to work!).  

In any case, this hurricane season may unfortunately give Republicans a chance to put their money where their mouth is regarding climate change.  

I'm sure they'll be happy to spend the money.  

The Chinese Wildfire Hoax

Friends and family back in Georgia have been dealing lately with something out of the ordinary and outside my own experience -- a series of big wildfires scattered all across the Southern Appalachian mountains. One of the fires, the Rough Ridge fire in the Cohutta Mountains, is said to be perhaps the largest in North Georgia's history. I've seen satellite images of smoke covering the northernmost third of the state, reaching down to Atlanta and Athens. It seems a bit unreal.

If it's the same Rough Ridge area that I once went camping with my father and brother, then it is some very rugged terrain firefighters have having to contend with.

Of course, in the heavily wooded mountains of Georgia and North Carolina, there have always been the occasional forest fire, though none from the past that really stand out in my mind.

Back in the days when my father was young, there was the habit of burning off the underbrush in the mountains in springtime, all the better for the grazing cattle that farmers let range freely during the summer. But that practice ended long before I was born.

As a kid, I can recall seeing just one wildfire, from a distance at night. It formed a crooked orange line in the dark as it burned on the side of Talona Mountain (which we called Reed Mountain, for some reason), an isolated "monadnock" that rose within easy viewing distance of my family's home.

And when I was in college at Young Harris, essentially at the base of Brasstown Bald, Georgia's highest peak, there was once a fire somewhere in the area. It was serious enough that the Forest Service asked for students to volunteer to help with the fire fighting. My classes wouldn't allow me to join, but some of my friends did and came back to school at the end of the day sooty and looking a bit exhilarated. I did envy them for the experience.

In any case, never when I was living in Georgia would there be so many fires burning at the same time, especially in November. Typically, autumns were coolish, and a bit wet, not what I would think of as fire season. 

The photos and reports that I'm seeing now seems like a smaller-scale version of something out of the American West, where fire is often enough an inescapable part of life. I know a family in Colorado who had to evacuate their house a few years ago due to an approaching fire and can still point to the spot just across the road where the flames thankfully came to a halt. And this is not not far from Storm King Mountain, where 14 firefighters lost their lives in 1994, a grim reminder of the deadly and destructive power of uncontrolled fire. 

A couple of years ago, we were driving across northern Arizona when the news came over the radio that 19 "hot shot" firefighters had similarly died at Yarnell Hill some 60 miles to the south of us. Later that night, we could see a small fire burning on Dean Peak in the Hualapai Mountains near Kingman, the faint smell of smoke noticeable in the car as as we sped down Interstate 40. 

Of course, fire is also a huge concern in Finland, a country made up almost entirely of forests. Fire prevention is taken very seriously here, and a typical feature of the evening news in summer is the latest update on which parts of the country are under metsäspalovaroitus ("forest fire warning"), when open fires in woodlands is strictly forbidden. Sometimes the entire country is under such a warning. That was surely the case in the summer of 2006, which was incredibly dry. Finland avoided major fires then, but even in Helsinki you could sometimes not avoid the smell of smoke reaching all the way from across the border in Russia, where numerous fires burned out of control for days, due to the lack of resources or motivation to extinguish them. 

Luckily, no lives or structures have been lost to the North Georgia blazes, and at the moment smoke is the biggest threat to people. But the smoke, if nothing else, is unpleasant and potentially unhealthy. The Atlanta area was placed under a Code Red air quality alert, indicating the smoke can be harmful for everyone, not only children and those with respiratory ailments. 

And conditions don't seem likely to improve. Apparently, there's a chance of rain this weekend for the area, but before that temperatures are still expected to reach 24 C (75 F), which to me seems unnaturally high for a week before Thanksgiving.

Nowadays, when every little thing gets politicized, I'm amazed I haven't yet seen anyone trying to score political points over these unprecedented wildfires, and I hesitate to do it myself (a bit).

I've always been extremely annoyed by conservative pundits or talk show hosts who poke fun at the notion of global warning wherever there is an usually big winter storm somewhere. Erick Erickson comes to mind, declaring something like, "Well, with all the snow covering Buffalo right now, it sure looks like 'Global Warming' to me. Ha, ha, ha!" Or something like that. Appealing to the common sense of the common man.

Hearing this kind of nonsense always makes me want to pull my hair out, thinking "No you idiot, you have to look at the trend, the overall trend. You can't look at just one isolated event and declare that climate change is bogus." Especially, when the event goes against the prevailing trend.

By the same token, you should also guard against making too much of an unusual weather pattern when it seems to confirm the reality of climate change. You never hear folks like Erick Erickson doing that.

