Category Archives: world climate

Playing the Long Game

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In the early 1990s, after the publication of the results from the coring of the Greenland Ice-sheet, I wrote to to express my support for inclusion of substantial tracts of inland montane forests in the Ancient Forest Protection Bill (Jontz 1992) being proposed at that time. Those cores made it clear that Earth’s climate was capable of very rapid shifts (Taylor 1999). That had serious implications for the genetic diversity of our western forests. Below is what I sent off to Congress.

I worked on air quality, water quality, soil nutrients, range management, wildlife habitat and forest dynamics with the U.S. EPA, and the U.S Forest Service in Nevada and Eastern Oregon for almost 35 years. Over that period, I developed a deep and abiding love for the island forests of the interior. With that had come a scientific interest in the development and status of the forest communities during the last few thousand years. It is from that perspective that I write this.

With climate modification a growing planetary concern, the interior western forests may offer us one of the best reservoirs of the genetic diversity necessary to cope with the changes which might result from such a catastrophic shift in the climate regime.

The Ponderosa Pine (Pinus Ponderosa) zone defines the boundary of almost all interior forests in the western United States. It is the most drought tolerant giant conifer forest in North America1. Paleobotanists examining the fossil record have found evidence that these forests have existed, in the past, in many different configurations. Plant associations which have no current analogs can be found in the fossil record:

Range shifts occurred that could not have been predicted … [these] apparently led to anomalous species associations” (Spaulding 1984).

The implication of these findings is of major importance for coping with changes in the variation of seasonal precipitation and temperature distribution which will result from modifications in our climate. We must assume from the fossil evidence that the gene pool of these forest types represents a large reservoir of unexpressed diversity. This diversity provides a crucial hedge against climate change, allowing the drought tolerant Ponderosa pine forests to adapt quickly to altered conditions.

In another vein, evidence of the massive failure of silvicultural theory on both public and private lands is all around us here in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. Foresters who chose to “liquidate” the stands of old-growth Ponderosa pine in favor of what they promised would be fast growing stands of Douglas-fir and Grand Fir have helped eliminate much of this gene pool.

These overstocked fir stands are now showing strains from attacks by insects and disease. In certain areas, they also constitute a serious fire hazard. This attempt at forcing these moderate to low-elevation sites to produce as if they were industrial forest plantations has been very misguided and extremely damaging. It has also served to reveal the sorry state, with some exceptions, of public and private forestry in this part of the country.

Douglas-fir and Grand fir will always be a part of these forests, and at higher elevation, they can even dominate. But at the forest margin, these trees are a minor component. Because of this, many of these stands cannot be economically managed now or for the foreseeable future. They are much more valuable for their water, forage, recreation and soil stabilization potential than as poorly managed quasi-industrial forests.

To insure the renewed health of these forests, and to protect against the looming possibility that we are in the process of forcing the world’s climate into a new state, we must protect as much of the remaining Ponderosa pine forests as possible.

Franklin, Jerry F, and C. T Dyrness. 1988. Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington. Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University Press.

Jontz, Jim. 1992. H.R.842 – 102nd Congress (1991-1992): Ancient Forest Protection Act of 1991. https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/house-bill/842.

Spaulding, W. Geoffrey. 1984. “The Last Glacial-Interglacial Climatic Cycle: Its Effects on Woodlands and Forests in the American West.” In Eight North American Forest Biology Workshop. Utah State University, Logan, UT: Dept. of Forest Resources, Utah State Univ. http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US8641645.

Taylor, Kendrick C. 1999. “Rapid Climate Change.” American Scientist, July. http://www.geo.umass.edu/courses/geo458/Readings/Taylor99_AS.pdf.

1 The Ponderosa pine of western North America is one of the worlds largest forest trees, with individual specimens reaching 4 feet in diameter, and more than 150 feet tall (Franklin and Dyrness 1988).

Power Line Peril

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I’ve written about the way this works (or doesn’t!) in a previous post. It’s about chaos, which isn’t really chaotic at all. It may have gotten that moniker as a way to deal with systems that can fly away from where you thought they were headed. It’s about natural and man-made systems with trajectories that can catapult to a very different place.

Here in the Western U.S., and across the country, there are calls for a greatly expanded network of high-voltage power lines. Those plans carry significant environmental and ecological costs. The threat from fire alone can quickly rework plant communities and just as quickly eliminate human ones. Soil erosion, damage to watersheds and water-tables, and the loss of wildlife habitat are all included in those costs.

