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The Coming California Megastorm (New York Times)

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nytimes.com

Raymond Zhong

A different ‘Big One’ is approaching. Climate change is hastening its arrival.

Aug. 12, 2022

California, where earthquakes, droughts and wildfires have shaped life for generations, also faces the growing threat of another kind of calamity, one whose fury would be felt across the entire state.

This one will come from the sky.

According to new research, it will very likely take shape one winter in the Pacific, near Hawaii. No one knows exactly when, but from the vast expanse of tropical air around the Equator, atmospheric currents will pluck out a long tendril of water vapor and funnel it toward the West Coast.

This vapor plume will be enormous, hundreds of miles wide and more than 1,200 miles long, and seething with ferocious winds. It will be carrying so much water that if you converted it all to liquid, its flow would be about 26 times what the Mississippi River discharges into the Gulf of Mexico at any given moment.

When this torpedo of moisture reaches California, it will crash into the mountains and be forced upward. This will cool its payload of vapor and kick off weeks and waves of rain and snow.

The coming superstorm — really, a rapid procession of what scientists call atmospheric rivers — will be the ultimate test of the dams, levees and bypasses California has built to impound nature’s might.

But in a state where scarcity of water has long been the central fact of existence, global warming is not only worsening droughts and wildfires. Because warmer air can hold more moisture, atmospheric rivers can carry bigger cargoes of precipitation. The infrastructure design standards, hazard maps and disaster response plans that protected California from flooding in the past might soon be out of date.

As humans burn fossil fuels and heat up the planet, we have already increased the chances each year that California will experience a monthlong, statewide megastorm of this severity to roughly 1 in 50, according to a new study published Friday. (The hypothetical storm visualized here is based on computer modeling from this study.)

In the coming decades, if global average temperatures climb by another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius — and current trends suggest they might — then the likelihood of such storms will go up further, to nearly 1 in 30.

At the same time, the risk of megastorms that are rarer but even stronger, with much fiercer downpours, will rise as well.

These are alarming possibilities. But geological evidence suggests the West has been struck by cataclysmic floods several times over the past millennium, and the new study provides the most advanced look yet at how this threat is evolving in the age of human-caused global warming.

The researchers specifically considered hypothetical storms that are extreme but realistic, and which would probably strain California’s flood preparations. According to their findings, powerful storms that once would not have been expected to occur in an average human lifetime are fast becoming ones with significant risks of happening during the span of a home mortgage.

“We got kind of lucky to avoid it in the 20th century,” said Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who prepared the new study with Xingying Huang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “I would be very surprised to avoid it occurring in the 21st.”

Unlike a giant earthquake, the other “Big One” threatening California, an atmospheric river superstorm will not sneak up on the state. Forecasters can now spot incoming atmospheric rivers five days to a week in advance, though they don’t always know exactly where they’ll hit or how intense they’ll be.

Using Dr. Huang and Dr. Swain’s findings, California hopes to be ready even earlier. Aided by supercomputers, state officials plan to map out how all that precipitation will work its way through rivers and over land. They will hunt for gaps in evacuation plans and emergency services.

The last time government agencies studied a hypothetical California megaflood, more than a decade ago, they estimated it could cause $725 billion in property damage and economic disruption. That was three times the projected fallout from a severe San Andreas Fault earthquake, and five times the economic damage from Hurricane Katrina, which left much of New Orleans underwater for weeks in 2005.

Dr. Swain and Dr. Huang have handed California a new script for what could be one of its most challenging months in history. Now begin the dress rehearsals.

“Mother Nature has no obligation to wait for us,” said Michael Anderson, California’s state climatologist.

In fact, nature has not been wasting any time testing California’s defenses. And when it comes to risks to the water system, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hardly the state’s only foe.

THE ULTIMATE CURVEBALL

On Feb. 12, 2017, almost 190,000 people living north of Sacramento received an urgent order: Get out. Now. Part of the tallest dam in America was verging on collapse.

That day, Ronald Stork was in another part of the state, where he was worrying about precisely this kind of disaster — at a different dam.

Standing with binoculars near California’s New Exchequer Dam, he dreaded what might happen if large amounts of water were ever sent through the dam’s spillways. Mr. Stork, a policy expert with the conservation group Friends of the River, had seen on a previous visit to Exchequer that the nearby earth was fractured and could be easily eroded. If enough water rushed through, it might cause major erosion and destabilize the spillways.

He only learned later that his fears were playing out in real time, 150 miles north. At the Oroville Dam, a 770-foot-tall facility built in the 1960s, water from atmospheric rivers was washing away the soil and rock beneath the dam’s emergency spillway, which is essentially a hillside next to the main chute that acts like an overflow drain in a bathtub. The top of the emergency spillway looked like it might buckle, which would send a wall of water cascading toward the cities below.

Mr. Stork had no idea this was happening until he got home to Sacramento and found his neighbor in a panic. The neighbor’s mother lived downriver from Oroville. She didn’t drive anymore. How was he going to get her out?

Mr. Stork had filed motions and written letters to officials, starting in 2001, about vulnerabilities at Oroville. People were now in danger because nobody had listened. “It was nearly soul crushing,” he said.

“With flood hazard, it’s never the fastball that hits you,” said Nicholas Pinter, an earth scientist at the University of California, Davis. “It’s the curveball that comes from a direction you don’t anticipate. And Oroville was one of those.”

Ronald Stork in his office at Friends of the River in Sacramento.

The spillway of the New Exchequer Dam.

Such perils had lurked at Oroville for so long because California’s Department of Water Resources had been “overconfident and complacent” about its infrastructure, tending to react to problems rather than pre-empt them, independent investigators later wrote in a report. It is not clear this culture is changing, even as the 21st-century climate threatens to test the state’s aging dams in new ways. One recent study estimated that climate change had boosted precipitation from the 2017 storms at Oroville by up to 15 percent.

