May 15th, 2008. A freakish pre-season heat wave sweeps across northern California, shattering record highs—not by a few degrees—but by a dozen or more in several cities.
One week later. High winds in the Santa Cruz Mountains whip up an early season wildfire that would claim more than 4,000 acres and 35 homes—a month before the northern California fire season typically starts.
June 4th Governor Schwarzenegger declares an official statewide drought and orders emergency transfers of water to the most stricken areas.
Current science cannot establish a certain link between these events and climate change. What scientists can say with a mix of confidence and trepidation: is that these events do provide a glimpse of California’s future, as the climate warms.
Peter Gleick: I think the world of 2050 is already in the pipeline.
There’s a lot of pain coming. And the question is: “Are we gonna be smart enough to avoid the worst of it?”
Regardless of where you stand on the cause, there is now no doubt that our climate is changing. And recent data suggests that it’s happening faster than scientists had predicted.
In the next half-hour, we’ll examine just some of these changes, and the ways that they’re…Turning up the Heat on California.
It is late February and just as he’s done for nearly 30 years, Frank Gehrke is trudging out to his regular spot near Tamarack Flat, just off Highway 50. It’s one of numerous snow courses that the state’s Dept. of Water Resources tracks every winter for snowfall and water content.
Frank Gehrke: The way we do water supply forecasting is an index method: You measure the snow parameters at various spots in the watershed and you relate those measurements to the outflow from the basin.
It’s crucial data because 40% of California’s surface water originates up here, in the “frozen reservoir” known simply as “the snowpack.” On this day, Gehrke’s usual partner was off on another assignment, so I thought I’d fill in…
Frank Gehrke: Yeah, get up there and gently step—or fall in. Not there, not there. Didn’t get you in time.
I have a feeling he could’ve worked faster alone. This course was established right around 1941, so we’ve got quite a long record.
We’re gonna start from here, we’ll measure up 50’ in the direction of that orange sign, take our first sample, repeat the process. This is the low-tech method, dating back about a hundred years. The basic gear includes a hollow aluminum pole with a sawtooth end—and a scale. The pole provides a core sample of the snowpack. Today we’re standing on about seven feet of accumulation.
79 inches.
Snow can pile up in the Sierra. By late February, this seasonal home is buried up to the second story. And of course, it’s not just as simple as how much snow is on the ground, it’s how much water is in the snow. If you carve out sort of a random square foot of snow—looks about right—this could be anywhere from 50% water density, all the way down to 1%. This snow we’re dealing with here, on this day, is about 33%. Makes a big difference.
30 inches of water content.
Since wet snow is heavier snow, the scale and conversion charts calculate the water content.
Frank Gehrke: The first snow surveys were made…is absolutely critical.
On this day in February, the survey showed a healthy snowpack. And then—it stopped snowing—or raining. And by the last survey in May, the critical water content measurement was at only 2/3 of normal.
Now, as long as you have snow falling on snow, the whole arrangement has a way of holding together pretty nicely until spring when it gradually melts off and runs off into the rivers and streams below.
But now, let’s introduce some rain to the equation. If you have spring arring sooner and warmer temperatures overall, that means more precipitation falling up in the mountains in the form of rain. Well when rain falls on snow, you can see that the snow still has some holding power but it’s melting. Even worse, you’ve got more bare ground at upper elevations, look what happens: There’s nothing to stop that water from just running off.
Again, rain on snow, rain on bare ground: problem.
In 2007, using 50 years of data, scientists confirmed that mountains across the West—not just the Sierra—are getting more rain and less snow, that snowpack is melting faster and streams drying up sooner. And that rapid climate change is the best explanation.
Martha Conklin: It does seem that snowmelt is occurring earlier. The records in Yosemite comparing the date of snowmelt now versus 20 years ago is about two weeks earlier. Two weeks doesn’t sound like big deal. But CA doesn’t get rain in the summertime.
Recent studies suggest that interior California is already warming faster than the world as a whole.
According to state projections, average temperatures in California could rise anywhere from 3 to more than 10 degrees Farenheit by the end of this century, depending on how aggressively we reduce the so-called greenhouse gases that accelerate global warming.
Gleick: It doesn’t matter much what we do for 2030 or 2040 or 2050. I think we’re committed already to the climate changes that are gonna have a significant impact in those years.
Peter Gleick directs the Pacific Institute in Oakland, a policy think tank devoted largely to water issues.
Gleick: That’s not to say that we shouldn’t make enormous things now to reduce the impacts even further out but we’re already committed to a lot of climate change.
Birdsong: The signs are already there.
Studies show that the harbingers of spring are arriving earlier; plants blooming…
Insects appearing…
Some migratory birds are arriving earlier in the spring and leaving later in the fall.