We’re likely talking cart before the horse or, in this case, anticipating a push from the top-down before we have any feeling for pull from the bottom-up. The rapid proliferation of distributed energy sources – residential solar installations feeding into battery storage including the batteries in electric vehicles – is starting to give us just that feeling. Those emerging resources are being integrated into the electric ecosystem using digital controls, something new under the sun for the grid. Smart meters and smart inverters can use that digital intelligence in real time. That brings demand management into play so that utilities can partner with their customers to save energy on an as needed basis.

But that’s not where many utilities are headed. The legacy of rural electrification gave many a guaranteed fee they could tack onto the cost of infrastructure and the financing. All of that goes onto their customers’ electric bills – your electric bills. The big players in that arena have been at the forefront of calls for more power lines, big power lines. They will get much more money for that multi-billion dollar infrastructure than a digital build-out of the local and regional transmission grids to tap the emergence of distributed energy resources. They’ve been incentivized to chase those big dollars for more than eighty years, a business model that remains largely unchanged.

But high-voltage power lines are where the chaotic rubber hits the road. In contrast to DC power lines, AC lines are prone to failure and they will remain so. They are best described as non-linear dynamical systems. Any instability can result in blackouts. The larger the system, the more likely those are to occur.

That behavior informs many ecological systems, and the power grid is just such an ecosystem. In my time with the U.S. Forest Service, we used non-linear descriptions to model population dynamics which are also unpredictable. It was understood that without complete knowledge about the state of the system at a precisely defined time (an impossibility), any instability means the trajectory can’t be predicted. Fast-acting controls can help mitigate the resulting fluctuations, but only within well-defined limits. Push past those, and transitions to different states (including complete failure) are the rule.

The world of engineering has recently started to wrestle with this difficult fact. The seminal research only dates to 1982, when it was found that the swing equations used by power system modelers were analogous to those used in the analysis of planetary dynamics. The original work on such systems was initiated by the great French mathematician, Henri Poincaré in the late 1800s. He won an international prize competition by telling the world that solving the equations for gravitational attraction between three planetary objects didn’t have a single solution, and that some of them were beyond calculation. That was a breakthrough that led to a very different way of thinking about systems with feedback.

An AC power grid is just such a system. In a nutshell: even a simple 3-generator system was shown to transition from stable to unstable:

…in response to simulated faults on the line: tweak the operating parameters of the large generator just slightly, and a previously stable grid would run away…

This reality precisely describes the disastrous turn of events in Texas brought on by the cold spell and snowfall of February, 2021. As uninsulated nuclear plants, gas plants, pipelines, and to a lesser extent wind turbines randomly failed, the resulting instabilities pulsed through the Texas grid managed by Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Power would be restored at various intervals and at different locations, only to fail a short time later. The grid was so unstable that it came perilously close to catastrophic collapse. That’s the really important takeaway from the rolling loss of power sources during the blackout, yet it’s barely made the news.

The idea of the electric grid as a non-linear system subject to such behavior has started to take root. A detailed examination of the implications for grid planning was published in Spectrum, the journal of the IEEE, in 2004.

This missive has been met with the same sort of resistance other disciplines have faced when informed that their equations are too sensitive to initial conditions to be absolutely predictive. The answer as mentioned above is emerging and picking up speed though it’s going to take a bit of effort: rework local and regional grids with distributed generation and digital control surfaces to make the grid more stable. Doing that will allow portions of the grid to quickly disconnect themselves when disruptions happen, as they will.

Australia is moving there very quickly, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab has validated that distributed generation can be used to re-energize the grid piece by piece. At the heart of this approach is a model more akin to the bottom-up Internet than top-down control of all the emerging sources. That makes little sense once tens of thousands of such sources are producing and storing electric energy.

We can grow our own and bring utilities to the table as partners, those who are willing to change those obsolete business models. I believe that’s what should happen for the good of all those ecosystems, including the human ones!

ERCOT as it’s known, does not seem to give reliable counsel. Their preferred business model of unregulated laissez-faire economics has been disastrous. They are now being sued by the largest co-op in Texas. In its bankruptcy proceeding, Brazos Electric claims that the disastrous fluctuations in the power grid resulted in per-megawatt charges that went stratospheric during the brutal cold period.

Super Freakout

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Working for the Forest Service, I was often back and forth with leadership teams in Washington, D.C. One of those conversations revolved around a review by Elizabeth Kolbert, in the New Yorker, of Super Freakonomics published in 2009. The review starts with a parable about the projected growth curve for horseshit at the turn of the last century. Once automobiles came around, that problem dissipated – along with the rank odor of New York as the 1800s came to a stinking end.

