History > 2014 > USA > Environment, climate, weather (I)

Terry Stevens,

a rancher in Browns Valley, Calif.,

at a University of California Cooperative Extension drought survival workshop

last week.

Jason Henry for The New York Times

  Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst

NYT

1.2.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/us/severe-drought-has-us-west-fearing-worst.html

Tinderbox Explodes

in Wildfires Across Northwest

 

JULY 21, 2014

The New York Times

By KIRK JOHNSON

SEATTLE — A cool, wet spring that drew out luxuriant growth in parts of the Pacific Northwest, followed by a ferociously hot and dry early summer, has created a fire-season tinderbox across the Pacific Northwest that exploded over the past week with dozens of wildfires burning hundreds of thousands of acres and forcing thousands of residents from their homes.

More than 3,500 people, including fire crews from all over the country and National Guard troops in Washington and Oregon, have been battling the fires. Spreading mostly across sparsely populated areas, the fires have a vast scope: Less than a week into the typical three-month fire season in Washington and Oregon, the total area of scorched ground is already higher than in any full year in at least a decade.

With the fire season elsewhere in the nation relatively quiet, the blazes in Oregon and Washington now account for a majority of the 33 large and uncontained wildfires being battled. The nearly 1,400 square miles — much of it grassland — burned in those two states accounts for more than two-thirds of the nation’s total wildfire losses since January.

The fires are having a stunningly visible impact in another way: A vast plume of smoke from them has drifted east and, along with smoke from a huge series of fires in the Northwest Territories in Canada, is spewing ash particulates across much of the United States from the Gulf of Mexico to New England, according to satellite imagery.

“The whole West is dry; they just happen to be at the ignition source,” said Jennifer Smith, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

Fire officials said Monday that an interlude of cooler, damper weather, with the possibility even of some rain by midweek, had raised hopes that nature would intervene where human effort has in many cases been unsuccessful. The single largest fire, for example, in north-central Washington — really a combination of three fires that merged, called the Carlton Complex — has burned about 380 square miles and is only 2 percent contained.

The Carlton Complex has also damaged or destroyed about 150 structures, with one fatality attributed to it — a homeowner who had a heart attack while trying to protect his home. Thousands of residents have evacuated, with 1,200 families still out of their homes in 12 communities as of Monday morning, along a strip of mostly small agricultural towns on the eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains.

Washington’s commissioner of public lands, Peter J. Goldmark, said the cooler, damper weather was welcome, but the longer term forecast into next week is not so good, from a firefighter’s perspective. Much of the Northwest baked in a heat wave in early July, with temperatures over 100 in places and lower than normal humidity. The fires mostly flickered to life last Monday and Tuesday with lightning storms that were followed later in the week by winds of 30 miles per hour or more that provided oxygen like a bellows.
 

“I think it would be presumptive to think that there isn’t more of the same coming,” Mr. Goldmark said, referring to the dry, hot weather pattern.

Some of the fires, in high elevation timber and National Forest lands, where few residents or communities are at risk, are being allowed to burn. The ones considered most dangerous — and where resources are being concentrated — are in the lower elevations where grass and timberlands merge.

The fires snake in a twisting pattern nearly 40 miles long by 27 wide. But in many places, witnesses and firefighters said, the landscape within the fire complex looks less like a traditional wildfire than a constellation of small and large blazes in every direction.

Another fire cluster, called the Chiwaukum Complex, was within about nine miles of the tourist community of Leavenworth, where ash and smoke hung over the landscape.

Late Sunday, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington amended an emergency declaration to include a ban on most outdoor and agricultural burning for 20 counties east of the crest of the Cascades, beginning immediately and continuing until at least noon on Friday.

“Weather conditions including high winds, lightning and high temperatures continue to make conditions extremely challenging,” Mr. Inslee said. “Our resources are stretched thin.”

A spokesman for the Oregon Department of Forestry, Rod Nichols, said that with so many fires burning, fire becomes an inevitable hierarchy of risks, consequences and deployment. Oregon’s biggest fire, known as the Buzzard Complex, has burned more than 369,000 acres of mostly grassland in the state’s east central area, but much of the state’s valuable timberland has so far been spared, Mr. Nichols said.

“But with so many fires, it’s hard to single one out and say this is the bad one,” he said. “They’re all bad.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2014, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Tinderbox Explodes in Wildfires Across Northwest.

    Tinderbox Explodes in Wildfires Across Northwest, NYT, 21.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/us/
    wildfires-in-washington-and-oregon-scorch-more-ground-in-2014.html

Saving Water in California

JULY 9, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

California is in the third year of its worst drought in decades. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at how much water the state’s residents and businesses are using. According to a recent state survey, Californians cut the amount of water they used in the first five months of the year by just 5 percent, far short of the 20 percent reduction Gov. Jerry Brown called for in January. In some parts of the state, like the San Diego area, water use has actually increased from 2013.

Without much stronger conservation measures, the state, much of which is arid or semiarid, could face severe water shortages if the drought does not break next year. Los Angeles recently recorded its lowest rainfall for two consecutive years, and climate change will likely make drought a persistent condition, according to the National Climate Assessment report published in May.

Yet, even now, 70 percent of water districts have not imposed reasonable mandatory restrictions on watering lawns and keeping backyard pools filled. The State Water Resources Control Board is to consider placing restrictions on some outdoor water uses like washing paved surfaces at a meeting on July 15.

California’s agriculture sector is the largest in the country, and it accounts for about 80 percent of the state’s water use. Even a small percentage reduction in the fields could have a sizable effect on total water consumption.

A recent report by the Pacific Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that agricultural water use could be reduced by up to 22 percent if farmers more carefully scheduled the watering of crops based on weather and soil conditions and if they used the drip irrigation systems that deliver water directly to the roots of plants. Some progress has been made. About 38 percent of California farmland was irrigated by more efficient systems in 2010, up from 15 percent in 1991. But far too many farmers still irrigate by flooding their fields.

In terms of urban conservation, the report shows that homes and businesses could reduce water use by up to 60 percent by using it more efficiently, recycling and reusing water and capturing more rainwater. Some efficiency improvements are simple and could be done quickly, like installing water meters at all homes and businesses. Currently, about 250,000 water-utility customers, most of them in the Central Valley, have no meters and are charged a flat monthly fee regardless of how much water they use — a practice that invites waste.

Other changes will take longer to carry out but could have a big impact. For instance, Santa Cruz’s municipal water utility imposes water “budgeting” under which it determines how much water each home needs based on where it is and the number of people in the household. Customers who use more than their budgeted amount must pay higher rates for extra water used. This approach has helped Santa Cruz cut water use by about 30 percent since 1987.

Other government programs have been effective, too, and deserve broader adoption. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power last month began paying people $3 for every square foot of grass they replace with landscaping that requires little or no water under a “cash in your lawn” program, up from $2 previously; residents can claim up to $6,000 under that program. The department says it has paid to have 8 million square feet of lawn removed since the program started in 2009.

Finally, state officials need to act with a much greater urgency. Earlier this year, the State Legislature set aside nearly $700 million for emergency drought relief, but 90 percent of that money has yet to be spent. Mr. Brown’s administration should think a lot bigger than emergency aid aimed at a single drought. The state must focus on longer-term policies that encourage people to alter their lifestyles and businesses to change how they operate.


A version of this editorial appears in print on July 10, 2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Saving Water in California.

    Saving Water in California, NYT, 9.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/opinion/saving-water-in-california.html

Californians

Keep Up With Joneses’ Water Use

JULY 4, 2014

The New York Times

By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — For all the doomsday proclamations about the historic drought that has this state in a chokehold, here is what Californians have done to save water: not much.

In five months since the drought emergency was declared, Californians have cut their water consumption only 5 percent compared with recent years, according to state officials — a far cry from the 20 percent that Gov. Jerry Brown called for in January.

So, faced with apparent indifference to stern warnings from state leaders and media alarms, cities across California have encouraged residents to tattle on their neighbors for wasting water — and the residents have responded in droves. Sacramento, for instance, has received more than 6,000 reports of water waste this year, up twentyfold from last year.

Loretta Franzi has called the Sacramento water-waste hotline “a number of times” in recent months.

“You can hear people running their sprinklers when it’s dark because they don’t want to get caught watering when they’re not supposed to be — it’s maddening,” said Ms. Franzi, 61, a retiree. “You can tell the people who are conserving because their lawns are brown. The lawns that are really green, there’s something wrong.”

Sacramento has issued more than 2,000 notices of violations since the start of the year — including citations to some of Ms. Franzi’s neighbors — and the city is part of a region that has reduced its water consumption 10 percent from previous years, the highest percentage of any region in the state. (Not every water agency in the state responded to the board’s survey, though most did.)

“It’s becoming a competition to not have the greenest lawn anymore,” said Dave Brent, the director of utilities in Sacramento. “You want to have a lawn that’s alive but on life support.”

It does get personal. Some drought-conscious Californians have turned not only to tattling, but also to an age-old strategy to persuade friends and neighbors to cut back: shaming. On Twitter, radio shows and elsewhere, Californians are indulging in such sports as shower-shaming (trying to embarrass a neighbor or relative who takes a leisurely wash), car-wash-shaming and lawn-shaming.

“Is washing the sidewalk with water a good idea in a drought @sfgov?” Sahand Mirzahossein, a 32-year-old management consultant, posted on Twitter, along with a picture of a San Francisco city employee cleaning the sidewalk with a hose. (He said he hoped a city official would respond to his post, but he never heard back.)

Drought-shaming may sound like a petty, vindictive strategy, and officials at water agencies all denied wanting to shame anyone, preferring to call it “education” or “competition.” But there are signs that pitting residents against one another can pay dividends.

In Los Angeles, water officials will soon offer residents door hangers, which they are encouraged to slip anonymously around the doorknobs of neighbors whose sprinklers are watering the sidewalk. The notices offer a prim reminder of the local water rules and the drought.

The Irvine Ranch Water District, meanwhile, shows residents how their water consumption compares with that of other homes in the area — and puts labels on customers’ bills that range from “low volume” to “wasteful.”

“Not everyone realizes what a severe drought we’re in, or understands how their actions affect the whole system,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, which issued the report on water saving. “Just showing people what they’re doing vis-à-vis their neighbors motivates them. Shaming comes in when you’re worse. You want to be as clever as your neighbor.”

Of course, asking neighbors to inform on one another does come with drawbacks.

In Santa Cruz, dozens of complaints have come from just a few residents, who seem to be trying to use the city’s tight water restrictions to indulge old grudges.

“You get people who hate their neighbors and chronically report them in hopes they’ll be thrown in prison for wasting water,” said Eileen Cross, Santa Cruz’s water conservation manager. People claim water-waste innocence, she said, and ask: “Was that my neighbor? She’s been after me ever since I got that dog.”

Ms. Franzi said that in her Sacramento neighborhood, people were now looking askance at one another, wondering who reported them for wasting water.

“There’s a lot of suspiciousness,” Ms. Franzi said. “It’s a little uncomfortable at this point.” She pointed out that she and her husband have proudly replaced their green lawn with drought-resistant plants, and even cut back showers to once every few days.

One of her neighbors, a woman in her 90s, is convinced that Ms. Franzi reported her to the city.

“Right now, she’s out watering the grass with the hose in the middle of the day, looking over her shoulder at me like, ‘Are you going to report me?’ ” Ms. Franzi said.

(Ms. Franzi insisted that she did not report this neighbor, saying she did not feel comfortable issuing a complaint about someone she knew personally.)

On the flip side are people who have tried to turn dead, brown lawns into a source of pride, planting signs atop them with slogans like “Gold is the new green.” Even the lawn at the State Capitol has been allowed to die.

The challenge of persuading urban Californians to cut back is particularly difficult, said Ms. Marcus of the State Water Resources Control Board, because they do not see the fallow fields and dry reservoirs across the state.

With water still flowing very cheaply from the taps and lawns still green here, many people around Los Angeles said they were not especially concerned about running out of water, whatever the dire warnings, and doubted their own showers or dishwashing would have any discernible effect.

“I might turn the faucet off when I’m brushing my teeth or something,” said Ragan Wallake, 34, a resident of the lush neighborhood of West Hollywood. “But I don’t feel like that three seconds of turning off the water is going to make a difference.”

She has a point. Most homes in Southern California have already been outfitted with efficient shower heads, toilets and garden hoses, making it harder for residents to significantly reduce their water consumption than it was during the last severe drought a quarter-century ago.

Even those who are already water-conscious can occasionally benefit from guilt-laden reminders, though.

Femke Oldham, a graduate student who has studied resource conservation at the University of California, Berkeley, was walking with her fiancé on a sunny weekend when they passed a few children throwing water balloons. She suggested it would be fun to get some of their own.

He shot back, “Femke, we’re in a drought.”

“It made me feel guilty for wanting to use water in a way that was not necessary,” said Ms. Oldham, 29.

Alina Weinstein, 27, a web developer in Los Angeles, has also been called out for small acts of water waste; one of her co-workers reprimanded her for letting the kitchen faucet run for just a moment after she had finished washing her cup.

She has since reformed. Still, she does not believe the city pipes will run dry anytime soon.

“I’m more afraid of earthquakes rather than water running out in my faucet,” she said.

Robert B. Gunnison contributed reporting from Sacramento.

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Californians Keep Up With Joneses’ Water Use.

    Californians Keep Up With Joneses’ Water Use, NYT, 4.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/us/
    californians-keep-up-with-joneses-water-use.html

Justices Uphold

Emission Limits on Big Industry

 

JUNE 23, 2014
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — In a big win for environmentalists, the Supreme Court on Monday effectively endorsed the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from sources like power plants, even as it criticized what it called the administration’s overreaching.

The decision is one in a recent string of rulings upholding the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to issue Clean Air Act regulations to curb climate change, and the agency celebrated the decision.

But the combative tone of Monday’s ruling, along with its rejection of one of the agency’s principal rationales for the regulations under review, suggests that the road ahead may be rocky for other initiatives meant to reduce carbon emissions.

The decision, said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, “gave the agency a tongue-lashing and suggested the potential for some significant limitations on how the agency chooses to exercise its authority in the future.”

In a part of the ruling decided by a 7-to-2 vote, the court said the E.P.A. could regulate sources of greenhouse gases as long as they would already need permits for emitting conventional pollutants. That approach allowed the agency to regulate large, industrial polluters, such as power plants and oil refineries, and exempted millions of the nation’s small-scale carbon emitters, such as schools, apartment buildings and individual businesses like Dunkin’ Donuts or Chipotle.

In carving out the small emitters, the court effectively agreed with the agency, which saw such broad regulations as an unwieldy nightmare.

“E.P.A. is getting almost everything it wanted in this case,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in summarizing the decision. “It sought to regulate sources it said were responsible for 86 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted from stationary sources nationwide. Under our holdings, E.P.A. will be able to regulate sources responsible for 83 percent of those emissions.”

(“Stationary sources” are buildings like factories and power plants; the agency also regulates tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks.)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined that part of the decision.

The agency expressed satisfaction with the ruling. “The Supreme Court’s decision is a win for our efforts to reduce carbon pollution because it allows E.P.A., states and other permitting authorities to continue to require carbon pollution limits in permits for the largest pollution sources,” the agency said in a statement.

Another part of Monday’s decision rejected the agency’s primary rationale for the regulations. The agency had contended that it would interpret the Clean Air Act to require the regulation of far fewer stationary sources of pollution than the law seemed to require.

“An agency has no power to ‘tailor’ legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms,” Justice Scalia wrote. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined that part of the decision, which was decided by a 5-to-4 vote.
Continue reading the main story

The solution was not to require broader regulation, Justice Scalia said. Rather, he said, the practical problems identified by the agency were reason to think it was misreading the statute. “It would be patently unreasonable — not to say outrageous — for E.P.A. to insist on seizing expansive power that it admits the statute is not designed to grant,” Justice Scalia wrote

The National Federation of Independent Business, a plaintiff in the case, welcomed what it said was the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow the agency to rewrite the statute.

“If this rule had been allowed to stand, small-business owners such as ranchers, farmers, manufacturers, restaurant owners and others would have seen more paperwork, more oversight and fines,” the group said in a statement.

Supporters of President Obama’s climate change agenda said the ruling did not affect the administration’s recently proposed regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

“The E.P.A. has just proposed standards to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, and that critical work will move ahead to protect Americans from the worst impacts of climate change,” said David Doniger, director of the clean air and climate change program with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.

But legal experts said that Monday’s decision also included a warning that the court’s view of the E.P.A.’s regulatory authority has its limits.

“We are not willing to stand on the dock and wave goodbye as E.P.A. embarks on this multiyear voyage of discovery,” Justice Scalia wrote.

That statement was “a warning shot,” said Jody Freeman, a law professor at Harvard. “It suggests that the courts will look skeptically at assertions of authority that are very new and very far-reaching.”

Still, the agency has been on a winning streak. In April, the Supreme Court upheld its authority to regulate smog from coal plants that drifts across state lines, a ruling that Professor Lazarus called “one of E.P.A.’s biggest wins ever in the court.” After Monday’s ruling, he said, “E.P.A. walked away standing, but not quite as tall as before.”

The regulations challenged in Monday’s decision built on the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in 2007 in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, which required the agency to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles if it found that they endangered public health or welfare.

The agency made such a finding, saying that “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” pose a danger to “current and future generations,” and it set limits on emissions from new vehicles.

The agency said its regulation of tailpipe emissions also required regulation of emissions from stationary sources under two permitting programs. While acknowledging that the relevant provisions of the Clean Air Act fit such emissions imperfectly, the agency said the law nonetheless compelled it to require permits.

The Clean Air Act says those programs cover all sources that can annually emit 100 tons or 250 tons of the relevant pollutant, a threshold that works tolerably well for conventional air pollutants like lead and carbon monoxide. But that threshold, applied to greenhouse gases, which are emitted in far greater amounts, would require the regulation of millions of sources of pollution.

