pnwsarah - Member - The Prepared

Reply to: News for the Week 2023-07-03 Posted July 10, 2023

Here are a few good articles on why all this soil-carbon-sequestration-by-changing-agricultural practices stuff should be met with skepticism, along with some notes from me: Quanta: A soil-science revolution upends plans to fight climate change – Humus is dead, but the climate community doesn’t really seem to know it? World Resources Institute: Regenerative Agriculture: Good for Soil Health, but Limited Potential to Mitigate Climate Change – Some good links to other resources in this one, as well as examples of papers making claims about the capacity of soils to offset emissions that just don’t make sense/aren’t defensible. MIT Technology Review: Why We Can’t Count on Carbon Sucking Farms to Slow Climate Change – This one has a good treatment of the variability problem (also a fun account of CarbonPlan taking down Climate Action Reserve— CarbonPlan is good at debunking BS climate solutions and CAR is good at developing them). CarbonPlan: Getting Soil Carbon Right – And here is their overview; covers some of the same territory as the above. Earther: Soil May Not Be Able to Keep Storing Carbon Dioxide as Emissions Increase – Summary of Nature paper casting doubt on another sanguine assumption in the soil carbon world. Anthropocene: The hype behind carbon farming comes down to earth – This one’s pretty succinct and covers a lot of problems with the soil carbon hype. CDR Primer: Soil Carbon Sequestration – A more technical overview that isn’t as negative but does introduce the issues and discusses the likely implementation costs (which was one of your original questions). Fuss et al.: Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects – Covers several negative emissions technologies (NETs), including soil carbon sequestration (SCS). They look at a bunch of other studies and land on 5GtCO2/yr as the annual C storage potential from SCS— far below the 31GtCO2/yr this Guardian article is talking about. Also, the authors note that permanence is a big issue with SCS. Paustian et al: Soil C Sequestration as a Biological Negative Emission Strategy – Also lands on 5GtCO2/yr “as an upper limit for global biophysical potential” of soil carbon sequestration, upping the number to 8GtCO2/yr in the best case scenario for development of current frontier technologies. This is all from my husband’s list of resources… there is more, if you want, but I figure this is a good start!

Reply to: News for the Week 2023-07-03 Posted July 10, 2023

Okay, conferred with the household expert and he confirmed all of my initial thoughts: First, no, changes to ag practices alone will not keep us below 1.5° of warming. I couldn’t find a hyperlink to a paper (so don’t even know how they made these estimates and if it went through peer review) and don’t have time to dig in anyway. (My husband and I did this once on a report that made some big claims about the emissions reductions potential of sustainable forestry in a Western state I won’t name; it took weeks to really understand how they got those numbers, though in the end we were convinced that the numbers they got were wrong.) BUT, that headline is a major red flag to me. As for what seems legit: Reducing the use (and waste) of manufactured fertilizer will reduce GHG emissions just because producing that stuff emits a lot of GHGs, and we do use too much of it. I can get on board with that; it’s just not going to keep us at 1.5° of warming. Of course, the researchers aren’t claiming that reduced reliance on manufactured fertilizers will do that; the rest of the climate benefits of ag reform the study is touting would come from enhancing the capacity of agricultural soils to store carbon. And this is exactly the kind of thing where the enthusiasm has been way out ahead of the science for a long time— in large part, I suspect, because of the recent centrality of agriculture to environmental advocacy, environmental research, and public conversation about the environment, and because of the immense appetite for red-blue, urban-rural, enviro-grower collaboration that could deliver win-wins and incremental movement. A lot of this is arguably fine at the end of the day, even if the climate benefits are overstated, because there are other environmental and social benefits to ag reform (for nutrient cycling, food safety, rural economic development, etc.), HOWEVER, that all changes the moment modeled or estimated C storage from ag starts getting factored into claims about achieved emissions reductions or compensated as actual avoided emissions through offsets. The moment things like that start happening (and they usually happen almost immediately), we’re on really thin ice unless we’re sure that the storage and avoided emissions (1) are actually happening, (2) wouldn’t have happened anyway (they’re “additional”, in the parlance of the field), and (3) are permanent. (2) and (3) are huge problems with offsets generally (and why a lot of people in the environmental field, including me, don’t support them, and hold an extremely low opinion of entities like the Nature Conservancy that have a history of selling bogus offsets), and I think (1) is a MUCH bigger deal with ag, because there is so much variability across crop systems and soil types (including with regard to the permanence of C storage). It seems like this study/report is basically claiming that they’ve solved that problem with new technology, but I’m guessing they’ve probably just made refinements on models that turn remote sensing data into estimated C storage, and it would take a lot more than “research” by someone who has a financial interest in this being true to convince me that this is solid. Another big problem with ag-based solutions is that rotations are (typically) so short, which makes it easy to change practices on the ground or let good practices lapse or implement good practices incorrectly. At least in forestry (the home turf of problematic offsets), the rotation is really slow, so there is more opportunity to track what’s happening (also, a lot of the C storage is in the wood rather than the soil, which means it’s easier to quantify and permanence is more easily measured or at least estimated). I have seen the good that forest carbon offsets can do for ecosystems and rural communities, but I still think there is no place for offsets of any kind in meeting climate goals, just because the potential for miscalculation is so high and the incentive structure favors optimism rather than accurate measurement. Also, I want to be clear that I don’t think researchers and advocates are knowingly trying to mislead anyone. (Researchers are usually pretty transparent about their assumptions and the limitations of what they’re exploring.) I just think that a lot of people really want to believe in these fixes, the science is really complex, and the advocates who want to believe aren’t necessarily credentialed in the areas that would allow them to understand the science. You can absolutely get a PhD in an ag- or environment-related field without understanding the global carbon budget or the specific kinds of methods that are used to estimate soil carbon storage, and you can certainly get a master’s or have a multi-decade career in advocacy without knowing the details of these things. One of the hard things about climate is that it touches literally everything, and nobody can be an expert in everything, so it’s a bunch of experts in something working together and/or stretching to be generalists. … and to that end, I should emphasize that this is not where my training is, either. I did work on forest carbon offset policy briefly a long time ago, and detecting bogus climate solutions is kind of my husband’s superpower, but neither of us have actually researched soil carbon fluxes. So we could be missing something. I’m just saying, this seems wrong, AND it would make sense for it to be wrong based on the kind of stuff that happens in the enviro-climate world all the time. Again, if I have time later I’ll do some further sniffing and maybe I can put some resources on Discord?

