Meteorologist explains 2020 explosive wildfires

 Meteorologist explains 2020 explosive wildfires

Dr. Cliff Mass, a meteorologist and Atmospheric Sciences Professor at the University of Washington, recently spoke at the Annual Conference of the Oregon Forest & Industries Council. Dr. Mass, who’s presentation slides can be found here, concluded that the intense east winds that drove the fires were a remarkable event, unseen before and unlikely to occur again.

 

The historically high unprecedented east winds were caused by differences in temperature between a massive cold air mass merging with summertime hot air. Dr. Mass speculates that warming conditions caused by Climate Change could reduce the possibility of such a vast difference between summer cold air masses and warm air.

 

Overall, Dr. Mass feels it is unclear how Climate Change will impact fire seasons. This view contradicts with the often expressed fears from everyone beginning with President Joe Biden, that climate change will mean the 2020 fires are likely to reoccur. 

 

Additionally, Dr. Mass examined the Heat Dome that brought record breaking temperatures to the Pacific Northwest in June 2021. That was also an anomalous event and unlikely to occur again for decades, if not longer.

 

Cap and Trade or Cap and Cause Problems???

Oregon’s Forest Products Industry is possibly headed for a very uncomfortable debate in the upcoming 2019 session of the legislature. Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, previously reluctant to adopt Carbon Cap and Trade legislation, has stated his intention to pass such a bill in 2019.

To demonstrate his commitment, Sen. Courtney has joined Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, in chairing the Joint Committee on Carbon Reduction. The Committee has been meeting in preparation for Carbon legislation adoption in 2019 since the adjournment of the 2018 Short Session in March.

Carbon legislation means different things for the various sectors of the Forest Products Industry. Forest landowners see the opportunity for additional revenue from selling carbon allowances for growing forests to carbon dioxide emitters in Oregon and throughout North America.  The allowances can mitigate the Carbon dioxide emissions from forest product manufacturing.

Forest product manufacturers may be taxed for their carbon dioxide emissions. To avoid the fees they may be forced to curtail their operations to reduce emissions. One option is for manufacturers to purchase emission allowances from forestland owners who agree to restrict harvests on their own forestland.

Forest operators, like loggers, see the impending Cap and Trade legislation as more restrictions and increased taxes on diesel which is a critical component for converting forests to logs for mills. Expect to see manufacturers, loggers and forestland owners all seeking Cap and Trade specifications that protect their forestry interests. 

The forestry interests could lead to different stances on the Cap and Trade legislation. Landowners may choose to increase the harvest age of their forests to generate carbon credits. Recently much of Oregon’s private forestland has been transferred to Timber Investment Management Organizations and Real Estate Investment Trusts. These new landowners have investors with different financial objectives then Oregon’s traditional large forest landowners.

Most Oregon wood processing plants have adapted to the drastic curtailment of large logs from Federal Forest land since the 1990s. The small log processing mills can’t use large logs that would come from older trees which have carbon credits as their objective. Landowners must weigh the revenue from Carbon credits against the lower prices for their large logs.

Debates over the price of Carbon credits and the limits forest product manufacturers may be the theme of the negotiations over 2019 Cap and Trade legislation.

A vibrant wood products market is good for Oregon and the climate

A vibrant wood products market is good for Oregon and the climate

The Oregonian

By Kristina McNitt

In his April 21 op-ed "Our forests can make Oregon the first carbon-neutral state," Dominick DellaSala proposes that the state can achieve this feat by disincentivizing wood production from our forestlands. He believes that Oregon's forests have the potential to be a large carbon sink, and that they should be managed to more aggressively offset emissions from other sectors. We are confident that his proposals would not actually decrease global carbon emissions and would come at great cost to Oregonians.

DellaSala alludes to the fact that Oregon's forests are already sequestering huge amounts of carbon. What he doesn't tell you is that this is true across all ownership classes. Federal forestlands, state forestlands and private industrial forestlands are all growing more trees every year than are harvested or lost to wildfire or mortality. In fact, the 30 million acres of forestland across the state are sequestering approximately half of all of Oregon's carbon emissions every year.

