Dark Money Greenwash Wokewash

If you consider yourself an environmentalist and live in California, odds are high that your inbox has been bombarded with misinformation from a certain group that purports to speak for small solar rooftop owners combatting climate change. 

They call themselves The Something Rights Alliance.  Notice their rhetoric focuses on Individual Rights vs Collective Responsibilities.  This Libertarian framing is then wokewashed with faux concern for the poor to argue for policies that actively harm the poor. 

This Dark Money group is so effective at Flooding the Zone with Misinformation that I'm not going to name them for fear of their web sniffers and the mobs they unleash. But pay attention to the loaded, emotional language that they use in order to short-circuit critical thinking. 

I've been taking a lot of heat from this group and was going to lie low. But, this morning, I read Skeptics Say, ‘Do Your Own Research.’ It’s Not That Simple. written by Nathan Ballantyne and David Dunning (yes, that Dunning) and decided that I have to speak out against armchair environmentalists and the Dark Money manipulators weaponizing them.

It's bad enough that we are dealing with Covid & Climate Change deniers, but now we have to worry about Regulatory Capture by Big Solar as well? 

Let's start with Dark Money.

“Dark money” refers to spending meant to influence political outcomes where the source of the money is not disclosed. Here’s how dark money makes its way into elections: 

Politically active nonprofits such as 501(c)(4)s are generally under no legal obligation to disclose their donors even if they spend to influence elections. When they choose not to reveal their sources of funding, they are considered dark money groups.

I looked up this group in Charity Navigator to find out more about them. They are unscored because they won't disclose information. Hmmm. Then I looked up their 990s on the IRS website. They reported ZERO income in 2017, the last year 501(c)(4)s were required to disclose their donors in a supplement. New grassroots organizations may start with no money and a bunch of volunteers, then grow slowly (both members and $), but this organization's funds grew overnight and then stayed flat. 

IRS 990 for 2018, showed they went from $0 income to $215,017 income, but did not file a (now purely optional) supplement to show who gave them the money. Meanwhile, the board shuffled a bit, but kept the same executive director. He earns his keep by being very active on the bird app and always in your inbox stoking outrage for Straw Man claims that no one is seriously proposing or considering.

In 2019, they report $215,027 in income and their board changes slightly again with the addition of more minorities to bolster their wokewash credentials.

 

Enough about the Dark Money, let's talk about the lies. I wrote an entire fact sheet debunking the wild things they say in their mass emails. It all sounds so physically plausible, until you pick up a physics textbook and calculator. 

The kerfuffle is over Net Metering, the methodology where we credit rooftop solar owners at retail rates for excess electricity that they export onto the shared grid. It made sense when the goal is to nurture a nascent industry, but it becomes a problem when the industry is mature, per panel costs have come down over 90%, and a lot of homeowners are trying to do the same thing. 

When CA passed the first Net Metering law back in the 1990s, lawmakers were worried about the day when residential rooftop solar would be ubiquitous enough that Net Metering would cause a cost-shift from solar owners to non solar owners.  They wrote in the legislation that they would periodically examine the cost-shift and readjust incentives as necessary. This Dark Money group wants to subvert the law. 

This is further exacerbated by the fact that (with few exceptions) you have to own your home and have enough home equity to swing a loan to install solar panels on the home. Guess who has the money?  It's generally older, wealthier and whiter people than the general population.  Over half of Californians are renters. Add in the people who live in condos/townhomes, whose smaller roof area per resident constrain their ability to generate excess electricity to export. 

According to the vast majority of energy experts in academia, national labs and industry; that cost-shift is happening, costs CA electricity customers without solar over $3 Billion per year (and rapidly climbing), and is a very inefficient way ($ and materials) to decarbonize California's grid.  I'm not going to belabor the points, it's already covered in my Fact Sheet. The main point is that people who have  larger systems, and fewer residents/users, export the most electricity to the grid and benefit the most under the status quo NEM 2.0. 

This Dark Money organization tried to stop the regulatory reform process by claiming it was rigged.  When that failed, they turned to organizing a mob to lobby Governor Newsom to either veto the proposed decision or to appoint new California Public Utilities Commissioners that are friendlier to them. This might work because the CPUC was led by an environmental justice rock star, Martha Guzman Aceves, who has been tapped by the Biden administration to head up the EPA for Region 9, which includes California. 

There will be two openings on the CPUC, so this is where they might actually succeed. The vote is scheduled for January 27, 2022 and there might be new commissioners, or the vote can take place without two stalwart defenders of poorer Californians. This is why I'm writing about it here. I'm hoping you will learn more, and then help vaccinate the population against the lunacy.  They are going to flood the governor and the CPUC with their talking points. So I want to get mine out as well. 

I want to talk about the Straw Man claims vs the actual California Public Utilities Proposed Decision. The Dark Money group is using wildly inflated numbers for the Grid Participation Charge. The math doesn't even work out right on their claims.  If you don't want to read the 204 pages of the Proposed Decision (PD), then at least read the CPUC NEM Fact Sheet: Modernizing California’s Net Energy Metering Program to Meet Our Clean Energy Goals Proposed Decision for Proceeding R.20-08-020. 