Reply to: News for the Week 2023-07-03 Posted July 10, 2023

I have off-the-cuff thoughts, but will confer with my husband first since he is the one who actually follows the science on this stuff currently (I stopped doing so probably 6-7 years ago). Generally, I am VERY skeptical of claims of carbon storage through changes to ag and forestry practices— though it’s clear that the changes being advocated would be GREAT from a broader environmental standpoint, “environmental benefits” shouldn’t be conflated with “climate benefits”, and enthusiasm about the prospect for the latter in natural resource industries have a way of getting out ahead of the science, especially with regard to soil carbon and ag… this is for political/social reasons related to the history of environmental research and advocacy and how it intersects with agricultural in particular in the U.S…. which is one of my favorite rants, but not necessarily germane to the study you referenced, so I’ll withhold for now. 🙂

Reply to: New for the Week of 2023-05-29 Posted June 4, 2023

What a great read. Thanks.

Reply to: New for the Week of 2023-05-29 Posted June 3, 2023

Oh here’s a much better article on the State Farm sitch. I really like Cal Matters for analytical journalism affecting CA: https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/05/state-farm-california-insurance/

Reply to: New for the Week of 2023-05-29 Posted June 3, 2023

I was wondering how much you’d seen/heard about this. Same thing is happening out here over wildfire, though I haven’t heard much talk about it actually happening to folks in my network (just some friends up in WA for whom the “no insurance line” is now within like a half mile of their home, though they are still covered). I think that’s because I don’t know many people who live in the WUI. I’m sure it’s happening in the Sierra foothills. And then there is the whole State Farm thing, which I was going to post here last week: State Farm stops home insurance sales in California, citing wildfire risks https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/28/business/state-farm-california-insurance-wildfire/index.html In this case, current policyholders are unaffected, but it’s still a huge deal, esp. if other insurers follow suit.

