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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. Joining me is my friend and colleague Scott Greacen, Friends of the Eel River. Hey, Scott. And Alicia Hamann, Friends of the Eel River. Hey, Alicia. We are talking about climate change and how climate change is fueling this mega storm thing that we're going through right now, and joining us is climate scientist and Cal Poly lecturer on climate change, Michael Furniss. Hey, Michael.

MICHAEL FURNISS:

Hello, happy to be here.

WHEELER:

When talking about weather and climate change, this is often an area where people get into trouble -- we inappropriately draw lines of causation where they may not exist, or we may overemphasize or underemphasize the role of climate change in shaping our weather. I wondered if you wanted to just start by talk about this issue about like how climate affects our weather, and then we can get into more particulars about this storm season that we're experiencing and whether this is a harbinger of things to come.

FURNISS:

I'd like to start with something I heard from Jim Fatima at a recent webinar that I just love, and he said there's a way of talking about science that sounds as if you know more than you do. I just love that the Atmos Here in the Earth system are wildly variable and chaotic places and there are lots of uncertainties that doesn't mean complete ignorance for sure. We know a lot, but as far as what the future is going to be. There are a lot of uncertainties to it in terms of increasing rainfall. There's quite a lot of documentation now about increases in heavy rain. That is the 1% of frequency of rainfall and that's been documented in quite a few places. And the physics of rapid climate change or global warming increases in temperature are quite clear and well known. And that is for every one C rise in global average temperature, the atmosphere holds about 7% more water, so warmer air holds more water. And we've had about 1.3 degrees centigrade of global average temperature rise. And so we're looking at about 99.1% more water in the atmosphere overall. And that's a lot. That's really a lot and that leads to heavier rain. There's more water in the atmosphere. What goes up must come down. So the storms tend to be heavier as a result of the warming atmosphere. Also, there's a slow but steady warming of the ocean and warm ocean kind of juices up the storms and increases their energy and intensity. And so there's two factors at least going on there that lead to the rainier weather. Everybody wants to know is this attributable to climate change and global warming. It's a tough question to answer because you have to separate the long term statistically defined climate change from variability, which is pretty wild, especially in California. But there have been a number of attribution studies and the evidence is increasing. There is one that basically there were 126 rainfall or flooding events studied and 56% were found that human activity and anthropogenic climate change made the event more likely or more severe. I don't think that's a definitive number, but it is kind of an indication the attribution studies continue.

SCOTT GREACEN:

So you said warming in the atmosphere is allowing the atmosphere to continue to carry like 9% more water.

FURNISS:

Currently, yeah, you get 7% more water for each one C average temperature over all the earth. Atmosphere system gets wetter with climate change, right?

GREACEN:

You said you know that that that's a pretty big number and I was just thinking to myself as you said that you were freaking out over 8% inflation for a month there. Why is this relationship not a matter of more consequence?

FURNISS:

And it's going in the wrong direction. Of course this is increasing. So if we hit two degrees global average temperature, you're looking at what, 14% more water? That's really a big number actually. And so the physics of this is quite clear and it's why everybody expects more heavy rainfall and we're flooding to come from climate change. I would say the models don't yield extremes very well or at all. They work on average is and that's why they work so well. They work on long term averages, whereas weather prediction uses about the same physics, but you're looking for what's going to happen in a particular place at a particular time. Climate models are looking at more long term averages and the extremes just don't come out of them and the storminess that leads to the kinds of things that we're seeing now don't come out of the models, but they do come out of how the atmosphere works and how heat works. Heat is absolutely determinative of all kinds of things on the earth, especially the weather, but also how organisms work And all that. So even that 1.3 change, which doesn't seem a lot to people, is really a lot, it's really changing. So many things that we can see that everywhere we look now.

GREACEN:

A lot of the conversation right now in California is naturally around the contrast between the dueling extremes, if you will, of drought that we've been in and extreme rainfall and flooding that we're now in. Heat is related to both of those. But one of the things that really jumped out at me uh, in the last couple of years is the extent to which the warming atmosphere is changing. The ability is really drying things out, is driving drought. So it's really accelerating in both directions.

FURNISS:

And this effect of drought to heavy rain has come to be called weather whiplash, and we've certainly been seeing that the long term and short term, like, for example, the Klamath event that you mentioned earlier. So yes, with drought, the warming climate dries things out much quicker. It increases the Ev operative and transported demand on things and things dry out. Even if you don't have less rain, you're going to have a deeper, more severe drought because of that drying effect. But also what climate change does is intensifies everything and it increases the mean and so you're going to get more extreme events just from that and it also increases the variance. We should expect more larger storms and also more deeper drier droughts. And that's just kind of generalized intensification of the entire way.