Peter Gleick: There are three things we’re very sure about. One is it’s gonna be a lot hotter. The 2nd is we’re gonna see changes in the timing of water availability because of the impacts on mountain snow. And the third is sea level rise, which will have an impact inland—in the wetlands and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. I think all of those things are certain.
And they add up to a bewildering stew of apparent contradictions: In the high country, ski areas will be strapped for their basic stock in trade: snow. Even the most conservative warming estimates shave a full month off the ski season at middle elevations by 2100.
In the Valley below, the threat of more frequent winter-time flooding increases…even as Californians endure more sustained and severe droughts in summer.
These are almonds, right? Or a-monds, as you say up here. Yeah, this looks like pretty good set. You can see the nuts are starting to form here.
Mary Wells wants to know that the young trees she’s planted here in the Colusa Basin, will have enough water to yield almonds—and profits—for decades into the future.
Mary Wells: Most of us have come from a long line of farming families and we’re very tuned in to nature and we know it has its cycles. Hard for me to believe that Man caused all of them. But I think the important thing for us to understand is that we need the flexibility to deal with it.
That’s why—amazing as it sounds—Mary is in favor of a plan that would put her own home ranch—just over the hill—under more than 200 feet of water.
This is the hamlet of Sites, few miles west of Maxwell. For 36 years, it’s been home to Mary Wells and her family.
Mary Wells: So this is the back—more than 40, I’d guess.] Yes, we actually sit right in the middle of 250 acres. Right here’s just about the middle of the ranch.
They own one of several working ranches in the Antelope Valley; 14,000 acres that would disappear under water, to form California’s first brand new dam & reservoir project in four decades.
Mary Wells: And they would flood the entire valley? That’s correct. It’s basically a natural bowl. It’s 15 miles from one end of it to the northern end. Over here you can see the oak tree line Um-hm—on the far hills there. If you just sort of zone out there and kind of look at that, all the way across the valley, it’s about that high—that’s exactly where the water would be.
You can see how an engineer would look at this valley and see a reservoir. It forms almost a perfectly natural bowl. As a matter of fact, if you look down the road, thee way these two hills come together behind me and form a vee, it’s almost like there’s a sign hanging up above it that says: “Insert dam here.”
Mary Wells: While I really love this ranch, raised my children here, have grandchildren that come here now, I also come from a long-time agriculture family…
And I see a huge threat to the existence of agriculture in the north state, if we don’t get some off-stream storage or do something about an additional supply.
“Off-stream” storage is the idea of creating a reservoir without damming up more rivers. This part of the Antelope Valley would be a kind of remote holding tank, storing as much as 1.8 million acre-feet of water…that’s enough to supply all the homes in Sacramento—for four years.
Of course, all the water for that would have to come from someplace…and the someplace would most likely be here. This is one of a couple of major irrigation canals that happens to run within a few miles of Sites—but on the wrong side of the hill. This water starts in the Sacramento River, so someplace near here, would have to be pumped up over those hills behind me, into Antelope Valley.
Environmental groups have opposed the new dams, which are part of a larger plan to create this new reservoir and expand two more, farther down the Central Valley.
About 120 air miles south of the Wells ranch, John Fiscalini’s fate is also closely tied to the land. His family has been in the dairy business—on the same land outside Modesto—since 1914. Today they have 1500 milking cows, each of which gives up to 90 pounds of milk per day.
John Fiscalini: These cows are much more productive than cows in most other countries and at the same time there’s a whole lot less GHG emission per pound of milk produced in the US, because of our efficiency.
Fiscalini also runs an award-winning cheese operation. There’s a huge investment and several generations of tradition at stake here. But facing potential water shortages and oppressive heat that could threaten his herd in years to come, there’s one thing that John Fiscalini fears more than rapid climate change itself.
John Fiscalini: One of the biggest concerns is legislation; what govt agencies are going to tell us we must do and how we must conform our businesses.
Fiscalini is trying to keep ahead of the curve. When we visited here, he’d already more than $3 million sunk into a massive “methane digester.”
[Construction equipment noise]
Methane gas is the “other” high-volume “product:’ produced by John’s herd. Researchers—and regulators--are starting to look more closely at methane.
Though our economy as a whole produces far more carbon dioxide, as a greenhouse gas, methane is 25 times more potent than CO2.
John hopes to harness that methane for the farm, reducing its greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.
John Fiscalini: We think where we’re going with this is certainly going to be a beneficial thing in a multitude of ways—not only is it going to hopefully reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it’s also supposed to be profitable for us to make renewable energy on site here, use that energy and then give some of that energy—sell some of that energy back to the grid.
Supposedly , yeah, heh…
Once it’s up and running, this system will literally feed on itself. They’ll use methane to heat up water, which will then be circulated through all this tubing that spirals around the entire tank. That’ll promote the digestive process, so to speak. They’ll make more methane, send it back to the generator, and power the entire operation.