Applying the law as written would increase the number of covered sources under one program to more than 80,000, from just hundreds, reaching commercial and residential sources and subjecting them to expenses averaging almost $60,000, according to a decision under review from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

A second program would reach six million sources, subjecting them to expenses of more than $20,000 each. The cost of administering the programs would rise to $21 billion from $62 million, and the new covered sources, Justice Scalia wrote, would face costs of $147 billion.

The agency said Congress could not have intended such an “absurd result.” Its solution was to raise the statutory emissions threshold to 75,000 to 100,000 tons per year, thus reaching far fewer facilities. This was, it said, a permissible exercise of discretion and one subject to tightening over time.

Justice Scalia, writing for five justices, rejected that approach. “It is hard to imagine a statutory term less ambiguous than the precise numerical thresholds at which the act requires,” he wrote.

Endorsing the agency’s approach, he added, “would deal a severe blow to the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

Justice Breyer, writing for the court’s four-member liberal wing in a partial dissent on this point, said the agency’s approach was a sensible attempt to apply the purpose of the Clean Air Act.

The dispute had little immediate practical effect, as the other part of Justice Scalia’s opinion, now speaking for seven justices, allowed the agency to get to largely the same place by a different route by sustaining regulation of carbon emissions from sources already subject to regulation for conventional pollutants.

“We are not talking about extending E.P.A. jurisdiction over millions of previously unregulated entities,” Justice Scalia wrote, “but about moderately increasing the demands E.P.A. (or a state permitting authority) can make of entities already subject to its regulation.” But he acknowledged that the two approaches are almost equally effective.

Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented from that part of the decision, Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 12-1146.

A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Justices Uphold Emission Limits On Big Industry.

    Justices Uphold Emission Limits on Big Industry, NYT, 23.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/24/us/
    justices-with-limits-let-epa-curb-power-plant-gases.html

Too Hot to Handle

June 23, 2014
12:01 am
The New York Times
By JANE E. BRODY
 

Hot weather kills more Americans than all other natural disasters combined, and the casualties continue to climb despite decades of warnings about how to recognize the signs of heat stress and take prompt corrective action.

With climate change, some experts predict ever-worsening summer heat waves and even more related illnesses and deaths. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that excessive heat caused by climate change could kill more than 150,000 Americans by the end of the century in the 40 largest cities.

“As carbon pollution continues to rise, the number of dangerously hot days each summer will increase even further, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of lives lost,” the council reported.

Extreme heat claims an average of 117 lives each year, but the real incidence is likely far higher. In addition, about 1,800 people die from illnesses made worse by heat, the council estimates.

“Death rates from many causes rise during heat waves that are related to heat but not reported as such,” said Dr. Christopher B. Colwell, director of emergency medicine at Denver Health Medical Center. “Lots of deaths that occur during heat waves are attributed to natural causes like heart attacks, kidney disease or respiratory disease.”

Especially at risk are the elderly, young children, athletes of all ages and weekend warriors whose bodies are not adapted to heat stress.

“As common as the problem is, it’s not common enough to grab people’s attention until it hits close to home,” Dr. Colwell said in an interview.

Even a high-profile death, like that of Korey Stringer, 27, a Minnesota Vikings offensive tackle who suffered heatstroke after a summer morning practice in 2001, has not prompted all coaches to take necessary precautions.

“Many coaches have held practices in the heat for years and no one died, so they think a bigger deal is being made of the problem than it really is,” Dr. Colwell said.

In the six years before Stringer’s death, 19 high school and college players died from heatstroke, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina. Too often, a player suffering from heat exhaustion, the first stage of a potentially life-threatening heat illness, is sent back on the field after a brief rest instead of being benched for the day or longer.

While deaths of healthy young athletes tend to be well publicized, the elderly are much more likely to succumb to extreme heat. Dr. Colwell explained that with age, the body’s ability to cool itself declines. Among other changes, blood vessels don’t dilate as readily to allow heat to escape, a problem made worse by conditions like congestive heart failure and peripheral vascular disease.

Many older people without air-conditioning or fans may not know when to get out of the heat, or they may be physically unable to leave an overheated dwelling.

Dehydration, a common problem among the elderly as well as among younger people who exercise strenuously, raises the risk of heat illness by diminishing the body’s ability to lose heat.

Medications taken by many older people also increase their vulnerability to heat stress, among them beta blockers prescribed for high blood pressure and anticholinergics used to treat lung problems and urinary incontinence.

Other drugs, too, can contribute to a hypersensitivity to heat, including lithium, tricyclic antidepressants, antihistamines and antispasmodics. Recreational drugs, like cocaine, amphetamines, PCP and alcohol, can be a problem as well.

Heat illness often occurs several days into a heat wave, as the effects on the body accumulate.

The body normally operates within a rather narrow temperature range. If body temperature rises above 105 degrees Fahrenheit, enzymes begin to break down and normal metabolic processes are disrupted. When Stringer collapsed, his temperature registered above 108 degrees.

Body heat is dissipated through four mechanisms: conduction, convection, radiation and evaporation. When the air temperature rises above 98.6 degrees, heat cannot be conducted away from the body unless a significant breeze creates a convection current, or windchill.

Heat radiates from the body when blood vessels are maximally dilated and the air temperature is lower than body temperature. But the most effective natural coolant is sweat; as it collects on the skin and evaporates, it draws heat from the body.

The risk of heat illness rises with the heat index, a combined measure of air temperature and relative humidity. When the humidity is high (or too much clothing is worn), sweat simply rolls off the skin without evaporating and cooling it.

Coaches, take note: depending on athletes’ ages, intensity of activity and degree of acclimatization, you should consider canceling practice and games when the heat index exceeds 105, experts say. City dwellers are most at risk during heat waves because paved surfaces, tall buildings and minimal tree cover enhance heat absorption, creating a “heat island.”

Heat illness is a form of hyperthermia, defined as a rise in core body temperature. But it does not respond to fever-reducing medications, making it extremely important to recognize heat exhaustion, an early sign of trouble. Common complaints include fatigue, dizziness, weakness, headache, nausea and muscle cramps.

Dr. Colwell explained that the brain’s cerebellum is especially sensitive to heat, which explains the early signs of a heatstroke: unsteady gait, confusion and disorientation. Heatstroke, characterized by a rise in body temperature above 104 degrees, has a death rate as high as 50 percent. Symptoms typically include a change in mental status, like delirium, seizures or even coma.

Among the elderly, heatstroke most often develops gradually, over several hot days. But among otherwise healthy people engaged in strenuous exercise, it tends to occur suddenly, within minutes to hours, which demands particular attention to early symptoms.

    Too Hot to Handle, NYT, 23.6.2014,
    http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/too-hot-to-handle/

Arizona Cities Could Face Cutbacks

in Water From Colorado River,

Officials Say

JUNE 17, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

Arizona could be forced to cut water deliveries to its two largest cities unless states that tap the dwindling Colorado River find ways to reduce water consumption and deal with a crippling drought, officials of the state’s canal network said Tuesday.

The warning comes as the federal Bureau of Reclamation forecasts that Lake Mead, a Colorado River reservoir that is the network’s sole water source, will fall next month to a level not seen since the lake was first filled in 1938.

Officials of the Central Arizona Project, which manages the 336-mile water system, say the two cities, Phoenix and Tucson, could replace the lost water, at least in the short term, by tapping groundwater supplies, lakes and rivers.

If they do not reduce consumption, the cuts could be necessary by as early as 2019, according to an analysis by the water project, and officials said that depending on drought conditions, the chances of water cutbacks by 2026 could be as high as 29 percent.

Although experts have been aware for years that shortages would eventually occur, the analysis represents a marked turnabout in officials’ thinking.

“We’re dealing with a very serious issue, and people need to pay attention to it,” Sharon Megdal, a University of Arizona water expert and board member of the Central Arizona Project, said in an interview. “The possibility of cutbacks of water deliveries to municipalities is higher than we’ve ever thought it was going to be.”

The mere prospect of a shortage in Arizona cities, now raised publicly for the first time, is but a proxy for the rising concern among many experts over a longer-term water crisis across the entire Southwest. States along the lower Colorado River use much more water than flows into the lake in an average year, a deficit that upstream states shouldered for decades by opening their reservoir sluices to release more water.

But the drought has all but ended that practice, and Lake Mead has begun a sharp decline; the principal upstream reservoir, Lake Powell, now holds only 42 percent of its capacity, and Lake Mead about 45 percent.

If upstream states continue to be unable to make up the shortage, Lake Mead, whose surface is now about 1,085 feet above sea level, will drop to 1,000 feet by 2020. Under present conditions, that would cut off most of Las Vegas’s water supply and much of Arizona’s. Phoenix gets about half its water from Lake Mead, and Tucson nearly all of its.

As a practical matter, neither the states nor the federal government can allow major cities to run dry. But because the lakes’ water levels drop faster the lower they get — the canyons holding their water are V-shaped — Arizona officials say governments must act soon to stave off that worst-case scenario.

Under an accord negotiated in 2007, the lower Colorado states have already laid out cuts in water deliveries for every 25-foot drop in Mead’s level, down to 1,025 feet above sea level. For example, Arizona farmers are expected to lose some of their allotment when the lake falls below 1,075 feet.

But lake levels lower than 1,025 feet are uncharted territory. “We have a plan to deal with less severe shortages, but we need to start coming up with a plan to avoid deeper shortages, or to figure out how to deal with the impacts that will come,” said Tom Buschatzke, an assistant director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

Tom McCann, the Central Arizona Project’s assistant general manager for operations, said the states needed to reduce Lake Mead drawdowns by at least 800,000 or 900,000 acre-feet of the 10.2 million taken each year.

An end to the drought, followed by a few years of heavy rains, could rescue the states. But many now say that climate change would make that a temporary respite. Most scientists believe global warming will make an already arid region even drier in this century.

“We can’t expect to live on releases from the upper basin anymore,” Mr. McCann said. “The states need to come together and make hard choices so we can stem the decline of Lake Mead.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

Arizona Cities Could Face Cutbacks in Water

From Colorado River, Officials Say.

    Arizona Cities Could Face Cutbacks in Water From Colorado River,
    Officials Say, NYT, 17.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/us/
    arizona-cities-could-face-cutbacks-in-water-from-colorado-river-officials-say.html

Nearing a Climate Legacy

 

JUNE 2, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages | Editorial

The greenhouse gas reductions required by the Obama administration’s proposed rule on power plants will not get the world to where it has to go to avert the worst consequences of climate change. But they are likely to be enormously beneficial: good for the nation’s health, good for technological innovation, good for President Obama’s credibility abroad, and, in time, good for the planet and future generations.

The proposed rule — and the importance of this cannot be overstated — signals the end of an era in which polluters could dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without penalty. It would set new emissions standards for America’s existing power plants, which generate 38 percent of the emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and one-third of overall greenhouse gas emissions. The broad goal is to cut these emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. This means that many of the nation’s roughly 550 coal-fired power plants, which are much dirtier than plants powered by natural gas, will have to close or undergo expensive upgrades.

The 2030 target is ambitious but hardly unattainable. Emissions from power plants have already fallen roughly 13 percent from the 2005 baseline partly because tougher rules on pollutants like mercury have forced some coal-fired plants to close or become more efficient and partly because cheap and cleaner natural gas is edging out coal as the fuel of choice among big generators. In other words, the country is almost halfway to its goal. A recent study by M.J. Bradley, a Boston consulting firm, showed that 100 of the largest power producers steadily reduced pollutants of all kinds, including carbon dioxide, between 2008 and 2012.

If it withstands almost certain legal and legislative challenges, the rule also means that Mr. Obama’s pledge in Copenhagen in 2009 to cut America’s overall greenhouse gases by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 202o is well within reach. And it will give him leverage as he leads this country into the next round of global climate negotiations. World leaders will meet this fall in New York with an eye to producing ambitious new national emissions targets by next spring and, perhaps, a new global climate treaty by the end of 2015.

Mr. Obama’s credibility will be enhanced by the fact that he has begun this process on his own, in the face of a hostile Congress. After a bill imposing a price on carbon that passed the House in 2009 found no takers in the Senate, Mr. Obama decided to invoke executive powers to impose the kinds of limits that Congress had refused to entertain. Two Supreme Court rulings have said he has the authority under the Clean Air Act to do so.

The issue now is how tough the new standards can be and how they are to be achieved. The rule provides industry and the states — which, by law, share responsibility for carrying out the rule — with considerable flexibility.

Each state will be given a reduction target tailored to its energy mix. States will be able to decide how best to meet their targets, using an array of strategies of their choosing — deploying more renewable energy sources like wind and solar and more natural gas, ramping up energy efficiency, creating regional cap-and-trade initiatives aimed at the greatest reductions at the lowest cost.

Even so, Mr. Obama and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy, have been accused of a power grab, of governing by fiat, of declaring a war on coal. Jobs will indeed be lost in coal country and costs imposed on industry. But, over time, these jobs are likely to be replaced by new jobs created by the retrofitting of much of the current energy delivery system and by the expansion of alternative energy sources. And because the rule will also greatly reduce harmful toxic pollutants, the costs will be more than offset by health savings — by a ratio of as much as $7 in savings to every $1 invested in cleaner energy.

So far, Mr. Obama’s major environmental achievement has been a set of landmark fuel economy standards that will greatly reduce automotive carbon emissions and rested on essentially the same legal authority. This new rule is his last big chance to enlarge that legacy.


A version of this editorial appears in print on June 3, 2014,

on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:

Nearing a Climate Legacy.

    Nearing a Climate Legacy, NYT, 2.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/opinion/nearing-a-climate-legacy.html

Using Executive Powers,

Obama Begins His Last Big Push

on Climate Policy

MAY 31, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
and CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — All but giving up on Congress, President Obama has spent the year foraging for issues he could tackle on his own, and largely coming up with minor executive orders. But on Monday, he will unveil a plan to take on climate change that may be his last, most sweeping effort to remake America in his remaining time in office.

The far-reaching regulations will for the first time force power plants in the United States to curb the carbon emissions that scientists say have been damaging the planet. By using authority already embedded in law, Mr. Obama does not need Congress — so, in this era of gridlock, he has a chance to transform the nation’s energy sector and, at the same time, his presidency.

“The shift to a cleaner-energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way,” Mr. Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address, previewing Monday’s announcement. “But a low-carbon, clean-energy economy can be an engine of growth for decades to come. America will build that engine. America will build the future, a future that’s cleaner, more prosperous and full of good jobs.”

While the administration was still completing crucial elements of the plan, it was already clear that the economic stakes are enormous. The new regulations could eventually shutter hundreds of coal-fired power plants. Critics wasted little time arguing that the president’s unilateral plan abuses his power in a way that will cost jobs and raise energy prices for consumers.

“The administration has set out to kill coal and its 800,000 jobs,” Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, the nation’s top coal-producing state, said in response to Mr. Obama’s Saturday address. “If it succeeds in death by regulation, we’ll all be paying a lot more money for electricity — if we can get it. Our pocketbook will be lighter, but our country will be darker.”

Almost by default, climate change looks to be the defining domestic initiative of Mr. Obama’s second term. His aspirations to enact gun control measures, pass a jobs plan, overhaul the tax code and reach a grand bargain on long-term spending all have eluded him amid Republican opposition. He may yet negotiate legislation liberalizing immigration policy, but otherwise harbors little hope for major new domestic action.

In taking on climate change, Mr. Obama is returning to one of the themes of his first campaign for president, when he vowed that his election would be remembered as the moment when “our planet began to heal.” His difficulties living up to that rhetoric has deeply frustrated many supporters, and he personally urged his Environmental Protection Agency chief, Gina McCarthy, to draft an ambitious regulation in time to ensure that it is finalized before he leaves office.

“It’s the most significant executive action he can take probably in the entirety of his presidency,” said Neera Tanden, president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “The president is a relatively young president,” she added. “Not to do something would be something you wouldn’t want to live with for the next few decades.”

Having failed to pass climate legislation through the Senate in his first term, Mr. Obama has used his own power to advance his goals, including increased fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. In seeking to limit power plants, he is finally addressing the most significant source of carbon pollution.

“It’s the most important and the biggest reductions that we’ll get,” said John D. Podesta, the president’s counselor and a prime advocate of environmental policies. “Finally tackling climate in a significant way, this is a big deal.”

And yet the president seems to have chosen a low-wattage rollout of the plan. He will not unveil it in a televised East Room address or travel to some out-of-town venue for a big speech, as he has for moves of far less import. Instead, he will leave it to Ms. McCarthy to announce on Monday, while he plays a supporting role by making a telephone call to the American Lung Association.

That may reflect the complicated politics of the issue. Republicans are not the only ones concerned about economic costs, or for that matter political ones. Democrats from coal-producing states are acutely nervous with midterm elections approaching.

Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, for one, has already distanced himself from the plan. “I will oppose this rule as it will adversely affect coal miners and coal-mining communities throughout West Virginia and the nation,” he said.

White House officials denied playing down the announcement and said they were trying to be creative because an East Room event is no longer as useful as it once was. They are trying to frame the issue as a matter of public health. To tape his Saturday address, Mr. Obama traveled to Children’s National Medical Center in Washington to visit children with asthma aggravated by air pollution.

While studies show climate change may exacerbate respiratory diseases, that is hardly the most significant impact of global warming. But the White House hopes that focusing on sick children will play better politically than sweeping statements. An April Gallup poll found that one in four Americans is skeptical of the science of global warming.

The new regulation, which must go through a period of public comment before taking effect, will set a national standard to cut carbon from power plants. It will offer states a menu of options to achieve those cuts, such as adding wind and solar power and energy-efficient technology and joining or creating state-level emissions trading programs called cap and trade.

In 2012, the United States emitted 6.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, of which two billion came from power plants, most burning coal. Experts close to the drafting of the rule said they expected it would lead to annual cuts of up to 500 million tons of carbon in the next decade and more than one billion tons of carbon annually in ensuing years.

But as recently as last week, according to people close to the process, officials had not decided which year to use as the baseline for determining cuts. The coal industry has pushed for 2005, when emissions were near their peak, while environmentalists want a baseline of 2012, when they were lower, meaning that cuts would have to be deeper.

