Monthly Archives: May 2016

The Meaning of the Fort McMurray Fire

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The Climate Change Connection

It is hard to understand the connection between climate change and wild fire. This is in part because it is hard to understand the factors that determine the frequency and extent of wild fires to begin with, and partly because of the messiness of the conversation about climate change and fire. I’m going to try to make this simple, I don’t expect to succeed, but maybe we can achieve a somewhat improved understanding.

Fires have to start, then they burn for a while, then they stop.

Most wild fires are probably started by humans. This does not mean that human arsonists are running around the landscape having what they consider to be fun. There is a better way to think about this. Every species is unique, and one of the ways Homo sapiens is unique is in the control and use of fire. This has probably been going on for something close to two million years, which means that in some cases entire ecosystems have probably become more fully fire adapted than they otherwise might have been simply because humans started concentrating energy in a way that causes stuff to burst into flames. However, there are natural fire-adapted ecosystems that certainly emerged in the absence of humans, as humans have only recently come to live in all of the habitable regions of the world. The point is, when we think of fires, and realize that they have to start somehow, it is easy to confuse “natural” and “human-caused” fires, or to see them as distinct. What you need to realize is that while lightning strikes and other natural phenomena can and do start fires, human involvement is probably the most common source.

Humans start fires in a lot of ways. There were a lot of fires in the last half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century started by the railroads, which used coal in burners and had real sparky wheels. These trains were often serving lumbering regions, where trees were cut and huge piles of slash were left near tracks, which could then accidentally catch fire. Humans have always had camp fires, initially as the only way we cooked our food or kept warm, and more recently for most humans, as a recreational thing. There is a variety of other human activities that involve fire that can get out of control. Finally, humans start fires on purpose, to reduce slash, to limit large fires, or to manage the ecology. This last effect has been going on with our species for tens of thousands of years, but continues in park and wild lands.

As the number of humans in a region goes up, the chances of a fire starting, all else being equal, goes up. But then, the density of humans goes past a tipping point, and two things happen. One is that the value of what might be burned is increased (or recognized) including homes, but also, forests that are used for recreation. The other is that humans are dense enough, and have built enough roads and other facilities (including roads built just for fire suppression activities) that it becomes possible for humans to put out the fires they start, and thus, the number or extent of fires may go down.

Fort McMurray seems to have been caught between a rock and a hard place in this regard. The mountainous and forested regions of Alberta and other western Canadian provinces normally have a lot of fires, and normally they are left (mostly) to burn. They burn out, and the parts of the forest that are burned then go though a natural cycle. For McMurray, however, is a closely compact set of settlements and other human-built facilities that are in a place where suppression is not carried out on a day to day basis, so what might have been a big fire ignored and left to burn is happening in a place where we do not want a fire to burn.

Added to this, when this fire started, the residence of Fort McMurray needed to flee north to get away from the fire. But what is north of Fort McMurray? A dead end. If you go north form Fort McMurray, you eventually run into a cul-de-sac, and that’s it. As of this writing, during the day on Friday, May 6th, authorities are working out how to evacuate those residents that went north back through the fire area, to the south. But I digress..

Fires start, and humans starting fires is, really, just as “natural” in a way as any other way to start a fire. But fire starting is not context free. It is difficult to start a fire with human intent, carelessness, accident, or with lightning, in a wet forest. Stuff doesn’t burn that well, so a fire might start up but then it dies out. If, however, there is plenty of fuel and the fuel is dry, a real fire is more likely to get going. The conditions in Alberta (and over a much larger area, including the northern Tier of the US states at the moment) are ripe for fires to get started right now, and in many areas, have been so for weeks.

Once the fire starts, it burns. The more fuel, the more intense the burn, and the larger area with fuel, the larger the fire may become. Winds push the fire along and spread it. So, dry conditions with a good breeze are optimal to get a fire started and spread.