Fiscalini’s concerned that by the time his digester is ready to gulp down its first load of manure, the environmental targets—and rules—may all be different.
Farmers throughout the state share his concern.
Cynthia Cory is a Sacramento lobbyist for California’s farmers and ranchers.
Cory: People are talking about this at the federal level. We may need to figure out a new way of regulating that’s not trying to take a 1970s framework and bring it into this century with this whole new concept.
The state has moved forward with its own framework: the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, known by it’s legislative shorthand: AB 32. It gives force of law to an ambitious goal: rolling back greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels—by 2020.
Larry Greene: These are things that have come in so quickly, I haven’t even had a chance to put ‘em in here. [All climate change]. State, federal, local, background science, trees, legislation, CEQA, there are so many aspects to this, it’s hard to even keep up with it.
Larry Greene heads the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District.
He’s part of a brigade of state, local and regional managers who will be responsible for implementing the nation’s most sweeping counterattack on climate change.
Larry Greene: Lights, the car you drive, how you live your life—many different aspects of our lives are associated with climate change, greenhouse gases.
Greene is hoping that mitigation efforts in the years ahead will strike a balance between incentives and regulation—between the voluntary and the mandatory.
Larry Greene: At some point we might get to have to say everybody has to use fluorescent lights, or maybe all businesses have to have vehicles that meet a certain emissions standard. We’ll just have to see how that plays out over time but…
The more people do and the more innovative we are in the early years, the less impact we’ll have in the later years for regulatory things that we have to do.
Mike McKeever: There are some very difficult choices to make and the interconnectedness of the region—it’s just like a living organism.
Mike McKeever heads the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, where climate change has taken center stage, along with a movement toward something called “smart growth.”
Mike McKeever: You can’t separate out the housing from the transportation and floodplains from the watersheds from the airsheds—the whole thing functions as a unit.
That movement is now the law of the land. Passenger cars are the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California. But the state’s Air Resources Board can now require that new development plans be designed to minimize car travel, and bring homes closer to work and public transit.
Mike McKeever: We’ve looked out at the land use patterns and the travel patterns. If we don’t grow differently in the future than we have in the past and if we don’t transport ourselves differently in the future than we have in the past, we don’t have a functional region. It really is that simple.
As development pushes farther into the foothills, it poses another risk: Wildfires.
[Flames roaring]
In June, After an especially dry spring, lightning triggered a thousand fires in one weekend, mostly in northern California. Climatologists say that a 1-degree increase in the average temperature can produce 10 times the number of lightning strikes.
Couple that with generally hotter, drier summers and the future looks highly combustible.
Crawford Tuttle: We’ve had in the last 10 years, probably 7 of the hottest driest years, over the last 100 years, have occurred in the last decade.
I took a walk through a fresh burn zone in the Sierra with Crawford Tuttle, Chief Deputy Director at CalFire, the new name for the state Dept. of Forestry’s fire-fighting unit.
This is pretty much what we’re talkin’ about right here, eh?
Crawford Tuttle: It certainly is, Craig. What you see before you here is a very hot, damaging fire that occurred in the middle of the month of May, about two and half or three months earlier than it would in any typical year—fire year—which is a great demonstration of how fire regime, fire severity is expanding in CA.
What you see here is a fire condition that burned very hot. You can look at how the vegetation burned all the way up into the canopy here, so you see how the tops of these trees here were burned, and this is an example of a catastrophic fire where there won’t be anything left from this fire. You’ll end up with bare ground. If you look down here you can see that there was so much burn severity that much of the soil has been burned as well.
[Most certainly is, given the trends that we’re seeing now.
This particular stand is full of examples of trees that burned from the inside-out. And that’s much more likely to happen if the tree’s already been stressed by drought. It creates weak spots and openings where the fire can get inside and once that happens, that tree’s pretty much a goner.
Forests are one of our most effective filters for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. But that carbon is released when they burn—or more gradually when they die, from insect invasion or any cause.
Scientists are now concerned that some of our most troubled forests will become net emitters of carbon, instead of net holders, helping accelerate climate change rather than slowing it down.
Tuttle says part of the answer is aggressive re-forestation after major fires.
If you look behind us here, that’s what that stand used to look like before the fire. And as we walk through here, what you’re seeing is without any reforestation activity, the brush are out-competing the trees. And therefore from a carbon standpoint, you’re not seeing carbon return to this footprint as quickly as it might. This is an area that may not return to forest for over 50 to 100 years and in fact could burn again before you have an opportunity for reforestation to occur here.
Perhaps some answers can be found back where this story began; in the increasingly precious Sierra snows.