By using the existing Clean Air Act, Mr. Obama will not be able to go as far as new legislation, which would have affected the entire economy. “It would have been better to get more done, absolutely,” said Carol Browner, the president’s former environmental adviser. “But if you can’t get there, using existing law to look at things on a sector basis is a very smart move.”

The new rule will be announced hours before Mr. Obama leaves for Europe, where leaders have pressed him to be more assertive on climate change. “By increasing our credibility with this rule, we leverage everybody else and put the president back in a leadership position,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a research organization. “He becomes seen as a climate leader.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2014,

on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:

Using Executive Powers, Obama Begins His Last Big Push

on Climate Policy.

    Using Executive Powers, Obama Begins His Last Big Push on Climate Policy,
    NYT, 31.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/politics/
    obama-sets-the-stage-for-curbing-emissions.html

In California,

Climate Issues Moved to Fore

by Governor

MAY 19, 2014
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — Portraying California as the front line of climate change, Gov. Jerry Brown said Monday that the effects of man-made global warming were devastating the state, drawing a direct link between climate change and both the record-setting drought that has left the state parched and the early-season wildfires that broke out across California last week. He declared that people must find a way “to live with nature, not collide with it.”

Saying that California was at the “epicenter” of the impact of climate change, Mr. Brown said that states and nations in general were “not on a sustainable path” when it came to global warming and the harsh weather patterns and other problems it brings.

“We have to adapt because the climate is changing,” Mr. Brown said in a speech to scientists gathered in Sacramento for a conference on the drought’s impact on state agriculture. “Now there’s no doubt that the evidence has been strong for quite a while, and it is getting even stronger.”

Mr. Brown has made battling climate change one of the centerpieces of his tenure, traveling as far as China to marshal support for efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. He has pressed for continued enforcement of the state’s cap-and-trade program — which places limits on emissions from major polluters — despite some critics’ calls to scale back amid the weak economy. And he has repeatedly criticized Congress for not doing enough to take action.

Mr. Brown is at the forefront of governors across the country who are grappling with ways to deal with climate change through legislation and infrastructure changes, rather than waiting for coordinated efforts from the federal government. Governors from states including Maryland, New York and Washington are pushing for ways to combat what they say are dangerous threats to their state’s economic and environmental future, citing worries of rising sea levels, drought and snowmelt.

Eight states so far have passed legislation calling for the reduction of carbon emissions in the coming decades, though none with plans as ambitious as California’s. Nine Northeastern states along with California have adopted cap-and-trade policies for the largest greenhouse-gas-emitting industries.

Last month, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington signed an executive order to create a cap-and-trade program similar to California’s and updating the state’s emission limits.

“This is not a hypothetical thing for governors on the West Coast — this is fire alarms and floods,” Mr. Inslee said Monday in a telephone interview. “It’s not a next-century issue. This is a next half-hour issue.”

Some East Coast leaders have also sounded alarms: In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has praised proposals to improve state utilities to reduce emissions and has begun to issue warnings to investors in the state that climate change poses a long-term risk to the state’s finances.

Gathering support from other state and national leaders for stricter environmental regulations has been a cornerstone of Mr. Brown’s efforts. This summer, he plans to travel to Mexico as part of a trade mission and plans to press leaders there to sign a pledge to reduce greenhouse gases.

California officials are also preparing what many predict will be the worst wildfire season in the state’s history. The state plans to spend roughly $242 million on the wildfires this year, but Mr. Brown has warned that it might not be enough in coming years. And the record-level drought this year is expected to cost California’s agricultural industry $1.7 billion and cause about 14,500 workers to lose their jobs, according to a forecast released by the University of California, Davis.

In an effort to start “aligning our economy and our way of life in California with the demands of nature as we now understand them scientifically,” as Mr. Brown put it, he intends by 2025 to have about 1.5 million electric cars on California’s roads — a fraction of the state’s 32 million vehicles, but a big step nonetheless. The goal will require cooperation from other states to encourage the purchase of such vehicles. In his remarks on Monday, Mr. Brown said that drivers in the state traveled about 332.3 billion miles last year.

Mr. Brown added that the state was only “1 percent” of the problem globally.

“We have to get other states and other nations on a similar path forward,” he said, “and that is enormously difficult because it requires different political jurisdiction, different political values, to unite around this one challenge of making a sustainable future.”

Robert B. Gunnison contributed reporting from Sacramento.

A version of this article appears in print on May 20, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

Climate Issues Moved to Fore In California By Governor.

    In California, Climate Issues Moved to Fore by Governor,
    NYT, 19.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/us/politics/
    in-california-climate-issues-moved-to-fore-by-governor.html

California Wildfires Spread Across Hills,

Leveling Homes

MAY 16, 2014
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

ESCONDIDO, Calif. — With fire rolling swiftly down the hill toward their houses on Thursday, Jeff Brown, his brother and his grandmother were forced by sheriff’s deputies to flee the two homes here that the family has occupied since the 1960s.

Mr. Brown, 38, was back just an hour later. His house was untouched, but his grandmother’s home was gone — only the chimney still stood. “Damn, you can’t even tell there was a three-bedroom house here,” Mr. Brown said, as he walked across the property on Friday. “The trailer in the back is gone. The shed was over there, where that gray pile is. Everything is gone.”

At the end of a week in which 11 wildfires consumed nearly 20,000 acres across San Diego County, residents and officials here were just beginning to assess the damage and determine the causes, even as fire crews continued struggling to get five of the blazes under control. At least seven homes across the county were damaged, along with two commercial buildings and an apartment complex, county officials said. One body was found in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. And three people have been arrested in connection with setting small fires, the district attorney said.

“I wish I could say that we’re done,” said Dianne Jacob, a San Diego County supervisor, of the series of fires that began on Tuesday. “Day 4 is a much better day than the preceding days we’ve seen, but the difficult days for San Diegans are not over.”

She added that it was painful to watch children picking through “the rubble of what was once their homes, their bedrooms, their toys.”

For Mr. Brown, there was not even any rubble worth picking through. His grandmother, Doris Brown, 83, had been a book collector. But her book collection, her jewelry and generations of family photographs were lost amid a gray pile of twisting metal, shattered glass and ash, which was still smoldering on Friday.

“It’s terrible — I grew up here,” said Mr. Brown, who installs flooring for a living. “The family pictures of all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren is what we’ll miss the most, and her books. If you go sifting through that, you’ll probably find some melted gold. She had a lot of jewelry.”

The hills above the neighborhood were scorched. A house next door had also burned down. Trees were incinerated and, at the edge of the property, a cactus hung limply over the fence. The front bumper of a pickup truck had been melted off. But the rest of the neighborhood appeared to have been spared.

Mr. Brown was still using a sprinkler to spray water on his house, in case the wind kicked up again. He said he had never been evacuated before in nearly 40 years of living there.

“I’ve seen fire up on the mountain before, but it’s never come into the valley like this,” he said.

The week felt hard to fathom for many people around San Diego County, with triple-digit temperatures and unseasonably high winds — plus three years of drought, which had left the landscape almost eager to burn and contributed to a succession of fires that shook residents’ sense of safety.

A firenado, or fire swirl, was even spotted in the Carlsbad fire, set off by rising hot air which is set in motion by wind. While usually small and brief, they can be dangerous for firefighters, who were already struggling to control the blazes under hot, dry conditions.

With temperatures finally cooling and winds dying down on Friday, crews were finally able to make progress on several of the fires. Thousands of evacuees have been allowed to return home.

Still, the sky over northern parts of San Diego County looked apocalyptic, clouded with plumes of dark brown smoke from three fires that continued to burn on the grounds of Camp Pendleton, a Marine base. Winds moved smoke more than 100 miles north, obscuring the downtown Los Angeles skyline for much of Friday morning; air quality officials issued a smoke advisory for much of the region.

“This is different than anything before, especially with so many fires all over the joint,” said Lu Ziegler, 74, who was forced to leave the mobile home park where she lived on Thursday. “It makes you wonder.”

Bonnie Dumanis, the San Diego County district attorney, said the cause of each fire was being investigated, and the three people who were arrested did not appear to be connected to any of the larger fires in the area. One fire earlier in the week was started accidentally at a construction site, officials said.

On Friday, many people still could not return to their homes around San Marcos, north of San Diego, where firefighters were still working to control the Cocos fire, which had destroyed the homes in Escondido on Thursday.
Photo
In Oceanside, Calif., a plume of smoke from wildfires at nearby Camp Pendleton rose above a residential neighborhood. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

At an evacuation center at a high school in San Marcos, displaced residents huddled around a television, hoping for news that the evacuation order would soon be lifted.

Jerry Archibald had kept his eye trained on a huge American flag planted on a hillside near his home. “That’s what we’ve been watching through the night, because if that hill catches fire and that flag goes, our neighborhood could go,” said Mr. Archibald, 47, as he tossed a football with his wife and 7-year-old son on the high school field.

It was the first time they had been forced to evacuate. They left home on Wednesday night, bringing a few days of clothes and important documents. “I don’t see any fire near us now, so I think we’re in pretty good shape,” he said, adding that the profusion of fires so early in the year was “a scary sign of what’s to come.”

“It won’t make us pack up and move,” Mr. Archibald said. “But it definitely gives you pause.”

For Matt Procter, it was already too late to move. He returned from a trip to Northern California on Thursday night to push past fire trucks and find that the two-story apartment complex where he lived was smoldering on the ground.

“It was a pile of rubble — it looked as if they were starting construction over again,” said Mr. Procter, a 23-year-old construction worker. He said he was glad he had not lost anything important to him: “The only thing I have of real importance is my dog — he’s always with me.”

Ms. Jacob, the San Diego County supervisor, warned residents to prepare for more fires. Even though this week’s fires seemed to be winding down, she said, others were certain to follow.

“Our fire season has begun,” she said. “It was predicted by fire officials in January that this would be the worst fire season ever in the San Diego region, and we’re already seeing that their words have come true.”

Jennifer Medina contributed reporting from Los Angeles,

and Henry Fountain from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2014,

on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline:

California Wildfires Spread Across Hills, Leveling Homes.

    California Wildfires Spread Across Hills, Leveling Homes,
    NYT, 16.5.2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/
    california-wildfires-spread-across-hills-leveling-homes.html
 

Miami Finds Itself Ankle-Deep

in Climate Change Debate

MAY 7, 2014
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

MIAMI BEACH — The sunny-day flooding was happening again. During high tide one recent afternoon, Eliseo Toussaint looked out the window of his Alton Road laundromat and watched bottle-green saltwater seep from the gutters, fill the street and block the entrance to his front door.

“This never used to happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “I’ve owned this place eight years, and now it’s all the time.”

Down the block at an electronics store it is even worse. Jankel Aleman, a salesman, keeps plastic bags and rubber bands handy to wrap around his feet when he trudges from his car to the store through ever-rising waters.

A new scientific report on global warming released this week, the National Climate Assessment, named Miami as one of the cities most vulnerable to severe damage as a result of rising sea levels. Alton Road, a commercial thoroughfare in the heart of stylish South Beach, is getting early ripples of sea level rise caused by global warming — even as Florida’s politicians, including two possible contenders for the presidency in 2016, are starkly at odds over what to do about it and whether the problem is even real.

“The theme of the report is that climate change is not a future thing, it’s a ‘happening-now’ thing,” said Leonard Berry, a contributing author of the new report and director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University. “Alton Road is one of the now things.”

Sea levels have risen eight inches since 1870, according to the new report, which projects a further rise of one to four feet by the end of the century. Waters around southeast Florida could surge up to two feet by 2060, according to a report by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. A study by the Florida Department of Transportation concluded that over the next 35 years, rising sea levels will increasingly flood and damage smaller local roads in the Miami area.

The national climate report found that although rapidly melting Arctic ice is threatening the entire American coastline, Miami is exceptionally vulnerable because of its unique geology. The city is built on top of porous limestone, which is already allowing the rising seas to soak into the city’s foundation, bubble up through pipes and drains, encroach on fresh water supplies and saturate infrastructure. County governments estimate that the damages could rise to billions or even trillions of dollars.

In and around Miami, local officials are grappling head on with the problem.

“Sea level rise is our reality in Miami Beach,” said the city’s mayor, Philip Levine. “We are past the point of debating the existence of climate change and are now focusing on adapting to current and future threats.” In the face of encroaching saltwater and sunny-day flooding like that on Alton Road, Mr. Levine has supported a $400 million spending project to make the city’s drainage system more resilient in the face of rising tides.

But while local politicians can take action to shore up their community against the rising tide, they are powerless to stop what scientists say is the heart of the problem: the increasing fossil fuel emissions that continue to warm the planet. Scientists say that the scale of emission reductions necessary to prevent the most dangerous effects of global warming can only come as a result of national and international policies to cut carbon pollution.

In particular, climate experts say, national policies to tax or regulate carbon pollution are required by the world’s top emitters, chiefly the United States and China. Such efforts have to date met a wave of political opposition in Congress — bills aimed at putting a price on carbon pollution have repeatedly failed. President Obama plans to use his executive authority to issue a regulation that would cut carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, but Republicans, who call the rule a “War on Coal,” want to overturn it.

Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, supports carbon-cutting efforts, even as he acknowledges that they will come with some economic cost. In April, he convened a packed hearing at the Miami Beach City Hall on the encroaching waters.

“With sea level rise, you’ve got to get to core of the problem,” Mr. Nelson said at the hearing. “You have to lessen the amount of CO2. It’s politically treacherous and costly. But at the end of the day, something like that is going to have to get passed. Otherwise the planet is going to continue to heat up.”

But three prominent Florida Republicans — Senator Marco Rubio, former Gov. Jeb Bush and the current governor, Rick Scott — declined repeated requests to be interviewed on the subject. Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush are viewed as potential presidential candidates. Political analysts say the reluctance of the three men to speak publicly on the issue reflects an increasingly difficult political reality for Republicans grappling with the issue of climate change, particularly for the party’s lawmakers from Florida. In acknowledging the problem, politicians must endorse a solution, but the only major policy solutions to climate change — taxing or regulating the oil, gas and coal industries — are anathema to the base of the Republican Party. Thus, many Republicans, especially in Florida, appear to be dealing with the issue by keeping silent.

“Jeb likes to take positions on hot-button issues, the same with Rubio,” said Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami. “On immigration they are further mainstream on that than the rest of the G.O.P. But on this, Republicans are dead set against taking action on climate change on the national level. If you have political aspirations, this is not something you should talk about if you want to win a Republican primary.”

Over the past year, Mr. Rubio has signaled his skepticism about the established science that fossil fuel emissions contribute to climate change. When asked in a 2013 Buzzfeed webcast interview if climate change posed a threat to Florida, Mr. Rubio responded: “The climate is always changing. The question is, is manmade activity what’s contributing most to it?” He added that “I’ve seen reasonable debate on that principle” and “if we unilaterally impose these sorts of things on our economy it would have a devastating impact.”

But in 2008, while serving in the Florida State Legislature, Mr. Rubio supported a bill directing the State Department of Environmental Protection to develop rules for companies to limit carbon emissions.

As governor from 1999 to 2007, Mr. Bush pushed several environmental initiatives, particularly efforts to protect Everglades National Park, which scientists say is highly vulnerable to encroaching seawaters. Political scientists say that Mr. Rubio’s shift and Mr. Bush’s current silence on the issue appear to reflect the position of lawmakers who are mulling transitions from the state to the national stage and the realities of satisfying their party’s base in the 2016 primaries.

A version of this article appears in print on May 8, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Florida in Eye of Storm Over Climate Change.

    Miami Finds Itself Ankle-Deep in Climate Change Debate,
    NYT, 7.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/us/
    florida-finds-itself-in-the-eye-of-the-storm-on-climate-change.html

Climate Disruptions, Close to Home

MAY 7, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Apart from the disinformation sowed by politicians content with the status quo, the main reason neither Congress nor much of the American public cares about global warming is that, as problems go, it seems remote. Anyone who reads the latest National Climate Assessment, released on Tuesday, cannot possibly think that way any longer. The report is exhaustive and totally alarming.

The study, produced by scientists from academia, government and the private sector, is the definitive statement of the present and future effects of climate change on the United States. Crippling droughts will become more frequent in drier regions; torrential rains and storm surges will increase in wet regions; sea levels will rise and coral reefs in Hawaii and Florida will die. Readers can pick their own regional catastrophes, but here are three:

THE SOUTHWEST WILL FRY California’s relentless drought has been making headlines for years. But while there may be some cyclical relief, global warming will make things worse in the long run, increasing wildfires throughout the Southwest and in California, stunting crops in one of America’s great breadbaskets and greatly increasing the region’s historical competition for water — its most precious natural resource.

THE EAST WILL SOAK Hurricane Sandy provided a costly glimpse into a future that will bring more destructive storms, not because a warming climate will cause more hurricanes (that link is still a matter of debate) but because sea levels will rise, leading to bigger storm surges and greater risks for Americans who live in coastal areas. There will also be many more sudden and intense rains in parts of the South and in Florida.

As for the sea level, the study went beyond the recent predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which forecast a rise of 3 feet unless aggressive measures were taken. The new American report says that a rise of 6 feet cannot be ruled out. Much of South Florida sits at 4 feet above high tide.

ALASKA WILL KEEP MELTING An academic study 12 years ago noted an astonishing 5.4 degree increase in the annual mean temperatures in Alaska, causing melting permafrost and dying forests. More of the same lies ahead: shrinking glaciers and summer sea ice and more global warming as the carbon trapped in the permafrost is released into the atmosphere as methane.

The broad contours of the report are not news to President Obama, who said in his State of the Union address that “the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.” And he promised, in his climate action plan, to impose through executive action new limits on carbon dioxide emissions that Congress has failed to deliver legislatively. And, so far, he has done so, announcing rules governing emissions from new power plants and stricter fuel-efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks to go with the historic fuel-efficiency standards for cars finalized in 2012.

