The environment in the news friday, 2 November, 2012

In addition to damage from water and wind, the East Coast is experiencing cascading effects of power outages and disrupted transportation systems. Downed power lines have led to fires and electrocutions. Widespread shutdowns of government and business operations are curtailing economic activity.

More than 50 lives have been lost. It is too early to get an estimate of damages, but the economic costs will likely amount to billions or perhaps tens of billions of dollars. The element of risk is epitomized by the disabled boom of a construction crane, dangling 80 stories over the streets of Manhattan, an all-too-real sword of Damocles.

Many of the areas buffeted by Sandy were hit by Hurricane Irene in August of 2011.

What is going on? Is the punch from Sandy or the one-two pounding from Irene and then Sandy a consequence of climate change or an unlucky roll of the climate dice?

The evidence is not yet in for the East Coast in 2011 and 2012, but the general trends are increasingly clear. In its 2012 report on managing the risks of extreme events and disasters, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that "A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events."

Many observations and many lines of evidence support this conclusion. Yet, the fact that hurricanes and other climate extremes occur only rarely means that it is very difficult to know for sure that the recent pattern is really outside the range of historical variation.

Globally, we don't have conclusive evidence that hurricanes are increasing, but we do see a clear indication that the major storm tracks outside the tropics are moving further from the equator.

From the perspective of expected damages, two trends highlight causes for concern. First, economic losses from weather-related disasters have increased over the last several decades. This is mostly because of increases in the value of the assets in harm's way. Second, sea level is rising. Globally, sea level is now about 6 inches higher than in 1900.

This may not sound like much, but a modest change can have big effects. Flooding from storm surge is a classic threshold event. If the waves are 1 inch below the top of the sea wall, there is no damage. One inch above leads to flooding. This combination of increasing exposure and increasing sea level is gradually notching up the level of risk.

What can be done? For disaster managers, the long-standing foundations for effectiveness are preparation, response, and recovery. So far, disaster management agencies, from the local to the national level, have taken Sandy very seriously, appropriate for a storm of its magnitude.

The tradition in disaster management has been to base planning on past experiences. That's a reasonable approach when the future looks basically like the past. But it is a recipe for regret when climate and development are changing. Much can be done to incorporate new knowledge into disaster management, including steps to reduce the risks of future disasters.

One key is recognizing that the future won't be like the past. To cope with changes in climate, development and population, we should be building climate and sea level projections into infrastructure planning, building codes and plans for managing disasters.

We have the scientific knowledge and engineering knowledge to improve all three phases of disaster risk reduction -- preparation, response and recovery. But we don't know everything.

As a consequence, it is important to make learning by doing an integral part of disaster management. We need to continue to refine our understanding of the role of climate change in altering the risks, at the same time we test technologies and strategies for dealing with a future that we know will be different from the past.

Climate change is occurring now. We see its consequences in hotter temperatures, higher sea levels and shifted storm tracks. In many parts of the world, we are also seeing an increase in the fraction of rainfall that comes in the heaviest events. When it rains, increasingly it pours.

Climate change over the next couple of decades is already largely baked into the system, but changes beyond that are mostly in our hands. As we learn more about the links between climate change and extreme events, it will benefit all of us to think hard about the opportunities and challenges of getting a handle on climate change, so we control it and not vice versa.

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Seattle Times: Superstorm Sandy caused by global warming?

By Erika Bolstad

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — There's no clear answer to the raging scientific debate over whether climate change, including record low levels of sea ice in the Arctic this summer, influenced Hurricane Sandy's path and intensity.

But scientists agree on one point: Rising sea levels caused primarily by global warming could worsen the effects of storms such as Sandy, particularly when it comes to storm surge. That means coastal communities throughout the United States must think about what they will need for protection from such storms.

"The economic impacts go from Florida to Maine," said Leonard Berry, director of the Climate Change Initiative at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. "Whatever you think about global warming, it suggests we're dealing with a different scenario of storms and patterns of rainfall, which is going to be exacerbated by even the small rise in sea level which we've already had."

In New York, that means rebuilding flooded subway tunnels in the short term; in the long term, it means perhaps building a multibillion-dollar flood barrier to protect Lower Manhattan from the sort of storm surge it experienced during Sandy. In places such as Punta Gorda, Fla., which was swamped by waters from the Gulf of Mexico during Hurricane Charley in 2004, it means rethinking coastal land uses and possibly abandoning some to the sea.