The conditions in the vicinity of Fort McMurray have been dry all winter. There was reduced snow pack, and the snow pack melted away quickly. there has been very little rain. There has been a lot of wind, which further dries things out. There has been a lot of heat, a warmer atmosphere, which exacerbates the drying. The forested areas of Alberta are ripe for fires starting, and for their spread, and for their intensity.

How does climate change fit in? First, let me disabuse you of a notion that we are seeing mentioned in relation to this fire, and that has been out there in conversations about climate change and weather (and yes, fire is part of weather) for some time now. It is a form of meme, and it goes something like this: You can’t attribute a given weather event to climate change.

This is patently false, not so much because it is not true, but because it begs the question and does so improperly. In other words, it is the answer to a poorly formulated question that assumes things that are not true. I’ll clarify by reformulating the whole idea.

Weather is climate, now, just as climate is weather over the long term. If the climate changes for any reason, the weather changes. In other words, the relationship between climate changing and weather being altered is a natural tautology. All weather events are related to climate because they are climate.

The relevant question, then, is not is there a link between A and A (because they are the same things at different scales) but rather, is the nature of a potential weather event — including it’s likelihood as a statistically defined hazard, or other variables such as how big, how wet, how hot, how dry, or when it happens, etc. — different now than it would have been in the absence of surface warming cause by the human release of greenhouse gas pollution?

When it comes to fire, the answer is, simply yes. But, the reasons for this are complex.

Surface warming has caused … wait for it … warming. The warm air exacerbating the Alberta fires is warm air we can presume is contributed to by an El Niño event (which has been winding down but surface temperature remain elevated after the event itself is over), riding on top of surface temperatures elevated by global warming. There are a lot of ways to get warm air into Alberta in May, but we know that the northern regions have been warming apace with global warming, with winters shorter, snow pack melting out faster, etc. So we can be reasonably confident that the “warming” part of “global warming” can account for … warming, generally, probably here, now, this Spring.

Surface warming has caused atmospheric moisture to become more clumped. This has to do with differential warming in the Arctic vs. the rest of the planet, which has caused the polar jet stream to change its characteristics, so instead of being usually straightish as it runs around the planet, it seems now to be usually slow moving and wavy. This has caused large areas of the landscape to experience prolonged dry conditions, sometimes for months (then it rains) and sometimes for years (like in California, where there is a drought). Meanwhile, other areas experience multiple 100-year or 500-year rainfall events with flooding in a short period of time. The forested regions of Alberta have been dry.

The same effect might also have brought prolonged and energetic winds to Alberta over recent weeks, making it more dry and fanning and spreading fires once they start. I quickly add that I’m not sure if Alberta has been exceptionally windy or, of so, why, but that is something that should be examined.

Finally, climate change has helped the spread of the pine bark beetle in the region. Fort McMurray is within the area of increased pine bark beetle activity, but other areas farther to the west are even worse. These beetles turn normal trees into kindling, providing fuel for any fires that start in the area.

So, yes, the Alberta fires, and other fires in western Canada and in the northern tier of the US are more frequent and larger than they otherwise would have been because the things that cause fires to get started and spread are worse because of climate change.

Schadenfreude and Karma

We have seen a lot of yammering on social networks, Op Eds, and a few other places, engrossed in a sense of schadenfreude and invoking references to Karma. This is because most of the settlement at Fort McMurray happened because of the bituminous sands exploitation in the area, and of course, this has to do with global warming because it is part of the process of exploiting fossil fuels, which causes the release of CO2 pollution, which causes … well, you get the picture. So, if you are mad at the people of Fort McMurray for being part of this, then you might think they are getting what they deserve. And, you might even see this as some sort of Karma.

That would, however, make you something of an asshat.

Privilege examination time. Most of the time, most people don’t get to make most of the decisions that they would ideally make in order to save the world from humanity. If I could, I would drive an electric car charged entirely from solar panels that I would plaster all over my house and property. But, actually, I’m kind of a working class stiff without the resources to do that. So, instead, I just don’t go to conferences any more, and thus burn far less air fuel than I otherwise might. I do that because I can do it, but I can’t do those other things.