The book’s take-home is that we just have to think about things differently and all of this stuff about the environment will take care of itself. In other words, we get more of the standard economic mantra from the same folks who brought us the collapse of 2007-2008. That new-world thinking about packaging junk loans into investments, led to old-world gifting: a $17+ trillion dollar bailout as the Fed green-washed Wall Street’s derivative sins in free money.

The horseshit-gone-away parable may be one to take to heart. The ad-hoc engineering so easily floated by the economists whose book she reviews, is much less so. We have a basic problem as humans, at least when thinking through solutions to difficult problems such as climate change. We like very straight lines and find it inconceivable that any man-made or natural system would violate that comfortable principle.

To get a feeling for what’s really going on, try figuring out when the trajectories in the image below will transition from one wing to the other.

Here’s the takeaway from that exercise: for many of us, it’s difficult if not impossible to accept two simple but profound truths:

Image from Wikimedia Commons.
  1. There are completely deterministic systems which are inherently unpredictable because their initial conditions can never be precisely stated and any imprecision – any at all – can put them on a completely different trajectory.
  2. The corollary is that when that path takes it onto an adjacent trajectory, it might just transition very quickly into orbiting around a very different part of the system far removed from the one it left.

So, this isn’t about straight lines. Nonlinear systems with feedback can and do behave exactly as described above. The climate is such a system. The worry is not about global warming. That might simply be a prelude. Warm the world enough to melt the Greenland ice cap – flushing all that fresh water into the North Atlantic – and you have a much bigger problem. That’s about as nonlinear as you can get on the planet and it’s happened many times in the past.

The thermohaline circulation which currently moderates the earth’s climate (we’re in an interglacial cycle within a larger glacial epoch at this point) will shut down. Without that circulation to distribute the heat that gathers at the equator, the climate will transition to another much colder state. If that happens, there’s no short-term return path to the one we’re on now. The bad news is that we have no way of predicting where we are on the current trajectory, how much we’ve done to perturb it, and whether we’ll slip onto one of those funky orbits, one that has us visiting some other system state.

Tweaking the world with giant straws to suck up the bad gases, one of the super-freaky suggestions in the book, reeks of the sort of cuteness that got us mortgage-stuffed derivatives as “investments” – and the lost jobs and sinking retirement funds that came with them.

Any system that requires a measurement unit like the Sverdrup (a million cubic meters of flow past a given point every second!) and that circulates on the order of once every thousand years (!!) is not something we should rationally be messing with. Frankly, I’d rather let the book’s authors play on Wall Street.

The (Forest) Vision Thing

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Logging has always been heavily subsidized in the interior Northwest. That was politically driven and it led us  down the path to overstocked forests. The timber was given away, often below market value let alone at the cost of replacement. That cost is a function of what it takes to grow the next stand. That was never factored in because doing that would have made the timber unsaleable. So the management needed to grow replacement forests has always lagged far behind the desire to keep pushing timber out to the mills.

The natural result is overstocked, and in many cases heavily overstocked, stands that are coming in at hundreds and some times thousands of stems per hectare. That leads to drought-prone soils, and nutrient shortfalls. Fire is the primary means of redress and in lieu of that, insects, so fires suppression hasn’t helped the situation at all.

Speaking of which, insects and those interior forests are so tightly bound they should be considered one biological entity, not two. Spruce budworm, Tussock moth and the Western and Mountain pine beetle are not pests in any sense of the term. Spruce budworm works at the intra-stand level, opening up overstocked forest stands over an 8-10 year period. Tussock moth simply knocks down stands that have encroached onto sites on which they are not suited. It re-sculpts those stands in about three years, probably an adaptation to what we know has been the regular cycling of global temperature over the last 400,000 years. It works at the stand scale. The pine beetle, the most important insect in the Western Hemisphere, will take down all the lodgepole pine for as far as the eye can see, re-setting the clock on those forests. That’s happened in the Canadian Rockies and interior British Columbia over the last 20 years and in many parts of the interior Western US.

Vostok ice-core record, courtesy of AntacticGlaciers.org.

Lodgepole pine only live to be 70-80 years old at which time something has to take them down. We started seriously suppressing fire maybe 100 years ago? I don’t believe the current timeline for lodgepole die-off from the pine beetle is a coincidence.  Moreover if we are experiencing the effects of climate change, that could be one more signal for the beetle to bring it on.