But sterner tests lie ahead. For starters, Mr. Obama must devise new rules governing natural gas drilling, lest leaks of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — erase natural gas’s carbon advantage over coal. More important, he must follow through with the strongest possible new rules on existing power plants, which account for about 40 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. These rules, which are now being written and are due to be announced in early June, will be hugely controversial and almost certainly litigated, since regulating greenhouse gases from stationary sources is largely uncharted territory.

The climate-change deniers in Congress and industry allies like Senator Mitch McConnell, who hails from a coal-producing state, will be ferocious, employing the usual disruptive legislative and legal stratagems. The surest antidotes are continued presidential resolve, backed by voters sensitized to climate warming’s dangers. The new report should help on both fronts.

A version of this editorial appears in print on May 8, 2014,

on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline:

Climate Disruptions, Close to Home.

    Climate Disruptions, Close to Home, NYT, 7.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/opinion/climate-disruptions-close-to-home.html

U.S. Climate Has Already Changed,

Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods

 

MAY 6, 2014
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.

Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

“Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report continued. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.”
 

The report is the latest in a series of dire warnings about how the effects of global warming that had been long foreseen by climate scientists are already affecting the planet. Its region-by-region documentation of changes occurring in the United States, and of future risks, makes clear that few places will be unscathed — and some, like northerly areas, are feeling the effects at a swifter pace than had been expected.

Alaska in particular is hard hit. Glaciers and frozen ground in that state are melting, storms are eating away at fragile coastlines no longer protected by winter sea ice, and entire communities are having to flee inland — a precursor of the large-scale changes the report foresees for the rest of the United States.

The study, known as the National Climate Assessment, was prepared by a large scientific panel overseen by the government and received final approval at a meeting Tuesday.

The White House, which released the report, wants to maximize its impact to drum up a sense of urgency among Americans about climate change — and thus to build political support for a contentious new climate change regulation that President Obama plans to issue in June.

But instead of giving a Rose Garden speech, President Obama spent Tuesday giving interviews to local and national weather broadcasters on climate change and extreme weather. The goal was to help Americans connect the vast planetary problem of global warming caused by carbon emissions from cars and coal plants to the changing conditions in their own backyards. It was a strategic decision that senior White House staff members had been planning for months.

In the Northeast, the report found a big increase in torrential rains and risks from a rising sea that could lead to a repeat of the kind of flooding seen in Hurricane Sandy. In the Southwest, the water shortages seen to date are likely just a foretaste of the changes to come, the report found. In that region, the report warned, “severe and sustained drought will stress water sources, already overutilized in many areas, forcing increasing competition among farmers, energy producers, urban dwellers and plant and animal life for the region’s most precious resource.”

The report did find some benefits from climate change in the short run, particularly for the Midwest, such as a longer growing season for crops and a longer shipping season on the Great Lakes. But it warned that these were likely to be countered in the long run by escalating damages, particularly to agriculture.

“Yes, climate change is already here,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in writing the report. “But the costs so far are still on the low side compared to what will be coming under business as usual by late in this century.”

The report was supervised and approved by a large committee representing a cross section of American society, including representatives of two oil companies. It is the third national report in 14 years, and by far the most urgent in tone, leaving little doubt that the scientists consider climate change an incipient crisis. It is also the most slickly produced, with an elaborate package of interactive graphics on the Internet.

One of the report’s most striking findings concerned the rising frequency of torrential rains. Scientists have expected this effect for decades because more water is evaporating from a warming ocean surface, and the warmer atmosphere is able to hold the excess vapor, which then falls as rain or snow. But even the leading experts have been surprised by the scope of the change.

The report found that the eastern half of the country is receiving more precipitation in general. And over the past half-century, the proportion of precipitation that is falling in very heavy rain events has jumped by 71 percent in the Northeast, by 37 percent in the Midwest and by 27 percent in the South, the report found.

“It’s a big change,” said Radley M. Horton, a climate scientist at Columbia University in New York who helped write the report. He added that scientists do not fully understand the regional variations.

In recent years, sudden intense rains have caused extensive damage.

For instance, large parts of Nashville were devastated by floods in 2010 after nearly 20 inches of rain fell in two days. Last year, parts of Colorado flooded after getting as much rain in a week as normally falls in a year. Just last week, widespread devastation occurred in the Florida Panhandle from rains that may have exceeded two feet in 24 hours.

The new report emphasized that people should not expect global warming to happen at a steady pace, nor at the same rate throughout the country. Bitterly cold winters will continue to occur, the report said, even as they become somewhat less likely. Warming, too, will vary. While most of the country has warmed sharply over the past century, the Southeast has barely warmed at all, and a section of southern Alabama has even cooled slightly.

The report cited the likely role of climate change in causing an outbreak of mountain pine beetles that has devastated millions of acres of pine forest across the American West and the Canadian province of British Columbia; warmer winters and longer summers have let more of the beetles survive and reproduce at an exponential rate. And the report warned of severe, long-lasting heat waves. For instance, it cited research saying the type of record-breaking heat that scorched Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 had become substantially more likely because of the human release of greenhouse gases.

On rising sea levels, the new report went beyond warnings issued in September by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said that by the end of the century, sea levels could rise by as much as three feet globally if emissions continue at a rapid pace. The American scientists said the rise could be anywhere from one to four feet, and added that six feet could not be ruled out. Along much of the East Coast, the situation will be worse than the global average because the land there is sinking, the scientists said.

Historically, the United States was responsible for more emissions than any other country. Lately, China has become the largest emitter over all, though its emissions per person are still far below those of the United States.

The report pointed out that while the country as a whole still had no comprehensive climate legislation, many states and cities had begun to take steps to limit emissions and to adapt to climatic changes that can no longer be avoided. But the report found that these efforts were inadequate.

“There is mounting evidence that harm to the nation will increase substantially in the future unless global emissions of heat-trapping gases are greatly reduced,” the report warned.

Correction: May 6, 2014

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article

misidentified a town where overflow

from the South Platte River in Colorado submerged cars.

It is Greeley, Colo., not Greenley.

Coral Davenport contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds,

Citing Heat and Floods.

    U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods,
    NYT, 6.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/science/earth/climate-change-report.html

Running Out of Time

APRIL 20, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Next year, in December, delegates from more than 190 nations will gather in Paris to take another shot at completing a new global treaty on climate change. This will be the 21st Conference of the Parties under United Nations auspices since the first summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

For the most part, these meetings have been exercises in futility, producing just one treaty — in Kyoto in 1997 — that asked little of the big developing countries and was never ratified by the United States Senate. But if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report is to be taken seriously, as it should be, the Paris meeting may well be the world’s last, best chance to get a grip on a problem that, absent urgent action over the next decade, could spin out of control.

The I.P.C.C., composed of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists, has issued three reports in the last seven months, each the product of up to six years of research. The first simply confirmed what has been known since Rio: global warming is caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels by humans and, to a lesser extent, by deforestation. The second, released in Japan three weeks ago, said that profound effects were already being felt around the world, including mounting damage to coral reefs, shrinking glaciers and more persistent droughts, and warned of worse to come — rising seas, species loss and dwindling agricultural yields.

The third report, released last week, may be the most ominous of the three. Despite investments in energy efficiency and cleaner energy sources in the United States, in Europe and in developing countries like China, annual emissions of greenhouse gases have risen almost twice as fast in the first decade of this century as they did in the last decades of the 20th century. This places in serious jeopardy the emissions target agreed upon in Rio to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level. Beyond that increase, the world could face truly alarming consequences.

Avoiding that fate will require a reduction of between 40 percent and 70 percent in greenhouse gases by midcentury, which means embarking on a revolution in the way we produce and consume energy.

That’s daunting enough, but here’s the key finding: The world has only about 15 years left in which to begin to bend the emissions curve downward. Otherwise, the costs of last-minute fixes will be overwhelming. “We cannot afford to lose another decade,” says Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”

The report does not tell governments what to do — presumably, that’s for them to decide in Paris — but it lists approaches, mostly familiar, some technologically advanced. The most obvious, and probably the most difficult to negotiate, is to put a global price on carbon, either through a system of tradable permits like that adopted by Europe (and rejected by the United States Senate) or through a carbon tax of some sort, thus driving investments to cleaner fuels.

A more plausible pathway is to get each country to adopt binding emission reduction targets and then allow them to choose how to get there — ramping up nuclear energy, phasing out coal-fired plants in favor of cleaner natural gas (though natural gas itself would have to someday give way to low-carbon alternatives), and vastly increasing renewable sources like wind and solar, which still supply only a small fraction of the world’s energy (less than 5 percent for wind and solar combined in the United States). All this will require a huge shift in investment, both private and public, from fossil fuels.

Governments have an enormous amount of work to do in devising emission reduction strategies by next year. As always, American leadership will be required, meaning leadership from the top. Confronted with a hostile Congress, President Obama has commendably moved on his own to reduce emissions through regulations, first with cars and now with coal-fired power plants. And he has done so without a great deal of public support. However compelling the science, global warming has not generated the kind of public anxiety and bottom-up demand for change that helped win the big fights for cleaner air and water in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This makes his job harder but no less urgent.


A version of this editorial appears in print on April 21, 2014,

on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:

Running Out of Time.

    Running Out of Time, NYT, 20.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/opinion/running-out-of-time.html

A Cleanup Plan for a Toxic River

APRIL 15, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The inventory of pollutants at the bottom of the Passaic River, which meanders for 90 miles through northern New Jersey, is long and truly frightening. More than a century of industrial activity has deposited PCBs, pesticides and other contaminants into sediment that, in some places, is 15 feet deep. Among the worst of the poisons is dioxin, generated in part by a plant in Newark that produced Agent Orange and other deadly pesticides during the 1960s.

Now, after years of study, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a cleanup plan for a dangerously fetid eight-mile stretch from Belleville to Newark. This will be no small task. The agency calls it the largest cleanup in the 33-year history of the federal Superfund law, with a projected cost of $1.7 billion that puts it in roughly the same range as General Electric’s cleanup of the PCB’s in the upper Hudson River.

The E.P.A.’s plan is ambitious, necessary, long overdue and definitely good news for those who believe that humans should again enjoy this once-thriving waterway. It also shows that Superfund, in which Congress has shown steadily declining interest, still matters when it comes to the long and difficult battle against industrial leftovers. The cleanup has bipartisan support in New Jersey, including from Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, and Democratic members of Congress.

If approved, after a 60-day public comment period, the project would involve bank-to-bank dredging to remove 4.3 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment, after which the river bed would be capped. The task would take at least five years, and — according to Judith Enck, the agency’s regional administrator — it would mean excavating enough contaminated mud to fill New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, twice over.

Under the law, so-called responsible parties — companies that polluted the river — will be required to foot the bill. These include corporations like Honeywell International, Pfizer, Tiffany and others that either polluted the river themselves or acquired companies that did so in the past.

Needless to say, some of the companies are not pleased. One group of 67 companies calling themselves the Cooperating Parties Group has complained that the federal plan would take decades, not five years, would disrupt commercial activity and deny public access to the river. The group’s alternative plan is to clean “hot” spots along 17 miles of the river, a plan that E.P.A. finds insufficient to remedy the most polluted areas downstream.

Company representatives have also suggested a fish exchange — a program that would allow people to swap contaminated fish caught in the Passaic for healthy ones. (Catching crabs in parts of the lower river is prohibited, and people are warned not to eat the fish they catch.)

Instead of proposing such diversions as fish swaps, the cooperating companies should face up to their full responsibilities. Meanwhile, the E.P.A. should step up its efforts to identify other businesses that appear to be hiding from their duty to clean up the mess left by their predecessors. It is well past time to rehabilitate one of America’s oldest industrial dumping grounds.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 16, 2014,

on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Cleanup Plan for a Toxic River.

    A Cleanup Plan for a Toxic River, NYT, 15.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/opinion/a-cleanup-plan-for-a-toxic-river.html

Climate Study Puts Diplomatic Pressure

on Obama

MARCH 31, 2014
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — A sweeping new study on the effects of climate change — which the report says is already disrupting the lives and livelihoods of the poorest people across the planet — creates a diplomatic challenge for President Obama, who hopes to make action on both climate change and economic inequality hallmarks of his legacy.

The report, published this week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, concludes that the world’s poorest people will suffer the most as temperatures rise, with many of them already contending with food and water shortages, higher rates of disease and premature death, and the violent conflicts that result from those problems.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Christopher Field, the co-chairman of the group that wrote the report, discuss its warning.

Those countries and nongovernmental organizations point to a 2009 pledge by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to create a $100 billion annual climate fund for poor countries by 2020. The World Bank justified such an expenditure in a 2010 report concluding that it would take up to $100 billion a year to offset the ravages of climate change on poor countries.

Climate policy experts say that the United States, as the world’s largest economy, would be expected to provide $20 billion to $30 billion of that annual fund.

That puts Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been working aggressively behind the scenes to forge a United Nations climate change treaty in 2015, in a tough position.

But both men know there is no chance that a Congress focused on cutting domestic spending and jump-starting the economy will enact legislation agreeing to a huge increase in so-called climate aid. Since 2010, the Obama administration has spent about $2.5 billion a year to help foreign countries adapt to climate change and adopt low-carbon energy technology.

It will be a stretch even to continue that level of spending. Many Republicans, who control the House and have a chance to gain the Senate this fall, question whether climate change is real.

“If the White House actually wants something like this, it should begin by building support among congressional Democrats, but — at this point — I don’t see any real signs of support from House or Senate Democratic leaders at all,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio.

Vulnerable nations, emboldened by the new United Nations report, are demanding more, not less, from the United States.

Ronald Jean Jumeau, the United Nations ambassador from the island nation of Seychelles, and a spokesman for the Alliance of Small Island States, compared the proposed fund with the amount of money Congress approved after Hurricane Sandy.

“We know that $100 billion is not going to be enough,” Mr. Jumeau said. “After Sandy, Congress voted for $60 billion in recovery for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — for one storm. It shows you how much $100 billion is going to cover.”

The window is starting to close on Mr. Obama’s ability to broker a treaty that could significantly reduce greenhouse gas pollution in time to avoid the most disastrous effects of climate change. This fall, at the United Nations General Assembly, world leaders will meet to put offers on the table for a climate change pact, a mix of commitments to cut fossil fuel pollution at home and provide money to poor countries to adapt. A few months later, at a two-week summit meeting in Lima, Peru, they will negotiate a draft of a final treaty that is set to be signed next year in Paris and take effect in 2020.

Diplomats say the new report has increased pressure on governments to reach a climate deal.

“By underscoring impacts and vulnerabilities, the report makes clear the urgency for strong action to reduce emissions and build greater resilience,” said Todd D. Stern, the State Department’s chief climate change negotiator.

In a speech in London last fall, Mr. Stern made clear that there was no chance that the United States would finance most of any climate adaptation fund with taxpayer dollars. “The fiscal reality of the United States and other developed countries is not going to allow it,” he said. Mr. Stern and others say the bulk of that money will have to come from private investors and corporations.

Nongovernmental organizations say that relying chiefly on the private sector will not be enough, especially as food supplies grow short. “The scientists could not have been more clear, particularly in the area of food security,” said Timothy Gore, an analyst for Oxfam, the antipoverty group. “There is no government that’s going to be able to stick around very long if the price of bread keeps going up, if they can’t feed their people.”

“I challenge anyone in the U.S. government to explain how the private sector is going to invest in what’s needed on the ground, like funding farmers in the Sahel region facing crop loss from changing rainfall patterns,” Mr. Gore said, referring to the area of Africa just south of the Sahara.

Hanging over the coming negotiations will be the specter of the failed 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Vice President Al Gore promised in those talks that the United States would act on climate change, only to have the Senate refuse to ratify that treaty. At a 2009 climate summit meeting in Copenhagen, Mr. Obama promised that Congress would soon pass a sweeping climate change bill. Just months later, the bill died in the Senate.

Mr. Obama is now trying to bolster his credibility on the issue by flexing his executive authority and acting without Congress. His administration is moving ahead with aggressive new Environmental Protection Agency regulations to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. At talks around the world, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Stern have sought to persuade other nations that, this time, the United States will be able to keep its commitments, since they do not require action from Congress.

The United States’ inability to offer more substantial aid to countries that did little to cause global warming will probably remain a major sticking point with developing nations, including India and China.

Still, Connie Hedegaard, the European Union commissioner for climate action, said she hoped that could eventually be overcome: “I think the $100 billion mark can be reached. It was understood in Copenhagen that it had to be a mix of public and private money. I think vulnerable groups — families in Bangladesh or the Philippines — don’t care whether a dollar coming their way is public or private.”

A version of this news analysis appears in print

on April 1, 2014, on page A3 of the New York edition

with the headline: Climate Study Puts Diplomatic Pressure

on Obama.

    Climate Study Puts Diplomatic Pressure on Obama,
    NYT, 31.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/
    climate-study-puts-diplomatic-pressure-on-obama.html

White House Unveils Plans

to Cut Methane Emissions

MARCH 28, 2014
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday announced a strategy to start slashing emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas released by landfills, cattle, and leaks from oil and natural gas production.

The methane strategy is the latest step in a series of White House actions aimed at addressing climate change without legislation from Congress. Individually, most of the steps will not be enough to drastically reduce the United States’ contribution to global warming. But the Obama administration hopes that collectively they will build political support for more substantive domestic actions while signaling to other countries that the United States is serious about tackling global warming.

In a 2009 United Nations climate change accord, President Obama pledged that by 2020 the United States would lower its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels. “This methane strategy is one component, one set of actions to get there,” Dan Utech, the president’s special assistant for energy and climate change, said on Friday in a phone call with reporters.

Environmental advocates have long urged the Obama administration to target methane emissions. Most of the planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution in the United States comes from carbon dioxide, which is produced by burning coal, oil and natural gas. Methane accounts for just 9 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution — but the gas is over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so even small amounts of it can have a big impact on future global warming.

And methane emissions are projected to increase in the United States, as the nation enjoys a boom in oil and natural gas production, thanks to breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing technology. A study published in the journal Science last month found that methane is leaking from oil and natural gas drilling sites and pipelines at rates 50 percent higher than previously thought. As he works to tackle climate change, Mr. Obama has generally supported the natural gas production boom, since natural gas, when burned for electricity, produces just half the greenhouse gas pollution of coal-fired electricity.