A year and a half after the crisis, crews were busy rebuilding Oroville’s emergency spillway when the federal hydropower regulator wrote to the state with some unsettling news: The reconstructed emergency spillway will not be big enough to safely handle the “probable maximum flood,” or the largest amount of water that might ever fall there.

Sources: Global Historical Climatology Network, Huang and Swain (2022) Measurements taken from the Oroville weather station and the nearest modeled data point

This is the standard most major hydroelectric projects in the United States have to meet. The idea is that spillways should basically never fail because of excessive rain.

Today, scientists say they believe climate change might be increasing “probable maximum” precipitation levels at many dams. When the Oroville evacuation was ordered in 2017, nowhere near that much water had been flowing through the dam’s emergency spillway.

Yet California officials have downplayed these concerns about the capacity of Oroville’s emergency spillway, which were raised by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Such extreme flows are a “remote” possibility, they argued in a letter last year. Therefore, further upgrades at Oroville aren’t urgently needed.

In a curt reply last month, the commission said this position was “not acceptable.” It gave the state until mid-September to submit a plan for addressing the issue.

The Department of Water Resources told The Times it would continue studying the matter. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declined to comment.

“People could die,” Mr. Stork said. “And it bothers the hell out of me.”

WETTER WET YEARS

Donald G. Sullivan was lying in bed one night, early in his career as a scientist, when he realized his data might hold a startling secret.

For his master’s research at the University of California, Berkeley, he had sampled the sediment beneath a remote lake in the Sacramento Valley and was hoping to study the history of vegetation in the area. But a lot of the pollen in his sediment cores didn’t seem to be from nearby. How had it gotten there?

When he X-rayed the cores, he found layers where the sediment was denser. Maybe, he surmised, these layers were filled with sand and silt that had washed in during floods.

It was only late that night that he tried to estimate the ages of the layers. They lined up neatly with other records of West Coast megafloods.

“That’s when it clicked,” said Dr. Sullivan, who is now at the University of Denver.

His findings, from 1982, showed that major floods hadn’t been exceptionally rare occurrences over the past eight centuries. They took place every 100 to 200 years. And in the decades since, advancements in modeling have helped scientists evaluate how quickly the risks are rising because of climate change.

For their new study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Huang and Dr. Swain replayed portions of the 20th and 21st centuries using 40 simulations of the global climate. Extreme weather events, by definition, don’t occur very often. So by using computer models to create realistic alternate histories of the past, present and future climate, scientists can study a longer record of events than the real world offers.

Dr. Swain and Dr. Huang looked at all the monthlong California storms that took place during two time segments in the simulations, one in the recent past and the other in a future with high global warming, and chose one of the most intense events from each period. They then used a weather model to produce detailed play-by-plays of where and when the storms dump their water.

Those details matter. There are “so many different factors” that make an atmospheric river deadly or benign, Dr. Huang said.

Xingying Huang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Rachel Woolf for The New York Times

The New Don Pedro Dam spillway.

Wes Monier, a hydrologist, with a 1997 photo of water rushing through the New Don Pedro Reservoir spillway.

In the high Sierras, for example, atmospheric rivers today largely bring snow. But higher temperatures are shifting the balance toward rain. Some of this rain can fall on snowpack that accumulated earlier, melting it and sending even more water toward towns and cities below.

Climate change might be affecting atmospheric rivers in other ways, too, said F. Martin Ralph of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. How strong their winds are, for instance. Or how long they last: Some storms stall, barraging an area for days on end, while others blow through quickly.

Scientists are also working to improve atmospheric river forecasts, which is no easy task as the West experiences increasingly sharp shifts from very dry conditions to very wet and back again. In October, strong storms broke records in Sacramento and other places. Yet this January through March was the driest in the Sierra Nevada in more than a century.

“My scientific gut says there’s change happening,” Dr. Ralph said. “And we just haven’t quite pinned down how to detect it adequately.”

Better forecasting is already helping California run some of its reservoirs more efficiently, a crucial step toward coping with wetter wet years and drier dry ones.

On the last day of 2016, Wes Monier was looking at forecasts on his iPad and getting a sinking feeling.

Mr. Monier is chief hydrologist for the Turlock Irrigation District, which operates the New Don Pedro Reservoir near Modesto. The Tuolumne River, where the Don Pedro sits, was coming out of its driest four years in a millennium. Now, some terrifying rainfall projections were rolling in.

First, 23.2 inches over the next 16 days. A day later: 28.8 inches. Then 37.1 inches, roughly what the area normally received in a full year.

If Mr. Monier started releasing Don Pedro’s water too quickly, homes and farms downstream would flood. Release too much and he would be accused of squandering water that would be precious come summer.

But the forecasts helped him time his flood releases precisely enough that, after weeks of rain, the water in the dam ended up just shy of capacity. Barely a drop was wasted, although some orchards were flooded, and growers took a financial hit.

The next storm might be even bigger, though. And even the best data and forecasts might not allow Mr. Monier to stop it from causing destruction. “There’s a point there where I can’t do anything,” he said.

KATRINA 2.0

How do you protect a place as vast as California from a storm as colossal as that? Two ways, said David Peterson, a veteran engineer. Change where the water goes, or change where the people are. Ideally, both. But neither is easy.

Firebaugh is a quiet, mostly Hispanic city of 8,100 people, one of many small communities that power the Central Valley’s prodigious agricultural economy. Many residents work at nearby facilities that process almonds, pistachios, garlic and tomatoes.

Firebaugh also sits right on the San Joaquin River.

For a sleepless stretch of early 2017, Ben Gallegos, Firebaugh’s city manager, did little but watch the river rise and debate whether to evacuate half the town. Water from winter storms had already turned the town’s cherished rodeo grounds into a swamp. Now it was threatening homes, schools, churches and the wastewater treatment plant. If that flooded, people would be unable to flush their toilets. Raw sewage would flow down the San Joaquin.

