The Climate Cart

Issue 1: Vulnerability Studies. June, 2023

A publication of your Sierra Club Climate Adaptation and Restoration Team (CART)

Until we know in some detail what risks we will be running, we have no basis for effective action. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Sea-Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment Tools and Resources: A Guide for Florida’s Local Governments, June 2015 (extended) gives a general structure for such an inquiry. https://floridadep.gov/rcp/florida-resilient-coastlines-program/documents/sea-level-rise-vulnerability-assessment-tools-0   

1. Conduct an Exposure Analysis. What do we see as the coming challenges? Sea level rise? Dangerous heat? Storms and floods? Drought? Forest fires? While we may know in general what our community’s problems will be, a good vulnerability study will present detailed studies of what is in store for the period chosen for the study. The planning horizon will vary, but decadal projections for at least fifty years is usual.

2. Conduct an Impact Analysis. This should include all elements of the community; some will be at greater risk than others. The impact analysis should address all risks which are at all likely. It should address the physical, economic, and social impacts. It should include impacts which will extend beyond the study horizon. For example, if buried septic tanks or industrial waste will be compromised by flooding, the impact on the ground water and adjacent wetlands may extend well into the future.

3. Assess Adaptive Capacity. This “encourages the community to measure the degree to which it is equipped to adapt. . . through the existence of policies, structures, finances, and human resources that can assist, or already are assisting, adaption to potential changes.” Once we know what we are already equipped to do, we will be ready to develop a Climate Action Plan which will identify the resources and policies necessary to a satisfactory adaptation. We should be planning for a world we would look forward to living in.

One feature of that world needs to be an absence of new greenhouse gasses from human sources and less of what is already there. That is the task of mitigation, the necessary companion of adaptation. Ceasing to burn coal, gas, and oil must be a primary goal of climate action. So must be the adaptation to the changes we have already set in motion, and that is the concern of vulnerability studies and the resulting action plans. We may even hope to regain and restore some of what we have already lost.

CART has a number of toolboxes pertinent to vulnerability. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FKPXlLpVo-pWN2FhaVKgTcLP03Ry7JE1  The Climate Adaptation and Restoration Toolkit has a solid intro to the general topic and a discussion of vulnerability studies, screen 16-18.  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gxCowJe7qOi4Tmb49rUyQCnOcxuLv_Dh/edit#slide=id.p1  

As an example, Colorado’s 2015 vulnerability study gives an overview of the state’s climate risks and refers to documents, such as the state’s Water Plan and Drought Mitigation Plan, which anticipate specific actions to counter those risks. It also refers to more local vulnerability studies, such as Boulder’s.  https://dnrweblink.state.co.us/cwcb/0/doc/202146/Electronic.aspx?searchid=f02d65b3-001a-4eb5-ae79-f08bab6ac37c

CAKE, the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange, has an enormous store of online resources, including vulnerability studies. Registration is free at cakex.org.

The Sierra Club can play a constructive role at each of the three stages of the vulnerability study and in the action plan which should follow it.

Has an adequately detailed exposure analysis been conducted? It is not enough to say that we are faced with sea level rise, for example. How much is likely, and on what schedule? What will be the effect on buried infrastructure of a rise in ground water level (which, in coastal areas, will usually be higher than sea level)? Will significant roads be rendered impassable, isolating people from grocery stores and medical aid? Will the rising water be polluted, and if so, from what sources? All the right questions need to be asked and answered.

Not many adequate vulnerability studies have been conducted, though lame ones are common. The political and commercial pressures to avoid examining coming problems exert a constant pressure, and people generally hope that trouble might be avoided. But we deserve to know what risks we are running. Our community will suffer much more greatly than it needs to if we do not learn what is ahead. The Sierra Club can persistently ask for a complete vulnerability study. If an inadequately detailed one is presented, as it commonly is, the Club can point out the problem and ask for correction. If the plans are designed to meet the needs of the affluent and neglect the needs of others, we can say so and demand correction. If the needs of the wild are not addressed, who else will speak for it?