Environmental groups like the Sierra Club have campaigned against the boom in natural gas production, warning that it could lead to dangerous levels of methane pollution, undercutting the climate benefits of gas. The oil and gas industry has resisted pushes to regulate methane leaks from production, saying it could slow that down.

A White House official said on Friday that this spring, the Environmental Protection Agency would assess several potentially significant sources of methane and other emissions from the oil and gas sector, and that by this fall the agency “will determine how best to pursue further methane reductions from these sources.” If the E.P.A. decides to develop additional regulations, it would complete them by the end of 2016 — just before Mr. Obama leaves office.

Among the steps the administration announced on Friday to address methane pollution:

■ The Interior Department will propose updated standards to reduce venting and flaring of methane from oil and gas production on public lands.

■ In April, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management will begin to gather public comment on the development of a program for the capture and sale of methane produced by coal mines on lands leased by the federal government.

■ This summer, the E.P.A. will propose updated standards to reduce methane emissions from new landfills and take public comment on whether to update standards for existing landfills.

■ In June, the Agriculture Department, the Energy Department and the E.P.A. will release a joint “biogas road map” aimed at accelerating adoption of methane digesters, machines that reduce methane emissions from cattle, in order to cut dairy-sector greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020.

Advocates of climate action generally praised the plan. “Cutting methane emissions will be especially critical to climate protection as the U.S. develops its huge shale gas reserves, gaining the full greenhouse gas benefit from the switch away from coal,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former White House climate change aide under President Bill Clinton, now with the German Marshall Fund.

Howard J. Feldman, director of regulatory and scientific affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for oil and gas companies, said he hoped the steps would not lead to new regulations on his industry. “We think regulation is not necessary at this time,” he said. “People are using a lot more natural gas in the country, and that’s reducing greenhouse gas.”

Since cattle flatulence and manure are a significant source of methane, farmers have long been worried that a federal methane control strategy could place a burden on them. But Andrew Walmsley, director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said that his group was pleased that, for now, the administration’s proposals to reduce methane from cattle were voluntary.

“All indications are that it’s voluntary,” he said, “but we do see increased potential for scrutiny for us down the line, which would cause concern.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 29, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

White House Unveils Plans to Cut Methane Emissions.

    White House Unveils Plans to Cut Methane Emissions,£
    NYT, 28.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/us/politics/
    white-house-unveils-plans-to-to-cut-methane-emissions.html

Wind Industry’s New Technologies

Are Helping It Compete on Price

MARCH 20, 2014
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL

The wind industry has gone to great lengths over the years to snap up the best properties for its farms, often looking to remote swaths of prairie or distant mountain ridges to maximize energy production and minimize community opposition.

Now, it is reaching for the sky.

With new technology allowing developers to build taller machines spinning longer blades, the industry has been able to produce more power at lower cost by capturing the faster winds that blow at higher elevations. This has opened up new territories, in places like Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, where the price of power from turbines built 300 feet to 400 feet above the ground can now compete with conventional sources like coal.

And efforts to capture the wind could go even higher. In perhaps the most extreme example, a start-up called Altaeros Energies is preparing to introduce its first commercial pilot of an airborne wind turbine in Alaska.

Known as the BAT — or Buoyant Airborne Turbine — the enormous, white helium-filled doughnut surrounding a rotor will float about 1,000 feet in the air and feed enough electricity to power more than a dozen homes through one of the cables tethering it to the ground.

But the skyward expansion has already taken flight throughout the wind industry, transforming parts of the Midwest once shunned into wind powerhouses.

Six years ago there, the wind speeds at 200 feet were not strong enough to make wind development make sense, said Elizabeth Salerno, chief economist and director of industry data and analysis at the American Wind Energy Association, the industry’s main trade group. But as turbine hubs — which sit atop the towers — have risen above 200 feet and included longer blades, that has changed.

In Michigan, for example, there were no utility-scale wind farms operating in 2008, Ms. Salerno said. Now, there are enough to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity, which could power hundreds of thousands of homes.

Prices have fallen so low — in some cases to about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour — that utilities have been increasing the amount of wind energy they want to buy through long-term contracts, with regulators saying it is their cheapest option. At the same time, though, the push has spurred some opposition in these new areas from residents who object to the tall, industrial wind turbines.

“It’s not just more wind in the windy places that we already know about,” Ms. Salerno said. “It’s opening up, potentially, regions like the Southeast or others where maybe it’s not quite economic today but it could be in the future. That’s where we’re headed.”

Airborne wind takes that dynamic even further, though for now it can compete only in places where the price of other options, like diesel, is much higher.

Other companies besides Altaeros have tried to develop airborne wind systems.

For example, Makani Power is working on a winged turbine that, according to its website, flies in circles. It was acquired by Google last year, but the technology has yet to be perfected.

In Alaska, though — as in other remote regions, representing a multibillion-dollar market Altaeros hopes to tap — energy costs run so high that even a promising but largely unproven technology is cost-effective, officials say.

“Particularly for Alaska, eliminating the costs that are associated with power installation,” said Alan Baldivieso, program manager for hydrokinetics, geothermal and emerging energy at the Alaska Energy Authority, “makes this type of deployment very attractive.”

The authority awarded Altaeros a $1.3 million grant from its Emerging Energy Technology Fund to support testing the equipment over 18 months with the idea of expanding its use.

“Our biggest focus is on cost just because it’s so, so expensive in parts of Alaska,” said Sean Skaling, deputy director of alternative energy at the authority. “A nice byproduct is that it’s also typically greener and cleaner if it’s less expensive.”

Ben Glass, chief executive of Altaeros, said he expected the company to be able to offer power at about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour, far too high for most conventional markets but still well below the 35 cents a kilowatt-hour often paid in remote areas of Alaska.

In parts of Alaska, prices can reach about $1 per kilowatt-hour, roughly 10 times the national average. Serving markets like that could help the company establish its business and lower costs to eventually compete for larger-scale projects.

Mr. Glass started the company in 2010 along with Adam Rein (and another partner who has since left) as the two were completing graduate programs at M.I.T., Mr. Glass in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and Mr. Rein in business at the Sloan School of Management. Mr. Glass, whose father had been a pilot in the Israeli Air Force, planned to pursue rocket science but strayed from that career path after an internship at SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, the summer before his senior year.

“I realized that to be a rocket scientist you kind of had to be a billionaire and have a rocket company or you were just going to be designing some little widget part of the rocket,” he said.

With an interest in clean energy, he turned toward wind and ended up designing an array of turbines for his senior project and putting his engineering skills to use on the airborne machine.

Borrowing from the technology of blimps used to hoist communications, surveillance and weather monitoring equipment high above the earth, the Altaeros system is able to adjust the turbine’s height and alignment in response to changing winds to maximize power production. That allows the machine to produce anywhere from two to three times as much electricity as its conventional tower-mounted counterparts, Mr. Glass said.

The company has raised more than $1 million in the last two years from angel investors and some state governments as well as the federal government, including the Energy and Agriculture departments. The technology could help provide power after natural disasters.

In the long term, executives say they hope to expand into the offshore market, particularly places like the Pacific Coast, where officials recently approved plans to test floating turbine platforms because the waters are too deep to sink conventional foundations and towers into the seabed.

But that is years away. For now, the team is focused on flying as many balloons as it can in areas that lack electricity or are dependent on expensive diesel fuel.

As far-fetched as a field of wind turbines swaying as high as 2,000 feet in the air may seem, the partners say the technology is relatively tried and true. Rather than inventing a whole new approach, said Mr. Rein, a former Bain consultant who dabbled in energy before meeting Mr. Glass through an entrepreneurship class at M.I.T., the partners looked to the most proven, least risky equipment to make a product as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Rather than going for, “a moon shot,” he said, “what we really tried was the safe shot.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2014,

on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Going Higher for Power.

    Wind Industry’s New Technologies Are Helping It Compete on Price,
    NYT, 21.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/21/business/
    energy-environment/wind-industrys-new-technologies-are-helping-it-compete-
    on-price.html

Meat Makes the Planet Thirsty

MARCH 7, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributor
By JAMES MCWILLIAMS

AUSTIN, Tex. — CALIFORNIA is experiencing one of its worst droughts on record. Just two and a half years ago, Folsom Lake, a major reservoir outside Sacramento, was at 83 percent capacity. Today it’s down to 36 percent. In January, there was no measurable rain in downtown Los Angeles. Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency. President Obama has pledged $183 million in emergency funding. The situation, despite last week’s deluge in Southern California, is dire.

With California producing nearly half of the fruit and vegetables grown in the United States, attention has naturally focused on the water required to grow popular foods such as walnuts, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, almonds and grapes. These crops are the ones that a recent report in the magazine Mother Jones highlighted as being unexpectedly water intensive. Who knew, for example, that it took 5.4 gallons to produce a head of broccoli, or 3.3 gallons to grow a single tomato? This information about the water footprint of food products — that is, the amount of water required to produce them — is important to understand, especially for a state that dedicates about 80 percent of its water to agriculture.

But for those truly interested in lowering their water footprint, those numbers pale next to the water required to fatten livestock. A 2012 study in the journal Ecosystems by Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra, both at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, tells an important story. Beef turns out to have an overall water footprint of roughly four million gallons per ton produced. By contrast, the water footprint for “sugar crops” like sugar beets is about 52,000 gallons per ton; for vegetables it’s 85,000 gallons per ton; and for starchy roots it’s about 102,200 gallons per ton.

Factor in the kind of water required to produce these foods, and the water situation looks even worse for the future of animal agriculture in drought-stricken regions that use what’s known as “blue water,” or water stored in lakes, rivers and aquifers, which California and much of the West depend on.

Vegetables use about 11,300 gallons per ton of blue water; starchy roots, about 4,200 gallons per ton; and fruit, about 38,800 gallons per ton. By comparison, pork consumes 121,000 gallons of blue water per ton of meat produced; beef, about 145,000 gallons per ton; and butter, some 122,800 gallons per ton. There’s a reason other than the drought that Folsom Lake has dropped as precipitously as it has. Don’t look at kale as the culprit. (Although some nuts, namely almonds, consume considerable blue water, even more than beef.) That said, a single plant is leading California’s water consumption.

Unfortunately, it’s a plant that’s not generally cultivated for humans: alfalfa. Grown on over a million acres in California, alfalfa sucks up more water than any other crop in the state. And it has one primary destination: cattle. Increasingly popular grass-fed beef operations typically rely on alfalfa as a supplement to pasture grass. Alfalfa hay is also an integral feed source for factory-farmed cows, especially those involved in dairy production.

If Californians were eating all the beef they produced, one might write off alfalfa’s water footprint as the cost of nurturing local food systems. But that’s not what’s happening. Californians are sending their alfalfa, and thus their water, to Asia. The reason is simple. It’s more profitable to ship alfalfa hay from California to China than from the Imperial Valley to the Central Valley. Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa. All as more Asians are embracing the American-style, meat-hungry diet.

Further intensifying this ecological injustice are incidents such as the Rancho Feeding Corporation’s recent recall of 8.7 million pounds of beef because the meat lacked a full federal inspection. That equals 631.6 million gallons of water wasted by an industry with a far more complex and resource-intensive supply chain than the systems that move strawberries from farm to fork.

This comparison isn’t to suggest that produce isn’t occasionally recalled, but the Rancho incident reminds us that plants aren’t slaughtered, a process that demands 132 gallons of water per animal carcass, contributing even more to livestock’s expanding water footprint.

It’s understandable for concerned consumers to feel helpless in the face of these complex industrial and global realities. But in the case of agriculture and drought, there’s a clear and accessible action most citizens can take: reducing or, ideally, eliminating the consumption of animal products. Changing one’s diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual’s food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian, a better option in many respects, reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent.

It’s seductive to think that we can continue along our carnivorous route, even in this era of climate instability. The environmental impact of cattle in California, however, reminds us how mistaken this idea is coming to seem.

James McWilliams is a professor of history

at Texas State University and the author, most recently,

of “The Politics of the Pasture: How Two Cattle Inspired

a National Debate About Eating Animals .”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 8, 2014,

on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline:

Meat Makes the Planet Thirsty.

    Meat Makes the Planet Thirsty, NYT, 7.3.2014
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/meat-makes-the-planet-thirsty.html

In Parched California,

Town Taps Run Nearly Dry

MARCH 7, 2014
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LAKE OF THE WOODS, Calif. — People in this mountain town straddling the San Andreas Fault are used to scrapping for water. The lake for which it is named went dry 40 years ago. But now, this tiny community is dealing with its most unsettling threat yet: It could run out of water by summer.

As of last week, just two of the five wells drilled into the dry lake bed that serve its 300 homes were producing water. The mountains of the nearby Los Padres National Forest got their first dusting of snow — and it was a light one — last week; it is the winter snow that feeds the wells come spring. People are watering trees with discarded dishwater, running the washing machine once a week, and letting their carefully tended beds of flowers and trees wither into patches of dusty dirt.

There are scenes all across California that illustrate the power of the drought. A haze of smog, which normally would be washed away by winter rains, hung over Los Angeles this week. Beekeepers near Sacramento said the lack of wildflowers has deprived bees of a source of food, contributing to a worrisome die-off. Across the rich farmland of the San Joaquin Valley, fields are going unplanted.

But for 17 small rural communities in California, the absence of rain is posing a fundamental threat to the most basic of services: drinking water. And Lake of the Woods, a middle-class enclave 80 miles from downtown Los Angeles, a mix of commuters, retirees and weekend residents, is one of the most seriously threatened. Signs along its dusty roadways offer stark red-on-white warnings of a “Water Emergency” and plead for conservation.

“I didn’t think it would come to this,” said Diane Gustafson, the manager of the Lake of the Woods Mutual Water Company, as she greeted a team of county and state officials reviewing the community’s request for emergency funds to drill more holes. “Our wells are so deep. I have lived here for 40 years, and this is the first time we’ve had a problem like this.”

So far, nothing has seemed to have helped: not the yearlong ban on watering lawns and washing cars, not the conscientious homeowners who clean their dishes in the sink and reuse the gray water on trees, not even the three inches of rain that soaked the area last weekend. Three attempts to drill new wells, going down 500 feet, have failed.

For a while, Lake of the Woods bought water from Frazier Park, five miles up the road, but that community halted sales as its water table dropped through the winter. Now Lake of the Woods is trying to line up alternatives, and fast: State officials predict the existing water supply will last no more than three months.

The town, which covers an unincorporated square mile of Kern County and has a population of about 900, says it is prepared to truck in water should the wells run dry, an expensive remedy that it employed briefly during a dry spell last year and that now looms as a potential fact of life here. Bob Stowell, a general contractor who is the unpaid chairman of the board of the water company, promises that no faucets in Lake of the Woods will go dry.

But that assurance is being met with skepticism from residents who, with every dry passing day, have grown uneasy at the prospect of running out of water for drinking or, no less alarming, to fight what many see as the inevitable forest fires on the way.

“I am very worried,” said Craig Raiche, 43, who works at the local hardware store, as he tended the dry brown dirt of his front yard here. “We understand what we are in the middle of. People have been cutting back considerably. I don’t see neighbors gardening anymore. I had a neighbor with flowers in front of her home — she let them all go.”

Kathy Hamm, 50, who works at the general store on the old lake, said that last year was bad “but not like this.”

“It’s been getting worse and worse,” she said. “People aren’t watering their lawns. Laundry one day a week. Doing dishes in the sink instead of using the dishwasher.”

The developments here offer a window into the anxieties and battles that may be ahead for many parts of this drought-stricken region should rain not return. Ms. Gustafson said the owners of summer homes threatened not to pay their water bills after they were told they could not water their lawns; she has responded by vowing to cut off their water.

For Mr. Stowell, the once-modest obligations of running the water company have become time-consuming. He spends much of his day dealing with homeowners anxious about what the next season will bring, and scolding the occasional water scofflaws who resist the conservation directives.

“Hey, Bob, did that guy Cliff call you?” Rafael Molina Jr., who oversees the daily operations of this and neighboring water systems, said to Mr. Stowell. “He wants to snitch on one of his neighbors who is taking water.”

Mr. Stowell said most people were pitching in, but added: “There’s always the people who are driving around, calling in, saying, ‘My neighbor’s doing this, my neighbor’s doing that, and he’s out there washing his car now. The water is running down the street, and he’s got green grass.’ ”

He said he had a simple message for any such offender: “I’m sure you’d rather take your shower than water your lawn.”

The isolated beauty of this community accounts, in large part, for why it is so hard to find water. Lake of the Woods is on the edge of Los Padres National Forest, all of it off-limits for exploratory drilling. It is 5,500 feet up in the mountains, resting on granite.

“It’s different in the San Joaquin Valley: You can drill and find water,” said David A. Warner, a senior community development specialist with Self-Help Enterprises, a nonprofit group that has been working with homeowners during the drought. “Up here in the mountains, it’s much harder. They’ve tried, they’ve really tried.”

This community lies atop on a nest of earthquake faults, anchored by the San Andreas Fault. That may not be entirely a bad thing; geologists have told water company officials that the best place to look for water this high in the mountains is where fault lines meet.

Mr. Warner said the situation was made worse because so many communities face similar challenges, and are responding by digging new wells. “The problem for them is there are only so many well drillers,” he said. “Farmers need water. Cities need waters. Everybody is lining up for a driller. We had a bid for test wells, and the driller said he won’t be able to be out there until April.”

And as the drought has shown no sign of easing, the water company, with emergency financial assistance from California, has intensified its efforts to find new water sources: buying land, opening up closed wells and drilling ever deeper.

“We did drill three test holes, and we found nothing,” Mr. Stowell said. “Went down, three, four, five hundred feet. And we didn’t find anything. Now we’re going to go down more, 1,000 feet.”

“We’ll keep drilling until we find water,” Mr. Stowell said as he trudged past a closed well, marked by a white cap. “We have three new test locations. We’re going to attempt to drill down and see if we can find more water. I suspect we will eventually find water.”

