Phoenix Descending

The four horsemen of Phoenix’s Apocalypse, writes William deBuys at TomDispatch, are heat, drought, windstorms, and fire. DeBuys, who is the author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford, 2011) actually adds a fifth horseman—the political disorganization and social fragmentation that will make for an incoherent and divisive response to these travails. Phoenix is a sort of Ground Zero for such inter-locking vulnerabilities, but the entire American Southwest is implicated in the scary future projected by DeBuys:  

. . . Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time -- New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy -- may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures -- grids going down, levees failing, back-up systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time. 

Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. . . . 

[I]n Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention. . . . 

It goes without saying that Phoenix’s desert setting is hot by nature, but we’ve made it hotter. The city is a masonry world, with asphalt and concrete everywhere. The hard, heavy materials of its buildings and roads absorb heat efficiently and give it back more slowly than the naked land. In a sense, the whole city is really a thermal battery, soaking up energy by day and releasing it at night. The result is an “urban heat island,” which, in turn, prevents the cool of the desert night from providing much relief. 

Sixty years ago, when Phoenix was just embarking on its career of manic growth, nighttime lows never crept above 90°F. Today such temperatures are a commonplace, and the vigil has begun for the first night that doesn’t dip below 100°F. Studies indicate that Phoenix’s urban-heat-island effect may boost nighttime temperatures by as much as 10°F. It’s as though the city has doubled down on climate change, finding a way to magnify its most unwanted effects even before it hits the rest of us full blast. . . . 

Heat . . . is a tricky adversary. It stresses everything, including electrical equipment. Transformers, when they get too hot, can fail. Likewise, thermoelectric generating stations, whether fired by coal, gas, or neutrons, become less efficient as the mercury soars.  And the great hydroelectric dams of the Colorado River, including Glen Canyon, which serves greater Phoenix, won’t be able to supply the “peaking power” they do now if the reservoirs behind them are fatally shrunken by drought, as multiple studies forecast they will be. Much of this can be mitigated with upgraded equipment, smart grid technologies, and redundant systems.  But then along comes the haboob. 

A haboob is a dust/sand/windstorm, usually caused by the collapse of a thunderstorm cell. The plunging air hits the ground and roils outward, picking up debris across the open desert. As the Arabic name suggests, such storms are native to arid regions, but -- although Phoenix is no stranger to storm-driven dust -- the term haboob has only lately entered the local lexicon. It seems to have been imported to describe a new class of storms, spectacular in their vehemence, which bring visibility to zero and life to a standstill. They sandblast cars, close the airport, and occasionally cause the lights -- and AC -- to go out. Not to worry, say the two major utilities serving the Phoenix metroplex, Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project. And the outages have indeed been brief.  So far. 

Before Katrina hit, the Army Corps of Engineers was similarly reassuring to the people of New Orleans. And until Superstorm Sandy landed, almost no one worried about storm surges filling the subway tunnels of New York. 

Every system, like every city, has its vulnerabilities. Climate change, in almost every instance, will worsen them. The beefed-up, juiced-up, greenhouse-gassed, overheated weather of the future will give us haboobs of a sort we can’t yet imagine, packed with ever greater amounts of energy. In all likelihood, the emergence of such storms as a feature of Phoenix life results from an overheating environment, abetted by the loose sand and dust of abandoned farmland (which dried up when water was diverted to the city’s growing subdivisions). 

In dystopic portraits of Phoenix’s unsustainable future, water -- or rather the lack of it -- is usually painted as the agent of collapse. Indeed, the metropolitan area, a jumble of jurisdictions that includes Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Mesa, Sun City, Chandler, and 15 other municipalities, long ago made full use of such local rivers as the Salt, Verde, and Gila. Next, people sank wells and mined enough groundwater to lower the water table by 400 feet. . . . 

Longer term, the Colorado River poses issues that no amount of tribal water can resolve. Beset by climate change, overuse, and drought, the river and its reservoirs, according to various researchers, may decline to the point that water fails to pass Hoover Dam. In that case, the CAP [Central Arizona Project] would dry up, but so would the Colorado Aqueduct which serves greater Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as the All-American Canal, on which the factory farms of California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys depend. Irrigators and municipalities downstream in Mexico would also go dry. If nothing changes in the current order of things, it is expected that the possibility of such a debacle could loom in little more than a decade. . . . 

Phoenicians who want to escape water worries, heat waves, and haboobs have traditionally sought refuge in the cool green forests of Arizona’s uplands, or at least they did until recently. In 2002, the Rodeo-Chediski fire consumed 469,000 acres of pine and mixed conifer on the Mogollon Rim, not far from Phoenix. It was an ecological holocaust that no one expected to see surpassed. Only nine years later, in 2011, the Wallow fire picked up the torch, so to speak, and burned across the Rim all the way to the New Mexico border and beyond, topping out at 538,000 charred acres. 

Now, nobody thinks such fires are one-off flukes. Diligent modeling of forest response to rising temperatures and increased moisture stress suggests, in fact, that these two fires were harbingers of worse to come. By mid-century, according to a paper by an A-team of Southwestern forest ecologists, the “normal” stress on trees will equal that of the worst megadroughts in the region’s distant paleo-history, when most of the trees in the area simply died. 