"It's a longer conversation, but I think part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality; extreme weather is a reality; it is a reality that we are vulnerable," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said Wednesday. "The frequency is way up. It is not prudent to sit here and say it's not going to happen again. Protecting this state from coastal flooding is a massive, massive undertaking. But it's a conversation I think is overdue."

Climate change got short shrift this election season. It didn't come up during the presidential or vice-presidential debates, a first since 1984. President Obama did mention it during the Democratic National Convention, telling delegates: "Climate change is not a hoax" and vowing to approach energy policy in a way that he said would "continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet."

During the Republican convention and on the campaign trail, opponent Mitt Romney has bashed Obama repeatedly for his 2008 promise to "begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet."

Environmental groups have been agitating for more discussions of climate change, and they have used Sandy as an illustration of what many consider a global problem. The Climate Reality Project, founded by former Vice President Al Gore, called Wednesday for the political debate to "catch up with the reality of the climate crisis."

"The facts are clear: Climate change is happening now, and devastating extreme weather has become more frequent and more severe," Chief Executive Officer Maggie Fox said. "Sea levels have been rising at alarming rates, making storm surges that come with all storms more damaging. With superstorms like Sandy, the surges are devastating."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that even if the direct cause of Sandy's severity was unknown, cities must recognize something has changed.

"What is clear is that the storms that we've experienced in the last year or so around this country and around the world are much more severe than before," Bloomberg said Tuesday. "Whether that's global warming or what, I don't know. But we'll have to address those issues."

Human role

Sandy resulted from the alignment of several weather systems, including a winter storm that dumped snow on Colorado, said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded operation.

But a human influence was present, too, he said. From the Carolinas to Canada, sea-surface temperatures just before the storm were about 5 degrees above the 30-year average for this time of year. About 1 degree is "very likely a direct result of global warming," Trenberth wrote in an article explaining the role of climate change in the storm.

With every degree rise in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 4 percent more moisture. As a result, Trenberth said, Sandy was able to pull in more moisture, fueling a stronger storm and magnifying the amount of rainfall by up to 5 percent to 10 percent compared with conditions more than 40 years ago.

Coupled with higher sea levels — since 1992, satellites have observed a 2.25-inch rise — that means more water to surge onshore and penetrate farther.

"That may not sound like a lot," Trenberth said in an interview. But "a small increase in sea level can actually make a big difference."

Ben Strauss, director of the sea-level-rise program at the Princeton, N.J.-based research group Climate Central, warned Congress in testimony last spring that over the long term, the rising sea level will force cartographers to redraw the map of the United States. It's enough to turn Miami-Dade County in Florida "into a collection of islands," he said.

Short term, it means more coastal flooding during severe storms, as was seen in New York City and along the New Jersey shore.

"Storm surge is basically the most damaging part of most hurricanes, not the wind," Strauss said in an interview from New York. "Sea-level rise has been increasing the damage from coastal flooding in every hurricane. The more sea level rises, the more that will be the case."

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ClimateWire: Group proposes $20B yearly budget for climate-related defense spending

Lisa Friedman, E&E reporter

Published: Thursday, November 1, 2012

The United States should invest $200 billion over 10 years to take on the national security threat posed by climate change, according to a sweeping new budget report by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress (CAP).

Calling rising global temperatures and the resulting extreme weather "a real and growing concern" for the U.S. military, the bipartisan panel of authors put investments in clean fuels research, sustainable transportation projects, "smart grid" transmission development and clean energy investments in other countries at the center of a defense budget overhaul.

Meanwhile, the group proposes cuts to weapons spending -- like the purchase of seven additional F-35 aircraft or a V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. The overall effect would be a 20 percent increase in the international affairs budget while also reaching the $500 billion in defense cuts demanded by the automatic process known as sequestration set in motion by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

"By cutting some of the weapons which are kind of a throwback to the Cold War era, you can put more money into energy. And we feel that $200 billion over 10 years basically will make us more secure," said Larry Korb, a senior fellow at CAP and a former assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration.

The proposal of $20 billion a year for 10 years makes climate change spending the largest addition to the proposed prevention budget, an area that also includes money for peacekeeping, international development and nuclear nonproliferation.