Reply to: New for the Week of 2023-05-29 Posted June 3, 2023

Financial peril looms nationwide as hurricane season starts URL: https://www.eenews.net/articles/financial-peril-looms-nationwide-as-hurricane-season-starts/ TL;DR – FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is running low, and so are the three Florida programs that backstop the private insurance market in various ways. Texas and Louisiana also have state programs that are underfunded. With the state programs, the upshot appears to be that recent hurricanes have both drained the public funds and prompted private insurance companies to drop more and more properties and areas from their coverage. As a result, the state insurers’ exposure is going up (as they have to cover more properties that the private market won’t) even as their reserves dwindled. There are mechanisms in place to raise more money, but it seems as though it will be difficult to fill the gap using these methods. They don’t talk about this in the article (which is pegged to the start of hurricane season this week), but a version of this is either coming or already unfolding in the West re: wildfire. Besides that, I think the only thing I would add is, “Yikes.”

Reply to: News for week of 2023-04-03 Posted April 7, 2023

Super interesting / ominous news from CA’s Central Valley, much of which (particularly in the southern half of the valley, called the San Joaquin Valley) used to be a seasonal lake. The lake is now re-forming— even before the massive, record-breaking snowpack in the Sierra has melted. The reservoirs cannot hold all of that water, and there is no real way to drain the lake, so this is going to get much worse before it gets better. The effects will likely be felt far outside California, since a lot of food is grown in this region. Tulare Lake Was Drained Off the Map. Nature Would Like a Word / https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/us/tulare-lake-california-storms.html The Resurrection of Tulare Lake / https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/03/us/california-tulare-lake.html

Nat gas “sniffers” for friends who can’t smell anymore due to Covid

AdviceGear 2

3

Posted February 28, 2023

Reply to: News for week of 2023-02-06 Posted February 13, 2023

Thanks for resurrecting this tip, Eric, and I’m glad it stuck when I mentioned it! The thinking behind the under the bed items is that if your job is to get out of a damaged building in the middle of the night, you need to (1) see (flashlight and batteries), (2) protect your feet from broken glass (shoes), (3) protect your hands as you move debris (gloves), and (4) pry open doors/windows if your home has shifted off its foundation (crowbar). You put them in a bag or box because you don’t want glass shards in the supplies (especially the shoes!). Fortunately (and as I’ve argued repeatedly elsewhere on the forums :D), if you’re living in the U.S. (and esp. if you’re in CA, in relatively new construction, and/or in a wood-framed single-family dwelling), your home is very unlikely to collapse on you, but it can’t hurt to throw a whistle in the under the bed box or bag just in case you need to call for help (they’re cheap!). Broken windows and power outages are MUCH more likely, and if you live in an SFD that is not bolted to the foundation, your house may slide right off its footings. That’s very survivable (i.e., the house is still unlikely to collapse), but it will make it very difficult to open doors and windows.

Reply to: Survival movies Posted February 3, 2023

Wow, what a neat story— I mean, sad that the 100-year-old building burned, but neat that the film crew pivoted to take advantage of the smoldering ruins, and that you got to shoot it!

Reply to: Grid down – How to recognize it early? Posted February 1, 2023

I really enjoyed your review! It’s interesting… the author of that book wrote another one, published last year, called The Devil Never Sleeps (read my review on the TP preparedness books discussion thread), which I thought was weak sauce. Now I’m wondering if she put all the interesting stuff in the first book, and the second one was the publisher thinking, “Too bad we didn’t release Security Mom during the pandemic. It would probably have sold a lot better now that so many more people actually care about preparedness. Maybe Juliette has another idea?”

Reply to: Survival movies Posted January 31, 2023

@Steve, you’ve tempted me to look up where “The Road” was filmed. Was surprised to find that the list includes many places I’ve been (though I watched it before I lived in Oregon, so I hadn’t been to those places then). Slightly tempted to re-watch, but I had nightmares for a decade after I saw it the first time, so probably won’t!

Reply to: CERT Training Posted January 15, 2023

I feel like something similar happened, not necessarily by design, in my CERT program: The people who were really serious about learning the stuff (and, frankly, more competent) tended to get into ham radio, and there was another group (connected to CERT) of licensed amateur radio operators who the county could draft into service in a disaster. My likely next move is to get my license and contact the folks I knew in CERT who were in that group and move forward that way.