Compared to Phoenix’s other heat and water woes, the demise of Arizona’s forests may seem like a side issue, whose effects would be noticeable mainly in the siltation of reservoirs and the destabilization of the watersheds on which the city depends. But it could well prove a regional disaster.  Consider, then, heat, drought, windstorms, and fire as the four horsemen of Phoenix’s Apocalypse. As it happens, though, this potential apocalypse has a fifth horseman as well. 

Rebecca Solnit has written eloquently of the way a sudden catastrophe -- an earthquake, hurricane, or tornado -- can dissolve social divisions and cause a community to cohere, bringing out the best in its citizenry. Drought and heat waves are different. You don’t know that they have taken hold until you are already in them, and you never know when they will end. The unpleasantness eats away at you.  It corrodes your state of mind. You have lots of time to meditate on the deficiencies of your neighbors, which loom larger the longer the crisis goes on. . . . 

It is a truism that communities that do not pull together fail to surmount their challenges. Phoenix’s are as daunting as any faced by an American city in the new age of climate change, but its winner-take-all politics (out of which has come Arizona’s flagrantly repressive anti-immigration law), combined with the fragmentation of the metro-area into nearly two dozen competing jurisdictions, essentially guarantee that, when the worst of times hit, common action and shared sacrifice will remain as insubstantial as a desert mirage. . . .

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William deBuys, "Exodus from Phoenix," TomDispatch, March 14, 2013

See here for images of the haboob that descended on Phoenix in 2011.

Science on Trial

Surely among the most absurd judicial decisions in recent memory is the verdict by an Italian court that sends seven Italian earthquake experts to jail for six year terms. Their alleged crime, worthy of convictions for manslaughter and damage claims of $10.2 million, was for minimizing the risks of an earthquake to the residents of an Italian town after tremors struck the region. In the subsequent earthquake, over 300 people died. Though the prosecutors insist that the crime was not for failing to predict an earthquake, it amounts to the same thing. The guilty verdict must elicit incredulity; it presumes knowledge that does not exist, in effect postulating certainty in what is clearly a vastly uncertain enterprise. Though one expert says that the decision will lead scientists to keep their mouths shut, the more likely consequence (pointed out in the BBC piece below) is a mountain of false alarms. 

Here’s a report from the New York Times on the case:

Seven prominent Italian earthquake experts were convicted of manslaughter on Monday and sentenced to six years in prison for failing to give adequate warning to the residents of a seismically active area in the months preceding an earthquake that killed more than 300 people.

Speaking in a hushed courtroom in L’Aquila, the city whose historic center was gutted by the April 2009 earthquake, the judge, Marco Billi, read a long list of names of those who had died or been injured in the disaster before he handed down the sentences to six scientists and a former government official. The defendants, who said they would appeal the decision, will also have to pay court costs and damages of $10.2 million.

The seven, most of them seismologists and geologists, were members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, which met shortly before the quake struck — after weeks of frequent small tremors — but did not issue a safety warning.

The verdicts jolted the international scientific community, which feared they might open the way to an onslaught of legal actions against scientists who evaluate the risks of natural hazards. “This is the death of public service on the part of professors and professionals,” said Luciano Maiani, the current president of the risks commission, according to the news agency Ansa. The legal and media pressure prompted by the trial have made it impossible to carry out professional consultancies for the state, he said, adding, “This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.”

Thomas H. Jordan, a professor at the University of Southern California, led a commission that after the disaster advised the Italian government about better ways to communicate earthquake risks to the public. He described the verdicts as incredible, “given that they have just convicted scientists for basically doing their job during a time of crisis.”

“I’m afraid it’s going to teach scientists to keep their mouths shut,” he added.

Scientists said the case raised the issue of when a public warning is appropriate. While predicting the exact time and location of an earthquake is not possible, seismologists are increasingly able to forecast the likelihood that a quake might occur in a certain area within a certain time. But if the likelihood is very low — as it was in this case, despite the increased seismic activity in the weeks before — a warning may do more harm than good. Lawyers for the defendants were unanimous on Monday in their condemnation of the sentence, which exceeded the prosecution’s request of four years in prison, and vowed to appeal.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” said Alfredo Biondi, a defense lawyer. He described the ruling as one of the most erroneous that he had encountered in his long career.

“This was a trial that should not have been held in L’Aquila” because the emotional impact of the quake is still felt so strongly in the city, said Filippo Dinacci, who represents two of the defendants.

More than three years after the earthquake, L’Aquila, in the Abruzzo region east of Rome, has yet to recover fully. Its architecturally rich center is still largely abandoned, and residents are still mourning the dead. There are some sporadic signs of reconstruction around the center, including the inauguration last month of an auditorium designed by Renzo Piano, but the overall mood in the city speaks more of discouragement and dismay.

The city and surrounding towns were felled by the magnitude 6.3 quake in the early hours of April 6, 2009. The disaster left thousands homeless and killed 309, many of them in their sleep.