The situation has left people here confronting the kind of questions they say people who live in urban areas have never had to consider. “Where are you going to get your water from?” said Greg Gustafson, Ms. Gustafson’s son. “How can you flush your toilets? How can you take a shower? How can brush your teeth in the morning? It’s not a nice feeling knowing that your town could be completely turned into a ghost town because they don’t have a water supply.”

Sean Patrick Farrell contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

In Parched California, Town Taps Run Nearly Dry.

    In Parched California, Town Taps Run Nearly Dry, NYT, 7.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/us/
    a-dry-california-town-struggles-to-save-its-water-supply.html

A Severe Winter Breaks Budgets

as Well as Pipes

FEB. 15, 2014
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY
and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

SYRACUSE — Century-old water mains here have ruptured behind City Hall, popped in residential areas and split under the city’s bar and restaurant district. The mayor says she has personally reported three breaks, while exhausted crews work 18-hour shifts in subfreezing temperatures to repair the damage.

In Detroit, a break in a 30-inch main flooded a southwest neighborhood on Tuesday, turning streets into streams and stalling cars in water above their hubcaps. As city workers pumped away the water, and police officers and firefighters rescued stranded motorists, icebergs formed above the blacktop, locking some vehicles into place until the next thaw.

The exceptionally cold and stormy winter battering the Midwest, South and Northeast has forced cities and states to put road crews on double shifts and step up purchases of asphalt, trying to keep up with an epidemic of potholes. They have also bought and spread so much salt that there is a shortage in the Mid-Atlantic States, with more storms expected.

With revenues and staffing still below pre-recession levels, many local and state governments face a new financial strain from storm-related increases in spending on overtime pay, contractors and supplies. On Saturday, another snowfall covered the Northeast, a reminder that winter is far from finished.

“Cities still do not have a lot of cash available, so this particular storm season is having a really severe impact on their budgets,” said James Brooks, a director for community development and infrastructure at the National League of Cities. “We’ve also had many years of disinvestment in things like roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, which makes them more vulnerable when something like this happens.”

Stephanie A. Miner, the Syracuse mayor, said such things are too often overlooked when politicians want to spend money on economic development. “You don’t cut ribbons for new water mains, but that’s really what matters,” she said.

Northern regions tend to have older pipes and bridges, while areas farther south tend to be ill-equipped for snow drifts and subfreezing temperatures that can snarl traffic and buckle pavement. Officials around the country said the costs would be steep, but many said they would not worry about tabulating them until the crisis was over.

“We don’t ask those questions, but we do keep receipts,” Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina said in an interview. “At this point in time, you’re putting out the fires.” He said he expected to tap into the state’s emergency fund to pay for storm response. Local governments will also have to bear some of the burden, he said, and should not expect the state to pick up the whole tab.

Whoever is paying, the repair work will be extensive and expensive.

In Baltimore, 353 water mains ruptured in January, about one-third as many as in all of 2013. South Carolina officials estimated that a single weather system last month drained $2 million from the state’s budget. A 137-year-old main that popped in Lower Manhattan turned some of the most stylish streets in Greenwich Village into a temporary Venice, and a break in Boston’s Chinatown nearly swallowed a public works truck.

Chicago budgeted $20 million for 2014 to plow snow and salt roads, but it has already spent $25 million. City crews are filling potholes at double the rate of last year — which means buying twice as much patching material for that purpose — yet drivers are still doing what look like drunken swerves to avoid yawning gaps in the streets. So far, according to the National Weather Service, the city has had its third-snowiest and fourth-coldest winter since the service began keeping track in 1872.

Pennsylvania has used road salt at a pace 24 percent ahead of normal, an additional cost of more than $8 million so far, and on Thursday, Gov. Tom Corbett deployed elements of the National Guard to help with an emergency response, which means another expense. Maine’s Department of Transportation ordinarily spends about $15.7 million a year clearing roads of snow, but “right now we’re already up to $21.8 million,” said Ted Talbot, a department spokesman. “If it continues along this line, we’d have to curb some spring maintenance, like tree trimming, some signage potentially.”

Detroit — the largest American municipality ever to enter bankruptcy, and yet to exit it — was already suffering from an aging, neglected infrastructure; Darryl Latimer, deputy director of the city’s Water and Sewerage Department, said that after a wave of retirements, the department’s staff, like the budget for water main repair, was not up to the job. To those burdens, this winter added persistent subzero temperatures and heavy snow, contributing to about 500 water main breaks in January, compared with about 300 a year earlier, forcing the city to hire outside crews to try to keep up.

The major break last week in Detroit, in a pipe dating to about 1890, sent water gushing through gaps in the pavement in front of a grocery store, and submerged streets in a 12-block radius to a depth of as much as two feet. A police car was among those stranded until a front-end loader pushed it out of the water, an officer still inside.

It took hours to shut off the flood and pump out most of the remaining water, Mr. Latimer said. “We had to tow some of the cars out of the way so we could get to our manholes,” he said, and even then, the valves controlling the flow of water had frozen.

Cold weather is tough on water systems because as the water chills, metal pipes contract. At the same time, frost and ice cause the ground to expand, adding pressure.

In addition to the direct costs to governments, harsh weather can also mean lower tax revenue by slowing economic activity. A downtown Syracuse water main break on — no kidding — Water Street left a deep crater in front of the Miss Syracuse diner, surrounded by Water Department barricades. “It doesn’t appear to be a lot,” the owner, Joe Todisco, said of the business he has lost, “but it’s a lot to me.”

Across the street, a bar, J. Ryan’s, managed to stay open even while its water supply was cut off, because a local brewer, Middle Ages, sent over kegs filled with water.

On a recent day, with temperatures in the teens, a six-man repair crew on the city’s north side, equipped with shovels, a pump and allegedly waterproof boots, searched the bottom of a six-foot-deep pit for the leak producing muddy, bubbling water. The men’s breath fogged the air, and water froze their clothes stiff, but they kept digging and the water kept percolating.

Syracuse has had at least 100 main breaks since the start of the year, a large number for a city of 145,000, including those breaks that the mayor happened upon mayor.“They’ve all been doozies, too,” said Paul Trovato, the city’s superintendent of water operations. “They’re old, and it was cold. And they just started breaking.”

Jesse McKinley reported from Syracuse,

and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.

Reporting was contributed by Steven Yaccino from Chicago,

Alan Blinder from Atlanta, Jess Bidgood from Boston,

and Dan Frosch from Denver.

A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Severe Winter Breaks Budgets as Well as Pipes.

    A Severe Winter Breaks Budgets as Well as Pipes, NYT, 15.2.2104,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/
    a-severe-winter-breaks-budgets-as-well-as-pipes.html

Severe Drought

Has U.S. West Fearing Worst

 

FEB. 1, 2014
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — The punishing drought that has swept California is now threatening the state’s drinking water supply.

With no sign of rain, 17 rural communities providing water to 40,000 people are in danger of running out within 60 to 120 days. State officials said that the number was likely to rise in the months ahead after the State Water Project, the main municipal water distribution system, announced on Friday that it did not have enough water to supplement the dwindling supplies of local agencies that provide water to an additional 25 million people. It is first time the project has turned off its spigot in its 54-year history.

State officials said they were moving to put emergency plans in place. In the worst case, they said drinking water would have to be brought by truck into parched communities and additional wells would have to be drilled to draw on groundwater. The deteriorating situation would likely mean imposing mandatory water conservation measures on homeowners and businesses, who have already been asked to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent.

“Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing” said Gov. Jerry Brown, who was governor during the last major drought here, in 1976-77.

This latest development has underscored the urgency of a drought that has already produced parched fields, starving livestock, and pockets of smog.

“We are on track for having the worst drought in 500 years,” said B. Lynn Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Already the drought, technically in its third year, is forcing big shifts in behavior. Farmers in Nevada said they had given up on even planting, while ranchers in Northern California and New Mexico said they were being forced to sell off cattle as fields that should be four feet high with grass are a blanket of brown and stunted stalks.

Fishing and camping in much of California has been outlawed, to protect endangered salmon and guard against fires. Many people said they had already begun to cut back drastically on taking showers, washing their car and watering their lawns.

Rain and snow showers brought relief in parts of the state at the week’s end — people emerging from a movie theater in West Hollywood on Thursday evening broke into applause upon seeing rain splattering on the sidewalk — but they were nowhere near enough to make up for record-long dry stretches, officials said.

“I have experienced a really long career in this area, and my worry meter has never been this high,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, a statewide coalition. “We are talking historical drought conditions, no supplies of water in many parts of the state. My industry’s job is to try to make sure that these kind of things never happen. And they are happening.”

Officials are girding for the kind of geographical, cultural and economic battles that have long plagued a part of the country that is defined by a lack of water: between farmers and environmentalists, urban and rural users, and the northern and southern regions of this state.

“We do have a politics of finger-pointing and blame whenever there is a problem,” said Mr. Brown. “And we have a problem, so there is going to be a tendency to blame people.” President Obama called him last week to check on the drought situation and express his concern.

Tom Vilsack, secretary of the federal Agriculture Department, said in an interview that his agency’s ability to help farmers absorb the shock, with subsidies to buy food for cattle, had been undercut by the long deadlock in Congress over extending the farm bill, which finally seemed to be resolved last week.

Mr. Vilsack called the drought in California a “deep concern,” and a warning sign of trouble ahead for much of the West.

“That’s why it’s important for us to take climate change seriously,” he said. “If we don’t do the research, if we don’t have the financial assistance, if we don’t have the conservation resources, there’s very little we can do to help these farmers.”

The crisis is unfolding in ways expected and unexpected. Near Sacramento, the low level of streams has brought out prospectors, sifting for flecks of gold in slow-running waters. To the west, the heavy water demand of growers of medical marijuana — six gallons per plant per day during a 150-day period — is drawing down streams where salmon and other endangered fish species spawn.

“Every pickup truck has a water tank in the back,” said Scott Bauer, a coho salmon recovery coordinator with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “There is a potential to lose whole runs of fish.”

Without rain to scrub the air, pollution in the Los Angeles basin, which has declined over the past decade, has returned to dangerous levels, as evident from the brown-tinged air. Homeowners have been instructed to stop burning wood in their fireplaces.

In the San Joaquin Valley, federal limits for particulate matter were breached for most of December and January. Schools used flags to signal when children should play indoors.

“One of the concerns is that as concentrations get higher, it affects not only the people who are most susceptible, but healthy people as well,” said Karen Magliano, assistant chief of the air quality planning division of the state’s Air Resources Board.

The impact has been particularly severe on farmers and ranchers. “I have friends with the ground torn out, all ready to go,” said Darrell Pursel, who farms just south of Yerington, Nev. “But what are you going to plant? At this moment, it looks like we’re not going to have any water. Unless we get a lot of rain, I know I won’t be planting anything.”

The University of California Cooperative Extension held a drought survival session last week in Browns Valley, about 60 miles north of Sacramento, drawing hundreds of ranchers in person and online. “We have people coming from six or seven hours away,” said Jeffrey James, who ran the session.

Dan Macon, 46, a rancher in Auburn, Calif., said the situation was “as bad as I have ever experienced. Most of our range lands are essentially out of feed.”

With each parched sunrise, a sense of alarm is rising amid signs that this is a drought that comes along only every few centuries. Sacramento had gone 52 days without water, and Albuquerque had gone 42 days without rain or snow as of Saturday.

The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which supplies much of California with water during the dry season, was at just 12 percent of normal last week, reflecting the lack of rain or snow in December and January.

“When we don’t have rainfall in our biggest two months, you really are starting off bad,” said Dar Mims, a meteorologist with the Air Resources Board.

Even as officials move into action, people who have lived through droughts before — albeit none as severe as this — said they were doing triage in their gardens (water the oak tree, not the lawn) and taking classic “stop-start-stop-start” shower.

Jacob Battersby, a producer in Oakland, said he began cutting back even before the voluntary restrictions were announced.

“My wife and I both enjoy gardening,” he wrote in an email. “ ‘Sorry, plants. You will be getting none to drink this winter.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on February 2, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst.

    Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst, NYT, 1.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/us/
    severe-drought-has-us-west-fearing-worst.html

Parched,

California Cuts Off Tap to Agencies

JAN. 31, 2014
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — Acting in one of the worst droughts in California’s history, state officials announced on Friday that they would cut off the water that it provides to local agencies serving 25 million residents and about 750,000 acres of farmland.

With no end in sight for the dry spell and reservoirs at historic lows, Mark Cowin, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said his agency needed to preserve what little water remained so it could be used “as wisely as possible.”

It is the first time in the 54-year history of the State Water Project that water allocations to all of the public water agencies it serves have been cut to zero. That decision will force 29 local agencies to look elsewhere for water. Most have other sources they can draw from, such as groundwater and local reservoirs.

But the drought has already taken a toll on those supplies, and some cities, particularly in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area, rely almost exclusively on the State Water Project, Mr. Cowin said.

“We’ll always keep basic human health and safety as highest priority,” he said. “We’ll try to meet those needs as best we can.”

The Metropolitan Water District, which serves much of Southern California, gets about 30 percent of its water from the State Water Project.

Most of the farmers served are in Kern County, at the southern end of the Central Valley. Kern County is a major producer of carrots.

“Our action is intended to keep as much of the remaining water supplies upstream in reservoirs,” Mr. Cowin said, “so we have it available for the warm period in the summer and fall.”

Last year was the driest on record in California, and January, usually one of the wettest months of year, has brought almost no precipitation.

In January, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency for California. And despite some moisture in some parts of the state this week, the news has only gotten worse in the two weeks since his proclamation.

State reservoir levels are lower than they were at this time in 1977, the last time the state endured a drought this severe. The snow pack sits at only 12 percent of normal for this time of year. And 17 rural communities are in danger of running out of water within a few months.

“Today’s action is a stark reminder that California’s drought is real,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “We’re taking every possible step to prepare the state for the continuing dry conditions we face.”

Mr. Brown has urged Californians to reduce their water consumption by 20 percent. In addition, a growing list of mandatory restrictions has been put in place.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has limited fishing in certain places because of low water levels. Outdoor fires have been restricted because of dry conditions that have prolonged the danger of wildfires in the state far past the usual end of fire season. The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has hired 125 more firefighters this week.

The announcement about water allotment was made Friday in part to help farmers determine what, if anything, they should plant this year.

Many ranchers, forced to buy hay to feed their cows, have sold off much of their herds, while farmers in a number of Western states have been mulling whether to let their fields lie fallow this year.

“Farmers, fish and people are all going to get less water immediately,” Mr. Cowin said. “But we think these actions will help protect our water sources in the long run.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 1, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

Parched, California Cuts Off Tap to Agencies.

    Parched, California Cuts Off Tap to Agencies, NYT, 31.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/us/
    amid-drought-california-agency-will-withhold-water-deliveries.html

Industry Awakens

to Threat of Climate Change

JAN. 23, 2014
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — Coca-Cola has always been more focused on its economic bottom line than on global warming, but when the company lost a lucrative operating license in India because of a serious water shortage there in 2004, things began to change.

Today, after a decade of increasing damage to Coke’s balance sheet as global droughts dried up the water needed to produce its soda, the company has embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force.

“Increased droughts, more unpredictable variability, 100-year floods every two years,” said Jeffrey Seabright, Coke’s vice president for environment and water resources, listing the problems that he said were also disrupting the company’s supply of sugar cane and sugar beets, as well as citrus for its fruit juices. “When we look at our most essential ingredients, we see those events as threats.”

Coke reflects a growing view among American business leaders and mainstream economists who see global warming as a force that contributes to lower gross domestic products, higher food and commodity costs, broken supply chains and increased financial risk. Their position is at striking odds with the longstanding argument, advanced by the coal industry and others, that policies to curb carbon emissions are more economically harmful than the impact of climate change.

“The bottom line is that the policies will increase the cost of carbon and electricity,” said Roger Bezdek, an economist who produced a report for the coal lobby that was released this week. “Even the most conservative estimates peg the social benefit of carbon-based fuels as 50 times greater than its supposed social cost.”

Some tycoons are no longer listening.

At the Swiss resort of Davos, corporate leaders and politicians gathered for the annual four-day World Economic Forum will devote all of Friday to panels and talks on the threat of climate change. The emphasis will be less about saving polar bears and more about promoting economic self-interest.

In Philadelphia this month, the American Economic Association inaugurated its new president, William D. Nordhaus, a Yale economist and one of the world’s foremost experts on the economics of climate change.

“There is clearly a growing recognition of this in the broader academic economic community,” said Mr. Nordhaus, who has spent decades researching the economic impacts of both climate change and of policies intended to mitigate climate change.

In Washington, the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, has put climate change at the center of the bank’s mission, citing global warming as the chief contributor to rising global poverty rates and falling G.D.P.’s in developing nations. In Europe, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based club of 34 industrialized nations, has begun to warn of the steep costs of increased carbon pollution.

Nike, which has more than 700 factories in 49 countries, many in Southeast Asia, is also speaking out because of extreme weather that is disrupting its supply chain. In 2008, floods temporarily shut down four Nike factories in Thailand, and the company remains concerned about rising droughts in regions that produce cotton, which the company uses in its athletic clothes.

“That puts less cotton on the market, the price goes up, and you have market volatility,” said Hannah Jones, the company’s vice president for sustainability and innovation. Nike has already reported the impact of climate change on water supplies on its financial risk disclosure forms to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Both Nike and Coke are responding internally: Coke uses water-conservation technologies and Nike is using more synthetic material that is less dependent on weather conditions. At Davos and in global capitals, the companies are also lobbying governments to enact environmentally friendly policies.

But the ideas are a tough sell in countries like China and India, where cheap coal-powered energy is lifting the economies and helping to raise millions of people out of poverty. Even in Europe, officials have begun to balk at the cost of environmental policies: On Wednesday, the European Union scaled back its climate change and renewable energy commitments, as high energy costs, declining industrial competitiveness and a recognition that the economy is unlikely to rebound soon caused European policy makers to question the short-term economic trade-offs of climate policy.