Simply put, the Grid is a support system that binds all of us together.  We depend on our neighbors and they depend on us. That is the rationale for the Grid Participation Charge, GPC. 

The Grid is a complex and expensive system to build and maintain.  It's also extremely creaky, with many system components from the Rural Electrification Act era, over 80 years ago. If we are not going to burn coal or fossil gas, for which we already have plants close to the users, then we need to build out a twenty-first century national grid to move renewable energy around from source regions to use regions. 

Transmission losses are inversely proportional to voltage; high-voltage interstate transmission lines that bring New Mexico evening wind energy to Los Angeles can lose as little electricity to transmission loss as from a neighborhood substation to a home in the suburbs (a few % each).  That's all taken into account in the Avoided Costs Calculator that NEM 3.0 uses. 

People without solar pay for the grid through volumetric rates ($ per kWh) and a very daily fee.  Rooftop owners push/export electricity to the grid during midday and then pull/import from after sunset.  They are heavy users of the grid, but their volumetric bill can be effectively zero. So they are not financially supporting the grid even though they are heavily reliant on the grid.

In order to encourage conservation, we set volumetric rates so that, the more you use, the more you pay.  That makes intuitive sense, as long as everyone is paying into it.  But, suppose all the heavy users, who also happen to be the wealthiest, install privatized systems--rooftop solar. With volumetric rates, they buy a lot less electricity, which means the (~9/10) non solar customers have to pick up the slack to support the grid.  

The fewer people paying for the Grid through volumetric rates, they higher the volumetric rate (cost per kilowatt hour) needs to be to pay for the Grid.  Under the current Net Energy Metering 2.0 program, rooftop solar owners get paid the retail rate for electricity they export, which is about 5 times as much as the avoided cost (generally wholesale cost of utility-scale solar plus transmission & reserve capacity).

This retail rates have to go up to cover this overpayment, which then generates even higher payments to the rooftop solar owners.  This is a positive feedback mechanism, also known as a runaway train.

Net Metering Reform is about countering this runaway train effect. 

It's long, it's complex, the ruling (proposed decision) is 204 pages for a reason. But I want to counter two BIG LIES. 

The first is that the Grid Participation Charge will hurt low-income solar owners (or which there are very few).  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Remember earlier when I explained that the Grid is a social contract?  Well, we acknowledge some people have more needs and less resources than others.  We subsidize the vulnerable.  Low income and disabled people (their entire households) will be exempt from the GPC.  The GPC will phase in slowly over 5 years, with a Market Transition Credit to soften the landing. Low income households will also get the MTC so they will get a negative GPC. 

In contrast, NEM 2.0 is paying low income homeowners with solar LOWER prices than for much wealthier solar owners.  Why? Because low income people pay 18-35% lower retail electricity rates.  So, the wealthier you are, the more you are earning under NEM 2.0. 

The second lie is that the CPUC is doing the bidding of the utility companies and designing NEM reform to kill their competitor, roof top solar.  Utility companies are regulated monopolies. They can wish for the sky, but the CPUC tells makes the rules. 

The CPUC has an obligation to keep the Grid in good working order (capacity and maintenance); ensure a safe, reliable and affordable electricity supply for all users; decarbonize the Grid in a cost-effective way as fast as possible, using roof top solar as one of their many tools; and to sustainably promote roof top solar.  It's a tough balance, which is why they studied the issue for so long, listened to many arguments, examined a lot of data. 

The CPUC isn't trying to kill off an industry they are tasked to support.  They are just trying to do it within the constraints of the other things they must also ensure--like affordable rates and a robust grid for everyone.

The second lie is related to the resilience argument.  Currently, the CPUC and the public who pays for NEM 2.0 has no say in where new rooftop solar is installed and subsidized.  Adoption is much broader in wealthy communities. That leaves a lot of poor communities vulnerable to rolling blackouts and Public Safety Power Shutoffs.  Rooftop solar + batteries/storage help insulate people from power outages. If your community has a lot of solar power, and it is set up to run in island/micro-grid mode, then you may be able to access some intermittent power off the micro-grid. But it's not reliable.

Under NEM 2.0, the resiliency benefits of rooftop solar accrue to the owners, and a little bit to their neighbors.  If you are so worried about access to reliable electricity for the medically fragile in the era of frequent Public Safety Power Shutoffs, why not just give solar systems with batteries for the disabled?  Or build Community Resilience Centers in poor neighborhoods where people can come for air conditioning, electricity, wi-fi, hot showers, etc?

That's the beauty of proposed NEM 3.0.  It would raise and disburse $150 Million each year to fund solar installations with storage (batteries) for those in highest need.  We would swap a horribly inefficient subsidy system, NEM 2.0, for a new subsidy that identifies those in highest need and directs the largest subsides to help them. Disabled people who are on SSI (and their households), regardless of income, will be exempt from the GPCs. 

It's about efficiency with our dollars. It's about directing help to those in need instead of waiting for trickle-down solar to work. It's about helping renters and multi-family residents instead of single family home owners (who have a larger rooftop/person ratio).

Please, please, please, don't feed the outrage machine.  Read the Proposed Decision yourself (the conclusions of law starts on page 175 and the order starts on page 179), or at least the CPUC NEM Fact Sheet. 