But rather than praise Oregon forest landowners for being part of the climate change solution, DellaSala proposes that they bear ever more of the burden. By taxing industrial landowners and paying others to stop cutting trees, he believes that even more carbon emissions from other sectors can be stored on Oregon forestlands. Putting aside the fundamental inequity of making forestland owners solve a problem caused by others, curtailing harvest means curtailing the forest products industry and all of the otherwise carbon-neutral employment in rural communities those industries support.

But the real punchline is this: Domestic development and redevelopment will not stop. New houses are built every day in Oregon and across the United States. By reducing the state's wood production, we only ensure that developers turn to wood from other jurisdictions with more lenient environmental protections than we have here. Or worse, that they use less-climate-friendly alternatives to wood. For this reason, DellaSala's proposals would not actually decrease global carbon emissions and, in fact, could increase net emissions depending on what products are substituted for wood. 

We hope that reasonable people see DellaSala's op-ed for what it is: A thinly-veiled anti-logging agenda. In most mainstream circles working on climate change issues, including the International Panel on Climate Change, use of wood products is strongly encouraged. The panel concluded that in "the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fiber or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit."

Of course, wood products come from trees. And there's no better place in the world to grow (and re-grow) trees than Oregon. In light of its positive contribution to climate change, we look forward to working with state lawmakers on finding ways to encourage the use of more Oregon wood, not less.

Kristina McNitt is president of the Oregon Forest & Industries Council, which is based in Salem.

Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence

The Wall Street Journal
Monday, December 5, 2011 

Every snowflake is unique, but attacks on climate science all seem the same. I should know. I've been one of the climate contrarians' preferred targets for years.

A recent op-ed on this page by blogger and climate-change denier James Delingpole attacked the "hockey stick" graph my co-authors and I published more than a decade ago with well-worn, discredited arguments ("Climategate 2.0," Nov. 28).

Our original work showed that average temperatures today are higher than they have been for at least the past 1,000 years. Since then, dozens of analyses from other scientists based on different data and methods have all affirmed and extended our original findings.

Contrarians have nonetheless painted a misleading picture of climate science as a house of cards teetering on the edge of a hockey stick. In reality, my research is just one piece in a vast puzzle scientists have painstakingly assembled over the past 200 years establishing the reality of human-caused climate change.

Does that mean that everyone should have to drive an electric car and adopt a polar bear? Of course not. Policy decisions must balance matters of economics, international diplomacy and ethics in a way that is informed, rather than prescribed, by science.

In 2006, then-Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R., N.Y.) asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into studies like the hockey stick. It affirmed our conclusions.

In recent years, attacks on climate science have become personal. After my colleagues and I had our emails stolen and posted online in November 2009, attacks from climate contrarians were subsequently shot down by investigations from two universities, the National Science Foundation, two federal agencies and several media outlets. Contrarians declared that those institutions were part of an imagined global-warming conspiracy.

In April 2010, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli demanded emails I sent or received from other scientists while at the University of Virginia. A judge concluded Mr. Cuccinelli hadn't demonstrated any good reason to see that correspondence. Shortly after that, the American Tradition Institute, a group with ties to fossil-fuel interests, asked for the same emails under the state's open records laws. The university rightly asserted that much of my private correspondence is just that and not subject to release.

Many fossil-fuel interests and their allies are following the same attack-the-science strategy that tobacco companies adopted to delay smoking regulation. Climate scientists can also find kinship with Dr. Herbert Needleman, who identified a link between lead contamination and impaired childhood brain development in the 1970s. The lead industry accused him of misconduct. Later, the National Institutes of Health exonerated him.

Mr. Delingpole ends his piece by saying the anonymous hacker or hackers who stole emails from me and my colleagues deserve thanks. What they deserve is to be brought to justice. But British police have not determined who stole the emails. Recent reports of police expenditures suggest they may be devoting far fewer resources to it than other similar investigations.

Celebrating theft is silly. We should respect the role science and scientists play in society, especially when scientists identify new risks. Whether those risks stem from smoking, lead exposure or the increasing use of fossil fuels, scientists will always work to increase knowledge and reduce uncertainty. And we all benefit from that work.

Prof. Michael E. Mann
Meteorology Department
Penn State University
Director, Penn State Earth System Science Center
University Park, Pa.

The Great Global Warming Fizzle

The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.
By BRET STEPHENS

How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.

Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.

That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.

But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere.

The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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