That said, rare drought conditions and historically bad wildfires certainly seem to fit predictions of a rapidly warming planet. You would think the warm, tinder-dry conditions in the Southern Appalachians in late autumn would make local people, many of whom voted for Donald Trump, stop and consider that maybe this is a sign of global warming. Maybe it's not a Chinese hoax after all, despite what Trump has claimed over and over again.

You would think they might finally take the issue seriously and be alarmed that the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency might well be a climate change denier.

Or, maybe not. Maybe they'll just breathe in the pungent smell of burning timber and, with a sense of self-satisfaction, think to themselves, "Ah, nothing to worry about. That smells like Trump's America to me!"

Wildfire in California, 2008. 
Photo: Bureau of Land Management.

Honoring Tater Patch

This summer, President Barack Obama made a much-publicized trip to Alaska, during which he emphasized the effects of climate change on the state. In addition to photo ops involving glacial backdrops and face-to-face meetings with native Alaskans on the verge of losing their village to rising sea levels, Obama’s trip took him above the Arctic Circle, making him the first sitting US president to venture so far north.

Obama also attended an international conference named GLACIER, as in “Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience”. Kudos to the PR person who managed to make that cumbersome acronym work. Mostly.

The GLACIER conference agenda reads like a workshop for high-level bureaucrats, which it kind of was. I was a bit surprised to see on the evening news Finland’s Foreign Minister Timo Soini hosting one of the GLACIER panels. But, of course, that does make sense, as Finland is in that select group of eight nations with territory within the Arctic Circle, or as they say in Finnish, Napapiiri.

Still, it seems that the thing that got the most attention in the US during Obama’s trip was the announcement just before the trip that he was renaming the highest mountain in North America.

It was amusing to see how some American conservatives fell over themselves to complain about the move, though this act by the Obama administration has, in fact, long been desired by the people of Alaska, Democrats and Republicans alike.

The mountain previously known as McKinley.
Courtesy the National Park Service

Denali, as the mountain has traditionally been called locally (and will now be known officially nationwide), was given the name Mt. McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector who was a supporter of presidential candidate William McKinley. The prospector favored McKinley’s strong position on the gold standard (as any self-respecting gold prospector would), so his christening of the mountain was a bald-faced act of branding for political purposes. The name caught on, however, especially after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. 

Caught on, that is, except in Alaska, were locals have reportedly always referred to the mountain as Denali, its name in one of the local indigenous languages. Since 1975, the State of Alaska has lobbied the federal government to change the name, but politicians from McKinley’s home state of Ohio have successfully prevented any such “disrespecting” of their native son. It is the very essence of petty politics.

Anyway, this whole episode brought to mind something I read recently, something much closer to home than Denali.

I have a book about the history of my home county in Georgia, published in 1965 by George Gordon Ward, the husband of my second grade teacher. The book is not a straightforward history, as such, though at some 600 pages it is in many ways a comprehensive one. It consists of a sometimes randomly organized collection of interesting bits and pieces about Gilmer County and the people who lived there in the past. As the author was also something of a small-town “booster” with an eye toward advancing the county’s prosperity and economic progress, he even included in his book some suggestions for improving the county’s image. One such suggestion was the renaming of a mountain.

Mr. Ward felt that some of the local mountains had decidedly hillbilly-sounding names that reflected poorly on the up-and-coming prospects of a county like Gilmer. As he saw it, "some of these early-day designations were temporarily applied by pioneers as a joke or without thought the names would stick." Sounds a bit like how Mt. McKinley got its name. 

As an example of an "absurd" pioneer-era name, he singled out "Tater Patch", as locals usually refer to Potatopatch Mountain, a high ridge dominating the horizon north of my teenage home. For this 3560-foot (1085m) knob on the edge of the present-day Cohutta Wilderness area, Mr. Ward proposed the more respectable name of “Mount Ivan Allen”, in honor a prominent Georgian at the time. 

Tater Patch Mountain, the ridge line to the right in this photo.

Reading about this long-forgotten proposal-in-passing made me cringe a bit. While someone bearing the name Ivan Allen had been active in public life in Georgia for some 70 years, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the name, even now, is office supplies. As in paper, pencils and desks.

The company founded by and named after Ivan Allen was an Atlanta institution, I guess, and well-known far beyond the city. In my youth, the company’s adverts reached across North Georgia, though perhaps not quite as far as the secluded and forested summit of Tater Patch. At least, they must have stuck with me somehow.

When I ran across our homegrown historian’s suggestion of assigning Allen’s name to natural spot I remember well, it struck me as very wrong. For my taste, the Allen’s name reeked too much of commercialism to deserve being honored in that way. 

