The asthma attack was an entirely different experience, though. What followed has gotten foggy over the years, but after some time, which must’ve seemed an eternity, the attack cleared up. I got the news that it was likely an asthma attack and given an inhaler as a constant companion. But over the years it diminished as a concern and labored breathing chalked up to being woefully out of shape.

Ozone pollution is bad for everyone, but children and adults over age 65 are particularly vulnerable to its effects. Source: iStockphoto.com/Chris Rogers

But asthma is a serious concern. Nearly 26 million Americans suffer from asthma (which works out to about 1 in every 12 Americans). This number includes 7 million children, which is eye-opening as a parent — and brings back thoughts of how truly frightening an attack was for me, especially not knowing what was happening. (And only slightly less frightening when I did know what was going on.)

Asthma is a real drag on the economy — to the tune of $56 billion each year from hospital costs, missed school and work, and treatment. More importantly, it can be deadly. In 2009, it was estimated that asthma accounted for over 3300 deaths and that was not an extraordinary year.

So asthma deserves awareness and attention as a serious public health threat. In keeping with that, May is Asthma awareness month. Much of the activity is focused on providing information about what asthma actually is, what exacerbates asthma and can lead to attacks (including numerous triggers in your home), and outlets for information and guidance, such as Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and American Lung Association. You can even get tips on how to tell your asthma story to the media.

The recipe for dangerous air

Outside of the home, outdoor air pollution is a primary driver of asthma attacks and risk of experiencing one. More to the point, ozone is a leading culprit. Mention ozone and people may think of the ozone hole, which indeed would be correct. This, though, is ozone we want around as it protects people and wildlife from damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun by blocking it very high up in the atmosphere. Ozone closer to the ground, on the other hand, is very harmful to human health and a primary component of smog.

Ozone is not emitted directly into the air. Instead, it takes a handful of ingredients to form this “bad air soup”. On the chemical pollutant side, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are the main ingredients. Sources for these include activities such as driving cars, electric power generation from fossil fuels, and some industrial processes. The other two key ingredients for dangerous ozone being formed are heat and sunlight, which is why ozone alerts tend to be most common with the elevated temperatures of summer. It’s probably not surprising then that high ozone levels often occur in urban areas. It’s also these areas that are densely populated with more people at risk for exposure to ozone pollution.

Chemicals emitted from human activities mix together in hot, sunny conditions to form ground-level ozone. A warming climate provides one of the ingredients for this harmful air. Source: EPA.

We have a few control knobs with which we can dial down ozone levels and reduce asthma risk. There has been success in dealing with the chemical pollutants that form ozone. Thanks to the Clean Air Act, NOx emissions have dropped by 52 percent in the U.S. over the past three decades. Likewise, VOCs emissions fell by 63 percent over the same period. And most likely as a result, average ground-level ozone concentrations have dropped by 28 percent. This is good news and shows that those particular control knobs can work, though most states in the U.S. still have counties that violate current EPA ozone standards.

The “climate penalty factor”

There is also a climate story here and one that threatens to offset some of the success we’ve had in cleaning up the air. I came to this connection through an EPA study that found a relationship between increased temperatures and higher ozone levels based on numerous measurements throughout the eastern half of the U.S. They termed the resulting number (i.e. the increased amount of ozone per degree of warming) the “climate penalty factor” on ozone. This relationship between temperature and ozone has also been confirmed in many other modeling studies and measurements.  The risk climate change poses to harmful ozone levels has also been highlighted in the “Human Health” chapter of the recent draft National Climate Assessment report.

Rising temperatures, worsening ozone pollution, real impacts

A colleague and I at UCS took this concept a step further and asked what this climate penalty factor means in a future, warmer U.S. Basically, we used projections of warming temperatures for the country under a couple of widely used future climate scenarios (which may be optimistic based on recent carbon emission trends) and determined how much ozone levels could increase from this warming in the years 2020 and 2050. We then ran these numbers through the EPA’s BenMAP model to see what the health and economic impacts are from these ozone increases.

The full report is of course worth reading (author bias, perhaps), but the top-line finding is that climate change’s potential impact on ozone may indeed be costly (economic and otherwise). Health impacts could total an additional $5.4 billion in 2020 alone. It’s projected that there could be 2.8 million more occurrences of acute respiratory symptoms, such as asthma attacks. And most importantly between 260 and 510 additional premature deaths are projected in that single year. All of these numbers go up in 2050 with further warming in the U.S. Not surprisingly the states projected to be hardest hit are those that are most populated, with California, Texas, and New York leading the way.