Luckily, the river stopped rising. Still, the experience led Mr. Gallegos to apply for tens of millions in funding for new and improved levees around Firebaugh.

Levees change where the water goes, giving rivers more room to swell before they inundate the land. Levee failures in New Orleans were what turned Katrina into an epochal catastrophe, and after that storm, California toughened levee standards in urbanized areas of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, two major river basins of the Central Valley.

The idea is to keep people out of places where the levees don’t protect against 200-year storms, or those with a 0.5 percent chance of occurring in any year. To account for rising seas and the shifting climate, California requires that levees be recertified as providing this level of defense at least every 20 years.

Firebaugh, Calif., on the San Joaquin River, is home to 8,100 people and helps power the Central Valley’s agricultural economy.

Ben Gallegos, the Firebaugh city manager.

A 6-year-old’s birthday celebration in Firebaugh.

The problem is that once levees are strengthened, the areas behind them often become particularly attractive for development: fancier homes, bigger buildings, more people. The likelihood of a disaster is reduced, but the consequences, should one strike, are increased.

Federal agencies try to stop this by not funding infrastructure projects that induce growth in flood zones. But “it’s almost impossible to generate the local funds to raise that levee if you don’t facilitate some sort of growth behind the levee,” Mr. Peterson said. “You need that economic activity to pay for the project,” he said. “It puts you in a Catch-22.”

A project to provide 200-year protection to the Mossdale Tract, a large area south of Stockton, one of the San Joaquin Valley’s major cities, has been on pause for years because the Army Corps of Engineers fears it would spur growth, said Chris Elias, executive director of the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, which is leading the project. City planners have agreed to freeze development across thousands of acres, but the Corps still hasn’t given its final blessing.

The Corps and state and local agencies will begin studying how best to protect the area this fall, said Tyler M. Stalker, a spokesman for the Corps’s Sacramento District.

The plodding pace of work in the San Joaquin Valley has set people on edge. At a recent public hearing in Stockton on flood risk, Mr. Elias stood up and highlighted some troubling math.

The Department of Water Resources says up to $30 billion in investment is needed over the next 30 years to keep the Central Valley safe. Yet over the past 15 years, the state managed to spend only $3.5 billion.

“We have to find ways to get ahead of the curve,” Mr. Elias said. “We don’t want to have a Katrina 2.0 play out right here in the heart of Stockton.”

As Mr. Elias waits for projects to be approved and budgets to come through, heat and moisture will continue to churn over the Pacific. Government agencies, battling the forces of inertia, indifference and delay, will make plans and update policies. And Stockton and the Central Valley, which runs through the heart of California, will count down the days and years until the inevitable storm.

T​​he Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta near Stockton, Calif.

Sources

The megastorm simulation is based on the “ARkHist” storm modeled by Huang and Swain, Science Advances (2022), a hypothetical statewide, 30-day atmospheric river storm sequence over California with an approximately 2 percent likelihood of occurring each year in the present climate. Data was generated using the Weather Research and Forecasting model and global climate simulations from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble.

The chart of precipitation at Oroville compares cumulative rainfall at the Oroville weather station before the 2017 crisis with cumulative rainfall at the closest data point in ARkHist.

The rainfall visualization compares observed hourly rainfall in December 2016 from the Los Angeles Downtown weather station with rainfall at the closest data point in a hypothetical future megastorm, the ARkFuture scenario in Huang and Swain (2022). This storm would be a rare but plausible event in the second half of the 21st century if nations continue on a path of high greenhouse-gas emissions.

Additional credits

The 3D rainfall visualization and augmented reality effect by Nia Adurogbola, Jeffrey Gray, Evan Grothjan, Lydia Jessup, Max Lauter, Daniel Mangosing, Noah Pisner, James Surdam and Raymond Zhong.

Photo editing by Matt McCann.

Produced by Sarah Graham, Claire O’Neill, Jesse Pesta and Nadja Popovich.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett.

Cloud Wars: Mideast Rivalries Rise Along a New Front (New York Times)

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nytimes.com

Alissa J. Rubin, Bryan Denton

Artificial lakes like this one in Dubai are helping fuel an insatiable demand for water in the United Arab Emirates.
Artificial lakes like this one in Dubai are helping fuel an insatiable demand for water in the United Arab Emirates.

As climate change makes the region hotter and drier, the U.A.E. is leading the effort to squeeze more rain out of the clouds, and other countries are rushing to keep up.

Aug. 28, 2022

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Iranian officials have worried for years that other nations have been depriving them of one of their vital water sources. But it was not an upstream dam that they were worrying about, or an aquifer being bled dry.

In 2018, amid a searing drought and rising temperatures, some senior officials concluded that someone was stealing their water from the clouds.

“Both Israel and another country are working to make Iranian clouds not rain,” Brig. Gen. Gholam Reza Jalali, a senior official in the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, said in a 2018 speech.

The unnamed country was the United Arab Emirates, which had begun an ambitious cloud-seeding program, injecting chemicals into clouds to try to force precipitation. Iran’s suspicions are not surprising, given its tense relations with most Persian Gulf nations, but the real purpose of these efforts is not to steal water, but simply to make it rain on parched lands.

As the Middle East and North Africa dry up, countries in the region have embarked on a race to develop the chemicals and techniques that they hope will enable them to squeeze rain drops out of clouds that would otherwise float fruitlessly overhead.

With 12 of the 19 regional countries averaging less than 10 inches of rainfall a year, a decline of 20 percent over the past 30 years, their governments are desperate for any increment of fresh water, and cloud seeding is seen by many as a quick way to tackle the problem.

The tawny mountain range that rises above Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates is where summer updrafts often create clouds that make excellent candidates for seeding.