GREACEN:

When you say more storms and more droughts, we should try to situate that in what we know not only about history, the fairly short colonized history of California, but also the paleo history, we know about what came before we started settling here. So the things that jump out at me are the 18 62 flood of the Central Valley, which rendered Sacramento uninhabitable for months and really transformed the economy of what was about to be a state I guess. But Then also the mega floods that we haven't seen that are significantly larger than the 1862 event. Can you tell us what we know and how we know it?

FURNISS:

We don't know the really specific events for the 1862 I think it was event because we didn't have satellites and weather bureaus and all that. We do have a lot of information about the 1964 flood really severe here and we can still see evidence of it just everywhere it was so large. But one thing about that and it's relevant to any storms and particular storms were happening now is that there are conspiracies. There's various factors that combined. So you get rainfall on a place that's already heavily saturated, which we're seeing now the whole earth mantle is very, very wet and we're getting more on top of it. So there's not a lot of absorptive capacity in it may have rain on snow events. These storms are rather warm, so it's melting some snow that's adding rainfall to it. And then the increase in development and impervious areas, Urbanization also increases the peak flows greatly in the 64 flood. It was a cold front and a warm front meeting together and stalling together. So these things are Devilishly hard or arguably impossible to actually predict or put a particular probability on. But we do know that they happen. A former state climatologist, James Goodridge. He always ended his everything he wrote with the biggest one is yet to come. And that has to be true just the way extremes work.

ALICIA HAMANN:

And I think that's true for a lot of things in California. I know when I think of the big one these days it's earthquake, earthquake, earthquake. But you know, one thing that I've been seeing a lot of the younger generation talk about is kind of trying to make sense of what's happening based on what they've seen in their lifetime. Right. And so many of them are like, okay, well, we just had this period of intense drought and so that must be why the flooding is, is so terrible. Can you address that, Michael just coming out of a time of drought. Does that have any thing to do with the flooding that we're seeing, or what's the situation in the soils?

FURNISS:

This series of floods or rainfall is hitting a place where the soils are already very wet. It only takes about two inches of rainfall per foot of soil to bring that soil up to the capacity. It can hold of water after it sort of drains out. And we had that, I'm not sure if we had it all in October, but by November, the soils were basically at field capacity or greater than that at saturation, that's not really the problem. And that drought, it would also lead to below the soil and the rock formations and whatnot. It's drier there and can hold more water. So kind of the opposite is true. It doesn't really go over that well to tell people that wrong, but that's just not the case and it's really the opposite. Now, what the real flood hazard now is, we're seeing lots more rain. The atmospheric rivers are just lined up back to back here on and off already very wet system that can't really hold anymore. And so, so much of it is going to run off.

HAMANN:

Speaking of other misconceptions that I see a lot in the news about how, well we're out of the drought, we're doing great now because we've got all this water now, we just need to figure out how to build more dams to keep it all from wasting into the ocean. Are we back to a neutral point? Are we good on our water security because we've had these massive rains?

FURNISS:

Yes, as far as surface water, we're absolutely out of the woods at this point. As far as groundwater, it's a different story and we have huge groundwater deficits because of pumping for many decades for agricultural use. That deep groundwater actually reflects kind of an average climate. So it takes a long time for the water to get down there and it reflects not one year, but maybe five years or 10 years or even 50 years. A lot of that water is hundreds of years old, one heavy rain here doesn't solve that. Or even a few heavy drought years doesn't really affect that all that much. But in terms of the surface water, obviously our streams are -- they're full and getting fuller and then the reservoirs are filling up like crazy if you look at the reservoir stats, they're filling really fast and so there is a lot of commentary that oh well we're still in a drought, don't think this gets us out of the woods. I don't really buy that. We're out of the woods for surface water and the storage in reservoirs and especially the snowpack is persists. We're in great shape. It's almost unprecedented levels of snowpack in the Sierra. You know, we never know the future, like last year. It could just shut off and be super dry the whole rest of the winter in the spring. Nobody knows that and it could sort of turn into a mild drought I suppose. But this is really an absolute deluge. And if we can handle some good news, which sometimes I feel like people have a hard time with that. We're just so used to bad news and on top of bad news, on top of bad news, this is really good news relative to the California drought situation. We're kind of out of the woods other than the groundwater deficit, which is a longer term problem.

