Climate expert launches group to help local communities
He led panel that Trump disbanded
When President George H.W. Bush’s administration signed a law mandating long-term research into the consequences of global warming, Deerfield native and fledgling climate scientist Richard Moss was tapped to join the effort.
The National Climate Assessment was conceived as a landmark series of reports intended to bear out the threats posed by climate change, aiming to inform members of Congress and the president about the emerging issue every four years.
In four editions published in the course of 28 years, federal scientists have consistently warned about the dire consequences of inaction on climate change. But a discernible gulf exists between the plethora of scientific research and the dearth of tangible policy action.
Under former President Barack Obama, Moss chaired a federal committee tasked with finding ways to help communities turn the National Climate Assessment into informed decision-making.
“This last couple calendar years have been replete with all kinds of disaster: hurricanes in the Atlantic, fires on the West Coast, flooding in the Midwest. But there’s also a lot of subtle changes like change in flowering dates impacting allergies, invasive species changing ecosystems,” Moss said. “In putting this organization together, the great thing is we’re working with communities to help them use science to make better decisions.”
However, the Trump administration declined to renew the committee’s charter, effectively dissolving the 15-member panel midway into the endeavor.
A noted climate skeptic, Trump has frequently denounced climate change as a “hoax.” He spearheaded the decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to mitigate carbon emissions. He’s also regularly cast doubt on his own administration’s findings on climate science, most recently announcing plans to form a panel to investigate the conclusions of the Fourth National Climate Assessment published in November.
With new funding from the state of New York, Columbia University and the American Meteorology Society, Moss resurrected the committee initiative. “I like to think I owe it to my Midwestern upbringing,” he joked.
This month, the panel launched a new association of scientists and climate experts that hopes to provide guidance to state and local communities on how best to shrink their carbon footprint and prepare for conditions that may lead to more flooding, infrastructure shortfalls and lower crop yields.
“You always tend to worry about the immediate threat instead of the one that’s going to bite you down the road,” said Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who contributed to each of the National Climate Assessments. “We need to change that approach. We need to have an adaptive risk management approach.
“When the first President Bush signed the Global Change Act, I don’t think any of us expected it to be as bad as it actually is — that’s the problem,” Wuebbles continued.
The Science for Climate Action Network (known as SCAN) will be attempting to make inroads with local, state and tribal governments to discuss how they can brace for climate change through bond ratings and infrastructure design. The network will look to particularly aid communities with limited resources, such as many of the rural communities impacted by flooding in the Midwest.
The Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, an organization comprising 88 riverfront mayors across 10 states, is one of the organizations that has endorsed the concept for the network. Colin Wellenkamp, the initiative’s executive director, said many of its communities have dealt with drastic swings between record flooding and crippling drought.
In recent months, heavy snowpack combined with rainfall caused the Mississippi River basin to crest to a major flood stage in many parts of the Midwest, inundating homes, farmland and roadways.
“More robust science around the impacts that we’re dealing with is certainly welcome,” Wellenkamp said. “We are certainly one of the organizations that could use it. There are still lots of things that we’re trying to get a hold of, in terms of climate risks, because the impacts just keep changing. You get a recordbreaking event year after year. We can tell you what the immediate impacts are, but the larger, more cumulative patterns aren’t well understood.
“We have nothing in our history that we can turn to, to help with that,” he said.
Without science to inform these decisions, rebuilding can be even more costly. Residents, businesses and all levels of government are already spending billions of dollars to recover from extreme weather and implement measures to protect against future disasters. But many of these projects continue to stall in the planning phases, and it remains unclear if communities are accounting for the latest and most pertinent data.
In the past, Mississippi River communities have moved away from costly infrastructure projects, such as redesigning levees, choosing natural solutions instead. Restoring wetlands, Wellenkamp said, has helped to absorb heavy rainfall while also boosting tourism.
But Wellenkamp said communities still need more guidance for more intensive undertakings. And considering some smaller communities have a limited tax base, they can’t afford to be wrong.
“We need to know which solutions will achieve the best results with the least amount of liability on the taxpayers,” Wellenkamp said. “We don’t want to go chasing a bunch of solutions that could’ve been answered by science.”