Proposition 19 and Wildfire Danger

Proposition 19 is such a dangerous scam.  Why are realtors so eager to pass this convoluted proposition that they spent over $63 Million (as of 10/28/2020) to pass it?  Because they will make a lot of money.

Proposition 13 has been amended over the years to give ever bigger loopholes to exploit.  First was the inheritance tax break for heirs: 

One effect of Proposition 13 and the inheritance tax break has been to create generational inequities between those who have owned homes and those who haven’t. The laws place no limits on how many descendants can take advantage of the benefit, so future generations of Californians whose ancestors purchased houses decades ago will continue to pay property taxes based on values established in the 1970s.

Then came the portability for seniors to make a one-time move within the same county to homes of equal or lesser value.  This was supposed to help people prepare for aging at home.  E.g. help seniors move to a home without stairs or in a less auto-dependent location when they stop driving.  

Some counties extended portability between reciprocating counties, ostensibly so that seniors could move closer to family for help with care.

Propositions 60/90 amended section 2 of Article XIIIA of the California Constitution to allow a person who is over age 55 to sell his or her principal place of residence and transfer its base year value to a replacement dwelling of equal or lesser value that is purchased or newly constructed within two years of the sale. These propositions are implemented by Revenue and Taxation Code section 69.5. 

Proposition 60 allows for the transfers of a base year value within the same county (intracounty). Proposition 90 allows for the transfers of a base year value from one county to another county in California (intercounty) if the county has authorized such a transfer by an ordinance. 

As of November 7, 2018, the following ten counties in California have an ordinance enabling the intercounty base year value transfer:

Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Tuolomne, Ventura are among the 9 most urbanized counties in California and are home to 75% of Californians.  75% of Californian seniors already have one-time Proposition 13 intercounty portability and all have one-time intracounty portability.

Proposition 13 property tax assessments are already transferable between 10 counties including 9 of the most urbanized ones. 75% of CA's population already have one-time Prop 13 portability at age 55.

Once, there was momentum and counties were willing to extend intercounty portability.  But, counties discovered that this bled their coffers.  Seniors use a lot of public services, especially when their health fails or when they lose driving privileges.  Accepting people who will consume ever larger portions of scarce public dollars while paying lower taxes is a suckers game.  Prop 13 portability stalled.

Existing law allows tax assessment portability only to homes of lesser or equal value. This was marketed as a way for house-rich, cash-poor empty nesters to free up some of their equity for living expenses.  It's bad policy to give things away to all seniors, instead of just targeting low-income people specifically, but this is existing policy.

It's a misnomer to call it a giveaway to all seniors.  About 6 million seniors live in California.  Over 1 million are renters.  Senior renters are the ones most in need.  About half have trouble paying for basic necessities.

Giving money to seniors who were lucky/white enough to purchase homes in the 1970s or earlier is not going to help the seniors in most financial distress.  It's going to take money away from governments, that they could have used to help the real seniors in need.

Prop 19 would allow portability of low Prop 13 assessments to more expensive homes.  If seniors are able to purchase a more expensive home, do they need the subsidy from everyone else?

Business interests have exploited the CA initiative process to do an end run around government and elected officials when they can't get what they want.  They spend a lot of time and money crafting initiatives that sound good, while having stealth effects that they obfuscate with convoluted language.

Proposition 19 is marketed as a way to close the inheritance loophole, which will raise tens of millions per year, but it will create liabilities many times larger.

For instance, the inheritance loophole will still be valid as long as the heirs live in the home as a primary residence at the time of the transfer.  Be prepared for people to move into mom and pop's place for just long enough to get the lower tax assessment, and then transfer the low tax assessment to another home later.

Existing law, Prop 60/90, allows one-time property tax assessment transfers.  Proposition 19 expands that to THREE transfers.  Why settle for one real estate commission when you can get three?  Seniors are going to need it if they move to a rural area and then find themselves unable to drive dark rural roads.  They will need to move back to an urban area that is more friendly to those that can't drive.

[A UC Berkeley geography professor found that seniors who move to rural areas create many low-wage jobs, first in food-retail, then in home healthcare aides. Providing for seniors and the low-wage workers they depend upon is bankrupting rural counties.  That's why counties now refuse to opt-in to Prop 13 portability.]

So why does Prop 19 have these Rube Goldberg rules that tighten the inheritance loophole and redirect the money to fire fighting?  Because the 48 CA counties not participating in Prop 13 portability are mostly rural firetraps.

On the map below, the 10 counties with existing Prop 13 portability are aqua.  The 48 counties that Prop 19 would extend portability to are yellow.

Historical fire data for 1878-2019 is shown in brown.

Fire perimeters for the 2020 fire season is shown in pink.

Although there are many fires in the Southern California aqua counties, they are mostly contained in the rural, mountainous parts of the county.  Urban dwellers in the denser parts of those counties subsidize the few that live in harms way.  That is not true in most of the yellow counties.

Realtors know that Prop 19 would incentivize seniors to move to Paradise and other fire traps.  That's why they added the sop to fire fighters.  But, it would raise only tens of millions per year in fire fighting funds.  California spends a half to a full BILLION on fire suppression annually. That's not counting money spent by the Feds for fire suppression on Federal lands. 