GREACEN:

Could we talk for a little bit about the ecological effects of these climate extremes? One of the points you made in the past, Mike, that I found really helpful is talking about the difference between blue water drought and the effects on the larger landscape, the long-term effects of low water availability across forested landscapes, for example. But then the other point is the amount of work that high water does -- boil it down, are floods good for fish?

FURNISS:

Yeah, it's important to make a distinction between what we call green water drought and a blue water drought. So the green water is the water that hangs up in the soil against gravity, sort of hangs in the landscape. It's a lot of water and it feeds the plants through the summer. It's why everything doesn't die in California in our summer drought, which we always have. And then a blue water drought, which is the runoff, which is the excess that isn't caught by the soil or that runs through the soil slowly and comes, shows up in the creeks and rivers and streams and lakes and that. And so it has to be really dry to have a green water drought. And in the last few years we've had a blue water drought here, there's not enough for fish. It's really been pretty dire, but we haven't had a green water drought. We've had enough to kind of fill our soils to field capacity. And if you look around at the forest, we don't see the whole bunch of forest die back as a result of that drought. We did have a green water drought in southern California, there was so little rain in central California as well, there was so little rain. You had a green water drought and then if you have a green water drought, you've got a severe blue water drought. But in terms of is this good for fish and aquatic ecology? Yes. Peak flows are part of the natural system and they really help rivers. They rearrange the gravels. They create complexity. They kind of sweep out the direct and they tend to be really good for aquatic ecology. There is a point where they kind of turn the corner and become too big. Not so much for the flow in the stream in the river, but for the hill slopes kind of coming apart and delivering too much sediment into the system and causing a lot of disruption and a lot of changes, some of which is quite negative. So the really big floods are pretty negative for fish. The regular flows which the kind of peaks that we're seeing now and hopefully it won't get too big. It's going to get bigger I think. But those are generally positive for aquatic ecology. It may not be great if you live right near water's edge or the river is pulsing away your backyard or you landslides and whatnot. But for fish it's, we want those big peak flows and it's it's why dams can really buck up a river is they take the peaks off and you don't get those peak flows that rearrange the river and create that diverse habitat that the salmon really need.

GREACEN:

There's been a fair amount of recent science pointing to the values of floodplains for juvenile salmon in terms of food availability and it seems like one of the things we might want to try to do is connect our rivers to their flood plains or not just to avoid impacts on human communities, but better provide for natural communities.

FURNISS:

Yeah, I think that re connection of floodplains to their rivers is one of the best things that we can do. And we're getting up onto the flood plains now and watering those and and keeping them in the in the condition that that nature wants them to be. That's that's where they want to be. So, I think that's really important. The other thing to note though is when you get these long durations soaking rains which were starting to really see now, it increases what's called the poor pressure in the hillsides. Actually, the water keeps coming and bearing down on the hillside and it actually increases the pressure on all those gazillions of little pores that are in the soil and in the bedrock. And that actually lifts lifts the hillside up it boys. The hillside becomes kind of buoyant and it reduces the friction that holds these slopes in place. And that's why we get the mudslides and you don't see the mudslides in the initial heavy rains. But when it keeps up, when it's long duration and soaking like this, I think that's when you start seeing the landslides, the mudslides and I think we're going to, you know, in the next few storms kind of watch out, we're going to start seeing quite a proliferation of them. That's my guess, but that's how it works.

GREACEN:

You're particularly well placed to explain why the north coast of California is so subject to landslides. Why do we have so many landforms slide so easily?

FURNISS:

Well, our uplift rates from the plate tectonics pushing the mountains up when you have plate movement and earthquakes, that movement is upwards. So we have uplift and that's just tips the landscape up on its side really. And then we also have deep soils because we have very fractured bedrock also as a result of tectonic movement and the deep soils have a harder time holding themselves up. There's not as much of a shelf of bedrock to hold them up. And in a lot of places they've been geologically weathered. They may be the soil material to find material that ends up in these mudslides, maybe 102 103 100 ft deep and where you get these big earth flow. So it's tipped up on its side and it doesn't hold itself together very well. So it's geology is destiny is what they say. And our geology is why we have the deep soils and rapid uplift rates.

GREACEN:

So we had an event in the Klamath this past summer in early August that kind of combined a lot of the different things we're talking about here -- a flash flood during the Mckinney fire that looks like it's done a lot of damage to fish and the habitat in the creek and in the Klamath. But can you sort of lead us through what we're thinking about here? You know, where we've got this combination of fire and flood and fish impacts.