Your Group may find that other organizations will join it in demanding that risks be acknowledged, as the Club has in the Beyond Coal and Gas campaigns and many others. We may find, though, that other groups are less willing to confront the pressures working to suppress vulnerability analyses. Attempts to organize alliances may dilute and impede our efforts. We must be ready to go it alone. As we succeed, others will be encouraged to join us. Your community finally needs to know what it is in for, and finally will support your efforts to find out.

A Campfire Community Group, the Climate Leaders Circle, has been set up for you to communicate with other Sierra Club units on adaptation issues. The CART team will participate in the discussions and will assist you as it can and as you wish. Look for and join the Climate Leaders Circle if it could be of use to you.

The next issue of the Climate CART will be on sea level rise. The issues will be collected on the Campfire Leaders Circle along with further information sources which will be revised as new ones arise. Our intention is to maintain an up-to-date discussion on the following topics: vulnerability studies; sea level rise; excessive heat; floods, drought and water supply; public health; relocation programs and community rebuilding; and rewilding. We believe that these are fields of action in which Sierra Club members, led by you, can make a difference. If you see a subject we have missed, let us know at our Campfire Group, the Climate Leaders Circle. (The Grassroots Network lists site where you subscribed is used just as a mailing list.)

Joining the Climate Leaders Circle

Log in to campfire.sierraclub.org

Enter Campfire community.

Click the grid of 9 small squares at the upper right (apps). Click “Community groups” on the dropdown menu.

Search for Climate Leaders Circle. Join the Group and leave a message for Allen Tilley to let him know you’re there.

The Climate Cart

Issue 2: Sea Level Rise  July, 2023

A publication of your Sierra Club Climate Adaptation and Restoration Team (CART)

We are experiencing accelerating sea level rise. We have had about 8” of rise in the last century, and are headed for a lot more.

Some of the rise will come from expansion of the oceans as the heat grows. In some places, the land is sinking, so sea levels will increase there; in others, it is rising. Even changing gravity as ice masses grow or shrink can contribute to local sea levels. More rise will come from our melting glaciers, from the Alps to the Himalayas to the Andes. Most of the rise, though, will come from melting polar ice sheets. For a very long time glacial and polar ice has been roughly in balance, with snowfall making up for yearly melting. That balance has been lost because the blanket of carbon around the earth from the burning of fossil fuels traps heat in the atmosphere which was once lost to space.

How much rise in our oceans we may expect depends partly on our success in controlling emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and the other greenhouse gases. Some rise is inevitable from the heat imbalance we have already produced—and that grows daily as we burn coal, oil and gas. Studies indicate that the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are destabilized. Greenland would raise seas 20 feet, and the West Antarctic, 14 feet. If we are so weak as to do nothing about it, that would come slowly, as humans measure time—centuries, some suggest. Recent findings about the West Antarctic, though, indicate that at least part of it, the Thwaites Glacier, has in the past fallen into the ocean over a period of only a few decades, and we should be ready for the prospect that we will get significant rises on a yearly basis. Totten Glacier and others in the East Antarctic are also unstable.

Greenland, too, may have surprises. The unexpected rate of melt of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier suggests that sea level rise estimates have been too low. According to a study in PNAS, the grounding line has been found to respond to tidal flows, allowing warm water to intrude. If other glaciers ending in the ocean are in similar patterns, sea level rise projections could increase by as much as 200%. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-rapid-ice-greenland.html

If we were to restore the climate by drawing down carbon from the atmosphere we could moderate and even reverse sea level rise. That is worth our effort to promote.

NOAA maintains a projection of sea level rise, regionally adjusted, which has become the standard for planning in the US. While the possibilities are described under a range of levels, so far we have experienced rises toward the high level of projection. It is prudent that we base planning on the NOAA high level figures. The primary sources of variation are the polar ice sheets, for we know too little about their rate of destabilization to make tight projections.