"Unless we invest seriously to stabilize the climate, the resulting increased weather extremes will be, in the U.S. military's words, 'threat multipliers' for instability and conflict," the authors say. They argue that spending on climate and clean energy would advance goals of national security, domestic nation building and job creation.

Overall, the CAP plan achieves a 20 percent increase in the U.S. international affairs budget, focusing on diplomacy and development. Over 10 years, the authors predicted the gap between what they called "offense" and "prevention" spending would narrow to a ratio of $8-to-$1. "Doomsday would not result," the authors say.

Currently, they argue, the sequestration plan has divided the budget into military funding and money for all other nondiscretionary spending, requiring equal cuts to both categories.

Various congressional proposals would eliminate the categories and ax discretionary spending only while protecting military accounts. The report argues that would "make the imbalance between military and nonmilitary resources even more extreme" and argued more diplomacy, not less, is key to security.

"This massive imbalance must be righted for two reasons," they wrote. "First, the U.S. diplomatic corps face an international climate of unprecedented complexity and a globalizing world in which U.S. interests are increasingly diffuse, and they need to have adequate resources to meet the evolving geopolitical climate.

"Second, if we hope to maintain positive relationships with global partners and preserve national security interests, we must recommit ourselves to diplomacy and show the rest of the world that we are serious about pursuing peace rather than war."

The report also recommends that the federal budget process include a climate change mission area -- reinstating an accounting of federal climate change expenditures performed by the Office of Management and Budget that Congress had suspended and presenting federal spending on climate in a unified way.

Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta drew a decisive line between climate change and national security. Declaring in a landmark speech that rising sea levels, natural disasters and melting polar ice caps are creating challenges for the U.S. military, Panetta also called for investment in renewable energy as a key element in relieving the Pentagon's rising fuel costs.

The remarks drew fire from some Republicans, notably Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), who said the Defense secretary should not "waste his time trying to perpetrate President Obama's global warming fantasies or his ongoing war on affordable energy."

Julia Pyper, E&E reporter

Published: Thursday, November 1, 2012

Large sections of New York City's subway system remain waterlogged or destroyed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which is raising questions on how to protect East Coast and other transportation networks from severe weather events in the future.

One of the major lessons learned from the storm "is the recognition that climate change is a reality; extreme weather is a reality; it is a reality that we are vulnerable," said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in a press conference yesterday.

The governor called for a "fundamental rethinking of our built environment" to ensure the city is more prepared to deal with extreme weather events like Sandy in the future.

"Protecting this state from coastal flooding is a massive, massive undertaking. But it's a conversation I think is overdue," Cuomo said.

Researchers, however, have been warning of the damage New York City would sustain in the event of severe flooding and sea-level rise for years. A 2009 study by Stony Brook University's Storm Surge Research Group, for instance, estimated that building a barrier network to protect New York City and the surrounding area from storm surges would cost at least $10 billion.

"At the end of the day, I wouldn't be surprised if fixing the city up from this catastrophe costs more than that easily," said Malcolm Bowman, an oceanography professor at Stony Brook and author of the report. "And it could happen again in the next year."

New York has been a leader in studying the impacts of flooding and sea-level rise and has already taken some initial precautions. In response to a fierce storm during the summer of 2007, the city began raising subway entrances and ventilation grates to stop runoff from entering the tunnels. But it has been slow to make long-term preventive measures.

Last year, David Bragdon, former New York City sustainability chief, told the New York's City Council that the city government was looking at a number of "structural and non-structural" coastal protection strategies. But he did not make mention of any major engineering solutions, such as storm surge barriers.

Asked whether Hurricane Sandy had triggered action to take on future adaptation measures, a spokesperson with the mayor's office said in an interview that, for the moment, the city is focused on "dealing with the current situation."

After suffering what New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Chairman Joseph Lhota called "a disaster as devastating as it has ever faced in its history," the New York transit system is starting to reopen.

According to the MTA, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad started offering select service yesterday and the subway system will start to offer limited service on several routes today, supplemented by a shuttle bus where necessary.

Hurricane Sandy caused an immense amount of damage to New York's metropolitan area, but the damage would have likely been worse if city managers hadn't pre-emptively shut down the subway, blocked grates and built makeshift dams to hold back water in vulnerable stations.