Reply to: California megafloods! New research, articles, prepping challenges, etc. Posted January 14, 2023

Did you ever end up spending more time on this paper (in the last half a year)? No, and now I don’t have to, because you just did it— THANK YOU for saving me the trouble! (I am not a modeler and I really do not enjoy reading modeling papers, both because I have to work so hard to understand them and because that engenders some regret about how I approached building my methods toolkit in graduate school.) The candidate factors you distilled match my memory of the language in the paper that made me think we could pull “factors” from it; part of what I had intended to do was pull out more “factors” (which you’ve done here); the other part was to re-read the language around those “factors” to see how much the paper even supports their use as such. The tricky thing, of course, is that at this stage of the endeavor, we’re not going to get anything better than a “these findings suggest”, so a deep dive into the methods is really necessary to figure out how strong the suggestion is. I did…. not want to do that at all, and now you have done it, so, excellent! If I seem very happy about the fact that my original plan for figuring out when to evacuate is now voided, that’s because I got to the same place just by living through these past couples of weeks in California and reading the news and watching CalTrans road closures and local evacuation orders. This series of storms has demonstrated that even if Huang and Swain had identified a set of factors that they were comfortable characterizing as strongly predictive of an ARkStorm-caliber event, it would still be really tough to evacuate on time: Roads are going to be trashed here long before it’s clear that we’re facing a megaflood-producing storm series. I recently read somewhere (I thought it was Swain’s blog, but I can’t find it there now) that we’ve had maybe 1/3 of the precip that an ARkStorm would produce, and it has been two weeks, compared to the month of ARs in the ARkStorm scenario. What we’ve had has been more than enough for landslides and downed trees everywhere. We’ve had exactly one clear day this year that was forecast as such. This may not be true for folks in the Central Valley, but for those of us in the 1 and 101 corridors (closer to the coast), I can’t see driving around in the Coast Ranges to evacuate as a particularly good idea. I feel kind of dumb for not having thought of this earlier: I have lived in NorCal most of my life, and I know how things tend to go to pieces when it rains hard after a drought, but I’ve been out of state for the last three years, and the way these storms have come in on top of each other is pretty rare… So my current evac strategy is “hope for a couple of decades’ worth of research advances before I need to have one.” For our household personally, that isn’t totally unworkable: These storms have demonstrated that our neighborhood is extremely unlikely to flood, so preparing becomes a matter of keeping a lot of food and water around, which is something we do anyway. For those in low-lying areas, though? I don’t know. Again, my sincere thanks to you for doing an incredible job on a task I had been putting off!

Reply to: CERT Training Posted January 14, 2023

My county has enough of a formalized CERT program that they can direct basic training grads to neighborhood-specific sub-groups. It does not have enough of a formalized CERT program to mentor the leaders of those neighborhood-specific sub-groups or provide examples of or templates for activities the groups can do together to advance their training. My neighborhood group was not well managed, and the meetings really tried my patience, so I am hesitant to plug back in. :/

Reply to: News for week of 2023-01-09 (all current event convos go here) Posted January 14, 2023

In Northern California, one coastal town hasn’t seen power for nearly a week [URL: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/01/10/us/california-storms-rain-weather/in-northern-california-one-coastal-town-hasnt-seen-power-for-nearly-a-week%5D This is very near where I was living (alone, except for my new puppy) when I realized that I needed to start thinking seriously about disaster preparedness.

Reply to: News for week of 2023-01-09 (all current event convos go here) Posted January 11, 2023

Aw, thanks, M.E.! I so appreciate your concern!

Reply to: News for week of 2023-01-09 (all current event convos go here) Posted January 10, 2023

Hey, thanks for asking, Shaun. It appears that we live on an island of geologic and hydrologic calm in a saturated, crumbling county in a drenched, desperate state. Additionally, I just had a certified arborist tell me that all of my trees are safe and healthy, so I might even be sleeping in my bedroom tonight?!

Reply to: News for week of 2023-01-09 (all current event convos go here) Posted January 10, 2023

A Day-By-Day Look at California’s Weather: The state, already inundated with water, could see rain and high winds for days. https://www.nytimes.com/article/california-weather-forecast-rain-wind.html Can’t stop won’t stop out here.

Dog Bug Out Bag

Dog Preps

Nat gas “sniffers” for friends who can’t smell anymore due to Covid

Nat gas “sniffers” for friends who can’t smell anymore due to Covid

California megafloods! New research, articles, prepping challenges, etc.

Makeover of a pre-assembled BOB in 1 week and $125

Drop, cover, and hold on? Maybe not— esp. if you’re in the PNW!

NYT article on PNW tsunami threat

Anyone have any experience with heated clothing?

Stocking a pet first aid kit with meds

Family emergency plans?

Where do you keep your car fire extinguisher?

Just for fun: Kit pics!