The people of Fort McMurray did not decide to cause climate change. They decided to get a job so they could eat and live in a house. Same with the coal minters in West Virginia or the workers in a Koch refinery somewhere. It is only form a position of great and unexamined privilege that one can see the victims of this enormous catastrophe as getting what they deserve.

The Residents of Fort McMurray are Victims

Indeed, these people are victims in many ways. The economic viability of the entire region has been heavily damaged by fuel prices, and to a much lesser extent (than most people think), by pipeline politics. Now they are forced out of their homes by a threatening fire, and in many cases, a very large percentage of cases, will not be able to return to those homes because they are burned down. Indeed, the entire community may be destroyed. You can’t burn down so many homes and have people just go back and rebuild. Their places of work (both bituminous sands exploiting related and other jobs, like as school teachers, grocery store clerks, etc.) are in many cases not going to be there when the fire finally goes out.

The Fort McMurray people were already undergoing a major economic disaster, and now an even greater disaster has befallen them.

The Rhetorical Damage of Insensitivity and Sensitivity

There has been pushback against the schadenfreude and karma tropes. Unfortunately, some of this pushback, including some by Prime Minister Trudeau, has been destructive in another way.

We see people falling into the “we can’t attribute this fire to climate change” trap as a way of reacting to the schadenfreude and karma comments. This is entirely inappropriate. Rather, the role of climate change in causing this type of disaster has to be kept firmly in mind, while at the same time the plight of the people of Fort McMurray has to be fully acknowledged as an epic human disaster, and addressed.

It is not a good idea to throw the importance of climate change under the bus because some people are disrespecting the victims of this catastrophe. That doesn’t do any body any good.

Other material

There is a lot written about this fire and related issues, and I’ve put together a few items that you will find intereseting.

  • The Extraordinary Fate of Fort McMurray , Alberta
  • Horrible, awful, devastating fire in Fort McMurray Alberta
  • Destructive Canadian wildfire fueled in part by global warming
  • Wildfire: Syrian Refugees in Canada Donating to help climate Refugees
  • Helicopters, trucks set to remove thousands north of Canadian wildfire
  • Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change
  • Destructive Wildfire near Canada’s Oil Sands May Have Been Fueled by Global Warming

    • Shawn Otto’s New Book: The War On Science

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    I’m going to publish my full review of The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto closer to the publication date, which is June 7th. (I believe you can use the above link to pre-order the book.) But I just wanted to let you know the book exists, and is amazing, you will want to read it. You will definitely, absolutely, not want to not read it. It is a must read.

    This isn’t just someone yammering about the lack of respect for science in America, or about the Republican Party’s antiscienceosity, etc. Shawn’s book is actually a history of science, in a sense, exploring the interrelationship between major evolutionary changes in how science works and how it has related to the parallel evolution of politics, and how politics works. It really is one of the more important books on this topic written.

    Shawn also wrote the novel Sins of Our Fathers. Here is an interview Mike Haubrich and I did with Shawn about that book. And, here is a more recent interview from Ikonokast, with Shawn, about science and anti-science.

    Here’s a way to get a special, signed, copy of the pre-print of Shawn Otto’s book, and donate to a good cause at the same time:

    Here’s a great way to support the environment and good environmental policy action while getting ahold of a collectible pre-publication version of my next book, THE WAR ON SCIENCE. I have just a couple collectible uncorrected advance reader copies left, and I’ve donated two of them to the DFL Environmental Caucus, who is auctioning them off on Ebay as a fundraiser. These have gone for over $200 each at other fundraisers. I will sign and personalize them for the winning bidders per your request and mail them to you. If you care about science-related environmental issues like climate change, clean water, clean energy, and a host of others, then policy action is where the rubber hits the road, and electoral politics like the kind the DFL Environmental Caucus engages in helps bring pressure to bear on lawmakers on the campaign trail, giving them reason to do the right thing when it comes to passing evidence-based policy. So bidding massively on this book should be a no-brainer. Help the world, help your kids and grandkids, help the DFL Environmental Caucus, and get a great book at the same time. What’s not to love? Dig deep! And PS: if you’re a lobbyists, ignore this. They don’t solicit donations from lobbyists during the regular legislative session.