And as wealthy countries like the emirates pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort, other nations are joining the race, trying to ensure that they do not miss out on their fair share of rainfall before others drain the heavens dry — despite serious questions about whether the technique generates enough rainfall to be worth the effort and expense.

Morocco and Ethiopia have cloud-seeding programs, as does Iran. Saudi Arabia just started a large-scale program, and a half-dozen other Middle Eastern and North African countries are considering it.

China has the most ambitious program worldwide, with the aim of either stimulating rain or halting hail across half the country. It is trying to force clouds to rain over the Yangtze River, which is running dry in some spots.

While cloud seeding has been around for 75 years, experts say the science has yet to be proven. And they are especially dismissive of worries about one country draining clouds dry at the expense of others downwind.

The life span of a cloud, in particular the type of cumulus clouds most likely to produce rain, is rarely more than a couple of hours, atmospheric scientists say. Occasionally, clouds can last longer, but rarely long enough to reach another country, even in the Persian Gulf, where seven countries are jammed close together.

But several Middle Eastern countries have brushed aside the experts’ doubts and are pushing ahead with plans to wring any moisture they can from otherwise stingy clouds.

Today, the unquestioned regional leader is the United Arab Emirates. As early as the 1990s, the country’s ruling family recognized that maintaining a plentiful supply of water would be as important as the nation’s huge oil and gas reserves in sustaining its status as the financial and business capital of the Persian Gulf.

While there had been enough water to sustain the tiny country’s population in 1960, when there were fewer than 100,000 people, by 2020 the population had ballooned to nearly 10 million. And the demand for water soared, as well. United Arab Emirates residents now use roughly 147 gallons per person a day, compared with the world average of 47 gallons, according to a 2021 research paper funded by the emirates.

Currently, that demand is being met by desalination plants. Each facility, however, costs $1 billion or more to build and requires prodigious amounts of energy to run, especially when compared with cloud seeding, said Abdulla Al Mandous, the director of the National Center of Meteorology and Seismology in the emirates and the leader of its cloud-seeding program.

After 20 years of research and experimentation, the center runs its cloud-seeding program with near military protocols. Nine pilots rotate on standby, ready to bolt into the sky as soon as meteorologists focusing on the country’s mountainous regions spot a promising weather formation — ideally, the types of clouds that can build to heights of as much as 40,000 feet.

They have to be ready on a moment’s notice because promising clouds are not as common in the Middle East as in many other parts of the world.

“We are on 24-hour availability — we live within 30 to 40 minutes of the airport — and from arrival here, it takes us 25 minutes to be airborne,” said Capt. Mark Newman, a South African senior cloud-seeding pilot. In the event of multiple, potentially rain-bearing clouds, the center will send more than one aircraft.

The United Arab Emirates uses two seeding substances: the traditional material made of silver iodide and a newly patented substance developed at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi that uses nanotechnology that researchers there say is better adapted to the hot, dry conditions in the Persian Gulf. The pilots inject the seeding materials into the base of the cloud, allowing it to be lofted tens of thousands of feet by powerful updrafts.

And then, in theory, the seeding material, made up of hygroscopic (water attracting) molecules, bonds to the water vapor particles that make up a cloud. That combined particle is a little bigger and in turn attracts more water vapor particles until they form droplets, which eventually become heavy enough to fall as rain — with no appreciable environmental impact from the seeding materials, scientists say.

That is in theory. But many in the scientific community doubt the efficacy of cloud seeding altogether. A major stumbling block for many atmospheric scientists is the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of documenting net increases in rainfall.

“The problem is that once you seed, you can’t tell if the cloud would have rained anyway,” said Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University and an expert in evaluating climate engineering strategies.

Another problem is that the tall cumulus clouds most common in summer in the emirates and nearby areas can be so turbulent that it is difficult to determine if the seeding has any effect, said Roy Rasmussen, a senior scientist and an expert in cloud physics at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Israel, a pioneer in cloud seeding, halted its program in 2021 after 50 years because it seemed to yield at best only marginal gains in precipitation. It was “not economically efficient,” said Pinhas Alpert, an emeritus professor at the University of Tel Aviv who did one of the most comprehensive studies of the program.

Cloud seeding got its start in 1947, with General Electric scientists working under a military contract to find a way to de-ice planes in cold weather and create fog to obscure troop movements. Some of the techniques were later used in Vietnam to prolong the monsoon season, in an effort to make it harder for the North Vietnamese to supply their troops.

While the underlying science of cloud seeding seems straightforward, in practice, there are numerous problems. Not all clouds have the potential to produce rain, and even a cloud seemingly suitable for seeding may not have enough moisture. Another challenge in hot climates is that raindrops may evaporate before they reach the ground.

Sometimes the effect of seeding can be larger than expected, producing too much rain or snow. Or the winds can shift, carrying the clouds away from the area where the seeding was done, raising the possibility of “unintended consequences,” notes a statement from the American Meteorological Society.

“You can modify a cloud, but you can’t tell it what to do after you modify it,” said James Fleming, an atmospheric scientist and historian of science at Colby College in Maine.

“It might snow; it might dissipate. It might go downstream; it might cause a storm in Boston,” he said, referring to an early cloud-seeding experiment over Mount Greylock in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

This seems to be what happened in the emirates in the summer of 2019, when cloud seeding apparently generated such heavy rains in Dubai that water had to be pumped out of flooded residential neighborhoods and the upscale Dubai mall.

Despite the difficulties of gathering data on the efficacy of cloud seeding, Mr. Al Mandous said the emirates’ methods were yielding at least a 5 percent increase in rain annually — and almost certainly far more. But he acknowledged the need for data covering many more years to satisfy the scientific community.

Over last New Year’s weekend, said Mr. Al Mandous, cloud seeding coincided with a storm that produced 5.6 inches of rain in three days — more precipitation than the United Arab Emirates often gets in a year.