In the United States, the rich can afford to weigh in. The California hedge-fund billionaire Thomas F. Steyer, who has used millions from his own fortune to support political candidates who favor climate policy, is working with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a former Treasury secretary in the George W. Bush administration, to commission an economic study on the financial risks associated with climate change. The study, titled “Risky Business,” aims to assess the potential impacts of climate change by region and by sector across the American economy.

“This study is about one thing, the economics,” Mr. Paulson said in an interview, adding that “business leaders are not adequately focused on the economic impact of climate change.”

Also consulting on the “Risky Business” report is Robert E. Rubin, a former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. “There are a lot of really significant, monumental issues facing the global economy, but this supersedes all else,” Mr. Rubin said in an interview. “To make meaningful headway in the economics community and the business community, you’ve got to make it concrete.”

Last fall, the governments of seven countries — Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, South Korea, Norway, Sweden and Britain — created the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and jointly began another study on how governments and businesses can address climate risks to better achieve economic growth. That study and the one commissioned by Mr. Steyer and others are being published this fall, just before a major United Nations meeting on climate change.

Although many Republicans oppose the idea of a price or tax on carbon pollution, some conservative economists endorse the idea. Among them are Arthur B. Laffer, senior economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan; the Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, who was economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign; and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the head of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, and an economic adviser to the 2008 presidential campaign of Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican.

“There’s no question that if we get substantial changes in atmospheric temperatures, as all the evidence suggests, that it’s going to contribute to sea-level rise,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. “There will be agriculture and economic effects — it’s inescapable.” He added, “I’d be shocked if people supported anything other than a carbon tax — that’s how economists think about it.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 24, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Industry Awakens to Threat of Climate Change.

    Industry Awakens to Threat of Climate Change, NYT, 23.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/science/earth/
    threat-to-bottom-line-spurs-action-on-climate.html

Severe Drought Grows Worse in California

JAN. 17, 2014
The New York Times
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
and MALIA WOLLAN

NORDEN, Calif. — Cattle ranchers have had to sell portions of their herd for lack of water. Sacramento and other municipalities have imposed severe water restrictions. Wildfires broke out this week in forests that are usually too wet to ignite. Ski resorts that normally open in December are still closed; at one here in the Sierra Nevada that is open, a bear wandered onto a slope full of skiers last week, apparently not hibernating because of the balmy weather.

On Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown made it official: California is suffering from a drought, perhaps one for the record books. The water shortage has Californians trying to deal with problems that usually arise in midsummer.

With little snow in the forecast, experts are warning that this drought, after one of the driest years on record last year, could be as disruptive as the severe droughts of the 1970s.

Under state law, that would allow the governor to “waive laws or regulations and expedite some funding,” said Jeanine Jones, deputy drought manager for the State Department of Water Resources. “It does not create a new large pot of money for drought response or make federal funding available.”

Signs of drought are everywhere, affecting vast sectors of the economy. A sense of dread is building among farmers, many whom have already let fields go fallow. Without more water, an estimated 200,000 acres of prime agriculture land will go unplanted in Fresno County, according to Westlands Water District officials. Cattle ranchers accustomed to letting cows graze on rain-fed grass have had to rely on bought hay or reduce their herds.

Clergy of all faiths have been exhorting the faithful to pray for precipitation. “May God open the heavens, and let his mercy rain down upon our fields and mountains,” Bishop Jaime Soto, the state’s Roman Catholic conference president, said last week. The Sacramento Valley chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations followed suit by announcing that area mosques would offer the traditional rain prayer, Salatul Istisqa.

California gets much of its water from the snowpack of the Sierra Nevada, so towns like this one have a front-row view of the problem. The base at Donner Ski Ranch, a family-owned resort with limited snow-making capacity, was less than a foot of snow this week. Usually, it would be several feet deep in January, like other resorts in the Sierra.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Lincoln Kauffman, 55, the resort’s general manager, who has been skiing in these mountains since the early 1970s. “I think 1976 and 1977 were comparable to this — that was a really tough one. I remember the restrictions on showers and flushing toilets.”

Near Sacramento, the Folsom Lake reservoir’s level has fallen so much that remnants of a Gold Rush-era ghost town are now visible. The San Juan Water District, which serves communities near Sacramento and relies on water from Folsom Lake, has asked customers to reduce their water usage by 20 percent and in some areas cease all outdoor watering. Santa Cruz, some 75 miles south of San Francisco, banned restaurants from providing customers with drinking water unless it is requested. In Glendora, near Los Angeles, but also in Humboldt County in far Northern California, firefighters have been battling wildfires that normally do not happen during the winter.

“We still have extreme fire conditions throughout the state in January,” said Dennis Mathisen, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “This is definitely not the norm for us.”

The snowpack plays a critical part in what is one of the world’s most sophisticated and complex water delivery systems, supplying water to more than 25 million people and the $44.7 billion agricultural industry. The snow that piles up on the Sierra Nevada’s 400-mile range during the winter acts as a reserve that starts to melt in the spring. The melting snow drains into rivers that feed reservoirs below, providing water to densely populated communities hundreds of miles south in Southern California.

Given the snowpack’s significance to the state’s farmers and water boards, winter snow surveys are carried out monthly starting every January. In a ritual that often makes it onto the front pages of newspapers in California, the chief snow surveyor, Frank Gehrke, measures the depth of the snowpack every month by plunging aluminum tubes into the same spot along Highway 50 in the Sierra.

After the survey this month, the Department of Water Resources said that the snowpack was only 20 percent of the historical average.

The lack of precipitation has been caused in large part by a high-pressure zone stretching along the coast from Oregon to northern Mexico. The zone acts like a mountain range, blocking storm systems from striking land. Storms are pushed instead north into Canada and Alaska, contributing to the extreme cold weather seen in recent weeks across much of the Midwest and Northeast. Though such high-pressure zones are normal during the winter, they usually dissipate and re-form, allowing storms to blanket the state in snow and rain.

“We’ve got a ridge of high pressure sitting overhead, and it is not budging,” said Diana Henderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.

In Truckee, a ski resort town near here, the Back Country store was holding a clearance sale on mountain bikes, which some people were riding this winter instead of skiing.

“These should be sitting on the shelves this time of the year,” an employee, Aaron Breitbard, said of CO2 cartridges used to inflate flat tires in an emergency. “But they’ve been selling. And, as you can see, we’re building one bike and repairing another one.”

About a hundred miles west of here, the relics of Red Bank, a Gold Rush-era town that, according to California State Parks, included a mine, winery and dairy, now lie exposed on the dry bed of Folsom Lake. A few dozen locals had come to look at nails, glass and bricks scattered here and there.

“Everybody’s been talking about how low the lake is,” said Ramone Velazquez, who was visiting with his wife, Mariana, and their young daughter, Juliet.

“I’m really worried about how this drought is going to affect us,” he said. “I heard about the drought in the ’70s, and how people couldn’t water their lawns and wash their cars. They could take only one-minute showers.”

“Can you believe that?” his wife said. “We’re used to taking an hour.”

Norimitsu Onishi reported from Norden,

and Malia Wollan from San Francisco.

A version of this article appears in print on January 18, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

California Watches Bad Drought Grow Worse.

    Severe Drought Grows Worse in California, NYT, 17.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/us/
    as-californias-drought-deepens-a-sense-of-dread-grows.html

As Winter Takes Hold,

Plunging Temperatures Test Utilities

JAN. 8, 2014
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

The short-term price of natural gas in the Northeast eased on Wednesday after surging during the cold snap this week, but many consumers face the prospect of higher bills as utilities seek to pass along the added costs.

Already, several utilities, including Connecticut Light and Power as well as National Grid and NStar, which serve Massachusetts, have recently announced increases in their retail electricity rate as they struggle to meet peak periods of demand.

On Tuesday, for example, spot prices for a few large energy customers in the region spiked nearly 10 times higher than national prices as demand for electricity and heat soared and overwhelmed pipelines taking gas supplies to the region from the south and west.

Many power providers compensated by importing more gas from Canada through pipelines that have been mostly underused in recent years and through imports of liquefied gas supplies.

Utilities also bought more coal- and oil-fired power, which is normally priced higher than gas but has recently been lower because of constraints in gas pipelines.
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A worker controlling a natural-gas-drilling rig doing exploration in the Marcellus shale field outside Waynesburg, Pa. Mladen Antonov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

All the while, electricity grid operators pleaded with customers to conserve energy by lowering their thermostats, and they asked gas customers to switch to other fuel sources.

The frigid weather presented a big test for utilities, especially in the Northeast, which have switched from coal to gas power in the last decade as cheap natural gas from the Marcellus shale field became available.

“The power system in New England has performed as expected so we’ve been in good shape through this latest cold snap,” said Marcia Blomberg, a spokeswoman for ISO New England, a big operator of the regional grid. “The system has held up.” There were no serious interruptions of power reported and utilities were not forced to conduct rolling brownouts to prevent a blackout.

“The system is big, diverse and robust,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, a consultancy based in Amherst, Mass. “Some of the utilities have to buy some coal power and small amounts of gas at high prices, but a lot of adjustments across the system are enough to cope.”

Mr. Lynch said consumers would probably face higher electricity rates in coming months because “this winter has been colder than normal and because natural gas prices have recovered.”

The spike in prices on Tuesday was significant. On the wholesale market, a megawatt-hour of electricity, an amount of energy that would run a big suburban house for a month and which on normal days sells for $40 or $50 in many locations, was going for $500 to $1,000 in New Jersey, Delaware and big areas of Pennsylvania and Maryland.

In parts of New England, the prices were over $200. In New York City, wholesale prices were under $200, mostly because generators were burning oil, whose price does not spike seasonally as much as the price of natural gas does.

With prices falling on Wednesday, energy experts expected the trend to continue as temperatures climb through the rest of week.

Nationally, gas prices remained at historically low levels and declined substantially on Wednesday to just over $4.20 per thousand cubic feet despite surging national power demand and recent large withdrawals of gas from stored inventories.

Nevertheless, the Energy Department, in a report this week, raised its estimated 2014 average price by 11 cents, to $3.89 per thousand cubic feet.

The gas drilling boom in Appalachia and other shale fields around the country, made possible by technical improvements in drilling dense shale rocks, led to a plunge in gas prices and a sharp shift over the last decade from coal-fired generation nationwide, and from heating oil in the Northeast particularly.

Natural gas provided less than 30 percent of the electricity generated in New England in 2001, but now provides more than 50 percent, well above the national average. Gas pipeline capacity has been more than adequate during the summer months, but the pipes are sometimes constrained in the winter since gas not only produces electricity but also heat for homes and businesses in cold weather.

There were several regional gas price spikes last winter, including in the metropolitan New York area. But over the last year, several gas pipeline expansion projects connecting the Marcellus field to New York and New Jersey have eased concerns, and more expansions are scheduled through 2015.

Still, the building of additional pipeline service to New England has fallen behind, and consumers there will probably need to wait until 2016 for an expansion of Spectra Energy’s Algonquin Incremental Market pipeline project to bring significant new Marcellus gas production through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Twenty interstate pipeline systems operate between Virginia and Maine, delivering gas from the Marcellus field as well as the Gulf of Mexico region and Canada. But as quickly as pipelines have been built, the depressed price of natural gas has forced producers to cut back on their drilling plans and encouraged pipeline companies to refrain from investing even more robustly on new pipelines. At the same time, rapidly growing renewable sources like wind and solar have taken some market share from natural gas.

“It’s not a reasonable expectation that pipelines will be built out in a smooth well-coordinated pattern given that power demand and gas-fired generation is very difficult to predict into the future,” said Lawrence Makovich, chief power strategist at the IHS-Cera energy consultancy. “That complexity means there will be cyclical, strongly seasonal and sometimes volatile delivered gas prices.”

Some energy analysts caution that the region’s energy diversity is narrowing, and that the recent increases in the natural gas spot price should be viewed as a warning.

They warn of trouble because of the expected retirement of aging coal-fired plants, particularly the Brayton Point power plant in southeastern Massachusetts, which is scheduled to be shut down in 2017. The plant has long been a target of environmental groups as a heavy polluter.

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 2014,

on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline:

As Winter Takes Hold, Plunging Temperatures Test Utilities.

    As Winter Takes Hold, Plunging Temperatures Test Utilities, NYT, 8.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/business/
    energy-environment/as-winter-takes-hold-plunging-temperatures-test-utilities.html

Celebrating Deep Freeze,

Insect Experts See a Chance

to Kill Off Invasive Species

JAN. 8, 2014
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

While some people were cursing a canceled flight or wishing they had donned an extra layer on Tuesday, when temperatures in the region took a deep dive, entomologists, foresters and naturalists were rooting for the mercury to drop even lower. That is because the extreme cold has the potential to beat back some of the invasive insects threatening treasured local tree and plant species.

“You do think, ‘Oh great, maybe some of those nasty insects are going to get zapped today,’ ” said Mark Fisher, director of conservatories and horticultural programs at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “It’s Mother Nature’s way of dealing with this issue.”

The insects, whether introduced pests like the hemlock woolly adelgid or native ones like the southern pine beetle, have weakened forests from Cape May, N.J., to Litchfield County in Connecticut. They are uncannily adept at surviving the winter, but most have a breaking point. And this week, that point was nigh.

“The lethal temperature for the woolly adelgid is minus 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Richard S. Cowles, a scientist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state research center. “I was cheering a couple of days ago because most of the adelgids will be dying from the temperatures we saw.”

Dr. Cowles, an entomologist, admitted to rejoicing that temperatures for the early morning hours of Saturday had ranged from 3 degrees to minus 9 in the state. Then came another deep freeze on Tuesday. “At that temperature, ice crystals start forming in the woolly adelgid’s body, and it kills them,” he said.

But entomologists cautioned that once an invasive species has arrived, it is almost always a matter of managing the population, not eradicating it. Some will inevitably survive. Dr. Cowles said that the adelgid population could still rebound within two years.

An aphid-like insect, introduced to the United States in the 1950s from Japan, the woolly adelgid has killed hundreds of thousands of Eastern hemlocks in Connecticut alone since arriving there in the 1980s. The pest, about the size of a period, can pierce the base of needles and suck out the tree’s nutritional supply. The adult can survive the winter on a branch.

Extreme cold is a fortuitous management tool. But with a warming climate, it is one that scientists cannot count on. “The weather will give them a temporary setback, but as soon as the weather warms up, they will take off again,” said Jan Nyrop, a professor of entomology and senior associate dean of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

In the Pinelands in southern New Jersey, state foresters have been battling the southern pine beetle. The beetle can tunnel through a tree’s bark, eating a layer of tissue that supplies the tree with critical nutrients. Until recently, the beetles, which are native to the southern United States, did not survive north of Delaware, because of the cold. But that has changed as winters have turned milder.

The past century in New Jersey has seen a warming trend of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit. More important than average temperatures in the beetles’ spread is the lack of periodic cold snaps in which the temperature plunges to minus 8 degrees.

The Pinelands have not experienced that kind of cold since 1996, and the first southern pine beetles were detected several years later. Whether the recent deep chill was enough to thwart their progress remains to be seen. The temperature for the past week in Chatsworth, N.J., in the heart of the Pinelands, reached a low of minus 7 on Saturday.

Ron Corcory, the project coordinator for the southern pine beetle with the New Jersey State Forestry Services, said that “sustained, very cold” weather was a powerful weapon. “We’re certainly optimistic that this will have some impact, but we won’t know until the spring,” he said. “We’d want to see a lot of green tops of trees.”

Emerald ash borers need even colder temperatures to succumb. The insects were first detected in 2002, after they arrived on wood pallets from China, and have since killed tens of millions of ash trees in more than 20 states. Studies suggest that temperatures must plummet to minus 30 degrees in order to achieve widespread mortality, and foresters and scientists in Minnesota and Illinois, where it was that cold this week, were hoping for a die-off.

But in New York, scientists were setting their sights on other targets. Amy Berkov, an assistant professor of biology at City College of New York, said she was hoping for some downward pressure on ticks, some of which spread Lyme disease. She recalled a field trip during the unusually mild winter two years ago when one of her students came back bearing a tick.

Dr. Berkov, who specializes in tropical ecology, said that she was warmed by this week’s cold. “Even though I work in the tropics, I like a seasonal climate,” she said. “I think it does tamp down some of these things that we’d rather not be seeing more of.”

    Celebrating Deep Freeze, Insect Experts See a Chance
    to Kill Off Invasive Species, NYT, 8.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/nyregion/
    experts-cheer-the-deep-freeze-as-a-killer-of-invasive-insects.html

Arctic Cold Blankets Midwest,

Freezing Routines

January 6, 2014
The New York Times
By CHRISTINA CAPECCHI
and STEVEN YACCINO

MINNEAPOLIS — Hildagard Omete, 36, a mother of three who has been unemployed for a year and a half, went job hunting on Monday.

Sitting at the public library scanning help-wanted ads on a computer, Ms. Omete was wearing two hoods and a knitted hat, along with a full-length down jacket. It was cold inside the library.

Outside, the temperature was downright frigid, even by Minnesota standards. The thermometer read minus 15 to minus 20 degrees for most of the day.

A deep freeze not seen in decades swept through the center of the country on Monday — closing schools as far south as Oklahoma as well as some businesses. In a rare move, 3M closed its corporate offices, letting about 10,000 people in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area stay home. A spokeswoman, Jacqueline Berry, said it had been at least 10 years since 3M had made a similar move. “It’s brutal out there,” she said. “The decision was made by management in terms of the safety of the employees.”

Brian Korty, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said freezing temperatures could reach as far south as Florida. “This cold air bath, by the time it’s all over, it will cover everything from Rockies to the East Coast,” Mr. Korty said. “It isn’t going to last very long. Still, for most people, it’s the coldest winter they’ve felt in a while.”

Officials across the Midwest have been warning about the coming chill for days, while cities scrambled to recover from back-to-back blizzards that have left some Chicago streets impassable and grocery store shelves empty as people stocked their pantries for yet another day indoors. Temperatures that were 20 to 40 degrees below average were reported in parts of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nebraska.