[The Feds own 47.7% of California's land, including 57% of California's forest lands.]

People (and their cars) start fires.  Put more people out in fire country, and they will start more fires.  

Most importantly, prescribed burns to reduce fuels are difficult to do in areas that already have homes and people living and driving in them.  Ironically, prescribed fires aren't permitted if the PM2.5 particulate air pollution is already high and people live in the area.  

People driving cars shed PM2.5 (yes, even electric cars) so they add to the PM2.5 load while simultaneously reducing the allowable load.  It's so circular.  But, once people live in a fire-prone area, it gets harder to do the things you need to keep them safe.

The housing estates will further fragment wildlife habitat. 

Seniors will be socially isolated--especially when they stop driving.

Proposition 19 is just insane social, fiscal, ecological and fire policy.

Wildfire deja vu

If you are a new reader of this blog, you may not know that I used to work in wildfire remote sensing.  I've been blogging about Wildfire at the urban-wildlands interface for over a decade, starting with Fire is a River that Runs Uphill.  Start there and read the entire Wildfire series.

None of this is news to those that study fire.  We made stupid decisions over and over again.  I'm upset, and I don't want to blame the victims.  There is enough blame to go around.

Not looking like a white Christmas

Have you seen the Aleutian Low? It appears to be lost. But maybe we can work together to bring it back?

I have a new personal computer at work and setting it up for weather data wrangling has been a slow and sometimes painful process.

We have a new supercomputer at work and setting it up for weather data wrangling has been an excruciatingly painful process.

Anyway, I made a movie for you of the 10-day GFS forecast and it looks really, really dry.

Instead of a low pressure system near the Aleutians, bringing in storms into the Pacific Northwest and sometimes into California, we have a variant of the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge (R3).

I plotted the Geopotential heights of the 700 mb isobaric surface (about 70% of normal sea level pressure and about the height of winter moisture.). The red area sitting over the western US is about 200-300 meters higher than surrounding areas.

This is the equivalent of a 200-300 meter high mountain range sitting between you and winter rains.  The rain is going to find a lower energy path.

Around December 20, an offshore Omega Block pattern forms.  Alaska is going to get some dramatically atypical December weather!

I'll be with family in CA and we will probably be dry, cold, and windy.

Wildfire PSA

Image courtesy of NASA

With wildfires burning all over the western United States and floods ravaging Lousiana, this is a good time to reread Fire is a river that runs uphill.

One major reason that fire fighting in the western forests has become more expensive is the number of structures (homes) being built in the trees. One Colorado newspaper had the guts to run a story questioning if our firefighters should risk (or lose) their lives protecting the vacation homes of the rich after twelve firefighters died in the Storm King Mountain fire.

My Wildfire series.

Smoke Effects

During my after-work bike ride on Thursday, August 20, I noticed flashes of red coming from Boulder creek. Further investigation showed that they were the reflections of sunlight coming off the sun. We have been getting spectacular red sunsets due to the smoke from all the wildfires around the western part of North America.

Fortunately, I didn't need my inhaler during or after my bike ride.  I did cough a bit more than usual after my ride.

I did give up my hiking and biking plans for the weekend, though.  It's just too smoky outside.  My eyes hurt if I spend extended time outdoors.  When will the winds shift?  Check the California Regional Weather Server's Jet Stream visualizations of NCEP forecasts.

That Ridiculously Resilient Ridge in (non)action!

Thanks to some sips tips from Stackoverflow and OSXDaily, my sister's pointer to gifmaker.me, and the NOAA/ESRL Daily Mean Composites visualizer,  I managed to create an animation of the quasi-stationary Ridiculously Resilient Ridge (RRR) between December 23, 2013 and January 21, 2014.

The RRR is a remarkably scary phenomena because it's been sitting there, deflecting rain from California, for THIRTEEN consecutive months.  In fact, the high-pressure ridge is often so large, it's deflecting moisture from most of the west coast of Canada and the Unites States!

Remember Newton's First Law of Physics?  An object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an external force.

The earth's atmosphere behaves like a shallow pan of fluid on top of our rock ball.  The atmosphere responds with waves when pinged (water analogy) or plucked (string analogy).  You can see the opposite phases of the waves in blue (low pressure) and red (high pressure) below.  Normally, the waves move around a bit, spreading the sunshine and rain over time and space.

However, the RRR has been quasi-stationary with practically zero momentum for more than a year.  It would take a lot of energy to budge something so big and so stationary.  The strength and persistence of the RRR makes that an unlikely event.

This is a severe event.  In a widespread drought like this, it's simply not an option to pull water from another water shed (e.g. the Colorado River Basin).  No one in the west has any water to spare.  This is not media hype.  This could be a catastrophic disaster.

It't time to prepare for the worst drought and wildfire season in California in my lifetime.

Aside:

I showed it in Lambert Conformal (conic projection) instead of Polar Stereographic this time.  Which do you prefer?

An Early Start to the 2014 Fire Season

Bad Dad asked if it was his imagination that the air quality is better now than this morning. Was it an artifact of the sun angle?

After looking at today's two NASA MODIS images of this area, I can say that the peak of the smoke passed over us shortly before the NASA Terra satellite overpass (first image, about 10:30 AM).  When the fire first started, the fuel was abundant and the fire produced the most smoke.

