Category Archives: disaster

An oilfield waste plant blows up in Santa Paula: from the police interviews

On November 18th of last year, a vacuum truck at an oilfield wastewater treatment plant outside Santa Paula blew up. Besides severely injuring several people on site, including three firefighters, the explosion led to an extraordinarily dangerous fire and a cloud of toxic chlorine gas that drifted west over farm fields and sent 46 peopleContinue reading “An oilfield waste plant blows up in Santa Paula: from the police interviews”

CA leading on climate as well as water: LA Times

Yesterday the NYTimes’ lead op-ed in the Sunday Review was about how California is Winning the Drought (as discussed here a couple of days ago) from a respected author on water issues. Today the lead op-ed in the editorial pages of the LATimes comes from a well-known expert on drought, who argues that California isContinue reading “CA leading on climate as well as water: LA Times”

It’s the fourth year of drought in CA. How are we doing?

It’s the fourth year of drought in California. We’re suffering big fires in Northern California, employment drops and spikes of poverty in the Central Valley, and asking for unprecedented conservation in Southern California. We’re also seeing huge impacts on groundwater and to wildlife statewide. We’re hurting. But is it possible that despite our losses theContinue reading “It’s the fourth year of drought in CA. How are we doing?”

Patzert: El Niño 2015 a potential Godzilla. Maybe.

On a slow news day in August, NOAA’s prediction yesterday that El Niño will continue to strengthen and may well bring big precipitation to the southern half of the country (not just SoCal) made headline news across the nation. But the focus in the LATimes — and several other news outlets — came not fromContinue reading “Patzert: El Niño 2015 a potential Godzilla. Maybe.”

Hansen sees sea level rise of ten feet this century

James Hansen and a team of researchers have published a paper that foresees huge sea level rises changes this century, of ten feet in fifty years, which would doom much of developed south Florida and lower Manhattan, just to cite a couple of obvious examples. But the paper has not been peer reviewed, and researchers suchContinue reading “Hansen sees sea level rise of ten feet this century”

“big droughts end in big floods”: NOAA expert

From NOAA scientist Jake Crouch in his "reflections on a really big drought" today in climate.gov: The Southern Plains drought lasted more than four years before coming to an end very quickly in the spring of 2015. There is an old adage that big droughts end in big floods, and that was the case inContinue reading ““big droughts end in big floods”: NOAA expert”

CA water bureaucrat disses federal weather scientists

How often does one see an outright confrontation between state bureaucrats and federal scientists? In my experience, well — never. But that's what I saw last week at the Chapman Conference on California Drought.  Organized by the American Geophysical Union, at a National Academy of Sciences center at UC Irvine, this conference brought together aContinue reading “CA water bureaucrat disses federal weather scientists”

NYTimes: What is killing the forests of the world?

The biggest and most horrifying story I stumbled across at the AGU involves forest mortality, as mentioned in this 2012 story in the NYTimes: Los Alamos National Laboratory studies tree deaths

It's good on the technical aspects, and really helped me understand the mechanism of "hydraulic failure" — how heat can not just challenge, but kill trees. The story doesn't want to be the last word on the subject, perhaps to its credit. It helps us understand the details: 

To monitor how trees might succumb to thirst, researchers are measuring water flow inside each trunk. Normally ropes of water molecules are pulled up from the soil and roots by the atmosphere, moving through very small channels called xylem. When the air is warm, it exerts a greater pull on the water, increasing tension. If the tension gets high, the rope breaks and air is introduced. Like an embolism that can kill a person, air bubbles can block the flow of water. A tree can dry out and die.

It's helpful but I must say,it's not what the researcher in question, Nate McDowell, said at the at the AGU a couple of weeks ago. He framed it differently: as forest mortality. 

In which case, the Times' approach almost literally misses the forest (mass mortality) for the trees (how individual trees succumb to climactic conditions). 

In any case, talking to McDowell at the AGU, I mentioned that I was walking the Pacific Crest trail and had seen one burned out forest after another walking north through Southern California. Many huge fires have hit the trail before and after I have been walking just these past two years. Just weeks after myself and Chris Nottoli passed through the San Jacinto Mountains they were hit with a major fire, the Mountain fire, that consumed over 30k acres of pines near Idyllwild,and forced a long difficult roadwalk detour for those coming on the trail post-June 2013.  

In Section C, I encountered another large area –more than 16k acres – of burned forest to the east and north of Big Bear Lake. Huge pines. Big Bear Fire. 2007. Took a full day or more to walk through the dead and twisted trees and scorched earth.

In Section D, coming down from the San Gabriel Mountains and turning north towards Agua Dulce, I had to walk through the vast scar left by the Station Fire of 2009, which burned over 160k acres and filled the sky with the life of thousands upon thousands of trees. 

Then in Section E about thirty miles of trail north of Green Valley were completely destroyed by the Powerhouse Fire. A ranger told me that the soil itself had been changed by the extreme heat of the blaze. The trail had simply vanished. 

Joe Anderson, who with his wife Terry takes care of hundreds of hikers passing through the trail near his town of Green Valley, told me that one hiker who did go through the burn emerged entirely blackened below his shoulders after walking through miles and miles of chaparral and pinyon pine turned to charcoal. 

"It's like that the whole length of the trail, all the way up to Canada," said Nate McDowell, a couple of weeks ago, in the press room at the AGU. 

I don't want to be alarmist, but McDowell and his friend and fellow scientist Craig Allen believe that the forests of the Southwest are doomed. They have a date in mind, for when they will have died off.  

2045-2050. 

[for those curious about the mechanism of this catastrophe, the hypotheses and the studies, I've put some resources below the fold.]

CA drought hits home — in Upper Ojai

Or, to be precise, the drought hits my backyard. Yesterday the second of two enormous oak trees that have fallen in the same area in the past month came crashing down. About a year ago an even bigger and more beloved oak in vicinity split apart and fell. Here's a basic phone pic that givesContinue reading “CA drought hits home — in Upper Ojai”