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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. And I'm joined by my friend and colleague and co-host of the show, Jen Kalt of Humboldt Waterkeeper.

So the last two weeks or so have been kind of wild. So we're recording this on October 11th, 2024. Just a few days ago, Hurricane Milton hit Florida. I think at least 16 have died because of that storm. Days before it, Hurricane Helene hit the southeast, and over 270 are reported dead from that storm. So it's hard to draw certain causal chains between climate change and individual weather events, but it seems that both storms were at least exacerbated by climate change. Among the places Helene hit was Asheville, North Carolina, a place that has been popularly described as a climate refuge. I routinely call Humboldt County a climate refuge, which has me thinking, is this truly a climate refuge? Have I been wrong this whole time?

So we have two guests who are going to help, who are far smarter than myself on this issue. I have Michael Furniss, Professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and one of our local experts on climate change. And Troy Nicolini, meteorologist in charge at the US National Weather Service in Eureka.

All right. So climate change is going to impact different parts of the world in different ways. I know two places are the same, but what does our best available information suggest Humboldt County might look like in the future under some sort of a reasonable worst case scenario? By which I mean, let's cut off the tail ends of the models and look at what is a higher confidence interval, what could be the worst case scenario for climate change in our region? Then we can kind of broaden it and talk about other places, which might make Humboldt County look like more of a climate refuge. Michael.

MICHAEL FURNISS:

It's a tough question because, as you say, it's different everywhere. And there isn't anywhere where we know exactly how it's going to play out, even when we cast some scenarios. It'll be warmer and it'll probably be wetter. And that's the general picture in the world. A warmer world is wetter. There's about 7% more moisture in the air for every degree rise centigrade in global average temperature. That's a lot. And that's why we're quite sure that flooding and big storms will increase. We will get less warm here than other places because we're close to the ocean. And it's a huge moderating factor on temperature. And so that's why, in terms of temperature and moisture, the coastal areas, and especially here really, are a temperature moisture refuge.

So if it gets, don't hold me to these numbers, but if it gets four degrees warmer in Utah, maybe it'll get three quarters of a degree warmer here. And that's because we're close to the coast. And when you go inland in Humboldt County, that effect disappears when you get away from the ocean very far. But that said, we do have sea level rise here because we're up against the saltwater. And that has considerable consequences that have been pretty well worked out here as well. So when we say it's a climate refuge, that's a relative thing. We're better off than most places. And the coastal areas, in general, are refugia for climate change. And even with sea level rise, fortunately, we didn't build up against water's edge in most places. So the highway's close to the bay, and that's going to be a concern as time goes on. But there aren't a lot of people that live in the way of sea level rise. But there's a lot of places in the world where that's where most people live, and they're in much worse shape than we are. So it's relative.

WHEELER:

I was looking at an elevation map of Florida recently and I was just shocked by how much of the state is below 12 feet in elevation and would be susceptible to a 12-foot storm surge It was it was remarkable.

FURNISS:

We don't have the big storm surges here because we don't have the giant cyclonic storms that they see in the southeast. We do have some storm surge. I think it can get to a foot or two, Troy, but we don't have ten feet of storm surge like they do in the east.

WHEELER:

So Troy, the same question to you, maybe posed a little bit differently. Looking into your crystal ball, which allows some degree of speculation, what is Humboldt going to look like in 50 years or maybe a hundred years, if we can go that far out? What is our climate going to look like compared to how it is now?

TROY NICOLINI:

Yeah, I agree with everything Mike said, and I want to answer that, but first I have to point out that right now in our current climate, we can't get hurricanes. So for anybody who's freaking about what they saw in other parts of the country, our ocean is just too cold. So we can't grow hurricanes, and if one starts coming towards us from southern latitudes, our cold ocean will suck the life out of it before it can impact us. So everybody can relax on that point, at least for now with our current ocean temperatures. But they're way far off from what they need to be to be able to generate or sustain a hurricane.