By the NASA Aqua overpass (second image, about 1:30 PM), the thickest part of the smoke plume had moved past us and offshore.

Blogger is doing something very strange to the color balance of the images. Go see them yourself at the MODIS La Jolla subset page.  The Terra 7-2-1 Bands image shows two distinct hotspots.  The police already have suspects in custody for setting the fire.

Los Angeles Wildfire FAQ

When the LA Times is showing pictures like this

and the MODIS Image of the Day shows a smoke plume like this, I field a few questions.

I thought that others might have the same questions, but don't know who to ask.

Take a look at the burn area map.

Q: What do the colored lines mean?
A: The red line contains the burned area.  The blue lines represent the evacuation areas.  Some places further stratify with mandatory and voluntary evacuation zones.  But, some people outside those areas will want to evacuate anyway for health or mobility reasons.

Q:  What does 20% contained mean?
A: Fires are fought along the perimeter so the number refers to the percentage of the fire perimeter (red line) that is under control--where the firefighters are reasonably sure that the fire won't spread beyond that line.

Q: I live further away from the fire than my neighbor who is closer in distance to the fire.  Why do I have to evacuate and he doesn't?
A: Recall what I wrote in Fire is a river that runs uphill (and you can see the video evidence in Fire is a river that runs uphill redux):

On flat land, in the absence of winds, a fire will burn itself out after it has exhausted the fuels in the fire perimeter. To fight the fire, you need only create a firebreak which denies the fire of the fuel it needs to maintain itself.

Flames and hot embers rise. On a hill (still in the absence of winds), the fire will keep moving uphill, picking up fresh fuel, until it can climb no further.

Strong winds can blow the fire downhill and over ridge tops, as has happened in this fire.  Evacuation zones are set by risk; uphill and downwind areas are at higher immediate risk.

Q: Why are the firefighters pulling back and not doing anything?  The fire is still raging!
A: The problem is further complicated by shifting winds.  Wildfires in our region mostly start when we have an offshore wind pattern--the winds come from inland and blow towards the ocean.  But, we typically experience an afternoon sea breeze--the winds come from the ocean and blow inland.

There is a huge variability and uncertainty in the onset time of the afternoon sea breeze and firefighters have to pull back at the earliest possible time of onset.  Below is the weather prediction for the fire area on Friday morning.  Notice the wind shift was predicted to take place between 8 AM and 2 PM?

Here's the wind at a nearby weather station. It's as close to what actually happened as we know.

Notice that the winds rotated around, coming briefly from the *west*? That wasn't expected.

To efficiently and safely allocate firefighting resources, we need good wind predictions.  We are at a disadvantage because we live right next to the "big blue data void" aka the Pacific Ocean.  But, NOAA does run a (sparse) string of marine buoys and our government runs weather satellites and numerical weather prediction centers.  But, don't get too complacent.  Many scientists are sidelined due to austerity budgets (myself included).

Modeling behavior

Trena has a really insightful post about how people shop for entertainment because there are so few other options for them where they live.  I left a comment that shopping is also a socially communicable disease.  We learn how to spend our time from how we see others around us spend their time.

This year, Bad Dad and I are focused on teaching our daughter how to safely bike for transportation AND recreation.  (We are also helping her learn how to navigate public transit in metro LA.)

When we were driving up to Point Imperial at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon (see map), it reminded me of how much fun Bad Dad and I had riding our bikes, and stopping at every view point, around other national parks and similarly scenic places.  I begged Bad Dad to let me ride the route while he drove behind.  Surprisingly, Iris said she wanted to try it.  Here we are leaving the parking lot at Point Imperial, elevation 8803 feet above sea level.

I am carrying my purse and first aid kit in the left pannier and we are both carrying water.  It was in the upper 70s F and very dry.  You can see the burn scars on many of the trees from past forest fires.  It took us only 15 minutes to cover the 2.6 downhill miles to the junction.

The map I had showed Roosevelt Point at 8400' and visitor center at 8200'.  I expected rolling hills but an overall downhill so Iris wanted to go on.  The switchbacks climbing out of the junction and Greenland lake surprised me with their duration and it turned out to be too hard for her.  It was surprisingly easy for me.  (It must be all those trips to the gym now that I am unemployed.)

I left her at a turnout, confident that Bad Dad was minutes away with the minivan/sag wagon.  Iris took this picture of my bum as they passed me.  This is the kind of alpine riding I did every summer weekend in the Boulder foothills in my 20s.

It was so much fun, and I was so happy that my daughter could share part of that.  See my big smile?

The air is also somewhat hazy with smoke from fires that dot the southwest.  She was also suffering from altitude and smoke inhalation.  It's a complete mystery how I was able to ride without resorting to the inhaler in the first aid kit.  Fortunately, we had a bit of rain at the North Rim (AZ) and in Northern New Mexico; more relief is on the way.  This year, we will not complain about the rain on our vacation.

Fire is a river that runs uphill redux

Eric from Colorado sends this item:

...and when it gets to the top of the hill, it stops (usually)

Boulder's Flagstaff Fire - Timelapse from Dustin Henderlong on Vimeo.

