Lets talk a bit about forest management. There is growing acknowledgement among (some) policymakers that we need to tackle the combination of climate change, fuel buildup in our forests, and development in high-risk wildland urban interface areas.
First of all, we all acknowledge that climate change has played a major role in making wildfires worse. Human emissions of greenhouse gases have increased spring and summer temperatures by around 2C in the Western U.S. over the past century. 2/15
This has extended both the area and time periods in which forests burn; in parts of California, fire season is now 50 days longer. The recent NCA4 suggested that about half the increase in burned area in the Western U.S. since 1980s can be attributed to a changing climate. 3/15
However, even if we were to magically slash our emissions to zero tomorrow, the climate would simply stop warming, not return to the conditions of the 1970s. The best we can hope for is to make our current climate the new normal and avoid making things potentially much worse 4/15
To reduce the severity of wildfires in our current climate, we need to improve forest management. We need to deal with the legacy of a century of overzealous fire suppression efforts in ecosystems adapted to frequent low-level burns. 5/15
We need to start controlling fires instead of extinguishing them, thinning small trees in some regions and doing controlled burns to clear out accumulated fuels. Some estimates suggest that 20 million acres will need to be thinned and/or burned to minimize fire risk. 6/15
At the same time, we need to allow the best available science to guide us and avoid extreme logging of our public forests under the guise of fire mitigation. We need to work to return to a regime where we can both actively manage forests and control natural ignitions. 7/15
We also need to streamline regulations around prescribed burns and thinning, removing red tape that trades short-term improvements in air quality for orange-sky catastrophes down the road. 8/15
We need to work closely with communities to get buy-in for forest management solutions and tailor interventions to what works best for their surrounding ecosystem and their socioeconomic reality. What works for Malibu and Paradise may be quite different! 9/15
We need to work with and learn from native fire practitioners who understand the land and have generations of experience with effective management techniques. We also need to institute better liability protections for groups undertaking prescribed burns. 10/15
We need to work from communities out, intensively managing areas in the wildland urban interface, but also acknowledge the need to eventually do prescribed burns and other management in more remote wildland regions to avoid air quality disasters associated with megafires. 11/15
We need to provide significantly more resources to harden homes and communities, paying for ember-resistant vent screens, defensible space clearing, and other cost-effective risk-reduction measures. 12/15
But we also need to deal with the drivers behind much of the wildland-urban interface expansion in California: our limited housing stock and astronomical prices. More housing and more affordable housing in urban areas can go a long way to reducing assets at risk. 13/15
Overall, its past time we gave forest management and wildfire risk reduction the resources it deserves. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused $10 billion in damages, but we spent $70 billion on earthquake retrofits after it occurred. 14/15
Yet despite hundreds of billions in losses from wildfires over the past five years, we only spend a small fraction today on wildfire risk reduction than what we spend on earthquake safety. While simply throwing money at the problem won't solve it, more resources are essential. 16
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The first quarter of the year is off to an exceptionally warm start, as I discuss in a new Q1 State of the Climate Report over at @CarbonBrief:
⬆️ Warmest Jan, Feb, March, and April (to date) by ~0.1C
⬆️ 2024 on track to be warmest or second warmest year carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-c…
Based on first three months of the year and the current El Nino / La Nina forecast, we expect 2024 to be similar to or slightly warmer than 2023. With only 3 months in we can't know precisely where the year will end up, but its virtually certain to be at least the 2nd warmest:
While the uncertainty bars have narrowed as each new month of data has come in, our @CarbonBrief projection of 2024 annual temperatures has remained mostly unchanged since the start of the year:
It wasn't only the warmest February on record – this past month saw the largest anomaly (change from the 1850-1900 preindustrial baseline) at 1.79C of any month on record, beating out December (1.77C) and September (1.73C) 2023.
The past 12 months are 1.56C above preindustrial.
Here are the temperatures for Februaries since 1940 in the ERA5 dataset, with 2024 highlighted:
Despite today's grim milestone with the world passing 1.5C over the past 12 months, I see some reasons for cautious climate hope.
We stand both on the brink of severe climate impacts, but also on the brink of a rapid energy transition away from fossil fuels.
A decade ago global emissions were skyrocketing, and many thought we were heading toward a particularly dark climate future where the 21st century would be dominated by coal and global emissions would double or triple by 2100.
But something began to change: rather than continue their meteoric rise, global emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels and land use began to flatten out.
Flat emissions still cause CO2 to accumulate and the world continuing to warm, but not as fast as we previously feared.
Over geologic time the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is determined largely by the balance of volcanism and weathering of silicate rocks (which largely come from volcanoes!).
Today around a billion tons of CO2 is removed from the atmosphere annually by natural weathering.
Enhanced rock weathering seeks to speed up this process, applying ultra-fine basalt rock dust (or other silicates) on farmland to achieve dissolution in years rather than centuries.
Global temperatures in October smashed the prior monthly record by 0.4C, and were ~1.7C above preindustrial levels.
It wasn't quite as gobsmacking as September, but still comes in as the second most anomalous month in what has been an exceptionally hot year already.
Here is a comparison of October 2023 compared to all prior Octobers in the two leading reanalysis products: ERA5 and JRA-55. Note that HadCRUT5 is used here to help estimate warming since preindustrial:
We can really see the past few months stand out if we look at absolute temperatures (rather than anomalies):
The claim by Hansen et al today that climate sensitivity is 4.8°C ± 1.2°C per doubling CO2 is just as plausible as the claim by Cropper et al four days ago that its 2.8°C ± 0.8°C.
Across hundreds of different studies, and our best estimate remains somewhere between 2C and 5C.
Given all the conflicting estimates, I'd strongly advise folks against glomming onto any single new study (particularly if it informs ones priors that sensitivity is high or low). Instead, we should synthesize all the different lines of evidence: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
I should really update this at some point as its ~5 years out of date, but I put together a timeline of all the published studies on climate sensitivity in the literature here: carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-…