Sea level rise can destabilize our barrier islands. Many coastal communities are on such islands. Even without the wild cards at the poles, we expect a couple of feet of sea level rise around mid-century. Satellite estimates of ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration—20% increase in yearly loss from Greenland 2010-20, a seven-fold increase since the 1990s. Acceleration in the Antarctic is slower—64% since the 1990s. Through this study and others “we have come to learn that ice responds rapidly to our changing climate." Sea level rise projections are likely to increase.  https://phys.org/news/2023-04-devastating-greenland-antarctic-ice-sheets.html

Some coastal communities have already done vulnerability studies to inform themselves about what is coming. All should undertake such a study, and we as community leaders can urge our cities to undertake a thorough and complete vulnerability study. In her recent book Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm, Susan Crawford adds up the effects of the slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the destabilization of Thwaites Glacier in the West Antarctic, and the heating of the world’s oceans to project that Charleston should plan for “eight feet of sea level rise over decades, not centuries.” (Chapter Two, penultimate paragraph).

Most vulnerability studies do not take groundwater levels into account. They should. In coastal areas, groundwater levels rise higher than sea levels. That has been common knowledge in the scientific community since studies were done in Hawai’i about ten years ago. However, not much application of that knowledge has been included in sea level rise vulnerability studies. “A new report finds that over the next century, rising groundwater levels in the San Francisco Bay Area could impact twice as much land area as coastal flooding alone, putting more than 5,200 state- and federally managed contaminated sites at risk.” Obviously, other coastal regions need to do similar studies. https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/06/20/rising-groundwater-threatens-thousands-of-toxic-sites-in-the-bay-area/ The study in Hawai’i also found that flooding estimates doubled when groundwater levels are included. We in coastal areas can press authorities to pay attention to groundwater levels.

Obviously, we should not be developing new structures on a plain to be flooded soon. We should be preparing for current wetlands to become first marsh and then open water as they migrate inland, and we should be cleaning up brownfields, septic tanks, dumps, and the rotten gasoline under old gas stations before they have a chance to pollute the waters which will cover them. Coastal communities may face relocation. There is a great deal we can and should do even if local authorities are shy about looking at our situation squarely.

If you are in a coastal area, chances are that your community is already experiencing the effects of sea level rise and will support your efforts to spur vulnerability studies, planning, and action to anticipate the coming crisis. You may benefit from a chance to consult other Sierra Club units who are confronting the issue.

A Campfire Community Group, the Climate Leaders Circle, has been set up for you to communicate with other Sierra Club units on adaptation issues. The CART team will participate in the discussions and will assist you as it can and as you wish. Look for and join the Climate Leaders Circle if it could be of use to you.

The next issue of the Climate Cart will be on excessive heat. The issues are collected on the Campfire Climate Leaders Circle. The site supplies further information sources which will be revised and augmented as new ones arise. Our intention is to maintain an up-to-date discussion on the following topics: vulnerability studies; sea level rise; excessive heat; floods, drought and water supply; public health; relocation programs and community rebuilding; and rewilding. We believe that these are fields of action in which local Sierra Club units, led by you and your peers, can make a difference. If you see a subject we have missed, let us know at our Campfire Group, the Climate Leaders Circle. (The Grassroots Network Lists site where you subscribed is used just as a mailing list.)

Joining the Climate Leaders Circle

Log in to campfire.sierraclub.org

Enter Campfire community.

Click the grid of 9 small squares at the upper right (apps). Click “Community groups” on the dropdown menu.

Search for Climate Leaders Circle. Join the Group and leave a message for Allen Tilley or Dave Raney to let them know you’re there.

The Climate Cart

Issue 3: Excessive Heat  August, 2023

A publication of your Sierra Club Climate Adaptation and Restoration Team (CART)

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the earth was in rough heat equilibrium. A fairly steady influx of heat from the sun balanced radiation from the planet to provide a dependable global heat level, varying by the season, the weather, and the location, and sustaining a comfortable average global temperature. But when carbon dioxide began accumulating in the atmosphere as we burned fossil fuels, it heated the atmosphere so that it began to hold more water vapor. Water vapor and CO2 are the primary greenhouse gases. Like a blanket, they keep the earth from radiating some of the heat it gains from the sun. As CO2 accumulates, the hotter the earth becomes, the more water vapor is in the atmosphere, and the hotter we get.