As Chicago saw one of its coldest days since the 1980s, school officials extended the holiday break for all 400,000 students, closing schools on both Monday and Tuesday. Airlines at O’Hare International Airport pre-emptively canceled 1,600 flights. Garbage pickup was suspended. Sidewalks downtown, usually teeming on weekdays with tourists and workers at lunchtime, seemed all but deserted.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” said Phil Kwiatkowski, president of Pacific Garden Mission, a homeless shelter in Chicago, where more than 1,050 people slept on Sunday night, the most he has seen in years.

Close to 10,000 homes were without power in Illinois on Monday morning, according to the state’s emergency management agency. In Indiana, the number was above 30,000, state officials said, and the National Guard had evacuated at least 450 residents from heatless homes in Indianapolis, according to Marc Lotter, a spokesman for the city.

Sections of two major highways in Northern Indiana — Interstates 65 and 94 — were shut down for most of the day, their traffic cameras displaying post-apocalyptic stretches of frozen highways and drifting snow. And the mayor of Indianapolis, Greg Ballard, issued a travel warning on Sunday night that for a time made it illegal to drive on city roads except in an emergency.

“It’s just not safe for anybody to be on the road,” Mr. Lotter said. “If you broke down, it is a very serious situation for us to get to you. It’s dangerous for our first responders.”

Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota — where the National Weather Service could not find a single thermometer above negative 20 degrees on Monday morning — closed all public schools statewide, the first time a Minnesota governor had taken that step in 17 years.

And yet, for some in a region where residents are no strangers to below-zero blasts, life went on. Mass was said at the home cathedral of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. “I told them I was very proud of their bravery for coming in,” the Rev. John Ubel said. Babies were bundled in snowsuits and brought to day care, despite warnings of the dangerous weather.

“They scared me,” Ms. Omete said of the weather forecasters. “But when I see a little sunlight, I always come out.”

Christina Capecchi reported from Minneapolis,

and Steven Yaccino from Chicago.

    Arctic Cold Blankets Midwest, Freezing Routines, NYT, 6.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/
    arctic-cold-blankets-midwest-freezing-routines.html

Polar Vortex: Temperatures Fall Far, Fast

January 6, 2014
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON
and HENRY FOUNTAIN

Meteorologists called it “weather whiplash” — a drop of roughly 50 degrees in a matter of hours that took temperatures from 55 in Central Park on Monday morning to an expected low of 6 overnight and a high on Tuesday of only 10. The last time temperatures in New York fell that much in such a short time, Warren G. Harding was in the White House.

The reason was a mix of atmospheric ingredients that came together to give New York a precipitous, once-every-few-decades swing.

It began with the polar vortex, an elliptical-shaped pattern of frigid winds blowing west to east and centered on the North Pole.

“The vortex is normally very stable and keeps air bottled,” said James E. Overland, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the last week, though, a kink developed in the vortex’s winds, delivering arctic air to the Plains and the Midwest, forcing warmer air out of the way.

That cold air, a giant cottony blur on the weather maps, drove temperatures down to 32 degrees below zero in Fargo, N.D., on Monday, and 25 below in Comertown, Mont. Weather watchers recorded some of the coldest temperatures in years in places as far south as Nashville, where the temperature was 8 degrees at 6 p.m. and was expected to fall to 4 overnight.

In New York, Monday was a day of rapid change. Last week’s snow melted, or was chased away by early-morning rain. Thermometers that began the day in the 50s dropped through the 40s and kept sinking.

“It’s unusual, but it does happen,” said David Stark, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service at its office in Upton, N.Y., on Long Island. “The only difference in the 1920s, it went from the low 80s to the 20s.”

In March 1921, three weeks after President Harding’s inauguration in Washington, the temperature in Central Park dropped 56 degrees in 14 hours. The reading at 2 p.m. on March 28 was 82 degrees in Central Park, according to Weather Service records. Then a cold front blew in, and by midnight, the temperature had sunk to 34. It kept falling. By 6 a.m., the thermometer was at 26.

Scientists and meteorologists say one possible reason for such a sharp temperature drop was that the kink in the winds came later in the winter this year than in some previous years.

“It does so over Canada all the time,” said Thomas Herrington, a professor of ocean engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. “To come this far south, it usually takes a push from another system, usually a warmer air system over Alaska or Greenland.”

The kink created a trough of cold, dry air in the Plains and Midwest. At the same time, outside the trough, warm moist air was brought up from the south. As the kink traveled eastward across the country, the warm air was quickly replaced by the cold, and the mercury fell, sometimes startlingly fast.

“It just so happens that the air this time has managed to grow unusually cold,” said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology with the website Weather Underground.

Weather Underground’s historian, Christopher C. Burt, said temperature drops like the one forecast for New York were not unprecedented. “You go back 100 years, and you’ll see a lot of times when this has happened,” he said.

Drops tend to be more rapid and extreme in the Midwest and Plains than on the East Coast. In the nation’s midsection, there is little to stop the onrushing Arctic air, and the Rocky Mountains tend to hem the cold air in.

This can create a “Blue Norther,” a temperature drop of dozens of degrees in a few hours. On Nov. 11, 1911, in Oklahoma City, for instance, the temperature plummeted from 83 degrees in the afternoon to 17 at midnight.

“It’s pretty rare that you’d have the equivalent of a Blue Norther over the East Coast,” Mr. Burt said.

Dr. Overland said the changes to the polar vortex had become more common in the past five years, leading to suggestions by him and others that climate change in general, and the decline in Arctic sea ice in particular, may play a role. But most researchers say there is not enough data to conclude that anything other than normal climate variability is involved.

David A. Robinson, New Jersey’s state climatologist and a professor at Rutgers, said the huge one-day temperature swing was not particularly surprising given the other weather extremes of recent weeks.

“We’ve had this amplified pattern for the past six weeks or so,” he said. “With it, we’ve had record warmth. We’ve had record cold. The fact is it’s happened, and we don’t know exactly why.”

Justin Gillis contributed reporting.

    Polar Vortex: Temperatures Fall Far, Fast, NYT, 6.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/nyregion/
    in-new-york-temperatures-fall-far-fast.html

Bone-Chilling Cold

a Crippling Blow to Air Travel

January 6, 2014
The New York Times
By JAD MOUAWAD

The chaos in the nation’s air travel system worsened on Monday as a wave of frigid weather forced airlines to cancel thousands more flights, stranding passengers from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Los Angeles.

Compounding the issue, at least for one airline, were new regulations requiring more rest time for pilots that began at the beginning of the year.

JetBlue Airways said the combination of bad weather and the new Federal Aviation Administration rules led it to cancel all of its flights into and out of Boston and the three New York area airports for 17 hours starting Monday afternoon.

The regulations made airlines build more leeway into their already tight pilot scheduling. Once the delays hit, some pilots who formerly would have been available to fly were not allowed to.

“In the midst of us repairing those schedules disrupted by this week’s winter storms, we’re facing an additional challenge as new F.A.A. rules went into effect for crew rest,” JetBlue said in a statement.

The biggest impact on the airlines was in the Northeast and the Midwest, where polar weather swooped in. Airlines canceled 4,400 flights on Monday, bringing the total to more than 18,000 since last Thursday, according to FlightView.com, a flight information website.

The delays, during one of the busiest travel periods of the year, marooned thousands of people trying to return home from holiday trips, begin a new school term or get back to work. Fans of Florida State and Auburn scrambled to find their way to Pasadena, Calif., for college football’s national championship game at the Rose Bowl Monday night.

One traveler, Courtney Morrissey, said she was supposed to start a new job on Monday in Denver but has been stuck in Rochester since last Thursday after three different flights she had rebooked were canceled. She is now scheduled to fly on Wednesday.

“I am not holding my breath,” Ms. Morrissey said. “Every time they put me on a new flight now, I expect that to be canceled.”

Widespread cancellations are increasingly common in the airline industry, which relies on the hub-and-spoke model of connecting flights. Airlines also now operate on a much tighter schedule, leaving them with little slack, and have few spare planes to rebook passengers.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy forced airlines to cancel more than 20,000 flights over a four-day period.

Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport was hit the hardest, with more than 1,600 flights canceled on Monday as temperatures fell below minus 12 degrees.

United Airlines operated a pared-down schedule as ground workers and bag handlers could not stay more than 15 minutes on the tarmac. Refueling operations also took longer than usual, said Mary Ryan, a United spokeswoman.

JetBlue stopped all service from 5 p.m. Monday to 10 a.m. Tuesday from Logan Airport in Boston and from Kennedy International, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International Airport in the New York area. The airline warned of the effect of the new Federal Aviation Administration regulations on service.

The new rules mandate a minimum rest period for pilots of 10 hours before they report for duty, up from eight hours, and includes a provision that they get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. It also limits the number of hours a pilot can fly and sets cumulative flight duty limits.

“These rules further impact our ability to operate an already disrupted schedule, causing our pilots to ‘time out’ even sooner,” JetBlue said. “As a result, additional cancellations are likely to occur as we work to reset the operation.”

Capt. Sean Cassidy, a first vice president at the Air Line Pilots Association, said it was too soon to know what impact, if any, the new rules had on the recent cancellations. Airlines have had nearly two years to plan for the new regulations.

“It’s rather unfortunate that the day the new rule change became mandatory happens to coincide with this massive weather system,” Mr. Cassidy said. “It is very difficult to extrapolate.”

Still, Mr. Cassidy added, “some airlines were better prepared than others, that’s fair to say.”

These regulations, the most significant change for pilots in decades, were long in the making but were given a new impetus after the 2009 crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407, which killed 49 people on board. The investigation found that fatigue had most likely contributed to the crew’s performance.

“Some carriers got out front of this and planned better than others, and hired-up for the added resources required,” said Bob Mann, an airline consultant in Port Washington, N.Y. “When the cusp of a significant adjustment like this coincides with serial bad weather across the country and a heavy holiday traffic period, it would be unrealistic to expect good things to happen, and they didn’t and in some cases still haven’t, and won’t for days to come.”

In fact, airlines are still struggling to regain their footing from last week’s snowstorm that blanketed the Northeast. “It’s just been a very challenging string of weather events,” said Morgan Durrant, a spokesman for Delta Air Lines. “Whenever you have that line up when you can’t get a day to reboot and reset all your operations and assets, it gets to be very challenging.”

Some airlines fared better than others. Delta, for instance, canceled 695 flights on Monday, including 75 on its mainline operations and 620 in Delta Connection, its regional partner. That amounted to about 15 percent of its daily flights.

The weather disruptions affected travelers even in sunny climes. At Fort Lauderdale International Airport, the backlog of people waiting at the JetBlue counter on Monday morning was hundreds deep, forcing airport employees to steer them outdoors to line up. There, they were handed free bottles of water to help cope with the 84-degree temperature.

Nancy Labrecque, a nursing student from Montreal who had just returned from a cruise in the Bahamas, said she arrived to the airport at 6:30 a.m. but found that her flight to New York had been canceled.

Traveling with her husband and two children, she was told they might have a chance on Friday. “I was not being picky. I said, ‘Take me somewhere else,’ but there were no flights to anywhere,” she said. “We were in line for four and a half hours. This is a fiasco.”

Michael A. Nonnemacher, director for operations at the Fort Lauderdale airport, said that flights grounded in New York or elsewhere end up having a domino effect on later flights that depend on that aircraft.

“It’s a whole trickle-down effect,” he said. “When you have this number of flights canceled, you have a systemwide effects. It’s like a plume.”

Melissa Garcia arrived at the airport at 9 a.m. Monday with her husband, two children and babysitter. At noon, the nanny was still holding their place in line. Her 11:20 a.m. flight to Newburgh, N.Y., was canceled. At about 11 a.m., the airline sent an email offering a refund.

“If you look at the other airlines, they are delayed, not canceled,” Ms. Garcia said. “We’re still waiting to find another flight. It’s supposed to be first come first served, but when we got here the line was to the door.”

She added, "I don’t think this is related to the weather.”

Ms. Garcia, a biologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is out of sick and vacation days. If her vacation is extended, she will have to take unpaid days off. “I’m not mad yet,” she said. “I just want to get home.”

Jessica Bidgood contributed reporting from Boston

and Frances Robles from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

    Bone-Chilling Cold a Crippling Blow to Air Travel, NYT, 6.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/business/
    frigid-weather-cripples-air-travel-system.html

Kerry Quietly Makes

Priority of Climate Pact

January 2, 2014
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — As a young naval officer in Vietnam, John Kerry commanded a Swift boat up the dangerous rivers of the Mekong Delta. But when he returned there last month as secretary of state for the first time since 1969, he spoke not of past firefights but of climate change.

“Decades ago, on these very waters, I was one of many who witnessed the difficult period in our shared history,” Mr. Kerry told students gathered on the banks of the Cai Nuoc River. He drew a connection from the Mekong Delta’s troubled past to its imperiled future. “This is one of the two or three most potentially impacted areas in the world with respect to the effects of climate change,” he said.

In his first year as secretary of state, Mr. Kerry joined with the Russians to push Syria to turn over its chemical weapons, persuaded the Israelis and Palestinians to resume direct peace talks, and played the closing role in the interim nuclear agreement with Iran. But while the public’s attention has been on his diplomacy in the Middle East, behind the scenes at the State Department Mr. Kerry has initiated a systematic, top-down push to create an agencywide focus on global warming.

His goal is to become the lead broker of a global climate treaty in 2015 that will commit the United States and other nations to historic reductions in fossil fuel pollution.

Whether the secretary of state can have that kind of influence remains an open question, and Mr. Kerry, despite two decades of attention to climate policy, has few concrete accomplishments on the issue. The climate bills he sponsored as a senator failed. At the United Nations climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, Mr. Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts, labored behind the scenes to help President Obama broker a treaty that yielded pledges from countries to cut their emissions but failed to produce legally binding commitments.

“He’s had a lot of passion, but I don’t think you can conclude he’s had any success,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who has worked on climate legislation with Mr. Kerry in the past.

Yet climate experts point to one significant, recent accomplishment. As a result of midlevel talks Mr. Kerry set up to pave the way for a 2015 deal, the United States and China agreed in September to jointly phase down production of hydrofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air-conditioners.

“He’s pushing to get climate to be the thing that drives the U.S. relationship with China,” said Timothy E. Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado who now works on climate change issues with the United Nations Foundation.

For decades, the world has been skeptical of American efforts to push a climate change treaty, given the lack of action in Congress. But Mr. Obama has given Mr. Kerry’s efforts some help. In September, the Environmental Protection Agency began issuing regulations forcing cuts in carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

The rules, which can be enacted without Congress, have effectively frozen construction of new coal-fired plants and could eventually shutter existing ones. Republicans criticize the rules as a “war on coal,” but abroad they are viewed as a sign that the United States is now serious about acting on global warming.

“It has not gone unnoticed that this administration is now much more engaged on climate change,” said Jake Schmidt, the international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Every international negotiator understands it.” When Mr. Kerry took office, Mr. Schmidt said, “the dynamic changed quite a bit.”

Shortly after Mr. Kerry was sworn in last February, he issued a directive that all meetings between senior American diplomats and top foreign officials include a discussion of climate change. He put top climate policy specialists on his State Department personal staff. And he is pursuing smaller climate deals in forums like the Group of 20, the countries that make up the world’s largest economies.

“He’s approaching this creatively,” said Heather Zichal, who recently stepped down as Mr. Obama’s top climate adviser and worked for Mr. Kerry from 2002 to 2008. “He’s thinking strategically about using other forums.”

But Mr. Kerry’s ambitious agenda faces enormous obstacles.

Not only must he handle difficult negotiations with China — the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases — for the 2015 treaty, but the pact must be ratified by a Senate that has a long record of rejecting climate change legislation. “In all candor, I don’t care where he is, nothing is going to happen in the Senate for a long time,” Mr. McCain said.

The effort is complicated by the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if approved by the State Department and Mr. Obama, would bring carbon-heavy tar sands oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast — and infuriate environmentalists. Approval of the pipeline could blacken Mr. Kerry’s green credentials and hurt his ability to get a broader climate deal.

Mr. Kerry is nonetheless forging ahead. “One of the reasons the president was attracted to Kerry was that we were going to make climate change a legacy issue in the second term,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser.

Former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts to fight climate change, praised Mr. Kerry’s longtime focus on global warming. “He has continued to prioritize the issue even in the face of strong political resistance,” Mr. Gore wrote in an email. Mr. Kerry, he said, “has the rare opportunity to advance international negotiations at a critical time.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Kerry worked closely with Mr. Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, on climate change policy on Capitol Hill. In 1992, Mr. Kerry attended the first United Nations climate change summit meeting, in Rio de Janeiro, where he kindled a connection with Teresa Heinz, who attended with a delegation representing the elder President George Bush.

Married three years later, the couple went on to write a 2007 book together, “This Moment on Earth: Today’s New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future.” By that time Mr. Kerry had run for president and lost, and then was one of the founders of a think tank, the American Security Project, that defined climate change as a national security threat.

After Mr. Obama was elected president in 2008, Mr. Kerry and his wife began holding salons in their Georgetown home focused on climate policy, with guests like John P. Holdren, the new president’s science adviser. By 2009, Mr. Kerry had joined Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, to push an ambitious climate change bill.

At the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December 2009, Mr. Obama promised the world that the Senate would soon pass that bill — but a few months later, Mr. Kerry’s legislation fell apart. Since then prospects for global warming legislation on Capitol Hill have been poor.

Now, Mr. Kerry hopes to use his position as secretary of state to achieve a legacy on global warming that has long eluded him.

“There’s a lot of scar tissue from the U.S. saying it will do stuff” on climate change and not following through, said Mr. Schmidt of the Natural Resources Defense Council. But he said Mr. Kerry’s push abroad and Mr. Obama’s actions at home were changing expectations among other nations.

“They’re still waiting to see what we’re going to do,” Mr. Schmidt said, “but the skepticism is much thinner than it was a few months back.”

    Kerry Quietly Makes Priority of Climate Pact, NYT, 2.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/world/asia/
    kerry-shifts-state-department-focus-to-environment.html