To add to what Mike said, I like to think of it sort of from a seasonal standpoint. And I'm more confident that we're going to see lower change in the dry season, as Mike said, and in particular because there's two big atmospheric features that drive our summertime weather. It's true that we're on the coast and that will always moderate our temperature, but if you really pay attention to the news, you may notice sometimes that to the north of us on the Oregon coast, they can get offshore winds, hot temperature, and smoky conditions, when here in Humboldt County, we're not getting any of that. We're still cool and still have onshore breezes. And to the farther south on the coast, it can get really hot. They can have offshore wind and they can have smoke.

So this area is sort of unique, in addition to being on the coast, in that it's perfectly sandwiched between two really important atmospheric features. The high that's out in the Pacific Ocean, the Pacific High, is typically what it's called. And then there's a thermally induced trough of low pressure over the southwest part of the country, sometimes called the California Low, because it's often just down in southern California. So we happen to be situated right between those two features, and air likes to go from high pressure to low pressure, and that's what gives us those really strong northerly winds that we get in the summertime. And because there's no reason to expect those features will change in the timeframe that you're talking about, if anything, the thermal heat-induced low pressure over the interior of California is probably going to increase, right?

And so far, what we've seen with climate change is that the Pacific High is becoming more resilient and more persistent. So if anything, those two features are going to get stronger, and we're going to continue to have that incredible benefit. So as far as us suffering from extreme heat in that timeframe, my hunch is that that's not going to come to pass.

WHEELER:

Well, so let's dwell on the dry season. So other areas aren't so fortunate as us. Let's talk about perhaps if you can, if you're familiar, because you are in charge of the Eureka weather station, other places in California, say the Central Valley, what, what does climate change look like for them in the dry season, in the hot season, how hot can California get for some areas that have pretty significant populations?

NICOLINI:

Although, and I cover Northwestern California, I don't pay as much attention to the rest of the state, but I can say they are already warming. And interestingly, our data right here in the Humboldt Bay region suggests that so far we're not. So there's no reason not to believe they wouldn't continue to heat up. With the typical trends that you see globally, that Southern California would experience those. There's nothing to mitigate those in the rest of the state.

And by the way, when I say the rest of the state, as Mike said, it's just east of here, or north of here, or south of here. I mean, it really is a very narrow area that has this incredible, is an incredible beneficiary of the Pacific high and the thermal low. And it's a very narrow range of latitudes, and we happen to sit in the middle of it.

WHEELER:

Using maybe towns, because I'm not good at a lot of things, what are the bounds of this?

NICOLINI:

In the north ... In fact, it's interesting. It shuts off around Cape Blanco. I often think of between Cape Blanco and the Oregon coast, and then Cape Mendocino, but even further south, like Point Arena. As you get to the Bay Area, it starts to taper off. So that's the region that's impacted by these northerly winds that happens because of those two big atmospheric features that probably aren't going to change anytime soon. It's also why every time someone wants to talk about wind energy or wave energy, they show up at our doorstep. Because it's easy to look at buoy data and say, wow, it's really windy in Humboldt County. It's not as windy in Washington, just to be clear, in the summertime. It's not as windy up there.

They still have the Pacific High influencing their wind, but they don't have the thermal low in the interior because it's not as hot in Washington interior. And as you get farther south in Southern California, of course, they have the thermal low, but they're farther and farther from the Pacific High. So we're like the magic sweet spot between those two features.

FURNISS:

Yeah. And overall, California is a hot place when you get off the coast, and the Central Valley is very hot, and Redding, for example, is about as hot as you'd ever want to get. And so a lot of these places can't really afford to get any hotter, or they're going to become uninhabitable or uninhabitable without air conditioning, and the crop damage from extreme heating will be really significant. So California is very much a contrast in terms of the inland warmness and the coastal coolness.

WHEELER:

Troy, I cut you off before you were able to get to the wet season. So let's talk about the wet season.