Not enough of that science informed the reaction to those outbreaks, unfortunately. I worked for Forest Service Research  for 26 years and we were the red-haired step-child of the National Forest System. We would write up reports that detailed those relationships only to have many of them ignored. I have an endless supply of stories about that. The key point is this: the only funding available for forest management was from the Knutson-Vandenberg Act – mitigation money for cutting trees. That perverse incentive did exactly what you might imagine, it yoked intelligent management to unprofitable logging, stifling the former and monetizing the latter.

The result, given the excessive drive for that pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow, was a much darker reality – coal in that rainbow stocking if you like. This story, for example, needs airing. The failure of industrial forestry on the Oregon Coast led to an on-going disaster. That narrative is complicated enough that nobody ever seems ready to write about it. Given the difficult questions it asks about the state of industrial forestry, that’s not surprising, but badly needed.

Forest for the ages

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I worked in air quality, water quality, range, wildlife and forestry with the U.S. EPA, and the U.S Forest Service. I did that in Nevada and eastern Oregon for over 30 years. Over that period, it was natural to develop an abiding love for the island forests and woodlands of the interior. and a deep interest in their development since the last glaciation. There can be few places more welcoming on a blistering summer day than under the sun-filtered canopy of an old-growth Ponderosa pine forest, and nothing more sublimely elegant.

Old-growth Ponderosa pine
Old-growth Ponderosa pine: USFS Region 5 / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

How did they get here and how are they doing? They’ve been around a long time, and there should be more big ones than there are. That’s too bad since the plate-like bark, half a foot thick and often outlined in a mosaic pattern of fire-hardened scars – is nearly impervious to any but the largest blazes. Properly managed, these old-growth forests are the best hedge we have against wildfire in this widespread ecosystem. Even in death, the searing heat they’ve experienced over their 300-500 year life-span can seal the trunks off from rot for the next 80-100 years. They are then resurrected as crucial habitat for all the cavity nesting animals. Those creatures can, in turn, play an important role in kick-starting the next forest stand.

I’ve come to feel that, with climate modification a growing planetary concern, the interior western forests offer a crucial reservoir of genetic diversity. If there’s any hope of coping with the changes which might result from a catastrophic shift in the climate regime, it resides in the gene pool of communities like these dryland forests.

The Lost Forest Research Natural Area, Central Oregon
The Lost Forest can be found… miles from the drying shadow of the Cascade Range.

Ponderosa Pine (Pinus Ponderosa) defines the margin of many interior forests in the western United States. It’s the most drought tolerant giant conifer in North America. Paleobotanists examining the fossil record have found evidence that, in the recent past, forests of Ponderosa have existed in many different configurations. Plant associations which have no current analogs can be found in that record, an indication that “Range shifts occurred that could not have been predicted ...” and that these shifts “…apparently led to anomalous species associations“

The implications of this research are of major importance. They offer up some hope of coping with the changes in the variation of seasonal precipitation and temperature which will result from broad-scale climate modifications.

That’s because, from the fossil evidence mentioned above, we now know that the genes of these forest types represent a large reservoir of unexpressed diversity. This diversity provides a crucial hedge against climate change. It allows drought tolerant Ponderosa pine forests to adapt quickly to altered conditions. That’s happened many times in the past, that’s what this evidence tells us.

Unfortunately, this diversity has gone unacknowledged resulting in the failure of silvicultural theory on both public and private lands in the West. Foresters chose to “liquidate” stands of old-growth Ponderosa Pine in favor of what they promised would be faster growing stands of other conifers. The idea was to make more money off these new forests. But this attempt at forcing moderate to low-elevation sites to produce as if they were industrial forest plantations has failed. Insects, well-adapted to that same variation in climatic forcing, re-worked overstocked stands of drought-intolerant species, just as if there had been a change in the climate.

The message is clear: at the forest margin, trees other than Ponderosa pine are a minor component, so Ponderosa is what should be there. But since they are slow-growing many of these stands cannot be economically cropped now or in the future. Selective cutting, with its much lower rate-of-return, should be the only way we remove trees from these forests. The fact is, these pine forests are much more valuable for their water, forage, recreation and soil stabilization potential than as poorly managed quasi-industrial croplands.

We need to to insure the health of these forests. In their genes they carry a message from a long-distant past, one that may help us find our way in a very uncertain future.

US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station

1.  Spaulding, W. G. The last glacial-interglacial climatic cycle: its effects on woodlands and forests in the American West. in Eight North American Forest Biology Workshop (Dept. of Forest Resources, Utah State Univ., 1984).