In the tradition of many scientists who have tried to modify the weather, he is ever optimistic. There is the new cloud-seeding nanosubstance, and if the emirates just had more clouds to seed, he said, maybe they could make more rain for the country.

And where would those extra clouds come from?

“Making clouds is very difficult,” he acknowledged. “But, who knows, maybe God will send us somebody who will have the idea of how to make clouds.”

Covering a Disaster That Hasn’t Happened Yet (New York Times)

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Raymond Zhong

Times Insider

Giant rainstorms have ravaged California before. Times journalists combined data, graphics and old-fashioned reporting to explore what the next big one might look like.

Rudy Mussi, a farmer in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta of California, has lived through two devastating levee failures near his land. Neither experience made him want to go farm somewhere else.
Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Aug. 25, 2022

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Not long ago, when I heard that California officials were embarking on an ambitious, multiyear effort to study one of the worst natural disasters in the state’s history, I knew there would be a lot of interesting material to cover. There was just one wrinkle: The disaster hadn’t happened yet — it still hasn’t.

The California water authorities wanted to examine a much bigger and more powerful version of the rainstorms the state often gets in winter. The milder ones replenish water supplies. But the strong ones cause devastating flooding and debris flows. And the really strong ones, like those that have hit the Pacific Coast several times over the past millennium, can erase whole landscapes, turning valleys and plains into lakes.

As global warming increases the likelihood and the intensity of severe storms, the state’s Department of Water Resources wanted to know: What would a really big (yet plausible) storm look like today? How well would we handle it?

As a climate reporter for The New York Times, I had a pretty good idea of how to tell the first part of the story. The department was starting its study by commissioning two climate scientists to construct a detailed play-by-play of how a monthlong storm might unload its precipitation throughout the state. (And what a lot of precipitation it would be: nearly 16 inches, on average, across California, according to the scientists’ simulations, and much more in mountainous areas.)

All that detail would help operators of dams and other infrastructure pinpoint how much water they might get at specific times and places. It would also allow the graphics wizards at The Times to bring the storm to stunning visual life in our article, which we published this month.

But to make the article more than an academic recounting of a computer-modeling exercise, I knew I had to find ways to ground this future storm strongly in the present. And as I started reporting, I realized this was what a lot of people in the flood-management world were trying to do, too. Unlike traffic congestion, air pollution or even drought, flood risk isn’t in people’s faces most of the time. Forecasters and engineers have to keep reminding them that it’s there.

I realized this wasn’t a story about predicting the future at all. Like a lot of climate stories, it was about how humans and institutions function, or fail to function, when faced with catastrophic possibilities whose arrival date is uncertain.

The near-catastrophe Californians remember most vividly is the 2017 crisis at the Oroville Dam, north of Sacramento. The dam’s emergency spillway nearly collapsed after heavy rainstorms, prompting the evacuation of 188,000 people. The state authorities spent the next few years reinspecting dams and re-evaluating safety needs. Yet I found signs that all this attention might already be starting to fade, even when it came to Oroville itself.

For every example of proactive thinking on flood risks, I found instances where budgets, political exigencies or other complications had gotten in the way. I visited flood-prone communities in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta with Kathleen Schaefer, an engineer formerly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She helped prepare the last major study of a hypothetical California megastorm, over a decade ago, and she recalled the frosty reception her and her colleagues’ work had received in some official circles.

She described the attitude she encountered this way: “If you can’t do anything about it, if it’s such a big problem, then you don’t want to stick your head out and raise it, because then you’re supposed to do something about it. So it’s better just to be like, ‘Oh, I hope it doesn’t happen on my watch.’”

I also sought out Californians who had suffered the effects of flooding firsthand. One reason the state is so vulnerable is that so many people and their homes and assets are in inundation-prone places. The reasons they stay, despite the dangers, are complex and often deeply personal.

Rudy Mussi has lived through two devastating levee failures near his land, in a part of the Delta called the Jones Tract. Neither experience made him want to go farm somewhere else. He recently invested millions in almond trees.

“Even though there’s risk,” Mr. Mussi told me, “there’s people willing to take that risk.”

Bob Ott grows cherries, almonds and walnuts in the fertile soil along the Tuolumne River. As we drove through his orchards on a rickety golf cart, he showed me where the water had rushed in during the 2017 storms.

Mr. Ott said he knew his land was bound to flood again, whether from a repeat of rains past or from a future megastorm. Still, he would never consider leaving, he said. His family has been farming there for the better part of a century. “This is part of us,” he said.

Cobra Coral: Rock in Rio dispensa médium e tem previsão de chuva em shows (Splash)

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uol.com.br

Fernanda Talarico De Splash, em São Paulo 29/08/2022 04h00

O Rock in Rio está chegando! Depois de três anos, o evento de música voltará a acontecer no Parque Olímpico, Rio de Janeiro. Ao todo, serão sete dias de shows: 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10 e 11 de setembro. As apresentações acontecem em diferentes palcos, todos a céu aberto, o que gera uma grande preocupação: será que vai chover?

O Rock in Rio 2022 será a segunda edição seguida do evento que não contará com a parceria da produção com a Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral (FCCC), entidade esotérica que diz controlar o clima.

Ana Avila, meteorologista da Cepagri/Unicamp, afirma a Splash, assim como em 2019, quem for ao evento pode precisar separar o dinheiro da capa de chuva.

Ana explicou que os primeiros três dias de festival devem ter um clima mais seco. “O tempo é bom, ensolarado.” No entanto, a partir do dia 8, pode ser que o público enfrente momentos não tão agradáveis.

“Há a possibilidade de pancadas de chuvas. De fazer sol, mas com pancadas de chuvas. Não tem como cravar se será de dia ou de noite, mas elas podem acontecer.”