Steps in the right direction

It’s fitting that this month of asthma awareness has seen a couple of important steps in dealing with the problem. First, Representative Lois Capps of California introduced the Climate Change Health Protection and Promotion Act last week. This bill directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to develop a national plan to help the health community in creating plans for both responding to and preparing for public health impacts of climate change. Although, not named specifically, ozone pollution would surely fall under this effort.

It is also an acknowledgement of the growing body of evidence of adverse and costly climate impacts on public health in addition to air quality concerns. Also, it is not just a matter of responding to climate impacts here and those on the way, but there remain the critical efforts to reduce climate change itself to limit the severity of the impacts. Fortunately, there are myriad solutions for that, but much room for improvement on actually implementing them.

Activities and efforts to raise awareness around asthma is also a critically important step, but perhaps should extend beyond the month of May into the summer months when ozone levels are elevated and people are at higher risk. I’m not sure how to penetrate through to people’s lists of concerns beyond a steady drumbeat and clear explanation of risks.

Turning the lens on myself, having lived in areas prone to extreme weather of various sorts I’m very aware of and tuned into warnings around the more “acute” events (fairly infrequent, but high impact). On the other hand, even having studied the serious impacts associated with bad air, I still don’t notice air quality warnings until they become a deep shade of purple. That goes for heat advisories and warnings, as well.

The more “chronic” events that don’t appear as destructive and happen more frequently than say a hurricane or a blizzard tend to get minimized.  But ask anyone who has lost someone to a heat-related death or an asthma attack and you’ll see quickly how it takes just one instance of high ozone or a day of extreme heat to change lives.

There’s undoubtedly more to be done, but there are clear solutions and fortunately people out there talking about them.  Now we need to do some listening.

Let’s do a classic “thought experiment” (it’s only classic because climate scientists have been telling this one for so many years now). Imagine you went to 100 medical experts and asked each of them to diagnose whether you had cancer or not. If 97 of those hundred confirmed your worst fears and verified that you did indeed have cancer, would you keep asking for more evidence before you did something about it?  Most people would have a hard time ignoring that kind of agreement amongst experts! Except, it seems, when the experts we’re talking about are climate scientists and the subject is the consequences of burning so much coal and oil and destroying so many tropical forests.

Less than half of the American public recognizes that scientists agree on Anthropogenic Global Warming, despite the fact that 97% of climate scientists endorse the science. Source: The Pew Center, Cook et al (ERL), The Consensus Project

The meme that “scientists don’t agree on whether humans are affecting global warming” is one that I still hear frequently from the public in my job as a climate scientist. There’s a big gap between what climate scientists know and what the public thinks. Researchers call this the “Consensus Gap“. The science is clear. But because public perception of scientific consensus is an important element for public support of action for climate change, this gap needs to be narrowed so that we can move ahead with policies to reduce heat-trapping emissions. Corporate-funded groups that spread misinformation in the media are partly to blame, as exposed in a recent UCS report about disinformation on climate science.

Looking over more than a twenty year period from 1991 to 2011, Cook’s new study finds the number of peer-reviewed papers that reject outright the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming “is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.”  In fact, of almost 12,000 abstracts analyzed by the authors, less than 80 rejected the claim that global warming is exacerbated by human activity. That’s less than one percent. Not even one doctor out of our hundred giving us a contrarian health report on this one!

This is not the first study of its type by any means. There is no shortage of published research on the consensus of climate scientists and climate science publications when it comes to anthropogenic warming.  You can read Oreskes 2004, Oreskes 2007, Doran and Zimmerman 2009, and Anderegg et al. 2010. In addition, there are statements that verify the scientific claims about human-caused warming from 18 different scientific societies in the United States and more than a dozen national academies of science from around the world. And there are countless blogs on the topic including an analysis of over 13,000 papers by James Powell. Phew – consensus!

It’s telling that the analysis found so many papers that didn’t explicitly state whether or not human activity is causing climate change. That’s because scientists have known for so long that it is. It’s a given now, like gravity or the laws of motion. In recent years, in fact, scientists have focused much more on the consequences of climate change. Hopefully, this new analysis will help narrow the consensus gap with the public so we can start making decisions about adaptation and reducing emissions based on the science.

It’s also worth noting that Cook’s research was also conducted mostly by volunteers, with the publication costs funded by donations on social media websites. The paper is part of a new genre of publicly accessible peer-reviewed science. It is available free of charge for download here from Environmental Research Letters.