In the linked video, you can see time lapse photography from about an hour after the fire started until about 2 days later. The fire covers 1.5 miles over ground in the first few hours (you can't see this in the video, but you see the huge burst of smoke pouring over the ridge line) then, just as the fire crests the ridge that runs  north and south from the peak of Bear Mountain, it grinds to a halt. In the next 36 hours, it basically only advances a few hundred yards downhill.  

[...] at the peak of Bear Mountain, the vegetation is pretty thin, mostly rock.  That, plus the difficulty of going downhill, makes a very nice fire break. Today, we could see plumes of smoke on the slopes just east of Bear peak, but they were only from backfires lit to clean up patches of vegetation that represented possible leaks in the firebreak that the fire created for itself when it stalled coming over the ridge.

Read the original Fire is a river that runs uphill post.

Hello, sunshine, my old friend

We woke up to an unfamiliar sight today, bright sunshine. We've been experiencing unusually cold and foggy weather in coastal Los Angeles for the past three months. Check out today's weather in Hermosa Beach, California (courtesy of Weather Underground).

More specifically, look at the solar radiation density.  See the nice, smooth curve as the sun rises and then sets?  Not a cloud in the sky all day!  (The eagle-eyed may notice that our solar radiation peaked at 1 PM daylight savings time, which is actually noon local time.)

Even at 7 PM, the view from Aviation boulevard, looking southwest towards Hermosa pier, showed no traces of the marine layer creeping inland for the night.

Contrast that with a week ago, on July 6, 2010.

Just compare the solar radiation at 11 AM PDT on July 6, 2010 and today, July 13, 2010.

It was 180 watts per square meter versus 800 watts per square meter today.  That's more than 4x the sunshine!  (Additionally, we are a week farther from the summer solstice so the sun is lower in the sky,  resulting in a lower cloud-free incident solar radiation density.)  

The global average is about 342 watts/m^2, depending upon solar activity; a graphic is shown in Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change.


As an extra bonus, Scott B, who gets paid(!) to blog about the weather, posted an animation of the fog rolling out of the LA basin.

Here's a teaser, but go to his blog to see more here1 and here2.

Visit the CIMSS Satellite blog for this type of insightful commentary and interpretation:

In terms of the coastal fog and stratus in southern California, GOES-15 0.63 µm visible channel images (below) showed how slow these features were to burn off in some areas. In fact, a number of locations in the San Diego, California area experienced record low maximum temperatures for the date — including a daily high temperature of only 65º F at San Diego International Airport (labeled SAN on the images), which was 10 degrees below the normal high temperature (75º F) for San Diego on 06 July. It is also interesting to note that heating of the higher terrain of some of the offshore islands appeared to help initiate the earlier clearing of the marine layer stratus cloud deck.

I just love watching the channel islands perform a veil dance with the clouds.

And I want to know, how do I get Scott's paying gig?  ;-)

Addendum:
The sun came out for just one day, and already the hills are on fire.

Maybe One Wildfire Post

I was getting tired of fire season (and it has only just begun), but this picture was so interesting, I wanted to share.  Here's yesterday's NASA Aqua satellite imagery of southern California.  Look at the smoke plume emanating from the Sheep Fire.  (Click to see the 500 meter resolution images.)

In the false color image, you can see the burn area and past burn areas that have not yet recovered.  Look at the sizes of the burn scars from the Station fire (immediately to the west of the current fire) and near Santa Barbara.  Malibu and Baja California also show evidence of recent fires.

You can always find more imagery at the MODIS Rapid Response System website. The La Jolla Subsets are of particular interest to Angelenos and San Diegans. Santa Barbara residents may be more interested in the Fresno subsets.  They provide imagery in 2 km, 500 m and 250 m resolution.

The California Regional Weather Server at SDSU shows handy jet stream analyses like this one, from around the time of the Terra imagery above.  We were lucky that the wind was blowing smoke away from population centers.

The jet stream is still overhead.  We will have several days of cold, windy and unsettled weather, perfect for the new mommy and me riding boots that Iris and I bought over the weekend.

Addendum:
The jet stream is a high altitude current of fast-moving air.  Surface winds do not necessarily coincide with the jet stream, but they are influenced by them.    Right now, the sum of the jet stream and our seasonal Santa Ana winds is producing very calm wind conditions near the fire.  That's the good news.

Smoke and Ash

We have done some fiscal stimulus.
I want to make all the designs in A Fine Fleece. Even if you aren't a spinner, you should definitely check this book out. Each sweater is shown in a handspun yarn and a commercially available yarn in a common gauge/thickness. Just match your gauge and fiber characteristics, and you can get started.

That's my swatch for October Frost, knit in Lane Borgosesia Baruffa Merinos Otto Shadow. Otto is an Aran-weight 8-ply (Seis is a 6-ply DK weight). Words do not describe the softness of this superwash merino yarn. It feels like cashmere. The shadow color-blending effect is also gorgeous.

I am using a colorway named "Smoke and Ash". It's apt that I am knitting it now, because you should see the smoke plume to the northeast of us. We had dinner with friends last night, and we could see the glow of the fires from their balcony. The burn area is quite extensive. Because the burning hills are on the other side of downtown, when viewed from the beach cities, it looks like downtown is on fire.
Imagery of the Station Fire taken from NASA's Terra satellite courtesy of NASA's MODIS Rapid Response website. There are also fires burning south of the border.