“De forma geral, não há nada que possa impedir a atividade ou qualquer evento. O que pode acontecer são pancadas de chuvas. Quanto mais próximos chegarmos dos dias do Rock in Rio, podemos saber melhor as intensidades.”

Se a previsão da especialista se concretizar, os shows de Iron Maiden, Post Malone, Jason Derulo, Dream Theater, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber e outros que tocam nos primeiros dias de festival, acontecerão em uma noite sem chuva. Porém, os fãs de Guns N’ Roses, Green Day, Billy Idol, Coldplay, Dua Lipa e mais podem acabar se molhando durante as apresentações.

Quanto às temperaturas, Avila explica que nos primeiros dias elas podem variar entre 18ºC e 27ºC e, depois, a partir do dia 8 de setembro, em decorrência de nebulosidade e pancadas de chuvas, elas tendem a diminuir um pouco. “Ou seja, vai continuar calor, não vai haver uma amplitude muito grande. De noite, as mínimas serão de 19ºC e máxima de 22ºC.”

Sem parceria com Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral

Comandada pela médium Adelaide Scritori, que diz incorporar o espírito do Cacique Cobra Coral, entidade capaz de controlar o tempo, a fundação foi uma parceira histórica do Rock in Rio, além de ter mantido diversas colaborações com a prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro desde 2015 para, por exemplo, evitar fortes chuvas nas viradas de ano em Copacabana.

Procurada por Splash, a assessoria do Rock in Rio confirmou que não há mais a parceria com a FCCC. Ela foi questionada sobre o motivo do rompimento, mas até a publicação desta reportagem, não respondeu. A Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral também foi procurada, mas não respondeu nenhuma tentativa de contato.

Segundo reportagem do jornal Extra, Roberto Medina, o empresário responsável pelo evento, se desentendeu com a fundação depois que um grande temporal aconteceu em um dos dias do Rock in Rio de 2015.

À época, um representante da FCCC explicou que a médium se atrasou 30 minutos para chegar ao local do evento pois houve uma confusão com o adesivo do estacionamento. Quando finalmente conseguiram entrar, a chuva já tinha começado.

Em 2019, já sem a parceria, o festival foi novamente castigado pelo mau tempo e houve dias em que atrações como montanha-russa e roda gigante nem mesmo chegaram a abrir.

Ciências Sociais podem ajudar a combater a crise climática e a perda da biodiversidade global (Agência Fapesp)

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Por meio de estudos de percepção pública é possível entender os fatores que influenciam a resistência de parte da sociedade a reconhecer os riscos associados a problemas ambientais, disse a professora da UFRJ Elisa Reis durante a Escola FAPESP 60 anos: Humanidades, Ciências Sociais e Artes (foto: Irina de Marco/Agência FAPESP)

25 de agosto de 2022

Elton Alisson, de Itatiba | Agência FAPESP – Além de temas emergentes e próprios de seu campo de estudo, como mudanças no mundo do trabalho, inclusão e migrações internacionais, as Ciências Sociais podem contribuir para o avanço do conhecimento sobre questões intrinsecamente relacionadas com as Ciências Naturais, como a crise climática e a perda da biodiversidade global.

Por meio de estudos de percepção pública conduzidos por pesquisadores da área, por exemplo, é possível entender melhor os fatores que influenciam parte da sociedade a não reconhecer os riscos desses problemas ambientais a despeito de todas as evidências científicas, avaliou Elisa Reis, professora do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), em palestra proferida na terça-feira (23/08), durante a Escola FAPESP 60 anos: Humanidades, Ciências Sociais e Artes.

O evento, que começou domingo (21/08) e terminou ontem (24/08) em Itatiba, no interior de São Paulo, reuniu 53 pesquisadores em início de carreira para assistir conferências e interagir com especialistas de renome em suas áreas.

“Se os humanos não perceberem a gravidade não será possível superar as ameaças apresentadas pela crise climática. E na questão da perda da biodiversidade, muitos pesquisadores têm apontado que a grande lacuna para avançar no combate a esse problema é que falta convencer as pessoas comuns sobre sua importância”, afirmou Reis.

“As Ciências Sociais podem colaborar com o entendimento sobre percepção pública”, apontou a pesquisadora, que tem se dedicado a estudar ao longo das últimas décadas temas como estados nacionais, cidadania, elites, desigualdades sociais e políticas públicas.

A constatação da importância crescente da percepção pública para avançar no entendimento não só dessas questões, como também de outros problemas emergentes, entre eles o negacionismo científico, estimulou a pesquisadora a mudar mais recentemente seu foco de pesquisa.

“Estou conduzindo no momento estudos sobre confiança pública, mais especificamente sobre como as pessoas percebem as instituições e uns aos outros, relacionando isso com desigualdade, que é o meu tema base de pesquisa”, disse.

Algumas evidências já observadas pela cientista política é que a confiança e a desigualdade são questões interativas. “A seta causal da confiança começa na desigualdade”, afirmou Reis.

Nova agenda de pesquisa

De acordo com a pesquisadora, a desigualdade foi um dos temas que se destacaram na agenda de pesquisa nas Ciências Sociais no século 20. Em razão da continuidade do problema, segue sendo um objeto de pesquisa relevante.

“Até recentemente, o contrário de igualdade era diferença. Durante muito tempo, isso permaneceu líquido e certo até que o ressurgimento das diferenças e de demandas específicas introduziu as tensões que observamos atualmente e que se constituem em problemas que as Ciências Sociais precisam se debruçar”, apontou.

Entre esses novos problemas estão as migrações internacionais – em que há uma superposição das questões de diferença e de desigualdade; identidade, inclusão e revolução nas comunicações e nas formas de interação social. Completam a lista de temas os fluxos financeiros, mudanças no mundo do trabalho, crises sistêmicas e os problemas ambientais e crises globais, elencou Reis.