Central Asia as Surrogate

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Years ago, at the Forestry and Range Lab where I worked, we hosted Alexander Isaev, then Forest Minister of the old Soviet Union. He’d been appointed to the position because, as he told me through his interpreter, he’d “complained so much that Gorbachev said ‘you take the job'”. The very first thing I’d questioned him about was his impression of traveling through Oregon. He’d just flown in from the other side of the Cascades the previous evening. That thin strip of well-watered forest usually draws all the attention from visitors, especially the lush temperate rain-forest in the coastal mountains. A world-away from the dry interior, it edges its way southward along the Pacific Coast down from British Columbia, finally tapering to a width of of no more than a few miles populated by redwood stragglers tucked away on isolated mountain peaks and in the hidden canyons fingering into Mediterranean California. I was expecting he’d reflect on that world. Instead he paused for a few seconds and looked up and away, into his past it seems. When he woke that morning and looked out his window, he thought of his first posting as a young forester, to Samarkand.

That’s a clue, and a good one. Much of Central Asia has a similar climate to the American West. I remember eagerly leafing through Heinrich Walter’s Climate Diagram World Atlas many years ago (some of which have now found their way online), quickly locating analogs to the climate of the region we’d moved to in Northeast Oregon. These analogs included places like Van, Turkey and Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

The difference is that such a vast place has been host to any number of nomadic tribes roaming from Europe to Asia and back, a human wave of aggregate demand on the land that was just as vast in its effects. We’ve all heard the stories of ransack, rape, and pillage. Notice that those are all human-centered observations. What usually gets lost in the telling is the ecological history of the Eurasian landmass.

Any number of  dramatic mountains and highlands  should, and at one time did, host thickly forested montane ecosystems. Some, such as the Anatolian plateau, the Lebanon, and anti-Lebanon ranges, and the Zagros mountains have been deprived of most of their forest cover.  Too often that has meant the soil that held them in place and nourished them has vanished as well. First the superstructure of trees that ameliorated the above-ground climate and tempered the erosive force of water was removed. Then the substrate that acted not just as a physical prop, but which hosted the nutrients needed to feed the trees, and likely the micro-organisms needed to produce future forest stands as well, was carried off by wind and water.

Other mountain systems have been subjected to an ever-retreating treeline which has pushed those ecosystems further and further up their heights. The Caucasus, the Tien-Shan, and other spectacular ranges have seen their share of human activity and the impact has been significant.

Rainshadow…

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What makes the American West different? My guess is the length of time it’s been subject to dense human settlement and the serendipitous arrival of those settlers when fuel sources other than wood were just becoming available.

There are at least a few parts of the world that have similar climate patterns and vegetation, though the very size of the ecosystem in Western North America insures that there won’t be many worldwide. The mountain blocks that divide wet from dry, or at the very least semi-arid from arid, stretch from British Columbia down through much of Mexico with only a few gaps in between. The coast  mountains of BC, the Cascade mountains in the Northwestern United States, the Sierra Nevada down through California extending southward to the coastal ranges of California, and the massive Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico all cut the interior off from Pacific storm systems that might otherwise provide moisture to the drylands. At it’s widest extent, crest to crest from Mt. Whitney to the Front Range in Colorado, the dry gap is easily 900 miles across while north to south, it encompasses a few thousand miles at the very least

To get an idea of how extensive it is, we can use a proxy. Ponderosa Pine is just such a stand-in. It’s a species that conveniently fringes the dry interior of the western continent, separating the xeric domain from the wetter ecosystems that lead up to the adjacent high country, if any.

As befits good tree-people, the U. S. Forest Service, in the person of E. L. Little, Jr, lovingly built up an atlas of maps showing the geographic range of all the species in the United States. That was in the 1970’s. I picked up my copy of Volume I years ago at a yard sale. The cover was a bit charred from fire, appropriately enough. Otherwise the volume was completely intact and in very good condition including the delicate transparent overlays threaded through with solid isopleths for rainfall, temperature, and other important environmental variables. These overlays chart the chromosomal DNA for our North American landscapes! The range maps in their entirety have been digitized and are available on the Internet courtesy of the USFS. If you care about such things it’s easy to lose yourself at the site for hours.

Climate diagrams are a great way to draw a bead on similar climatic patterns. These patterns largely determine the ecophysiology of a place and the kind of vegetation that can grow there. Places with comparable climate often host similar plant communities, communities that have developed on convergent evolutionary pathways. The look of these communities can be startling in their visual coincidence, even when those communities are composed of different genera. For example, the Ethiopian desert hosts a community with euphorbia, aloe, and acacia that mirror the plant communities of Sonoran Arizona, with its cactus, yucca, and mesquite.