Australian Wildfires

You can see more images from the MODIS Rapid Response website, especially the Australia region 6 daily subsets. We are calling Mark's cousins north of Melbourne to let them know they can evacuate to our house in LAX.

Wildfire Weather 2

The Corona/Anaheim Hills aka Freeway Complex fire was quite small yesterday morning when NASA's Terra satellite flew overhead, around 10:30 local time.
By the time NASA's Aqua satellite flew overhead, ~13:30 local time, it was a different story.
Today, the Freeway Complex fire eclipsed the Sylmar fire at 10:30.
And at 13:30. Note the new fire in Baja California, Mexico.
Links:
MODIS Rapid Response daily imagery, La Jolla subset. You can download imagery at 2 km to 250 meter resolutions from that page. These images are 1 km resolution.

Satellite data is often organized by Julian day of year, from 1 to 365/366. For instance, today is 2008321. You can go to any day's imagery at the MODIS link above by changing the DOY in the url.
View a Julian Day conversion table.

LA Times put together a Fire Map. The Freeway Complex fire alone has burned 24,000 acres.

Earlier posts:
Wildfire weather
Fire is a river that runs uphill

Monster in the Tub

More than a month before our drive up to Seattle, I told Mark that Redding might not be the ideal place to stop because of smoke from the wildfires. Furthermore, it was the logical staging area for resting firefighters. Mark told me that the fires would be out by then. (Which one of us did wildfire research?)

Hotel rooms were scarce in Redding on both our northbound and southbound stays. On the return trip, with Iris in tow, they upgraded us to a spa tub suite because that was the only room available. All the other rooms had been turned over to firefighters.

As soon as she saw the tub sitting at one end of the bedroom, Iris had to take a bubble bath in it. She didn't expect--none of us did--the dramatic effect of the jacuzzi jets upon the bubbles. Fortunately, we turned them off before the bubbles overflowed the tub.

Iris signals for help.
We encountered the most severe smoke north of Redding and south of the Oregon/California border.

Aside:
Embers have been known to stay hot under a blanket of snow and reignite wildfires as soon as the fuel become dry enough in the spring. Fires can go on for a year or more, until all the fuel is exhausted and/or all the embers go out.

Perhaps we should have spread the bubble bath foam in the forest as a flame retardant blanket?

Big Burn

LA Observed has been monitoring the slow death of environmental reporting at local papers here

Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, cites declines at the Times as one reason he now writes a blog: "Since I first started working at Heal the Bay 20 years ago, newspaper media has been experiencing a slow and painful death. The first casualty was the Herald Examiner, followed by The Outlook, The Reader, and now the slow dismantling of the once highly respected Los Angeles Times. Now, it is nearly impossible to get a newspaper to run an investigative piece on the environment in LA, let alone cover the day to day decisions that continue to erode our local quality of life."

and here. (in list of reporters leaving LAT)

Janet Wilson covered air quality on the environment desk. With the previously noted departure of environment writer Marla Cone and the exit of veteran editor Frank Clifford earlier this year, there's concern in the scientific community that the Times is surrendering its tradition as a leader in environment and science coverage.

I have seen them drop the ball on some stories that they failed to follow through. But, Bettina Boxall, Julie Cart and many others have done a fantastic job with Big Burn, a series about "the growth and cost of wildfires".

Read the whole series, visiting each web page (and hit refresh many, many times). Maybe the bean counters at LAT who can't recognize great journalism when they see it will recognize a spike in pageviews.

Pay special attention to the Living near wildlands graphic in A Santa Barbara area canyon's residents are among many Californians living in harm's way in fire-prone areas.

Notice that there are only two ways out of this canyon 80 years ago, and that is still true today. The roads are still single lane each way, same as then. The only difference is that today, several orders of magnitude more people live in this canyon and the landscape has become more combustible. This is a deathtrap. (Albeit a deathtrap with pretty views.)

I will never forget a graphic shown by UCSB geography professor, Keith Clarke. The graphic depicted exit choke points and the integrated populace that lived in the hills above the choke points. The more people, the broader the thick red line. Map showed the narrowness of the choke points and how many people per hour the roads can handle. You look at the road capacity, you look at the number of people, and you know that is a horror story waiting to happen.

Actually, it has already happened, as explained in the LAT story:

In a 2005 research paper, Thomas Cova, an associate geography professor at the University of Utah, posed a question: Should places like Mission Canyon have population limits, just as movie theaters have occupancy limits to ensure everyone can escape in an emergency?
...
He grew up in the Bay Area. His career has been shaped by the 1991 Oakland Hills fire, which destroyed nearly 3,000 structures and killed 25 people in a matter of hours. Many of them died in or near their cars at the end of a long line of traffic, trying to flee a neighborhood of narrow, winding roads that funneled to four exits, two of which were blocked by the fire.

Asides:

• I wish I remembered the name of the student that produced the haunting graphic, but I didn't catch it and write it down at the time; not that I can decipher my old notebooks anyway.
• It reminded me of Minard's map of Napoleon's March to Moscow.