In 1958 Charles David Keeling for the first time started directly measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in air at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii as part of the International Geophysical Year. Photo: Mary Miller, Exploratorium (via NOAA)

I started my scientific life as a fresh-faced glaciologist drilling ice cores on the immense ice sheet of Antarctica. It was the early 1990s and my job (an amazing one, I’ll admit!) was to tirelessly process the ancient ice that we were bringing up from the deep drill hole. There was almost a mile of ice to analyze! This frozen archive is made from pure snow that fell on the continent tens of thousands of years ago and compressed into hard, cold ice. These ice cores, like many others since, reveal the secrets of ancient atmospheres from the air bubbles trapped within their lattice. They allow us to compare the modern atmosphere that is measured at Mauna Loa with what happened in the past.

Past atmospheres: the cycles of CO2 and temperature

I remember my excitement on seeing the cycles of ice ages pop out from our analysis. You’ve probably seen those graphs of wavy lines that show carbon dioxide dancing between a low level during an ice age and a high level in an interglacial (like the one we are in now).

For the last eight glacial cycles carbon dioxide has varied between 180 parts per million and 280 parts per million. Carbon dioxide has, in general, gone up and down hand in hand with global average temperature. When carbon dioxide is high, temperature is high; when carbon dioxide is low, temperature is low, with the leads and lags being well understood by the scientists studying these in detail. The ice core record shows this has been the natural cycle for at least 800,000 years. As a yardstick, homo sapiens has only been around for a mere 200,000 years at the very longest. Earth’s climate is very sensitive to the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But in the last two centuries of our short time on the planet we have altered the atmosphere drastically.

The cycles of carbon dioxide and temperature over the last eight ice ages show CO2 concentration varying between 180ppm and 280ppm. Carbon dioxide concentration is now at unprecedented levels in human history. Adapted from Luthi et al, 2008

Climate change: thickening CO2 blanket warms the world

At about the same time I was getting cold fingers from handling old ice, we had just passed the ominous 350 parts per million mark. Knowing what scientists knew then about the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature (see the First IPCC Assessment from 1990 here and the IPCC Supplementary Report from 1992 here), I could not imagine two decades later carbon dioxide levels would still be soaring upwards. But they are.

Carbon dioxide naturally forms a heat-trapping blanket around the earth – we can’t live without it. But our human practice over the last two centuries of digging up ancient sunlight in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas and then burning it has released excess carbon into the atmosphere.

For almost a million years, the earth cycled between roughly a two-blanket world (180 parts per million) and a three-blanket world (280 parts per million). By perturbing the atmosphere to this new level, we’ve managed to bump that up to a four-blanket world (now 400 parts per million) in a very short time. And we’re starting to feel it get hot under here.

Welcome to the Pliocene!

Scientists drill deep into the world’s ice sheets to obtain ice cores that unlock the secrets of ancient atmospheres. Photo: M Fitzpatrick

The last time the atmosphere had 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide was most likely between 3 and 5 million years ago, long before humans like us inhabited the earth. It was a geological epoch known as the Pliocene. The planet was many degrees warmer and scientists estimate sea level was about 80 feet higher.

Reaching 400 parts per million for the first time in human history is a wake up call for all of us. The science is clear. It’s high time we addressed the fundamental drivers of climate change — heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuels as well as deforestation practices which emit carbon and reduce the uptake of carbon dioxide.

If we don’t take action, in a couple of decades as we mark the passing of the next ominous milestone of 450 parts per million at Mauna Loa, there may be no returning to the climate we once knew.

Of course, spring is still the time to relax in your yard listening to warblers sing and breathing in the gorgeous perfume of lilacs. But the timing is off – increasingly so – and this is likely to be bad news for many species.

Lilac. Photo: Adam Markham

Just like us, Thoreau smelled the “vivacious lilac…unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring” when he lived in Concord, Massachusetts from the 1840s, but he undoubtedly smelled it later in the year than we do now. Cornell biology professor David Wolfe’s analysis of long-term records of flowering times of lilacs in the Northeast shows that they now bloom an average of 4 to 8 days earlier than they did 50 years ago. The Arnold Arboretum has permanently moved its famous Lilac Sunday two weeks forward so as not to miss the blooms.

Thoreau’s pioneering analysis

In recent years there has been a surge of new scientific studies analyzing the links between climate change and alterations in the timing of natural phenomena such as leaf-out, flowering, insect emergence, and egg-laying by birds.

The scientists who conduct these studies are known as phenologists and one such is Richard Primack at Boston University (BU). Primack’s team used their own field surveys, Thoreau’s original records of his annual field observations, and those of other local naturalists to demonstrate that by the time of the record hot spring of 2012, flowers in Concord were flowering up to 20 days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day. In fact, in 2012, Concord’s high bush blueberries flowered a remarkable 6 weeks earlier than Thoreau ever would have seen.