NICOLINI:

The wet season is a little different because that same high that's sort of like our friend in the summer because it shoves that cool northwesterly ocean breeze onto us, we have seen in just recent history where it wouldn't go away in the wet season. And it was a ridiculously resilient ridge. In our vernacular, it's a blocking ridge. And guess what it's blocking? It's blocking troughs from coming through and bringing us rain. So I feel like we are a little more vulnerable in the wet season. In this latitude, it's crazy. We have this thing called the drought monitor and it's a map and by color shows the severity of drought throughout the U.S.

And in this whole part of this whole northwestern part of California, down through California, we're often like the one little area that's not in extreme drought. When rainfall amounts on an annual basis start going low multiple years in a row, the rest of the state, the rest of the region, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, they plunge into these really extreme drought conditions. Ruth, our reservoir is 98% full of water. We do have impacts to folks who are on wells because the water level starts to drop and they need to dig deeper wells or spend more electricity. But in general, we seem really resilient to those low rainfall event years.

Now if that high starts to block more storms from coming our way in the future, that's like when you say 50 years out, that's probably my area of more concern that we seem really resilient to the issues of water supply now. But we're also, to some extent, very fragile because we get a lot of rain. Our aquifers are relatively flashy, meaning they like to get recharged every year. And if they didn't get recharged for 10 years, they would be in trouble. Other parts of the state have these really old ancient aquifers that fill over a thousand years. And so they're not quite as susceptible to small fluctuations. But when you see the water bursting out of the side of the hill around here, that's an artesian. Wow, that's groundwater coming to the surface because there's so much bursting with water. But when I see that, I think, yeah, we're more vulnerable than we think to water supply. So that's my one area of concern.

JEN KALT:

What about marine heatwaves? I mean, I know it's not a heatwave like what the Florida coast is dealing with as far as ocean temperatures, but there are marine heatwaves here that cause a lot of impacts to marine life, but how does that impact the weather?

NICOLINI:

Well, I think, interestingly, I think it's the exact opposite. It's the weather that's causing those. So the upwelling that brings cool, nutrient-rich water to the surface ... Just north of us in the Oregon coast is where we have the heat waves in the ocean that cause serious ecological impacts. And so far, we've been somewhat fortunate. We haven't had those. And it's probably because our strong northwest release causes the upwelling and brings the cool water to the surface. But if we had runoff, so in other words, if we had runoff shore here, it's because the northerlies weakened. So we would have impacts from the northerlies weakening. We'd have more offshore flow in the summer. We'd have more smoke from wildfires. We'd have hotter temperatures. So I guess there's a feedback, probably a feedback there, yeah.

WHEELER:

So, we have discussed a little bit sea level rise at the very beginning of the show, but let's delve into that a little bit more. Jen, and this is an area that I know the Humboldt Waterkeeper is particularly concerned with because of all of the historic mills around the bay and contaminated sites and the potential for sea level rise into these contaminated sites. Mike, if you want to take it, what does sea level rise, what are we looking at as models for sea level rise in a reasonable future here in Humboldt County?

FURNISS:

Yeah, of all the impacts of climate change, sea level rise is the least uncertain. We know it's happening, it's already underway. The ocean is slow, so it takes a long time to catch up with the heating of the atmosphere, but it's definitely happening. The degree to which it'll happen is somewhat uncertain because we don't have data on how these global continental ice sheets behave. We haven't ever seen them melt and collapse the way they're doing now, and so we don't really know how that's going to play out, but we're really looking at something like a meter to two meters by the end of the century. That's probably a fairly safe bet, and that impacts a lot of things, and it's global.

So it happens here, it happens all over the world, and we have a pretty good vulnerability assessment here for the Bay Area. I don't think we've done that yet for the Eel River Delta, but we kind of know what's going to be affected and how we're going to have to respond to that. There's a lot of challenges to it, and so we're not a climate refuge when it comes to living at water's edge here the way we do. It's happening, and there's no denying it, and it will probably continue to happen for perhaps hundreds of years into the future.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. I have Michael Furniss, professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and one of our local experts on climate change, and Troy Nicolini, meteorologist in charge at the U.S. National Weather Service in Eureka. So trying to figure out the impacts of the sea level rise on Humboldt Bay has been one of the projects of Humboldt Waterkeeper. Jen, you have for a number of years have done this King Tide program where you and volunteers have gone out and have looked at how King Tides impact certain areas with the understanding that these are the most extreme high tides of every year, and so they are a snapshot into the future, right?