FURNISS:

That was a really unusual event, and of course unusual events happen and they're likely to happen more frequently, more intensively with greater duration as a result of rapid warming. But it's particularly damaging once you have a fire, the surface of the soil is highly vulnerable, usually just for one or two years. But especially if you just had that fire, you have what's called hydrophobic soils when the volatile ization of the plant matter kind of ends up on the soil particles and it makes it resist getting wet. And so you have run off right over the surface of the soil, which doesn't happen very often in normal conditions, but happens a lot when you've just burned the site. And so that first year in this case it was the first, you know, day after the fire that these things happened. There's very high vulnerability, very high consequences to that heavy rain. And then we saw that extreme erosion and lots of mud delivered to the Klamath River and tributaries. So that was, that was the worst kind of whiplash you could get. That's like being rear-ended by a big semi truck, that kind of whiplash.

WHEELER:

I think something else that really has bothered me about these recent storms, and maybe this is just trauma from the earthquake are these winds, these winds have just whipped, I think I saw 70, 78 mile an hour gusts in Southern Humboldt. Can you talk about climate change and whether or not we're expecting to see higher winds and storms in the future and kind of the physics behind that?

FURNISS:

Is to say there's the general intensification of the weather system where we sort of turn up the knob on most things and it's going to go up to 11 on some of them. Wind is very tough and it doesn't really pop out of the models and there is evidence in some of the record of a de intensification of winds. So that can happen as well. And it's a very complex picture. And actually the de intensification of winds can lead to greater flooding because one of the things that kind of saves us from flooding is that the storms are moving pretty fast and they moved on through, you know, and it's like, oh boy, if that it's parked here, we'd be in serious trouble. And so that happens sometimes when there's not much wind or there's fronts that collide and stall, then you get heavy rain because the storm doesn't move through. It just parks in one place and stays there and rains and rains and rains and rains that happened recently in santa barbara just a few days ago, the storm just kind of parked over santa Barbara County and they had tremendous rainfall amounts and with it a lot of, lot of damage probably to the point of real damage to the fish habitat as well. So I don't have a good answer for you in terms of wind intensification, a lot of people are working on it, but it's a short term phenomenon, it's chaotic. It's one of those things that that doesn't lend itself very well to long term climate modeling.

WHEELER:

Another common feature on the north coast, although we're getting outside winter storms here, is summer fog. As I understand it, climate change is also going to disrupt normal summer fog patterns and that might have a big impact on species like redwoods that are dependent on summer fog for so much of their moisture. What do we know about fog and climate change?

FURNISS:

I'm a kind of a contrarian relative to the narrative that has been put out there. There were a couple of papers from Berkeley, I think that basically concluded that climate change was, was leading to less fog and would lead to less fog. That is probably completely wrong. And that happens with some Houston Berkeley, my alma mater, but I don't agree with these papers and they made a huge mistake and that is they never considered smoke at all, ever even mentioned smoking these two papers and we had an enormous um amount of smoke for many decades when, you know, the old growth timber party was in high gear. We had hundreds of tv burners all over the place going 24 7 and then we burn off the clear cuts as well. So not looking at the smoke factor was a big mistake. And also the signal that they found that suggested less fog was very, very weak and based on very poor data. I mean that's not their fault that all they had was some data from the airport and a few other things that the database was not very good. Fog is very complex. It's this threshold process and most bets are off in terms of what's going to happen. However, the physics of it suggests that we'll have more fog and I know that's really exciting to everyone if you're not a redwood tree. And that's because what really drives the fog and I think a lot of people have noticed this is the inland versus the coastal temperature difference and the hotter it is in the central Valley. And reading the more that fog layer gets pulled in on our coast. And that difference is intensifying its increasing and we know that. And so that should drive more fog. And they say, well, the ocean is cooling and that would make for less fog, but the ocean is warming rather and that should make for less fog. But the ocean is actually cooling here somewhat. Just in this kind of variability picture. So what I'm saying is the likelihood, even though there's a lot of uncertainty associated with this is that we will have more fog. The redwoods range looks like it corresponds to the extent of fog in California coast. That's not really true. It what limits the range is is hard freezes. They really can't tolerate hard freezes or a series of days that are well below freezing level. The fog is helpful to them. But if the soil has enough moisture to support them through the summer, fog is unnecessary. And you'll see redwood trees and lots of places, especially in the south counties where there is no summer fog. And the redwoods are doing fine as long as they have a decent soil with decent water holding capacity. So I think fog is something we want to, you know, define better. And there's a lot of really good people working on this, we have better data than we've ever had. We have incredible data now with satellites and so we should worry about it. But the idea that there will be less fog and this is imperiling the redwoods is in my view and the view of a lot of meteorologists and redwood scientists as well is that that's not really the case is one of the few things that we don't have to worry as much about as some of the many other effects.