Primack’s work forms the core of a fascinating new exhibition that has just opened at the Concord Museum and will run until September 15, 2013: Early Spring, Henry Thoreau and Climate Change. It’s truly a thrill see some of Thoreau’s original seasonal charts and field notes displayed there on loan from the Morgan Library.

The BU team also worked with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and Harvard to extend their analysis to data Leopold collected on flowers in southern Wisconsin. Lead author Elizabeth Ellwood says “our data shows that plants keep shifting their flowering times ever earlier as the climate continues to warm.”

Many signs of early spring

But climate-driven changes in phenology are by no means restricted to plants. According to the USA National Phenology Network there are many examples of change: Native bees are emerging 10 days earlier in the Northeast, numerous butterfly species are flying earlier in California’s central valley, American pipits are laying their eggs earlier in the mountains of Wyoming, and yellow-bellied marmots are emerging earlier from hibernation in Colorado. Meanwhile, northern flickers are arriving earlier in their breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest and yellow-rumped warblers have shifted the timing of their migration to Minnesota northern woods.

Many migratory birds are arriving in their breeding areas sooner in Europe too. One of Britain’s most famous amateur naturalists, Gilbert White, assiduously noted in his diary when the first swallows were seen in Selborne, the village where he lived. On April 29, 1793 he recorded “I have seen no hirundo yet myself” — meaning he’d seen no swallows or martins. These days, March 28, a full month earlier, is a much more likely date to see the first swallows in the south of England, and a recent study showed that one third of the bird species tracked by a British Trust for Ornithology study now nest over a week earlier than they did in the 1970s.

Pied flycatcher. Photo: Andy Morffew.

Seasonal cycles disrupted

The problem for many species may turn out to be that variable seasonal responses to climate change will cause mismatches in ecological synchronicity. For example, many birds have evolved their annual spring migrations to arrive in their breeding grounds at the best time to take advantage of peak food supply.

Scientists have found that in the northern parts of the broad-tailed hummingbird’s range in the interior West, food plants are flowering earlier but birds have not changed their migration in response. If this trend continues, the hummingbirds will eventually arrive after the flowers have begun to bloom and miss part of the vital annual nectar flow. In Europe, Pied flycatchers nesting in some Dutch woodlands are now laying eggs after the peak emergence of the caterpillars they feed on, resulting in poor breeding success and a major population decline.

So go ahead and enjoy the spring as it unfolds in all its glory — for as Thoreau said, “We need the tonic of wildness” — but stay alert. Global warming is already driving noticeable changes in the natural cycles in the fields and woods around us, and the harbingers of bigger changes to come are the flowers, insects, and birds in our own backyards.

The nine-year Marsden Farm study—conducted by researchers from the USDA, the University of Minnesota, and Iowa State University—replicated the industrial corn-soy midwestern farming system alongside two multi-crop alternatives. A three-year rotation incorporated another grain plus a red clover cover crop (pictured here), and a four-year rotation added alfalfa, a key livestock feed, into the mix. The more complex systems enhanced yields and profits, controlled weeds, and reduced chemical fertilizer, herbicide, and energy use.

The good news is that we know how to make agriculture work for people and the environment, if we can find the political will.

To help move us forward, UCS is launching its vision for healthy farms, including a briefing paper explaining the changes that are needed in the way we farm, and a web feature that illustrates the components of a healthy farm and farm environment.

Why Now?
The ability to lay out this healthy farm vision has been made possible by the work of many scientists and farmers over the past few decades, dedicated to improving the sustainability of agriculture. That work has resulted in cumulative knowledge that demonstrates that farming based on ecological principles, or agroecology, can be highly productive and can greatly reduce our environmental impact, while improving life for farmers and farming communities.

Our healthy farm vision brief identifies four major changes in farming practices that scientists have shown will allow us to achieve our sustainability goals:

• Crop Rotations: Agronomists have worked on developing longer crop rotations (alternating crops from year to year) that greatly reduce the need for pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, recycle nutrients, increase biodiversity, and protect the water and air. They have shown that these can be as productive, or more so, than the monocultures (growing the same crop year after year) of corn and soybeans that now blanket the Midwest. Working with economists, they have shown they can also be as profitable.
• A Landscape-Level Approach: Agroecologists have demonstrated the importance of seeing the farm as part of a bigger landscape, where uncultivated areas like woodlots protect streams from pollution and runoff, and provide biodiversity that pollinates our crops and controls pests, resulting in higher productivity and reduced need for pesticides.
• Cover Crops: Are grown to protect the soil when cash crops like corn are not growing. Agronomists and weed scientists have shown that they increase soil fertility, provide nutrients to crops, and control pests.
• Integrate Livestock and Crops: Manure from livestock contains valuable crop nutrients and enriches the soil. But separating livestock from crops in huge CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) reduces the ability to conserve those nutrients, which instead often pollute the air and water.