How hot is it? It is hotter than it has been for at least 125,000 years. No human civilization has ever had to deal with the heat waves which occupy our evening news.

How hot it feels depends not only on the heat but on the humidity. We and some other animals have evolved protection against excessive heat. We are particularly good at sweating, and we have lost most of our hair to make the sweating more efficient (with matted hair on only a couple of places). But our strategy only works if the air is dry enough to receive the 3 gallons of water a day we are capable of sweating. The wet bulb temperature indicates the temperature recorded on the bulb of a thermometer wrapped in a wet pad—a surrogate for our body. When the wet bulb temperature reaches 85F, we begin to suffer. When it goes above 88F (31C), we begin dying (depending on our age, physique, and condition). A 10-minute video from PBS explains wet-bulb temperature and sketches the growing regions vulnerable to life-threatening heat stress. https://climatecrocks.com/2023/05/12/pbs-more-areas-too-hot-to-work-too-hot-to-live/

Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First (Little, Brown, & Co., 2023) is a fine source for heat info. There, on page 22, you may read that 489,000 people died from heat in 2019—an underestimation, but more than from guns or illegal drugs. More than from all other natural disasters combined—including hurricanes and wildfires.

How hot will it get? The CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than it has been for about three million years. The earth will grow hotter as it reaches equilibrium. The more greenhouse gases we add, the higher that equilibrium temperature. Somewhere along the way, given our current CO2 level, we will pass the point of human survival, indeed of the survival of almost all of earth’s living things. We could, of course, stop burning fossil fuels and draw down the carbon we have already added to the atmosphere and the oceans.

“Global Warming in the Pipeline” (2023) by James Hansen and a team of coauthors is the latest and best account of what we are in for. At 440 parts per million of CO2, the earth will be ice free at equilibrium. We are at 419 ppm. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/Documents/PipelinePaper.2023.05.19.pdf

Earth has been in the Goldilocks zone: not too cold, not too hot. By adding two trillion tons of greenhouse gases and a billion nuclear bombs of heat we are in the process of pushing ourselves outside the zone. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-trillion-tons-greenhouse-gases-billion.html  Essentially, we are in the position of trying to keep things together while we mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions and draw down enough of the coal, oil, and gas fumes we have already sent aloft to reduce the atmosphere’s CO2 and, thus, water vapor to the point that we will have regained the climate niche in which we developed and which we require to live.

The Climate Adaptation and Restoration Team has prepared a Toolkit on excessive heat, among the other threats of the climate crisis, with an emphasis on personal action.  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OUuEdLM8Lshkv5BPJGGNf6nl6d0QKD6z/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p3  

What is to be done while we wait to reachieve our niche? Stay cool. Take work breaks. Keep hydrated. Hang around green things—they pump water into the air and keep the surroundings cool by, in effect, sweating as we do. Check up on one another to make sure that we are not succumbing to the heat and to get people who need it to heat shelters. (Survival in urban heat waves often depends on the community connections people have made for mutual support.)

In 2020 researchers at Purdue University developed a new ultra-white paint. Most ultra-white paint, colored with titanium dioxide, can reflect 90% of the sun’s energy, but at wavelengths which eventually heat the ambient air. As with air conditioning, cooling is balanced by heating elsewhere within the system. Purdue’s ultra-white uses a barium sulfate mixture to radiate back 98% of the sun’s heat at wave lengths to which the atmosphere is transparent. The reflected heat escapes back to space. Areas beneath the new ultra-white paint are as much as 19F cooler, and the general surroundings are cooled as well. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/the-whitest-paint-is-here-and-its-the-coolest.-literally..html

If 1-2% of the earth’s solid surface were to be painted the new ultra-white, we could send to space the heat we are suffering from our fossil fuel habit. The paint is a year or so from commercial availability, but we can fantasize—and maybe even plan. (The NY Times has a paywall, but it’s our only source.) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/climate/white-paint-climate-cooling.html#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20Dr.%20Ruan%20and%20his%20team%20unveiled,formulation%20that%20increased%20sunlight%20reflection%20to%2098%20percent.