WHEELER:

Well, that's not the useful answer.

FURNISS:

The big redwoods are so valuable. We should worry about them vis a vis climate change, but because they live near the coast, they tolerate heat okay, as long as they have sufficient moisture they turn out to be one of the last forest types that we would worry about. And there's plenty of forest types that would worry about, but not so much redwoods. And I guess I'd say can we handle a good story once in a while and that's kind of a good story. They can be subject to drought if we have extremes in cold temperatures which are becoming less frequent, range can be reduced. But redwoods are absolutely bomber. They've been here for 100 plus million years and still hear much of that time. The climate was warmer than it is now. And how did they possibly survive all the many climate fluctuations that must have happened in 100 million years. And the answer to that is there near the coast where it's cool and wet.

HAMANN:

Speaking of being near the coast, one of the other impacts we haven't talked about yet is sea level rise. And one thing we, we hear people talk about a lot around here is the fact that our region has effectively a double rate of sea level rise because our land is sinking while the while the ocean is rising. What what can you say about that? And what are the underlying causes of of the sea rising?

FURNISS:

Yeah, So we are kind of a temperature and moisture climate refuge here. But we do have sea level rise and it is most severe, I think along the whole Pacific Coast because of this rapid sinking caused by tectonic action in the Humboldt Bay area. When you go south of here or north of here, the land is actually rising and Ameliorating sea level rise, but where we are and where most people live in these northern counties, the land is sinking as a result of this movement between earthquakes, the plates are always moving. And so what is the land do well in these Humboldt Bay area, it's going down and that exacerbates the sea level rise. And so we also have a lot of sea level rise kind of cooked in to the system because the ocean changes really slowly. It has like 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere. And we're sort of looking at, you know, maybe a late 19 seventies type ocean now. So there's a whole bunch of warming that is queued up. That hasn't happened yet, that contributes to sea level rise. And then the other major factor in sea level rises, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the melting and especially the collapse of the antarctic ice sheet. And these are not well understood, especially the antarctic ice sheet, which holds, I think something like 57 m of equivalent and sea level rise. So we don't know how that behaves. We haven't ever seen a rapid warming before to have the data to run the models. Lots of research going on in that area, but huge uncertainty about how green, especially Antarctica are going to behave in terms of melting and collapse. We don't really know, it could be moderate, where we get a meter or two by 2100 or it could be much worse if there's a kind of a tipping point that happens particularly in Antarctica and particularly with the mechanism of ice sheet collapse. So I wouldn't buy property up against the water's edge and it's a big impact for our area. There are a lot of places in the world where it's a much bigger impact where they have huge populations on coastal deltas for example, they may contest the Mississippi delta, the Nile Delta on and on Bangladesh where these places that are highly susceptible to sea level rise are just chock full of people in development. It's not like that here. We have lots of things in the way of it, but we didn't develop a whole lot of residential or industrial capacity into these areas that are highly vulnerable here, but it's definitely something to worry about and we have good vulnerability assessment now for the Humboldt Bay area.

WHEELER:

Alright, so briefly, if folks want to learn more about how climate and weather interact and work for our region and our planet or what would you direct them to what sources?

FURNISS:

Well, there's a firehose of information on this stuff if you want to intro to it. The Carbon Almanac, which came out quite recently, is really good and then there's lots of text books, if you want to see what actual climate scientists say about what the skeptics are saying or the deniers go to real climate dot org. They really take that stuff on and make it clear if you're looking for climate solutions, there's a couple of products that were lead by Paul Hawkin, one called Regeneration -- regeneration dot org -- and one called drawdown -- drawdown dot org -- where a lot of climate solutions are arrayed and evaluated for their cost and efficacy. And then I'm actually working with Paul's group and some others to sort of put together and synthesize and curate this firehose of information. So we have Bill Gates's book, which is very good. Maybe you don't like Bill Gates, but he's a smart guy and he wrote a great book about avoiding climate disaster. There's John Doerr's book, there's Al Gore's climate reality program, there's the Carbon Almanac that I mentioned and on and on many, many good websites. And so if you're interested in learning about this, there are abundant resources for learning about it. Weather and climate are complex topics, but you can spin up on it and there's lots of things that you can learn about it, just accessing these free websites or very economical books that are out there and keep appearing.

WHEELER:

Michael, thank you so much for joining the Econews today, and I hope that folks learned as much as I did about how climate impacts our local weather. This has been another episode of the Econews Report. Join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.