As I researched (read, "Googled") Allen's background, I learned that he was quite the civil booster himself, active in service organizations and writing booklets promoting business in Atlanta. He also donated land that he owned on a mountaintop near my home for the creation of Fort Mountain State Park, a recreation area I have a long history with. This act of charity is probably what prompted our homegrown historian to think of bestowing Allen's name on a different, but (as he felt) poorly named, mountain nearby. 

So ingrained was the name of the Ivan Allen Company in my mind that I didn’t even remember that Ivan Allen's son, Ivan Junior, had been a leading light in his own right during my childhood and a two-term mayor of the big city a couple of hours south of my birthplace. Obviously, I didn't follow the news a lot back then. 

I have now come to realize how progressive, for the times, Ivan Junior was as mayor. He evolved from his early segregationist leanings to embrace civil rights in a sincere way and ushered in a relatively smooth racial transition for Atlanta during the turbulent 60s. He was even asked by President Kennedy to advise Congress on the creation of what would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

He deserves recognition for, if nothing else, defeating the hard-core segregationist politician (and Georgia’s best-known embarrassment) Lester Maddox, who was then also running for mayor of Atlanta. Sadly, Maddox went on to become governor. My hometown, to its discredit in my mind, named a prominent street after Maddox.

Still, despite gaining some long-overdue appreciation for the legacy of the Ivan Allen name, especially Allen the Younger, I’m grateful that Mr. Ward's notion of changing the local map never caught on. I still prefer “Tater Patch”, a fine name just as it is. 

Christmas Variability

It’s only a few days before Christmas, and I’m finding it a little depressing.  It’s been raining for days, the river near our house is swollen and brown, and outside it’s inky black by four in the afternoon.  It shouldn’t be this way.  It feels unnatural. 

What’s missing is the snow.  Big fluffy flakes should be falling from the sky, not rain, the river should be almost frozen enough to ski on, and even the long nights should be more luminescent, with white snow covering everything. 

We’ve been suffering unseasonably mild weather the past month, with temperatures hovering just a few degrees above freezing, way too warm for snow.  This time last year, our yard was covered in 60 centimeters (two feet) of the white stuff, though admittedly that winter was the snowiest we’ve had in years.  As it is now, we’re well on our way to a non-white Christmas, only the second or third time that’s happened in the twenty-five years or so I’ve lived here.  The last time was in 2007. 

I’ve heard it’s been unusually warm in some parts of the States as well, despite a freakily early winter storm that hit the Northeast in late October.  Georgia saw highs of about 20 (68 F) last week, prompting one of my Facebook friends to comment that if this was global warming, he was all for it. 

Of course, as with almost everything else these days, “the weather” has become politicized.  My wife, who is a scientist, was recently in a meeting where an agricultural researcher from Kentucky told her how political correctness has forced American universities to change the way they talk about climate change. 

Already some years ago, the term “global warming”, which is in fact a correct description of what is happening to the Earth’s climate, fell out of favor.  This was because “global warming” made it too easy for skeptics to ridicule the idea whenever some part of the world experienced weather that was much colder than normal.  The term “climate change” seemed more acceptable.  But, as the man from Kentucky told my wife, today even “climate change” is not politically neutral enough for the skeptics.  Now the current PC term is climate variability.  It’s like trying to avoid using the word “war” by instead saying “peace variability”. 

When the big storm hit in October, conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted something to the effect that major snowstorms at Halloween are not exactly making a strong case for “global warming”.  Being from Georgia, he should know better. 

This past summer, Georgia experienced extreme drought conditions across most of the state.  Temperatures in Atlanta were over two degrees (4 F) above average.  Rainfall for the year has been about 25% below normal, with Atlanta even now having a rainfall deficit of about 12 inches (30 cm).  Water levels in rivers and lakes are significantly down.  Lake Lanier (the state’s biggest reservoir and a major source of water for Atlanta) is currently eleven feet (over three meters) below the “full” level.  The “good” news is that even as low as Lanier has dropped this year, it is still not as bad as during Georgia’s last severe drought, in 2007, the same year we in Finland celebrated Christmas without snow. 

While Erick Erickson was quick to crow about how (in his mind) an unseasonal winter storm helps to disprove global warming, I suspect he didn’t come to the opposite conclusion during the long summer of abnormally hot and dry weather.  Nor should he.

One bad early winter storm or even a whole summer of drought can simply be outliers to the overall trend in the weather.  They are just single data points.  What’s important is the overall trend, based on a lot of such data points, lots of observations over time.  I tend to trust the scientists who have looked at all the data and found the long-range trend clearly pointing to a warmer planet.  But the data point that concerns me the most at the moment is the fact that, once again, there’ll be no snow at Christmas.  

Helsinki's Senate Square, as it should look this time of the year.  Photo by Jonik