    CLICK HERE

    The End Of American Childhood

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    Childhood is the most important human adaptation. If you don’t believe me, read this highly convincing essay.

    But childhood is also one of the most diverse aspects of our shared human culture. You know the aphorisms that incorporate the phrase “Kids these days…” You also know that most of the time the utterance is foundationless, just a grumpy complaint by someone who doesn’t like the noise or disruption or some other annoyance that kids these days are so good at. But we also know that things really were different when we were kids, and that childhood varies wildly across the globe, culture by culture, nation by nation.

    For example, when I was a kid, if first or second grade, I was out on the boat, by myself, using the five horsepower motor, as often as I could manage to pull the cord hard enough to get it started, which was in about one in five attempts. I walked home from Kindergarten and made myself lunch, using the stove and sometimes sharp knives. Today, I want my kindergartener to learn to use the stove and sharp knives, but I want him to do that after he moves out of my house!

    Many American kids, these days, are Americans. Back when I was a kid, a lot of kids were ethnic-Americans, and I’m not talking about recent immigrants. After three or more generations, the Polish and Italian kids in my neighborhood were pretty much like all the other kids, but the households they lived in were internally similar but externally different. In those days, you could guess pretty well the ethnicity of each household by walking down the street just before dinner time and smelling the food. That, of course, is still true of modern day immigrant families, often, but it seems that these days, the first generation assimilates as fast as it can. And, in the really old days, long before my own memories, the rate of assimilation was even slower. There were entire regions of the US where the first language was not English, but something else, often German, for two or more generations. I think it is fair to say that the rate of assimilation has sped way up over the last generation or so.

    Are American children different from children in other cultures? One might guess that they are, given that American themselves seem to be different. Of course, all cultures are different, and the difference between Americans and their kids vs., say, Indonesians and Iraqis may be much less than the difference between the people in the latter two cultures. One might also note that when diverse cultures around the world start to become more similar to each other, it is often (but not always, of course) because they are becoming Americanized. That seems to have been a phenomenon of the last few decades, but how much of a phenomenon was it, really, and is this global Americanization waning as the influence and even popularity of American culture wanes?

    A new book, The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child by Paula Fass, addresses many of these issues.

    Historian Fass examines the history of American childhood and parenting since the days of the Founding Parents. For more recent times, she identifies a shift from self reliance and self-definition to a the age of helicopter parents, and asks how this shift ultimately changes American culture, for better or worse. She examines changes in the nature of assimilation, and explores what the science has to say about child development under changing cultural conditions. Mostly, Fass makes a set of claims that things today aren’t like they used to be in mostly bad ways, and urges parents to take a second look at their role in raising their children.

    I’m agnostic as to whether or not I accept Fass’s charges and suggestions, but the book is a fantastic look at the history of American childhood, a story she often tells through fascinating examples of individuals living in times gone by, working in factories, running their farms, being adults in children’s bodies, and probably being less annoying and noisy than kids these days.

    Fass also underscores the fact that children, and the growing-up process, is often, usually, overlooked by social historians.

    Fass is a widely recognized scholar, Margaret Byrne Professor of History Emerita at the University of California at Berkeley, and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Rutgers. She is a social historian by training, and also wrote Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization and several other books.

    The right often launches a third party marginal, delusional, candidate. But this time around…

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    … they made that candidate THE candidate. So, that will be interesting.

    Yet another of Rachel Maddow’s excellent context rich historically driven missives. She almost lost it a few times while presenting this. You may do the same watching it.

    After the Primaries, What Next?

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    Donald Trump is now the presumed Republican candidate for President of the United States. Prior to Cruz and Kasich dropping out of the race, it was not 100% clear that Trump would achieve enough delegates to “lock” the convention, but he was vey close. I am not sure if Trump will be the only candidate on the ballot for the remaining GOP primaries. Had Cruz and Kasich remained in the race, my estimate was that Trump would be about six delegates short of a lock, but even if those candidates are still listed on some future ballots, it seems likely now that Trump will win enough delegates to go into the Republican National Convention with the required 1237 votes to take the nomination.

    Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is far enough ahead in the Democratic Primary process to enter the convention with a commanding lead over Bernie Sanders, though not enough to lock the convention from pledged delegates. However, she has plenty of unpledged delegates that are highly likely to support her. So even if Clinton goes into the convention with less than a lock with pledged delegates, she will still win the nomination on the first ballot.

    So, broadly speaking, there are two possible outcomes between now and election day. 1) Trump represents the Republicans and Clinton represents the Democrats in the general election; or 2) Something else happens.

    What are the alternatives?

    All of the possible alternatives have to do with the Republican Party. I’ll go over them here, but this is a rough list and there are many things to be considered deep in the details. If you have information that modifies or precludes any of this, please put it in the comments.

    The Republican National Convention Goes Rogue

    It is not entirely clear that the Republicans, at the convention, are required to simply vote in a ballot with pledged delegates casting their preference for the expected candidate. That is required by a rule of the convention, and the rules of the convention don’t exist until they are voted on at the outset of the convention. It is possible that the rules could be changed, and all of the delegates could be released to vote for whomever they want on the first ballot. I am fairly certain that there is not a hard and fast way to prevent this, even though it would be very messy to do so.

    If that happened, Trump would probably not get a majority of votes on the first ballot, simply because other candidates, especially Cruz, have played a better ground game than Trump in several states. A good number of the delegates pledged to Trump will jettison The Donald the first chance they get.

    This will not bring an alternative candidate to a majority position, or even close. But it would allow the convention to proceed pretty much as though the entire Republican Primary season never happened. Likely it would allow any name to be entered into the nomination.

    If, at the start of the convention, the pledged delegate rule is changed or thrown out, expect a strategy to be in place, for one or two candidates not including Trump (and, likely, not including Cruz either) to be nominated. In other words, for this extreme event to happen, there will likely be people in the party with a plan to nominate someone in particular. My money is on Paul Ryan, but that is mainly because he is so adamant on not being a nominee for president, which is a sure sign with Ryan that he wants to be a nominee for president.

    An Full On Independent (third party) Candidacy Emerges

    Is is possible for a third party candidate, running as an independent, to emerge from the apparent wreckage of the Republican Party. This would have to happen before the convention.

    In order for an independent candidate to run, it is generally the case that a petition with a set minimum number of names has to be submitted to the state authorities before a certain deadline. A few deadlines are in June, many in July, but I think most are in August. To get a name on every state’s ballot (plus DC) about 880,000 signatures in total would have to be obtained. This would also require all the efforts in each state to pick one candidate to get behind, presumably. This is extreme, but doable, and if it is going to be done, you’ll know about it soon because those petitions would start circulating within the next few weeks.

    A Spoiler Independent Candidate Emerges

    The independent candidate does not have to be on all of the state’s ballots to affect the election.

    Assume that Hillary Clinton is going to beat Donald Trump, and thus, in a two way race, achieve an electoral majority. But, also, assume that some people who would vote for Clinton over Trump would vote for an independent candidate rather than Clinton. If this could be forced in just one state or two, that could put Clinton at below 50% of the electoral vote, beating Trump who would also be below 50% of the electoral vote.

    This would mean that the Electoral College would not be able to chose a candidate, and the decision goes to the House of Representatives.

    But could you really do this? Because the Electoral College is generally winner take all, the spoiler candidate has to get a majority vote in a state to take those Electors away from the main candidates. But, since this strategy would emerge among Republicans and their ilk, but be directed against Clinton, that would require getting a LOT of Clinton voters to switch to the third party candidate.

