Welcome to MicroClimates, The Chronicle’s climate change newsletter. If someone forwarded you this email, you can sign up here.
It’s the first edition, so let us introduce ourselves...
The other, other crisis
We’ve all been focused on the coronavirus pandemic, for good reason. The pandemic is a once in a century event, and the open-ended nature of the crisis means we’ll likely be dealing with the effects for years.
But a bigger story hasn’t gone away. The dangerous wildfires the Bay Area is contending with this month are an indicator about how much stories driven by climate change will require our attention.
Climate change — and how we respond to it — is the century’s event. If anything, it’s the story that underlines so many other stories and has the largest long-term impact on our future, here in the Bay Area and beyond. It’s the weird weather that fits a pattern predicted for a warmer world. It’s more persistent droughts and more intense atmospheric rivers. It’s why Californians are obsessed with local food and why solar panels are popping up on more roofs.
So we’ve launched MicroClimates to give you a local view of a very global problem. The Chronicle has been publishing in Northern California for more than 150 years, so we know what covering a long-term story looks like.
This newsletter operates on a couple of assumptions, so let’s make those explicit:
• There’s no one coverage area or reporting “beat” for climate change: When we talk about a climate change stories, we mean stories on city governments banning natural gas in new buildings, how winemakers in Napa are planning for a warming growing season, and how long commutes are not just annoying and expensive. Climate change stories are both scientific and human, political and personal.
• As we found out from our special week of climate coverage last year, readers are interested in how climate change will affect their communities and what’s within their power to change. I’ll be focusing on all kinds of communities of the Bay Area: geographic, demographic, chosen — and keeping it local.
That being said, this MicroClimates is all new, so we’ll be trying out different things in this newsletter. Thanks for reading, and joining me on this ride.
Wildfires and climate change
It’s scary out there. Three complex fires have charred almost 800,000 acres around the Bay Area, as hundreds of other fires burn around the state and smoke clogs the air.
Is this already-record wildfire season driven by climate change?
Scientists who study climate don’t directly attribute individual weather patterns — like the dry lightning that set off this latest round of fires— to global warming. There’s no way of knowing whether that particular storm would have happened in the absence of climate change. So they focus on probablities, using models to understand the impact on the local climate.
That research shows that the effects of climate change make wildfires more likely and more dangerous — through a few different mechanisms.
First, that lightning: The strange and, in many ways, unprecedented weather of last week fits in with the pattern of longer and more intense heat waves climate scientists have been predicting for 30 years if nothing were done to stop carbon emissions, Peter Fimrite reports.
Last year, Kurtis Alexander and John Blanchard took a look at the factors making wildfires more destructive — at that point, seven of the state’s 10 most destructive fires had occurred within the past five years. Poor forest management and failed PG&E infrastructure are part of the trend. But a warmer atmosphere creates a baseline environment that dries out the landscape, extends the fire season and stagnates weather patterns.
For more on this, listen to UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain on KQED this morning.
Rising Bay
We want to hear from you as part of this newsletter. What are we looking for?
• Events, discussions and other local announcements having to do with climate change and sustainability.
• Story tips — Anything from: “Here’s someone doing something cool” to “I’d like The Chronicle to investigate this.” If you need a secure way to contact us, check out ways to do that here.
• Questions you’d like answered about what’s going on in your community, about things you’ve read about in this newsletter or elsewhere.
What we won’t be handling:
• Stories that don’t have any connection to the Bay Area or California.
• Publishing letters to the editor or similar opinion pieces. But our editorial page would love to hear from you.
How to contact us? Share your tips at this Assignment Editor survey or email us at climate@ sfchronicle.com.
Climate Chronicles
• J.D. Morris and Rachael Swan delved deeper into the future of wildfires and if we can expect more like this. As J.D. writes on Twitter: “This is a climate change problem. It is also probably a forest management problem. Both things can be true.”
• One of the major pieces of infrastructure at risk from rising sea levels in the Bay Area is roads in the North Bay — and a new study from Stanford researchers shows the biggest traffic delays would be far away from where flooding occurs, Kurtis Alexander reports.
• Transit systems are crucial to limiting transportation emissions, but they’ve taken a hit in ridership and in finances during the coronavirus pandemic. For our Throughline series, Sam Whiting talks to a local researcher about the potential futures for transit in the Bay Area. More Throughline: 13 steps to SF becoming a car-free city.
• What’s a COVID car? Residents who once relied on public transit for their daily commute are turning to used cars to travel solo to work— and prices are rising as a result. Anna Kramer looks at the extent of this trend.
• A bill by state Sen. Scott Wiener would fast-track existing projects focused on public transit, bikes and pedestrians — but not cars — by exempting them from challenges under the California Environmental Quality Act.
Changing California
• As the Martinez refinery shuts down indefinitely, what will happen to the workers there? (KQED)
• How California can keep the lights on while meeting its clean energy goals. (LA Times)
• What’s a “virtual power plant”? Three Bay Area electricity providers are working on a program that will give discounted solar panels and battery storage systems to up to 6,000 households and businesses, to provide backup power and enable them to band together when needed to send electricity out to the grid. (Inside Climate News)
• We knew declining demand for gas amid the pandemic would cut funding for high-speed rail through the state’s cap-and-trade auction. But CalMatters’ Rachael Becker reports California’s clean-air programs have also taken a hit in the new funding squeeze, and legislators are looking for more stable sources of funding for these programs.
• What does that abandoned bookshelf or loveseat on the side of the road have to do with climate? Oaklandside’s Azucena Rasilla profiles an Oakland resident who is doing the math on discarded furniture waste.
• Local company (but also giant multinational) Facebook puts a higher priority on coronavirus disinformation than climate falsehoods when it comes to its fact-checking initiative (NYT).
MicroClimates is The Chronicle’s climate change newsletter, written by Taylor Kate Brown, and sent every other week on Tuesday. Email newsletters@sfchronicle.com or taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com
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August 25, 2020 at 11:30PM
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MicroClimates: The story of the century - San Francisco Chronicle
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