Do you want to talk about the King Tides program and maybe your thoughts as the director of Humboldt Waterkeeper, the person concerned with Humboldt Bay, how sea level rise might impact this region?

KALT:

Yeah, so we do this King Tide photo initiative every year to raise awareness and people can't help but notice how high the water level gets. Pretty much even if you're not getting out of a car or riding your bike on 101, you're looking at the bay and how high it is. And so that's been really helpful in getting people to think more about what will a regular high tide look like every month with one foot of sea level rise. But another issue is rising groundwater.

So a lot of people in California, in San Francisco Bay area in particular, have been really thinking hard about all the contaminated sites that are on former wetlands around San Francisco Bay. And we've been looking at that in Humboldt Bay. Most of the old lumber mills were built on former wetlands. They filled the wetlands and the rising groundwater that's going to infiltrate these sites will probably affect those areas before sea level rise floods the surface of those areas. And so the rising groundwater pushing contamination off those sites could impact the bay or adjacent streams sooner than sea level rise is going to inundate these areas. So we've been looking at contaminated sites that are the lowest lying ones that need to be cleaned up soonest.

And, you know, there's other impacts like the sewer collection system, as the cities call them. The sewer lift stations are gravity based. They're not necessarily very far away from sea level. They're pretty close right now. And they need to be upgraded probably sooner than almost anything. Some of our water lines too are in areas that we diked the bay. We, I say, but I didn't do it. But 100 years ago, people diked the bay off and filled the tidelands and put a bunch of water lines and electrical lines and all these things that we all rely on in those areas. So it's going to get harder and harder to deal with fixing those things as the soil gets wetter and wetter. Yeah.

FURNISS:

A lot of the impacts of climate change are hard to see. They're slow and kind of statistical and just incremental. Sea level rise is easy to picture. So if you go during a king tide and stand at the water's edge, then imagine, say, in the lifetime of your children, the water will be up to your belt buckle or up to the top of your head. And then it gets really real when you have the king tide, when you have some freshwater flooding, when you have high surf, when you have some storm surge, and then on top of that is the tectonic settling that happens not on most of the California coast, but it does happen here. And so our sea level rise is probably the worst in California because of that tectonic subsidence that we're seeing. So that's when it really gets real, and that's when the inundation will come in way farther than you think, or than it used to, is when those things come together.

KALT:

Yeah. And when you're talking about fairly flat areas, like around Humboldt Bay, one foot of elevation of sea level rise, you could be talking a hundred feet laterally inland. But when all these things converge, if there's a King tide on a sunny, calm day, great for photos, not a lot of flooding, but last year during the King tides, I was texting Troy nonstop because we dodged a bullet. We had, I think it was a foot and a half higher tides than were predicted for about a month. And for some reason, the winds just changed direction like the day before the King tide. And that was the storm that destroyed a bunch of the Santa Cruz and central coast areas, the docks and some of the homes along the coast there. So just one more day of those extremely high tides at the same time as a huge storm from the south, and there would have probably been a lot of flooding here.

WHEELER:

So, Troy, we've talked about how much more energy there are going to be into weather systems, weather events. What does kind of an extreme storm on the North Coast look like in the future? What might—will we have more atmospheric rivers or more rich atmospheric rivers with more downpour in a single storm event, or does it not work like that where we are?

NICOLINI:

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't feel like I'm prepared to answer. Mike, do you have a thought on that? Because I saw you sort of nodding like...