    There are some indications that a double digit percentage of Sanders supporters (between 10 and 20%) are “Bernie or Busters.” One might assume that there are more Bernie or Busters in states Bernie Sanders won in. This would have to be a state Clinton is likely to win in during the General, since the idea is to take away some of her Electoral votes. So, such states could be targeted with the independent candidate. Perhaps the independent candidate could even run a campaign that would specifically appeal to former Sanders supporters. Sanders won plenty of small states where a huge effort might allow an independent to grab those electoral votes. If the difference between Trump and Clinton is small enough, Clinton’s majority could be forced below 50% with one state.

    Nebraska and Maine do not have winner take all rules. Sanders won both states, but Nebraska is red, while Maine is blue. I’m going to guess that the Bernie or Bust movement is at least average-strong if not very strong in Maine. Maine has 4 electoral votes, so even winning the entire state would not take a lot of Clinton votes away, but the point is that a number from 1 to 4 could be removed from her column in Maine.

    Among blue states, Sanders did well this primary season so far in Hawaii, Minnesota, Washington, and Michigan, and a few others. He will likely do well in California. So, using the idea that states where Sanders dis well in the primary are ripe for picking off Clinton with a third party, a focus on Michigan (16 electoral votes), California (55 electoral votes) and a couple of others might work. However, these larger, bluer, states are less likely to be fooled into voting for an independent.

    A better strategy might be two work the marginal states where Sanders did well. These are states that Clinton could win, but where the right third party candidate could take that win away. Florida comes to mind. Imagine a strong Florida candidate running as the independent. Even better might be a coalition of smaller Sanders-favoring not too blue states, such as Wisconsin.

    (Yes, you may be thinking at this moment that this strategy could be run for Sanders himself, but remember, the strategy here is to take a few electoral votes away from Clinton so a Republican House gets to decide the outcome of the election.)

    In any event, there is probably an analysis one could do that estimates Clinton’s electoral lead, then finds states where Clinton would likely win but where a third party candidate could take that lead away from her, which add up to enough electoral votes to manage this, and then find the right candidate. I’m fairly sure that somebody in the GOP is working out these numbers as we speak.

    The House proportions itself out to 50 votes, one for each state. (DC is left out of the process). The majority of members in a state must agree on a candidate, or that vote is simply lost (i.e., if there is a tie among members of the house for a given state). Obviously, this gets pretty complicated. A state with mostly members of one party might vote for that party’s candidate, but if there is a third candidate, that could split out the majority causing the other party’s candidate to win, or causing a tie, in a few states.

    If the House is unable to elect a president, this goes tot he Senate.

    By the way, the Congress that would be doing all this is the newly elected one. So, that might be a Republican House, or maybe not. It might be a Democratic Senate. Or maybe not.

    Electors Go Rogue

    The Electors in the Electoral College, from most states, are required to vote en masse (winner take all) for the candidate that won that state’s popular vote. (There are a few exceptions.) But the Federal system does not require this, and from the point of view of the national election, the Electors can do what they want. The states compel the electors to follow the state’s rule with various threats, possibly including jail time, often a fine. However, it is not clear that these threats can be carried out. This has not been tested sufficiently in court. Were it to be tested, it might be tested in the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court is short a Justice, so who knows how that will go.

    It is also conceivable that rogue electors would not be punished if they went rogue this year. It is even conceivable that some rogue electors will be given a ticker tape parade.

    But what would these electors do? They could ignore a third party candidate that happened to win their state, or they could vote for the minority candidate because they can’t stomach the majority candidate.

    If something like this happened, this might be the year we see a serious movement to amend the part of the Constitution that specified the Electoral College. Then, we can witness the fight between the small states (they benefit from the current system) and large states!

    Probably none of this will happen. Probably, Trump will be anointed at the convention (after a few broken bones and maybe a few shots fired). Clinton will mop the floor with him in November. But, who knows?

    I do expect an outcry from various quarters to reform both the primary and election processes. I expect that outcry to die down and be forgotten, but a few reforms to be put in place in the Democratic Party anyway, because people in the party are already part of that outcry. And,really, the big question is what is going to happen in Congress this year, and in two years. Don’t lose sight of that very important question.