All of these practices also increase resilience in the face of climate change. For example, they improve soil fertility, which increases soil water-holding capacity, which improves drought tolerance. Reduced vulnerability to pests means that new pests arising from a shifting climate are less likely to reach epidemic levels.

The reduced need for pesticides means less exposure for farmers, farmworkers, and the rest of us. Reduced dependence on expensive purchased inputs like engineered seed, fertilizers and pesticides from large corporations increases food sovereignty of farmers and consumers.

Biogeochemists and hydrologists have measured the relative impact of agroecological farming on nutrient cycling compared with industrial farming, and found that agroecology provides the best options for reducing the environmental impact of fertilizers.

As time goes on, we face the cumulative effects of pollution from farming and the loss of soil fertility and biodiversity that are critical for crop productivity, unless we act to change direction.

More to Do, and More Opportunities
Farmers do not want to harm the environment, but they are often not willing to change the way they farm without clear demonstrations that agroecological alternatives can work and are economically viable. They need information, demonstrations of success, and incentives to change. Policy at the State and Federal levels can greatly help with this transition in the form of extension services, demonstration projects, transition payments, better insurance policies, conservation stewardship incentives and continuing research.

There is also much to do to make agroecological farming even more efficient and productive. For example, while we have spent decades improving the productivity of crops like corn, there has been virtually no effort to make cover crops more productive, or to fit better into crop rotations. Crop breeders can do more to develop crop varieties that better use organic sources of nutrients, reducing the problems caused by synthetic fertilizers, and that fit better into crop rotations and that contain better pest resistance. We also need more research on optimal rotations for different climates and soils, and more experimentation with, and improvement of, additional rotation crops. And we need farm equipment better adapted to crop rotations.

Congress has an opportunity to facilitate this process by passing a Farm Bill that moves us in the right direction instead of continuing to subsidize more of the same. But entrenched farm interests, such as pesticide, seed and fertilizer companies, are working overtime to continue down a path to nowhere.

Those interested in better food and a better environment, and better lives for farmers and farmworkers, must make their voices heard. The UCS vision for healthy farms will help to support those voices.

A trailblazer for environmental giving

Ted Smith in his natural habitat

After spending the first years of his career working for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, and for the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation, Ted became  the founding director of the Consultative Group on Biodiversity and then for many years was the Executive Director of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation. In these roles he was a pioneer in designing and funding large-scale conservation initiatives in Alaska, Canada, and the Rocky Mountain West and was instrumental in the creation of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

In the late 1990s, together with his close friend Bill Moomaw (a climate scientist at Tufts University and UCS National Advisory Board member), Ted conceived the idea of Clean Air-Cool Planet. It was to be a New England non-profit focused on the then almost revolutionary idea of not waiting for Washington to solve climate change, but mobilizing civil society to take the lead and take practical action at the local level.

My contact with Ted was through my 13 years as director of Clean Air-Cool Planet, where, as a board member, he was a constant voice for strategic clarity and stretching to meet challenging goals. He saw earlier than most the urgency of addressing climate issues at the local level, the work I’m now engaged with as director of the new climate impacts initiative at UCS.

A mentor to many

He was a visionary leader, a remarkable wilderness advocate, and a true innovator in the world of conservation and climate philanthropy. He was charming, he was funny, and no one will deny he could be a bit of a curmudgeon too, but what made him truly extraordinary was the role of mentor he took in so many young conservation leaders’ careers.

It’s only since he passed away that most of us who knew him have learned just how many people had a story to tell of how Ted helped guide or kick-start their career and how he remained a guiding presence always ready to give advice or a helping hand for years to come. Many of those stories were told over tea and lemonade in the Friends Meeting House at a reception after the memorial. I don’t think I have ever met someone who so many claim as a mentor as Ted Smith. And that alone is a legacy to be proud of.

Coming full circle in Montana

Ted Smith flew smokejumping missions out of Missoula, MT in the 1962-64 fire seasons

Ted retired just a few years ago and moved back to his native Montana. He was a life-long outdoorsman, who by all accounts was never happier than when he was hiking in wilderness, picknicking by a mountain lake, or fishing a backcountry stream. His brother Roger remembers that even as young teens, their parents would drop them off at some distant trailhead with a sub-standard sleeping bag and too little food and arrange to meet them several days later. They survived just fine.