From the archives:

• Fire is a river that runs uphill
• The wildfire series

Wild Weather and Wild Fire in CA

The jet stream almost exactly traced the coastline today, not a typical pattern for us.

The Santa Cruz mountains wildfire injected a plume of smoke into the middle of the jet stream.

My sister says that there was no way I could have been feeling the effects of the smoke from the Santa Cruz fire by 8:30 AM when we IM'd. Jet stream speeds of 120-150 knots could travel between Santa Cruz and LA in 3 hours or so. The fire started around 5:30 AM. She's right. But what could it be?

Perhaps I was experiencing respiratory effects from the Santa Clarita fire closer to home? Santa Clarita is NE of me; the smoke from that fire is unlikely to travel this far west. It was such a small fire compared to the Santa Cruz one.

After discussion with my sister, I realized that the unusual wind pattern put me downwind of the Chevron refinery 5 miles NE of home.

It rained between 6 and 7 PM today and it sounds like the rain has started up again. Rain in late May in a non-El Nino year is rare. Could the soot from the fire have nucleated raindrops?

Links:

• CRWS Jet Stream Analysis (CA Regional Weather Server)
• MODIS Fresno (central CA) Subsets Moderate resolution imagery from NASA's Terra and Aqua Satellites
• Tornadoes, hail and snow in Southern California today
  

The ghosts among us, Part II

Speaking of the ghosts among us the recent fires have illuminated some of our dirty laundry. We like to keep our insatiable need for cheap, exploitable labor and throwaway people neatly hidden.

The NY Times wrote about how the Glare of Fires Pulls Migrants From Shadows.

Ms. Trujillo and others who help the immigrants said they saw several out in the fields as the fires approached and ash fell on them. She said many were afraid to lose their (agricultural) jobs.

“There were Mercedeses and Jaguars pulling out, people evacuating, and the migrants were still working,” said Enrique Morones, who takes food and blankets to the immigrants’ camps. “It’s outrageous.”

Some of the illegal workers who sought help from the authorities were arrested and deported. Opponents of illegal immigration, including civilian border watch groups, seized on news that immigrants had been detained at the Qualcomm Stadium evacuation center as evidence of trouble that illegal immigrants cause.

The Border Patrol also arrested scores of illegal immigrants made visible by the fires. Agent Fisher of the Border Patrol said 100 had been arrested since the fires started Sunday.

Migrants hide in the canyons at the urban-wildland interface. It appears that many (perhaps most) of the fatalities last week were migrants burned alive in their hiding places. Their remains are being found as the fires are slowly conquered.

Also don't miss another article, Rethinking Fire Policy in the Tinderbox. Here's a graphic from the story.

People outside this region are often not aware that LA is a broad basin ringed by mountain ranges. The basin is built out. The growth has largely been in canyons or in the mountains, at the urban-wildland interface (shown in yellow). The only reason that LA county's percentage is not as high as those of neighboring counties is because of urban infill developments such as the townhouse I call home.

I have mixed feelings about urban infill. I am collecting photos and other supporting documentation for a long post later.

You may want to visit Volker Radeloff's website. He collected the land category data for the map above. His website has a link to the paper, The Wildland Urban Interface in the United States.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), Radeloff and Yi-Fu Tuan are both at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Tuan writes short essays in "Dear Colleague" format. I don't always agree with him, but I enjoy reading him from time to time. When I reread him, I discover thoughts and ideas that I didn't see upon earlier reading. I highly recommend his website! I found this in his archives about the difference between science and magic.

Magic is knowledge and knowledge is power. Magic is full of esoteric knowledge, backed by test tubes, burners, and bubbling liquids, the end of which is power—that is, the ability to change the world or navigate effectively in it. In the sixteenth century came science, toted with great vigor by Francis Bacon. To him, science and not magic is knowledge and power. In the end, as we all know, science displaced magic, not because its knowledge is more esoteric or because it has fancier test tubes or because it is backed by a more prestigious social network, but because it has triumphed in the one area that truly matters to people—power.

At the end of this particular essay, he cautions against studying systems just so we can mess with change them.

Magic predates science. But so did something else—wisdom. Wisdom strove for knowledge about reality, but not so much to gain mastery over it as to enable humans to adapt. Ecological science is thus more like ancient wisdom than it is like modern, technology-driven science. The word "community," which frequently crops up in ecology, suggests that one studies it not to control or change it to something better, but rather the opposite, to preserve or restore it. When "human" is added to ecology, as in human ecology, the word "community" is retained, and with such retention, the implied conservative posture of wisdom. Political ecology, on the other hand, is more dynamic. Implied is a need to alter the socio-political structure of a community. Alter to what? Do ecologists say that a mangrove swamp or a tropical rainforest ought to be something ecologically better? No. But political ecologists do say of any existent human community that, yes, it can and ought to be better. Ecology is like old-fashioned wisdom in that it studies what exists and how creatures ought to adjust and adapt. By comparison, political ecology is more power driven, and is in this regard like modern science. On the other hand, the power it interests itself in is not physical power, like the ability to throw things, but rather socio-political power. So what is political ecology? A science, a wisdom, an ideology? All of the above, none of the above?