by Abigail Ahlert, CSTPR Science Writing Intern

When I sat down to talk with Dr. Antonio Busalacchi on April 21st, there was one topic that I was sure would come up: The Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act (H.R. 353). Dr. Busalacchi is the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, an organization that provided language for H.R. 353 and offered strong support for its passage. On April 18^th, it was signed into law.

H.R. 353 is largely considered a bipartisan triumph—a rarity in divisive political times. “If you look at the core of what we do, it’s all about protection of life, property, support of economic development and national security,” says Busalacchi. “And that’s apolitical. Both sides of the aisle resonate with that.” While the law does not guarantee funding increases for federal research organizations (whose budgets have remained mostly flat in recent years), it’s the first major weather legislation enacted since the early 1990s. After years of work, this bipartisan agreement on research priorities is a step forward for UCAR and the rest of the weather research community.

In May, on the heels of this victory, I traveled to Capitol Hill with Dr. Busalacchi, the UCAR Board of Trustees and fellow winners of a student essay contest. UCAR is a consortium of over 100 colleges and universities. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), it manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and various community programs in education and public outreach. Before he became UCAR’s president in August 2016, Busalacchi was director of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and a professor at the University of Maryland.

Busalacchi’s background gives him an external perspective on UCAR, especially since he’s the first president to hail from academia in many years. He says that fifty years ago, NCAR was the touchstone for advancements in numerical weather prediction. But since then, university research has played an increasingly important role, and modern earth system prediction is not something that either NCAR or academic institutions can do alone.  Busalacchi wants to draw upon the “breadth and depth” of expertise at UCAR’s university partners while providing them with the tools and platforms that they need through NCAR.

During the trip to Capitol Hill, we met with Congressional staffers. We described the ways that federal funding in weather and climate research has advanced scientific understanding and affected our communities. In many cases, we also passed along thanks to the Congressional members for their support on H.R. 353. But while it has a government relations arm, UCAR is not primarily an advocacy organization. Busalacchi likes to think of UCAR’s advocacy efforts as “nondenominational”. “When I go out, I’m not advocating for NCAR specifically,” he says. “I’m advocating for the community involved in weather, water, climate, air quality, space weather and training the next generation of STEM professionals.”

Overall, our meetings with both Republican and Democratic Congressional staff were very cordial. The time that we spent with Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s staffers was particularly amiable, since Senator Bennet is quite familiar with UCAR and supportive of federal science funding. This is perhaps unsurprising, since a recent study by the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business found that federal research facilities and their affiliates contributed $2.6 billion to the Colorado economy in 2015. According to the study, “these facilities accounted for nearly 7,800 full-time, part-time, contract, and student jobs in Colorado in FY2015, which supported an additional 9,800 jobs through the multiplier effect.” The greatest economic contribution of the research facilities was in Boulder County, which is home to UCAR and three NCAR facilities, including the iconic Mesa Laboratory.

However, despite these promising statistics, there are signs that flat federal funding may be starting to take its toll. NCAR recently announced that it will eliminate 18 positions that receive base funding from NSF and 18 currently vacant positions.  Reductions were made mostly to human dimensions and societal impacts research, statistical and numerical methodologies, and solar interior modeling. Laura Snider, Associate of Media Relations at NCAR, says that NCAR’s budget has not been reduced by NSF, but remained level. “Given inflation and other increased operating costs, these flat budgets have felt more like cuts,” says Busalacchi.

So with this setback, where does UCAR go from here? As Busalacchi says, “UCAR, as the manager of NCAR, is constantly striving to be the best possible steward of NSF’s investment in NCAR. Practically speaking, that looks like making sure as many dollars as possible go toward the actual science. For example, UCAR has also made some reductions in the past several months that will allow us to keep our overhead rate low heading into the new fiscal year.” The organization aims to manage NCAR so that it provides what many individual universities cannot, including research aircraft and supercomputing resources. To do this, UCAR will maintain its presence on the Hill and focus on its strategic priorities.

Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
August 2017 Summary

August media attention to climate change and global warming marked a second consecutive month of lower coverage throughout the world. Articles were down 20% globally from coverage in the previous month of July. While August 2017 counts from fifty-two sources across twenty-eight countries in seven regions around the world were up 7% from coverage in August 2016, coverage in the month was also down about 20% from the average number of stories appearing each month in 2017 (approximately 2300 stories per month from January – August 2017).

In the United States (US) media, political inputs clearly influenced the content of coverage. Significant attention during the last month continued to be on events and developments associated with the US Trump Administration. Figure 2 shows frequency of words in articles across the US and in the UK in August 2017. In the US press, Trump was invoked 3046 times through the 532 stories this month in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. In the UK press, Trump was mentioned in the Daily Mail & Mail on Sunday, Guardian & The Observer, the Sun, the Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mirror & Sunday Mirror, the Scotsman & Scotland on Sunday, and the Times & Sunday Times a combined 987 times in 446 August articles. This effectively continued the ‘Trump Dump’ that was mentioned in previous summaries and that has been detected since January 2017.

Looking further into coverage, hurricane Harvey – making landfall on US soil in Texas on August 25th as a Category 4 storm with winds of 130 mph – grabbed significant coverage relating to ecological and meteorological issues. In US media, the city of ‘Houston’ was invoked along with articles on climate change or global warming 3523 times, ‘hurricane’ was mentioned 1202 times and ‘Harvey’ was noted explicitly 1933 times. The ecological/meteorological event garnered a great deal of article content in the UK press as well, as the city of ‘Houston’ was cited 3116 times, ‘Harvey’ was mentioned 1431 times and ‘hurricane’ was explicitly referenced 1202 times as well.