As a graduate student at Berkeley, Ted worked the summers as a smokejumper literally parachuting in to fight the toughest fires in roadless forest tracts. His love of wilderness drew him back to re-settle in Montana after a career spent in Indonesia, New York, and Boston. Tragically, he died in a hiking accident in the remote Mission Mountains near St. Ignatius, Montana, last September. But as more than one person remarked at the memorial ceremony he died doing what he loved best in the place he loved above all.

The next generation of environmental leaders

The Alaska Conservation Foundation and Clean Air-Cool Planet have both created youth leadership programs in Ted’s honor. This summer as part of the UCS Climate Impacts Initiative I’ll be mentoring two students who will be working under the CA-CP program in partnership with the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation to survey and record the devastating impacts climate-driven mountain pine beetle epidemics are having on the whitebark pine forests of Montana. I hope I can be even partially as good a guide and advisor to these young scientists as Ted clearly was to so many of the people who turned out to celebrate his life and conservation legacy last weekend.

Monthly wildfire outlook

This week as fires were springing up and growing in size and impacts the National Interagency Fire Center released their monthly fire outlook that covers the bulk of the summer fire season. When looking at the maps of fire potential, the eye is immediately drawn to the growing field of red spreading throughout virtually all portions California and up into Oregon and Idaho. Likewise, much of New Mexico and portions of Arizona will see increasing fire risk for the next few months pulling in portions of southern Colorado.

A growing field of red represents above normal fire potential for most of California, Oregon, and portions of Idaho in the heart of summer wildfire season. A possible bright spot is that portions of the Southwest will be returning to normal during this time after being elevated. Source: Predictive Services/National Interagency Fire Center

What is driving wildfires?

Basically, we can look to precipitation (or lack thereof) to get a top-line idea of what’s driving the activity both current and forecasted for the rest of the summer. Over the past month, virtually all portions of the West that are experiencing fire or elevated fire risk are some shade of red, meaning below average precipitation.  Areas in Southern California dealing with fire outbreak saw less than 2 percent of normal precipitation.  And recently New Mexico rose to the top of the ranks of drought-stricken states with much of the West under severe, extreme, or exceptional drought conditions.  Sadly, there is no relief in sight as we get into the depths of the summer fire season as drought conditions are expected to persist through July for most of the West, in part driving the forecasted heightened fire risk.

A central driver of wildfire risk is drought conditions. There appears to be no relief in sight for much of the West with drought persisting over much of the region or developing in a few pockets in the Southwest and in Northern California and Oregon. Source: NOAA

Many factors play a role in fire risk and outbreak. How much fuel is available which can touch upon past land management practices and perhaps disturbances such as insect outbreaks and tree mortality. There is always an ignition risk from either lightning strikes or a campfire that was not fully put out. But dry fuels (trees, brush, and duff) represent a major risk factor. And the continuing widespread drought has both been priming current conditions and will likely continue to do so throughout not only this season, but further down the road as well.

Fire has always been a part of the West. For those of us who live or have lived there it is part of the trade-off for endless big sky vistas and majestic mountain landscapes. But it appears that it is an impact that is growing as the number of fires and area burned have increased over the past few decades and the fire season has lengthened. At the same time spring and summer temperatures have increased along with earlier spring snowpack melt overall and are likely driving increasing fire risk. Naturally, questions arise as to whether response plans are and will continue to be sufficient, how will sequestration and shrinking budgets affect things, what actions are local cities and towns taking to help reduce risk, and what does the future hold for wildfire in a warming climate.  We’ll have to leave the answers for another post.

Chatham House, the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is located on a pleasant square in central London, and has a long and distinguished history. It was founded shortly after World War I after conversations among British and American delegates to the Paris Peace Conference, and has been hosting meetings and speeches by international leaders and experts for nearly a century.

Burmese democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi at Chatham House in June 2012. SOURCE: Chatham House Annual Review 2011-2012, http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/General/AR11-12.pdf

An aside: internationally, Chatham House is well known for the Chatham House Rule (I had always called it “Chatham House rules” but there’s just one.) It’s a principle for conducting meetings:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

The value of the Rule is that, without keeping a meeting secret or totally off the record, you can nonetheless make the participants comfortable that they won’t get themselves in trouble by saying something stupid that later gets quoted on the front page of the Times. (of London, New York or anywhere else). The way I often explain it is: “you can tell people what was said, but not who said it.” It’s very useful in allowing people to relax and speak freely, without fear that they’ll embarrass themselves or their organization.