Six days before the quake, the risks commission met to assess the situation after the period of frequent small quakes. The seismic activity had made the public anxious, as had a series of specific quake predictions — none of which proved to be accurate — by a local man who is not a scientist. After the meeting, some commission members gave encouraging statements to the news media, which prosecutors said gave residents an overly reassuring picture of the risks they faced. The commission, prosecutors charged, did not uphold its mandate and consequently did not allow residents to make informed decisions about whether to stay or leave their homes.

In his closing arguments on Monday the prosecutor, Fabio Picuti, cited a United States court ruling that blamed the Army Corps of Engineers for “monumental negligence” for some of the flooding from Hurricane Katrina, Ansa reported. That case, Mr. Picuti said, demonstrates that it is possible to fall short of preventing and predicting a risk, according to Ansa.

Relatives of the victims cheered the decision. “It’s just a tiny bit of justice so that it doesn’t happen again,” said an unidentified woman on Sky television.

The court did not rule on whether earthquakes can be predicted. But Fabio Alessandroni, a civil lawyer who represents the relatives of more than a dozen victims, said the sentence showed that it is possible to have a “culture of prevention.”

“It is possible to predict a risk and to adopt measures that mitigate that risk,” Mr. Alessandroni said. “It’s what the commission is supposed to do,” taking various elements, like a city’s seismic history, into account. “And this was not done in L’Aquila.”

Elisabetta Povoledo and Henry Fountain, “Italy Orders Jail Terms for 7 Who Didn’t Warn of Deadly Earthquake,” New York Times, October 22, 2012.

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An open letter to Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, signed by over 5,000 scientists and issued before the decision of the court, underlines the error of the proceeding:  

Years of research, much of it conducted by distinguished seismologists in your own country, have demonstrated that there is no accepted scientific method for earthquake prediction that can be reliably used to warn citizens of an impending disaster. To expect more of science at this time is unreasonable. It is manifestly unfair for scientists to be criminally charged for failing to act on information that the international scientific community would consider inadequate as a basis for issuing a warning. Moreover, we worry that subjecting scientists to criminal charges for adhering to accepted scientific practices may have a chilling effect on researchers, thereby impeding the free exchange of ideas necessary for progress in science and discouraging them from participating in matters of great public importance.

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A report from the BBC provides further detail on the state of the scientific understanding, noting that predicting an earthquake is extremely difficult:

When a large amount of stress is built up in the Earth's crust, it will mostly be released in a single large earthquake, but some smaller-scale cracking in the build-up to the break will result in precursor earthquakes. These small quakes precede around half of all large earthquakes, and can continue for days to months before the big break.

Some scientists have even gone so far as to try to predict the location of the large earthquake by mapping the small tremors. The "Mogi Doughnut Hypothesis" suggests that a circular pattern of small precursor quakes will precede a large earthquake emanating from the centre of that circle.

While half of the large earthquakes have precursor tremors, only around 5% of small earthquakes are associated with a large quake. So even if small tremors are felt, this cannot be a reliable prediction that a large, devastating earthquake will follow. "There is no scientific basis for making a prediction", said Dr Richard Walker of the University of Oxford. . . .

The minute changes in the movement, tilt, and the water, gas and chemical content of the ground associated with earthquake activity can be monitored on a long term scale. Measuring devices have been integrated into early warning systems that can trigger an alarm when a certain amount of activity is recorded.

Such early warning systems have been installed in Japan, Mexico and Taiwan, where the population density and high earthquake risk pose a huge threat to people's lives. But because of the nature of all of these precursor reactions, the systems may only be able to provide up to 30 seconds' advance warning.

"In the history of earthquake study, only one prediction has been successful", explains Dr Walker. The magnitude 7.3 earthquake in 1975 in Haicheng, North China was predicted one day before it struck, allowing authorities to order evacuation of the city, saving many lives. But the pattern of seismic activity that this prediction was based on has not resulted in a large earthquake since, and just a year later in 1976 a completely unanticipated magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck nearby Tangshan causing the death of over a quarter of a million people. The "prediction" of the Haicheng quake was therefore just a lucky unrepeatable coincidence.

A major problem in the prediction of earthquake events that will require evacuation is the threat of issuing false alarms. Scientists could warn of a large earthquake every time a potential precursor event is observed, however this would result in huge numbers of false alarms which put a strain on public resources and might ultimately reduce the public's trust in scientists.

"Earthquakes are complex natural processes with thousands of interacting factors, which makes accurate prediction of them virtually impossible," said Dr Walker.

Seismologists agree that the best way to limit the damage and loss of life resulting from a large earthquake is to predict and manage the longer-term risks in an earthquake-prone area. These include the likelihood of building collapsing and implementing emergency plans.

"Detailed scientific research has told us that each earthquake displays almost unique characteristics, preceded by foreshocks or small tremors, whereas others occur without warning. There simply are no rules to utilise in order to predict earthquakes," said Dr Dan Faulkner, senior lecturer in rock mechanics at the University of Liverpool.

"Earthquake prediction will only become possible with a detailed knowledge of the earthquake process. Even then, it may still be impossible."

Leila Battison, “Can we predict when and where quakes will strike?” BBC News, September, 20, 2011.