The content of coverage of hurricane Harvey discussed the ‘unprecedented’ nature of the storm that left trillions of tons of water in Texas. A number of articles focused on the extreme precipitation event in a short period of time, while some articles discussed links with the physics of the atmosphere and oceans (where warmer air could hold more water and where warmer water could provide increased energy for the storm). For example, Dr. Kenneth Kunkel from the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies told Lisa Friedman and John Schwartz of The New York Times that warmer ocean temperatures associated with a changing climate likely fed the deluge. Other articles focused on impacts from the storm, including human displacement and suffering as well as explosions of industrial chemical plants near Houston due to flooding and electrical power failures.

Further coverage of ecological and meteorological dimensions of climate change in August 2017 were tethered to record-breaking flooding in South Mumbai, India. Amrit Dhillon from The Guardian reported that the devastating flood event was part of a larger and unprecedented monsoon season in south Asia that is said to have adversely impacted more than 40 million people (with over 1,2000 feared dead) across India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Reporting on wildfires in the Pacific Northwest of the US along with fires in the formerly frozen tundra of Greenland also dotted the August landscape of media reporting on climate change or global warming.

Bridging to media coverage of scientific dimensions of climate change in August 2017, a new study of deaths by extreme weather events in Europe (southern Europe in particular) generated a number of media accounts. This study from the journal Lancet Planetary Health found that over 150,000 people annually could die by 2100 – 99% of them due to extreme heat – if no mitigation and/or adaptation strategies are deployed to address vulnerability associated with climate change. Another study reported on by Damian Carrington from The Guardian in Science Advances found that as much as 30% of South Asia could face “dangerous and unsurvivable humid heat waves” in a changing climate without mitigation and/or adaptation measures taken. Through modeling scenarios, researchers Im, Pal and Eltahir also found that 1 in 25 year extreme heat waves could become annual heat waves in an area where the paradox of climate change – that those at the forefront of climate impacts are not those that contributed to the problem – rings as true as anywhere on planet Earth. Read more …

Figure caption: Word clouds showing frequency of words invoked in media coverage of climate change or global warming in the United States (on left) and the United Kingdom (on right) in August 2017. Data are from five US sources (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times) and seven UK sources (the Daily Mail & Mail on Sunday, Guardian & The Observer, the Sun, the Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mirror & Sunday Mirror, the Scotsman & Scotland on Sunday, and the Times & Sunday Times).

What is a forest carbon offset, anyway?
by Lauren Gifford

Lauren Gifford is a PhD candidate in Geography. She was the first recipient of the Radford Byerly, Jr. Award in Science and Technology Policy. She used the grant, in part, to support summer dissertation research in Grand Lake Stream, Maine, and will share some of her research findings at the CSTPR seminar series on September 13, 2017.

Within geography, I identify as a critical political ecologist who uses science and technology studies (STS) to broadly ask how, and by whom, climate and conservation policies are enacted. I focus primarily on forest carbon offsets, conserved forestlands that “offset” industrial greenhouse gas emissions. These forest offsets are translated into credits and traded on carbon markets as representations of avoided GHG emissions and are used by countries and companies to balance administrative carbon budgets. My research focuses on carbon offset projects in Maine that sell carbon credits to California’s cap and trade market. My dissertation explores how a mechanism originally designed to address industrial GHG emissions in California has become a major tool for forest conservation and economic development in Maine—essentially how climate policy in one place has driven large scale investment in another. I argue that, in achieving mutually exclusive goals, these mechanisms often overlook the atmospheric carbon concentrations they were designed to address.

Forest carbon offset projects, in which conservation and forest management support carbon sequestration, produce carbon credits for both voluntary and compliance carbon markets like California’s cap and trade program. Part of an umbrella of development that includes the contentious REDD+ mechanism, forest carbon projects are employed to simultaneously support conservation, carbon sequestration, and the balancing of administrative carbon budgets. They were originally designed to serve the dual goals of slowing tropical deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and central Africa, while sequestering carbon to offset pollution from industrial polluters in the global north. But increasingly– part of a trend toward the neoliberalization of conservation and environmental management– land managers are turning to carbon offsets as new funding streams to support existing conservation projects or foster more ambitious protection endeavors.

Forest carbon projects are gaining popularity in the US and, in particular in Maine. Maine has long been a key player in the US timber industry where there is a critical mass of large tacts of privately held land, many with existing conservation easements. In Maine, forest carbon projects are increasingly being used to fill economic voids amid the dismantled vertically-integrated pulp and paper industry. My fieldwork is primarily based in Grand Lake Stream, a remote town in the northeastern part of the state that’s home to four forest carbon projects—some of the most established initiatives in the country.

My research examines the use of forest carbon offsets as a means of conservation finance, and looks at the complexity of linking forest conservation to financialized carbon storage. I question the shift of a mechanism often criticized for its neocolonial implications of north/south capital flows, to one re-imagined by US landholders, reconfigured to administratively meet their needs, often without real change to forest management practices.

My dissertation is based on five years of qualitative data collection on forest carbon projects in the US and Latin America—with a focus on two projects, one in Maine and the other in the Peruvian Amazon. Additional data was gathered via annual attendance at the United Nations climate negotiations, meetings of emissions trading and ecosystem services professional communities, and via participant observation in carbon accounting training courses through the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. The latter was employed to critically study the techniques and discourses used by carbon accounting and verification professionals.

The results of this research are vast, and I will spend the next few months wading through empirical and theoretical questions to help frame these findings in ways that are useful to science and policy communities. I’ll begin by exploring the multiple subjectivities of forest carbon offsets, asking how they work to co-produce one another, and ultimately how they influence seemingly dispirit climate and conservation policies. In short, I’ll distill this data in order to return to (and answer) the simple question that drove me to chase this topic in the first place: “What is a forest carbon offset, anyway?”