But Chatham House has done much more than establish a Rule. One area where it has had an important impact is on forest degradation – the damage to forests that comes from activities that don’t totally clear them (and thus are not “deforestation”) but do release global warming pollution. Selective logging, the most widespread type of logging in the tropics, is one of the main causes of forest degradation.

An important initiative in reducing degradation was the 2007 report by Chatham House Fellow Sam Lawson, Illegal Logging and Related Trade: Measuring the Global Response. This report and subsequent work by Lawson and Larry McFaul showed the scale of illegal logging globally, but also the potential of reducing it by preventing illegal timber from being imported into U.S., European and other markets. With the impetus given by these studies and strong advocacy and leadership by the Environmental Investigation Agency and its partners (including UCS), legislation was adopted in the U.S. (the Lacey Act Amendments of 2008), Europe (the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance & Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan and the EU Timber Regulation) and Australia (the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act 2012). These laws have only been in force for a few years, but recent Chatham House studies have shown that they have already had a substantial impact on the illegal timber trade.

So, could the same approach help to reduce deforestation, most of which is driven by commercial agricultural commodities such as palm oil, soybeans and beef? That was the subject of the Chatham House workshop in which I participated, and the general answer was yes, but with some changes. When large areas of tropical forest are cleared illegally – e.g. in violation of Brazil’s Forest Code or Indonesia’s Moratorium, or in protected areas such as national parks or indigenous reserves – the products produced on the cleared land could potentially be kept out of international trade. However legal modifications would be needed, and the difficulties in getting them adopted in the current political climate could be substantial.

A new plantation of oil palm, one of the main drivers of tropical deforestation today.SOURCE: Rhett Butler, Mongabay.com

Because of these challenges to apply the legality approach to agricultural commodities, two other alternative approaches were actively discussed as well: emphasizing trade in “deforestation-free” or in “certified sustainable” commodities. These take into account that some deforestation is perfectly legal, so the legality approach wouldn’t stop it.

“Deforestation-free” needs to be the ultimate goal for all involved – throughout the entire supply chain, from the field in a tropical country through the whole series of companies that buy, sell, distribute and process what’s produced, all the way to the final consumer (you!). Certification, such as by the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil, is one way to try to achieve it, but it often has fallen short. For example, palm oil can come from plantations cut out of tropical rain forest or established on carbon-rich peat soils, and yet still be RSPO-certified. Corporate standards have to go beyond the certification of an often vaguely defined and voluntarily enforced “sustainability”, and companies such as Nestlé are already doing that.

Various governments and businesses are already committed to one or the other of these alternatives, so we should see further progress in reducing deforestation and forest degradation in years to come. Already, much has been done in some tropical countries, but there’s still a lot left to do.

Although many rivers remain above flood stage, hopeful stories are beginning to emerge that relief may have arrived as the record rains have departed the region. However, as the Midwest is out of the extreme rain woods for now, it remains in the thick of potential health impacts that linger well after rivers have crested and waters have retreated. The huge sigh of relief that the flooding is over is more than welcome, but the region needs to remain vigilant as the impacts story continues to unfold in sometimes unrecognized ways.

Hidden health risks of flooding

Map showing stream gauges that are currently at or above flood or at high flow. The black triangles that are concentrated in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin were above flood stage as of April 26. Source: USGS

Loss of life rightfully captures the headlines on flood impacts. So far four deaths have been attributed to this flooding. Floods have historically been one of the most deadly types of disasters in the U.S.  Over the 30-year period from 1982 to 2011, an average of 93 live were lost due to flooding each year, which makes it deadlier than lightning, tornadoes, and hurricanes over that same period. Much of this loss of life is due to drowning.

But beyond the immediate dangers to human life during the flood, more hidden and less obvious threats are present both during the flood itself and well after the waters have begun to recede. UCS colleagues and I looked into more detail at some of these that aren’t always on peoples’ radars or may be wholly unaware of — as I was prior to this work. It’s these hidden impacts that people in the Midwest will likely be confronted with over the coming days and weeks.

Drowning while driving was probably the risk that caught me most by surprise. Of the flooding deaths in 2010, almost half of them were a result of attempting to drive through flooded areas. In the current  Midwest flood, two men separately drowned while attempting to drive through the same swollen creek in Indiana. The risk is such that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration actually has a dedicated campaign, “Turn Around, Don’t Drown”, for this issue.