“As Ciências Sociais são ciências históricas. Nesse sentido, os problemas que estudamos, por mais particulares que sejam, são influenciados pelo ambiente em que vivemos”, disse.

A pesquisadora destacou que as Ciências Sociais têm sido mais reconhecidas como ciência. Um dos indicativos nesse sentido foi a integração recente dos Conselhos Internacionais de Ciências e de Ciências Sociais. A junção das duas entidades deu origem ao Conselho Internacional de Ciência, do qual Reis foi vice-presidente.

“Todas as ciências são sociais, uma vez que todos os cientistas têm função social”, ponderou.

Governo nacionalista da Hungria demite meteorologistas após previsão cancelar show (Folha de S.Paulo)

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24.ago.2022 às 23h01

Risco de tempestades não se confirmou, e mídia ligada a Orbán liderou críticas a agência

Dirigentes do Serviço Nacional de Meteorologia da Hungria foram demitidas depois de uma previsão de chuvas fortes levar o governo nacionalista de Viktor Orbán a cancelar um tradicional show de fogos de artifício em Budapeste no último fim de semana.

As informações são da agência de notícias Associated Press. O espetáculo, realizado anualmente em homenagem ao Dia de Santo Estevão, estava marcado para a noite do sábado (20). O show húngaro nessa data é tido como um dos maiores da Europa, o que explica o apreço do premiê pelo evento.

Naquela tarde, no entanto, o governo anunciou o cancelamento da festividade por orientação do serviço de meteorologia, que previa “condições climáticas extremas” para cerca de 21h.

Em vez de avançar sobre a capital como previsto, porém, a tempestade mudou de direção, restringindo-se ao leste da Hungria. Budapeste continuou seca.

O Serviço Nacional de Meteorologia publicou um pedido de desculpas nas redes sociais no domingo (21), afirmando que certo nível de incerteza faz parte da meteorologia, mas na segunda (22) o ministro de Inovação de Orbán, Laszlo Palkovics, demitiu a chefe e a vice da agência. Kornelia Radics dirigia o serviço desde 2013, e tinha Gyula Horvath como braço direito desde 2016.

Embora Palkovics não tenha dado uma razão oficial para as demissões, a agência meteorológica foi duramente criticada por meios de comunicação alinhados a Orbán. Eles afirmam que o “grave erro” do serviço causou um adiamento desnecessário.

Agências de notícias destacaram, porém, que parcela considerável de húngaros se opunha à escala e ao custo da explosão dos fogos, em especial num momento delicado como o atual, de crise econômica e Guerra da Ucrânia. Uma petição pedindo o cancelamento do espetáculo e um uso mais pragmático de sua verba reuniu quase 200 mil assinaturas.

Ainda segundo a Associated Press, o espetáculo buscaria mostrar de forma resumida os mil anos desde o nascimento da Hungria cristã até os dias de hoje, focando valores nacionais caros à plataforma de Orbán. O lançamento dos fogos foi remarcado para o próximo sábado (27).

Nesta terça (23), a agência de meteorologia publicou uma nota exigindo a readmissão das chefes demitidas. O órgão afirma que está sob “pressão política” no que se refere aos modelos usados para a previsão do tempo no feriado e que os responsáveis por pressioná-los “ignoram incertezas cientificamente aceitas inerentes à previsão do tempo”.

Orbán, que em abril conquistou seu quinto mandato como premiê —o quarto consecutivo—, lidera o que chama de projeto de “democracia iliberal”, com medidas anti-imigração, anti-LGBTQIA+ e contra a liberdade de imprensa. A postura rende uma série de atritos com a União Europeia, bloco do qual a Hungria faz parte.

Opinião – Hélio Schwartsman: Está tudo dominado (Folha de S.Paulo)

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21.ago.2022 às 23h15

“Elite Capture”, do filósofo nigeriano-americano Olúfémi O. Táíwò, é um livro interessante. O texto é daqueles bem militantes, contrastando um pouco por minha preferência por obras mais analíticas. Mas Táíwò, que é professor na Universidade Georgetown, levanta problemas relevantes, que frequentemente passam despercebidos.

Para Táíwò, está tudo dominado. Para início de conversa, as estruturas sociais são desenhadas para sempre favorecer as elites. É o que ele chama de capitalismo racial. Mas, como se isso não bastasse, vemos agora essas mesmas elites se apropriando da política de identidade, originalmente um movimento de resistência, para fazer avançar seus interesses, num fenômeno que o autor batizou de política de deferência.

Hoje, a fina flor do capitalismo mundial, isto é, grandes bancos e “big techs”, não só encampa o discurso identitário como também promove a elite dos grupos marginalizados a posições privilegiadas. Os diretamente envolvidos ganham. Os empresários sinalizam sua virtude, os promovidos ficam com a promoção, mas a maior parte dos marginalizados continua marginalizada. No Brasil, as cotas em universidades fazem um pouco isso. A sociedade fica com a sensação de dever cumprido por ter instituído essa política e os bons estudantes negros ganham vagas em boas escolas. Mas os mais discriminados, isto é, o garoto negro que não consegue concluir o ensino fundamental e acaba em subempregos ou no crime, continua quase tão discriminado quanto seus trisavós escravizados.

O que me incomodou no livro é que Táíwò não deixa muito espaço para respostas que difiram da sua. Precisamos necessariamente ver os empresários como cínicos tentando faturar em cima dos movimentos identitários? Não dá para imaginar que um “capitalista” considere o racismo imoral e esteja disposto a agir contra ele, embora sem deflagrar um movimento revolucionário, que é o que o autor cobra?