It’s critical that we know more about the forces that affect the mountain snowpack and how much water it yields.
That’s the goal of the Mountain Hydrology Group, led by scientists from UC Merced like Martha Conklin.
Martha Conklin: What we need to do is to develop some new technology; spot measurements that give us a better idea of how much snow has fallen—and then we’ll know what’s gonna be there in the spring when it melts.
Teams have been installing networks of ground-based sensors in key Sierra locations, like this one, near the Giant Trees forest of Sequoia National park. It’s a challenge to set up and maintain sensitive electronic instruments in an extremely harsh mountain environment. Scientists have to be part handyman, part mountain goat. There are more than 200 sensors already working in this one basin.
Peter Kirchner/Ryan Lucas: I’ve got a problem with the power coming to this site. I’m trying to troubleshoot it.
It’s probably cycling on and off, in and out, so…I just don’t think we get enough solar radiation here to power that battery. Right, right. We might need to relocate that panel this summer—get it up higher. Yeah—well it’s what we have for now. Let’s see if we’ve got any data coming in.
That data will form a first-ever map of indicators like soil temp, soil moisture, solar radiation and snow depth—even stream flow underneath the snow.
We’ve got everything from the atmosphere, the snowpack, to what’s happening in the soil, what’s happening in the stream, so it’s an integrated measurement.
-or-
That instrument right there, that’s hanging off the tower, to the left, is an ultrasonic snow depth sensor. Sometimes we call em pingers.
These scattered observatories make up a kind of “woods-wide” web that’s already feeding new snowfall data to the Dept. of Water Resources. And more is on the way.
Peter Kirchner: The problem we have right now is we don’t really understand the cycles and timing and distribution and amount of water that we’re going to get from snowpack in the mountains.
The cycling of water through the soil, in the streams and when we can expect runoff to occur—those are critical tools that water managers will need and can use in the future.
If you’re trekking around out here, you might come across something that looks like a walkie-talkie hanging from a tree. But it’s a relay—gathering data from the hydrologic stations up on the mountain and sending ‘em over to computer station nearby—which the researchers can access right from their own labs down in the valley.
They’ll take those readings and combine them with data from NASA’s Aquos satellite, which can measure snow cover over much wider areas.
Peter Kirchner: One of the things we’re trying to quantify in here and understand better is how much of the area’s covered with snow, because it’s difficult with the stallite to look underneath these trees.
What’s happening in the snowpack will affect more than our water supply. As more snow shifts to rain in the upper elevations, plants and trees will have to adjust or die.
Martha Conklin: We should expect that lower-elevation trees will be moving up higher and some of the trees that we associate with higher elevations might be dying off.
They’re wet during the rain event but they dry out sooner, so trees and other plants that were expecting to have water longer, won’t be able to get that, so we should expect to see major ecosystem shifts that occur. Major political shifts will occur, as well.
Polls show that for the first time in decades, Californians may be ready for a return to nuclear power, because—for all its controversy—it is a “carbon-free” source of energy.
Kim Stanley Robinson: We might need some “bridge” technologies to get to the sustainable future. It might even include nuclear power.
It’s not a clean technology but it’s perhaps not as bad a carbon-burning technology as coal burning. So we have to make some hard choices. Restrictions on water use will likely become more common in cities and suburbs. And climate change will become a major public health issue, especially in the Central Valley.
Gleick: If you look at smog alerts, and you look at temperature, high temp and bad smog come hand in hand. And the modelers are already telling us that higher temperatures in the Central Valley are going to lead to much more frequent smog days, much more asthma, much more deterioration of our air quality.
And if you think interior California would be insulated from rising sea levels, think again. As salt water advances up the Sacramento River, much of the Delta’s productive farmland would be reclaimed by salt marshes, returned to the way they were in millennia long past.
Kim Stanley Robinson thinks about the future every day. He’s best known for his Mars Trilogy of science fiction novels.
But he’s also written a series of books that lay out a grim future with unchecked global warming. But lately he’s been focusing on the future of his own planet and his home state.
Robinson: You can’t be an across-the-board optimist and you cannot be complacent at this moment. That would be the last thing to do. There’s no room for complacency because really, this is the biggest environmental challenge yet.
Everyone we spoke to for this program agreed on one thing: that we need to prepare now.
Larry Greene: Some of the things we’re doing, as far as designing our communities, the way we do business, we’re making decisions today that are going to be on the ground in 30 years, 40 years, and we need to think very seriously about how we do that.
Robinson: I’m a Californian and I love California. It’s one of the most beautiful landscapes in the entire world and we don’t want to wreck it for our children. And so…we gotta do these things.
Gleick: I think we know how and I don’t think it involves inventing new technology. And maybe—maybe we’ll get our act together in time to prevent the worst consequences.
[Music]
[Credits]