FURNISS:

Well, the degree to which we'll have larger floods or even longer droughts, you don't get that from the climate models. They're statistical long-term large area models. But the physics of the situation mean that there's going to be more water in the atmosphere, a lot more water, and what goes up must come down. And so I think the answer is yes, but the degree of it, we don't really know. But we're already seeing some tipping points, like we just saw in Florida, where things are getting more extreme quickly. And these tipping points are nonlinear processes that we don't model them very well. And we know they're there, but we don't know quite when we're going to hit them. Well, it looks like we're hitting some of them before we might have expected to hit them. And that's what keeps climate scientists and meteorologists up at night, is where are those tipping points and when are we going to hit them?

And it's the same with the ice melting and collapse in the continental ice sheets. We don't know where the tipping points are on that. We might see rapid sea level rise, and we've seen that in Earth's past, actually. Sea level is a lot of evidence, and you can see where there's been centuries where there's been many, many meters of sea level rise. And so I would say I wouldn't be surprised if the 100-year storm becomes the five-year storm.

NICOLINI:

And one thing I would add, and again, it's unique for us, like if you look farther south in California where the storms produce snow on the Sierras, Mike earlier said it's gonna be warmer and wetter, and it's true, more of that will fall as rainfall. Snow is actually a gigantic reservoir for us. It stores a lot of water. If it comes as rain, it's gonna run off and cause catastrophic flooding more frequently. So, and we don't really have that. In fact, there's still a myth that the 1964 flood was caused by a rain on snow event.

The snow contributed less than 5% to that flood. The 1964 flood happened because we had 43 inches of rain over just a handful of days. And so, we're already in a sweet spot where we get, we get the convergence of tropical moisture coming to the north, and we get extratropical cyclones, and those two entrain and produce atmospheric rivers. We already have some of the really amazing ingredients to produce huge storms here. But could they become more severe and more frequent? Certainly, that's what most climate models are suggesting that we would see that. But we can already get pretty hammered with our current situation.

KALT:

It does seem like we are seeing more extreme in both directions, and I'm not, I haven't looked at the data, but one thing people talk a lot about is the decrease in fog in this region. And when I moved here, oh, over 30 years ago, I had some neighbors who were born and raised in McKinleyville who said, oh, it used to be so much foggier here than it is now. And today, it feels like I've seen that over the three decades I've lived here. And people talk a lot about the redwoods and what will happen to the redwoods with a decline in fog. What do you think about that?

FURNISS:

Yeah, well, I'm glad Troy is here because I was happy to hear that he agreed with me that it is likely to be more fog. And I think the decline in fog is actually a decline in smoke. We had hundreds of TP burners going 24 and 7 during the big old growth cutting party. And that put just a tremendous amount of smoke in the air. And I think that creates fog and it creates a feeling of fog. It's just smoky all the time. And then we do know from the climate models and the observations that it's getting hotter inland faster than it is on the coast. And that difference between the temperature, say, in Redding and Red Bluff, and the temperature here is what drives that fog, is what pulls that marine air in and creates fog situation.

Also, as I mentioned a couple of times already, that there'd be more water in the atmosphere. And more water means more water available for fog. And so there's a couple of papers out of Berkeley. They totally missed the smoke story. And they had very weak data. They tried their best, but got a very weak signal.

And that translated into a popular idea that the climate change will result in less fog. Probably will be more fog. Fog's complex. We don't really know. We should keep working on it. There are a lot of good people working on this. But the most likely physics of the situation is that we'll see more fog as a result of climate change. I know everybody's all excited about that, but the Redwoods love fog. They don't need fog to survive, unless they're very... Some of the very young seedlings do much better if there's fog. But that's not what controls their range. And they can grow okay if they have sufficient soil moisture. And I pass this to Troy for your impressions of the fog story.

NICOLINI:

Everything ... I agree with everything you said. In fact some of my meteorologists were just talking about this and from the data they can't assess that fog has diminished significantly, and and most of the folks in my office agreed that the teepee burners, the availability of smoke as condensation nuclei probably produced more fog right around the Humboldt Bay region. But as far as like larger region, there's no data to support that fog has diminished.