Water is particularly at risk during flooding due to contamination, with serious health implications. Drinking water and recreational waterways can be contaminated with sewage, agricultural waste, chemical pollutants, and animal waste. A vivid picture of these risks is hog farm waste spilling over its storage lagoon and into the surrounding areas after Hurricane Floyd in North Carolina — one of the more unpleasant of numerous unpleasant images we came across for our report. In another well documented case, after a very heavy rainfall event in Milwaukee in 1993, an outbreak of the parasite cryptosporidium occurred and affected more than 400,000 people.

Livestock-waste lagoons overflowed on this North Carolina hog farm during Hurricane Floyd, representing a way local waterways and supplies can be contaminated in a flood. Source: Rick Dove

The risk of outbreaks and contamination may be heightened for areas in the Midwest now dealing with flooding as there is a high concentration of combined sewer overflow systems there that are more prone to backup and contamination during heavy rain. As I’ve found by encountering empty shelves when a tropical storm or hurricane is on the way, stocking up on water is the first line of defense. But beyond that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have useful information for dealing with flooding and its aftermath.

Signing up for local boiled water alerts is probably also a good idea even for those not directly impacted by flooding as drinking water may be coming from distant sources that have been affected. This raises the more general question of “do you know where your drinking water comes from?”  I don’t think I do.

And saving perhaps the most hidden risk of all for last, mold can pose serious health threats and linger well beyond the actual flood. Water anywhere in the home can lead to a mold outbreak and this risk is obviously going be heightened during flooding.

Mold can lurk behind drywall, under carpeting, in furniture, or in insulation, making it hard to detect. It can trigger allergic reactions and respiratory symptoms, including asthma attacks. This leads to a real drag on the health care system and the economy; some estimate annual expenses of between $2.1 and $4.8 billion. Some studies have shown that infants and children exposed to mold are more likely to develop asthma than those who haven’t. Unfortunately, not only can mold be difficult to detect, but it is also costly to remove once widespread. Drying out affected areas immediately, if possible, reduces risk of outbreaks and is the first step.  Again the CDC provides very helpful information in dealing with this threat.

Managing risk going forward

Right now the conversation needs be focused on helping those in the Midwest deal with flooding impacts already being felt and those that could still be lurking. But asking questions about the next flood, and if cities and the region are going to be prepared, is critical as there will surely be more. There is ultimately an entire chain of risk factors that influence flooding and impacts that can be addressed at the national level all the way down to individuals.

Climate change in the region represents a growing risk factor for flooding. The Midwest has seen a 45 percent increase in the heaviest precipitation events between 1958 and 2011, increasing the risk of dangerous floods. Over roughly the same period temperatures in the Midwest increased twice as fast as the entire period since 1900. If you look at the period since 1980, temperatures increased three times as fast. Correlation doesn’t always imply causation, but these trends fit with our picture of how heavy precipitation tracks with temperature. The basic physics behind this is that warmer air can hold more water vapor before it rains out, so the old adage “when it rains it pours” is unfortunately becoming more apt. Future projections show the same trend continuing as these heavy events become more likely under continued warming in the region.  So limiting warming is one control knob to reduce flooding risk by dealing with the problem before it hits the ground.

Rooftop gardens are one of a number of ways that cities are managing floodwater and minimizing risk of impacts. Source: Center for Neighborhood Technology

Other possibilities open up once the water does hit the ground. Cities can play a role in how storm water is managed. There seems to be a great deal of opportunity in improving sewers, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Chicago, which was in the thick of the deluge, has taken action by installing rain blockers, investing in rooftop and rain gardens, and increasing permeable surfaces to help manage runoff and flooding. Cities can determine if development should take place in areas prone to flooding as way to address risk. City and state health departments can also ensure that their response plans and resources to be mobilized are in place.

But there’s also a strong role for the individual in protecting themselves and their families from flooding impacts and reducing risk. Maybe the most critical step is being aware of the myriad health impacts beyond the obvious and developing effective responses to those.

I’ll interject my own flooding story here, which while paling in comparison to what others are currently facing, illustrates the point about what individuals can do. My house was partially flooded during a tropical storm prior to working on our flooding report. I was completely unaware of all of the potential impacts involved and how to address those, beginning with not buying any potable water beforehand,  to being told by my landlord that I should probably put fans on the flooded areas, to not turning off the power before going into my basement, to not checking to see if my faucet water was safe to drink.

Luckily, we came out okay, but looking back the biggest risk factor for me was not being aware of what exactly I was facing. So while the work at UCS started with how a warming world increases the risk of flooding, it ended up being about the actual, household-level impacts and especially those that are hidden. That’s what Midwesterners are going to be facing in the coming days and weeks. Sadly, they’re not in the clear yet.