It happens again and again.
The Seattle Times Climate Lab runs a story claiming global warming will create a dangerous situation.
A story that is factually incorrect or grossly exaggerated.
And it happened again yesterday in a Seattle Times story about Skagit Valley flooding:
This article claims that global warming will cause serious flooding of the Skagit River. This is clearly wrong.
Specifically:
- The article is based on a report by an advocacy group. A report that has serious technical flaws.
- The Seattle Times provides no analysis of the claims' viability, nor does it examine historical data to determine whether such an ominous trend is occurring.
- The report claims that "today’s 100-year flood events, or those considered to have a 1% chance of happening in any given year, will happen about four to five times as often by the 2040s.
The Seattle Times suggests that existing infrastructure will not protect communities. Disaster looms due to climate change.
Written by the Climate Lab project of the Seattle Times, it is an unfortunate example of "sponsored journalism" paid for by local advocacy groups.
The article is based on a report led by the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, which has secured tens of millions of dollars of funding from state and federal sources for adaptation to global warming.
There are serious technical flaws in this report and the ST articles.
For example, the climate models considered are driven by unrealistic increases in warming greenhouse gases, such as CO2.
Specifically, they make use of an average of the RCP 4.5 and 8.5 climate change scenarios. Unfortunately, RCP 8.5 is considered wildly excessive, so much so that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has dropped it.
The report and the Seattle Times failed to examine the actual historical trends of the high water on the Skagit River, which is important since global warming has occurred for several decades.
Let me show you the actual data. Below are the OBSERVED long-term trends of the annual peak streamflows of the Skagit River at Nehalem and Concrete. It is not rising, but DECLINING slightly.
Please note that peak streamflows were higher earlier in the century, before the reservoirs were in place.
No wonder they failed to show past observations. It does not support their narrative.
Reduced snowpack as a cause?
What about the future under global warming?
The UW effort to run high-resolution climate models driven by the more reasonable RCP 4.5 scenario (blue line) shows little increase in precipitation in the Cascades through 2080 during the winter at any site (Stampede Pass is shown below).
While the article makes big claims about climate change for Skagit flooding, it conveniently avoids other issues, such as land use changes.
For example, dike and levee construction has resulted in increased river confinement. By walling off roughly 100,000 acres of the natural floodplain, the river lost its ability to naturally spread out and slow down. Instead, the water is funneled into a highly confined channel, forcing the river stage to rise much higher and faster at narrow points like downtown Mount Vernon.
Urbanization and increased impervious surfaces have also been a factor
The growth of urban centers along the river, such as Mount Vernon, Burlington, and Sedro-Woolley, has converted porous, forested, and rural land into asphalt, concrete, and roof surfaces.
Thus, when heavy rain or atmospheric rivers strike the basin, the water is impeded from soaking into the ground. Instead, it turns into rapid urban runoff that empties directly into local tributaries and the main stem of the Skagit River, causing rapid spikes in water levels.
Deforestation and logjam removal
The removal of upper-basin forest cover and natural river obstructions permanently increased the velocity and volume of water and sediment rushing downstream toward Mount Vernon during major storm events.
Reduced snowpack as a cause?
Finally, both this article and report claim that reduced snowpack is an important element in Cascade flooding. They say this because global warming clearly reduces Cascade snowpack.
But they got it wrong.
Severe flooding in western WA is always associated with intense, warm atmospheric rivers in which nearly all the precipitation falls as rain. Furthermore, the melting of snow is always secondary for western Washington flooding.
In short, this kind of "supported" journalism at the Seattle Times is not meant to inform but to push a certain agenda
Really unfortunate.
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While The Seattle Times maintains strict editorial independence over the Climate Lab, its reporting is philanthropic journalism, that received specialized grant funding that inherently directs a newsroom's focus toward specific agendas. This reporting would fail Wikipedia’s guidelines that strictly demand a secondary, synthesized overview of all scientific consensus, historical data counterweights, and a neutral point of view (NPOV). It does serve as a visible artifact of a highly connected nexus between the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the lawmakers representing Washington's 40th Legislative District which encompasses parts of Skagit, Whatcom, and San Juan counties) that may require greater critical oversight by the Seattle Times.
ReplyDeleteI'm having trouble seeing how reduced snowpack would result in increased flooding, even if most precipitation during a flooding event fell as snow! Perhaps the idea is that the snow level during one of those Pineapple Expresses will rise to 11,000 feet instead of 9,000 feet? Even in the North Cascades, that wouldn't cover much territory, and there would be less snow to melt down below as it got rained on.
ReplyDeleteThe Swinomish tribe appears to include 1400 people. They recently talked Seattle City Light into spending almost $1 billion for salmon passage up the river past the dams -- some $700,000 per person. I would be happy to personally drive the salmon up Highway 20 in a limousine, then individually carry them to their preferred alpine streams or lakes, for a mere half a billion.
One of the first readings I saw about this issue was Luna** B. Leopold's USGS Circular #554 [1968]: Hydrology for urban land planning - A guidebook on the hydrologic effects of urban land use.
ReplyDeleteThe watershed was just west of Philadelphia PA and the public at that time had reports titled "Remember the Brandywine"
{**Son of Aldo of "A Sand County Almanac" fame.}
A guy walks into a bar with a piece of asphalt under his arm.
ReplyDeleteHe walks up to the bartender and says, "I'll take a beer for me, and one for the road!" 🛣️
In one of the greatest floods ever in the Pacific Northwest (February 1996) over half of the runoff was from snowmelt.
ReplyDeletemichael...you are not correct about this. The contribution of snowmelt was less than 20%. I wrote a published paper on this event and know it well. There are other papers that agree with my conclusions. The data is clear... snowpack was a minor contributor to the westside flooding. I would be happy to explain this to you in depth...cliff
DeleteCliff, I don't agree that snowpack is a "minor" contributor to westside flooding, but it's a subjective term so not much point in debating it. A bigger-picture question would be: If you're correct, and "nearly all" catastrophic flooding is caused by rain and not snow, then wouldn't global warming be expected to lead to more flooding? A well-established impact of GW is that more of our precipitation is falling as rain, and that trend will progress as GW progresses.
DeleteJerry...you are quite wrong about snowpack, something confirmed to me by US Army Corp Core folks. But you are right, the global warming will contribute modestly to increased flooding....perhaps by 10-15%--by the end of the century...cliff
Deletethe Swinomish tribe alone (many others also) has 17 funded items in the CCA structure. Essentially a slush fund since the stated uses are things like "Funds were used to support the Environmental Policy Department’s work to review all climate projects that may affect the Tribe’s
ReplyDeleteresources, including working with the Swinomish Senate to consult with agencies that administer Climate Commitment Act funding decisions and authorizations that may impact tribal resources" from https://ecology.wa.gov/air-climate/climate-commitment-act/auction-revenue/cca-account-spending-and-funds-reporting
Cliff- I agree that most weather reporting is sensationalized. However, as a farmer in the snoqualmie valley since 2004, I can say for sure that rain events have changed just in the last 10 years to be shorter, heavier rainfall events than in comparison to the 2000s. I saw floods in the 2000s that were awful but then recent floods involved 4-6” of rain over the span of maybe 6-8 hours. That’s been very difficult to manage.
ReplyDeleteIts regrettable that the Seattle Times Climate Lab is still reporting inaccurate information. The Skagit Valley will be worse off as a result. It isn't difficult to imagine people seeing articles like the one the Times published and making decisions about not living in, investing in, and/or visting the region based on them, not knowing that the information isn't accurate.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, thank you, Cliff!
ReplyDelete