In the aftermath, with all subway lines still closed, Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave orders to allow yellow cabs to pick up multiple passengers. "We're encouraging this ride sharing," Bloomberg said at a press conference Tuesday.

To help ease traffic, which is expected to worsen as more and more people return to work, Gov. Cuomo said there would be a "bus bridge" running express service between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

These types of temporary measures the city has put in place in the wake of the storm are practices that could reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions on a daily basis in future, said Michael Kodransky, global research manager at the New York-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

"The city tried to get congestion pricing to pass, and for political reasons, it didn't work. Now here's an opportunity to try other strategies and still mitigate greenhouse gases from the transport sector," he said. "I think it's providing an interesting testing ground."

The problem with implementing transportation-related adaptation or mitigation strategies in New York, or elsewhere, is that there are not enough resources to do so, even if there is enough will, said Joshua Schank, president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, D.C.

"I think it's harder and harder to ignore the reality that we need to make some upfront investments now in order to avoid paying more later," Schank said. "But I still think it's a hard sell to people. When the storm recedes and things get back to normal, asking people to pay more is going to be very different than recognizing the need [to act]."

Cuomo said this week that he expects the federal government to pick up most of the tab for rebuilding a "stronger and better" New York City.

But the federal government is facing a massive deficit and earlier this year could only find enough money to pass a two-year surface transportation bill, so it may not be in the best position to help out, said Schank. Further, Congress has been largely silent on the climate issue.

"The federal government has been, for the most part, denying the existence of climate change, and that has unfortunately extended to transportation funding and transportation planning processes, which do not account for adaptation to climate change," Schank said.

"And that is part of why we saw the devastation that we saw today, because we haven't been acknowledging it and, therefore, we haven't planned to adapt to it or made changes to reduce emissions."

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EnergyWire: Energy policy more influential than environment in presidential race -- poll

Pamela King, E&E reporter Published: Thursday, November 1, 2012

U.S. voters are more concerned about the presidential candidates' energy policies than their environmental plans, according to a poll this week from Harris Interactive.

Seventy-seven percent of people who responded to the New York-based polling firm's survey said they consider energy policy to be an important or very important issue in the election. A recent poll from the University of Texas, Austin, showed that voters prefer President Obama's energy strategy to challenger Mitt Romney's (EnergyWire, Oct. 18).

"Even after the election is over, energy will remain an important subject for Americans because it is also central to so many other policies, especially economic, jobs and environmental policies," said Harris Interactive vice president and senior consultant, Sarah Simmons, in a statement. "In addition, energy pricing has a significant impact on families -- whether it is in the prices they pay at the pump or in the impact energy prices have on the ability of large and small businesses to increase the workforce. This unique role that energy plays in our nation's economic health and our way of life will continue to keep the issues on the front burner."

In comparison to energy, 67 percent of respondents said environmental policy was either important or very important. The issue was the lowest-ranked out of all the topics included in the survey. Economic/budget policy was participants' top priority (88 percent), followed by tax and jobs policy (86 percent each).

Harris Interactive arrived at its results by polling 2,562 adults through an online survey Sept. 17-24. As a policy, Harris Interactive does not calculate margins of error for its polls.

The poll shows mixed opinions on the environmental impacts of energy production and hydraulic fracturing. Fewer than a quarter of Americans (23 percent) view natural gas as either harmful or very harmful to the environment. Forty percent say it is not that harmful, and 19 percent perceive it to be not at all harmful. Eighteen percent are unsure.

When it comes to hydraulic fracturing, the process of injecting chemical-laden fluids to extract oil and natural gas from shale formations, participants were split. Possible risks of fracturing, or fracking, include groundwater and air pollution and minor earthquakes. Thirty-one percent thought the potential benefits of the process -- which include job creation and economic growth -- outweighed the possible risks. Thirty-two percent thought the opposite. Thirty-eight percent were unsure.

Men were more likely to see the benefits outweighing the risk (41 percent versus 30 percent), while women were more likely to take the opposite view (33 percent versus 21 percent). Women were also more likely to express uncertainty on the issue (46 percent of females, compared with 29 percent of males).

"The public's view of natural gas is still evolving, as seen in the divided attitudes toward hydraulic fracturing," Simmons said.

Experts at Harris Interactive said participants' split views on fracturing suggest a need for more education on the subject.