Seca histórica atinge metade do México e leva a espiral de violência e desespero (Folha de S.Paulo)

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Crise climática impacta chuvas, e dois terços do país enfrentam problemas no fornecimento de água

Maria Abi-Habib e Bryan Avelar

7 de agosto de 2022

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O homem vestindo um boné de beisebol azul enche baldes com água de um caminhão do governo. Fonte: New York Times

O México —ou grande parte do país— está ficando sem água. Uma seca extrema tem deixado as torneiras secas, e quase dois terços dos municípios enfrentam escassez que vem obrigando as pessoas a encarar horas em filas para entregas de água feitas pelo governo em alguns locais.

A falta d’água está tão grave que moradores já fizeram barreiras em rodovias e sequestraram funcionários para exigir mais carregamentos. Os números são mesmo assustadores: em julho, 8 dos 32 estados enfrentaram estiagem de extrema a moderada, levando 1.546 dos 2.463 municípios a enfrentar cortes no fornecimento, segundo a Comissão Nacional de Água.

Em meados de julho, a seca atingia 48% do território do México —no ano passado, a situação afetou 28% do país.

Vincular uma seca isolada à crise climática requer análise, mas cientistas não têm dúvida de que o aquecimento global pode alterar os padrões de chuva no mundo e está elevando a probabilidade de ocorrência de secas.

Do outro lado da fronteira norte, nos últimos anos a maior parte da metade ocidental dos EUA sofre com estiagem de moderada a severa. São as duas décadas mais secas na região em 1.200 anos.

A crise está especialmente aguda em Monterrey, um dos centros econômicos mais importantes do México, com uma região metropolitana de 5 milhões de habitantes. Alguns bairros estão sem água há 75 dias, levando escolas a fechar as portas antes das férias de verão. Um jornalista percorreu várias lojas à procura de água potável, incluindo um supermercado Walmart, em vão.

Baldes estão em falta no comércio ou são vendidos a preços astronômicos, enquanto os habitantes juntam recipientes para coletar a água distribuída por caminhões enviados aos bairros mais afetados. Alguns usam latas de lixo limpas, e crianças lutam para ajudar a carregar a água.

A crise afeta inclusive as regiões de alta renda. “Aqui a gente tem que sair à caça de água”, diz Claudia Muñiz, 38, cuja família frequentemente tem passado uma semana sem água corrente. “Num momento de desespero, as pessoas explodem.”

Monterrey fica no norte do México e viu sua população crescer nos últimos anos, acompanhando o boom econômico. O clima tipicamente árido da região não ajuda a suprir as necessidades da população, e a crise climática reduz as chuvas já escassas.

Hoje os moradores podem caminhar sobre o leito da represa da barragem de Cerro Prieto, que no passado era uma das maiores fontes de água da cidade e uma importante atração turística, com animados restaurantes à beira da água, pesca, passeios de barco e esqui aquático.

A chuva que caiu em julho em partes do estado de Nuevo León, que faz divisa com o Texas e cuja capital é Monterrey, representou apenas 10% da média mensal registrada desde 1960, segundo Juan Ignacio Barragán Villareal, diretor-geral da agência local de recursos hídricos. “Nem uma gota caiu no estado inteiro em março”, diz. Foi o primeiro março sem chuvas desde que se começou a registrar esses dados, em 1960.

Hoje o governo distribui 9 milhões de litros de água por dia para 400 bairros. O motorista de caminhão-pipa Alejandro Casas conta que, quando começou na função há cinco anos, ajudava os bombeiros e era chamado uma ou duas vezes por mês para levar água a um local incendiado. Ele passava muitos dias de trabalho apenas olhando para o telefone.

Mas desde janeiro ele trabalha sem parar, fazendo até dez viagens por dia, para suprir cerca de 200 famílias a cada vez. Quando ele chega a um local, uma longa fila já serpenteia pelas ruas. Pessoas levam recipientes que comportam até 200 litros e passam a tarde sob o sol para receber água só à meia-noite —e ela pode ser a única entregue por até uma semana.

Ninguém policia as filas, por isso é comum ocorrerem brigas, com moradores de outras comunidades tentando se infiltrar. Em maio o caminhão de Casas foi assaltado por jovens que subiram no assento do passageiro e o ameaçaram, exigindo que ele levasse o veículo ao bairro deles. “Se a gente não fosse para onde eles queriam, iam nos sequestrar.”

Casas seguiu a ordem, encheu os baldes dos moradores e foi libertado.

Maria de los Angeles, 45, nasceu e cresceu em Ciénega de Flores, cidade próxima a Monterrey. Ela diz que a crise está afetando sua família e seu negócio. “Nunca antes vi isso. Só temos água nas torneiras a cada quatro ou cinco dias”, diz.

O viveiro de plantas de jardim é a única fonte de renda de sua família e requer mais água do que a que chega apenas ocasionalmente às torneiras. “Toda semana sou obrigada a comprar um tanque que me custa 1.200 pesos [R$ 300] de um fornecedor particular”, diz. É metade de sua receita semanal. “Não aguento mais.”

Pequenos e microempresários como ela estão frustrados por serem abandonados à própria sorte, enquanto as grandes indústrias podem operar quase normalmente: as fábricas conseguem receber 50 milhões de metros cúbicos de água por ano, devido a concessões federais que lhes garantem acesso especial aos aquíferos da cidade.

O governo está tendo dificuldade em responder à crise. Para tentar mitigar estiagens futuras, o estado está investindo US$ 97 milhões na construção de uma estação de tratamento de águas servidas e pretende comprar água de uma estação de dessalinização em construção num estado vizinho. Também gastou US$ 82 milhões para alugar mais caminhões, pagar motoristas adicionais e cavar mais poços.

O governador de Nuevo León, Samuel García, recentemente exortou o mundo a agir em conjunto para combater a crise climática. “Ela nos alcançou”, escreveu no Twitter. “Hoje precisamos cuidar do ambiente, é uma questão de vida ou morte.”