So yeah, but I've been here 26 years and it seems like it to me too, but there's also sort of this weird bias you have on sensing and weather. I'll just share with that share with you I've looked at people's perception against data in cases where I could compare the two, and perception often does not match data. So it's just I'm not saying my perception is wrong, but if there's a possibility, yeah

FURNISS:

And so it is such a foggy area, when the sun comes out, we go, wow, the sun's out again? Fantastic. And so we get this impression, and there's a narrative building that there's less fog. And as you say, there's no data really to support that. And the foggiest summer ever was just a couple of years ago, I think. And so it's a very highly variable situation. And again, the warming, the physics of warming and fog suggest that it will be foggier.

KALT:

Well a lot of people's least favorite weather around here is wind and fog but a lot of times I like to remind people that that's what causes the upwelling and makes this region so rich in marine resources and also what keeps massive amounts of population away.

FURNISS:

Some people just can't handle it.

NICOLINI:

Used to, now we're getting a reputation as a climate refuge. And I've actually spoken to people who left the North Bay because of wildfire smoke, sold their house, retired early, and came up here just specifically to get away from the heat and the smoke.

WHEELER:

I have multiple friends who have moved to the area because their house is burned in a wildfire that might have been influenced by climate change. And Humboldt has had visitors from Redding for decades, even before the kind of wars of climate change is on us that have come here to escape the heat. So the natural air condition of this region has always been a selling point for some.

FURNISS:

We're not immune to fire, but we're much less likely to have the big fires that we've seen in other parts of California. The redwoods are remarkably fire resistant. They don't have sap in their bark, and they are big giant columns of water. And it's cool and moist here, so we can have those situations, those kinds of conditions arise that can make for very high fire hazards. So we shouldn't get too complacent about that, even though we have less of a risk than most places.

WHEELER:

So in this conversation, I feel like I've learned calling Humboldt a climate refuge seems like it's going to be appropriate because this is a relative term relative to the rest of California, to many other places in this world. We aren't necessarily going to suffer the worst impacts of climate change. We're not going to have the extreme high weather or high, high temperature events, multiple days in excess of, of whatever degree we are likely to continue to have water, although the storms that we get might be flashier, might be more extreme, might cause more flooding. We're going to have sea level rise, but we already have sea level rise to some degree. And thankfully a lot of Humboldt has been built outside of even the high sea level rise projections. So it sounds like we fare pretty well. Is this kind of the group consensus here?

NICOLINI:

Yeah, and I would add one more piece to that equation, which is our latitude. So we're roughly at 40 degrees latitude. And just coincidentally, that's the latitude at which the amount of solar radiation coming in is matched by the amount radiating out on average over an annual basis. So as you go south from this latitude, you have to have conveyor belts to move heat to the north, or those areas become uninhabitably hot quickly. And as you go north from where we're at, they actually have conveyor belts that move warmth to those areas, or they would become frigid and lifeless, right?

So you hear about, I mean, I think what really keeps me up at night is the breakdown of conveyor belts, because that would lead to really compressed latitudes where you could grow food and live, right? And so, but even in that worst dire scenario, we happen to be at that latitude where we're not as reliant on those conveyor belts to keep this place at a reasonable temperature. Ignoring all the other mechanisms that we talked about, we have latitude in our favor.

WHEELER:

All right, and that's a great place to end it. Unfortunately, we didn't get to how we should, the kind of consequences or the ramifications of us being a climate refuge, what we should do in terms of planning, maybe planning for more people, planning for sea level rise, but that sounds like a wonderful next show. And so I invite my two wonderful guests to come back in the future and we can tackle that next.

KALT:

We should also plan for earthquakes and tsunamis too.

WHEELER:

Yes, we should.

FURNISS:

Yes, we are not safe from earthquakes. Nowhere is safe, it basically is the story.

NICOLINI:

But we can't get hurricanes.

FURNISS:

We're safe, we're marked safe from hurricanes.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, thank you listeners for joining us and join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the north coast of California.