What can the Sierra Club do? “Stay cool”—are there sufficient heat shelters in your community to handle those without air conditioning? Are they open at night, when we need to be able to cool off and recover from the heat stress of the day? If the power were to fail (both nuclear and fossil fuel power sources are vulnerable to heat stress), are there shelters with solar panels and batteries to supply cool air through a reasonable failure period?

Does your community see that employers make provision for work breaks? For shaded  or cooled rest spaces and hydration? In states such as Florida and Texas such issues will require organization at the state level, but the Club can provide that. Attempts in several states to protect workers from excessive heat have fallen to Republican opposition. https://stateline.org/2023/06/20/many-states-decline-to-require-water-breaks-for-outdoor-workers-in-extreme-heat/

“Green spaces”—can you identify neighborhoods which need more trees?

“Community support”—is anyone offering to maintain a list of people who need to be checked on in a heat wave? Older people with poor or no air conditioning are likely to need that, but so are many others in less affluent neighborhoods.

Then there is the new ultra-white paint. Some homeowner’s associations forbid any roofs colored lighter than beige. A little publicity and rabble rousing would bring the pressure necessary to change that. Your transportation authority might be able to identify paved shoulders and other surfaces which would look well in ultra-white. An ultra-white promotion team might look for likely roofs, public and private. Organization and education now will save lives later; at the worst, we will have called attention to the use of white paint.  

Chances are that your community is already experiencing the effects of excessive heat and will support your efforts to deal with it. You may benefit from a chance to consult other Sierra Club units who are confronting the heat.

A Campfire Community Group, the Climate Leaders Circle, has been set up for you to communicate with other Sierra Club units on adaptation issues. The CART team will participate in the discussions and will assist you as it can and as you wish. Check out the Climate Leaders Circle and join if it could be of use to you.

The next issue of the Climate Cart will be on floods, drought, and water supply. The issues are collected on the Campfire Climate Leaders Circle and on the Climate Adaptation and Restoration Team page on the Grassroots Network. The Campfire site supplies further information sources which will be revised and augmented as new ones arise. Our intention is to maintain an up-to-date discussion on the following topics: vulnerability studies; sea level rise; excessive heat; floods, drought and water supply; public health; relocation programs and community rebuilding; and rewilding. We believe that these are fields of action in which local Sierra Club units, led by you and your peers, can make a difference. If you see a subject we have missed, let us know at our Campfire Group, the Climate Leaders Circle. (The Grassroots Network Lists site where you subscribed is used just as a mailing list.)

Joining the Climate Leaders Circle

Log in to campfire.sierraclub.org  

Enter Campfire community.

Click the grid of 9 small squares at the upper right (apps). Click “Community groups” on the dropdown menu.

Search for Climate Leaders Circle. Join the Group and leave a message for Allen Tilley or Dave Raney to let them know you’re there.

This webinar was conducted on December 18, 2021 by the consulting firm Climate Access.  The 90-minute webinar provides an overview of public opinion regarding extreme weather and other climate impacts; how people process climate risks and solutions; and tools for framing resilience conversations and fostering equitable engagement. Here is the link to the webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7aAkKeeKyM

The Climate Adaptation and Restoration 101 Toolkit provides an introduction to the terminology for climate adaptation and resiliency, processes for developing community-based adaptation plans, and opportunities for Sierra Club Chapters, Groups, and individual members to engage in the development and implementation of climate adaptation and resiliency plans.

(LINK: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FKPXlLpVo-pWN2FhaVKgTcLP03Ry7JE1a)

The purpose of this toolbox is to provide Sierra Club Chapters, Groups, and individual activists with climate adaptation and restoration tools for addressing climate change.  The selection of tools to be used should be guided by Sierra Club policies, including considerations of climate justice and equity.

Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EYNpu5RuZdpCzZYpAVqgANJeO4nH6ypG