Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Subtract out the conspiracists and the willfully ignorant and the argument marshaled by skeptics against global warming, roughly restated, assumes that scientists vastly overstate the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Uncertainties in their calculations, the skeptics say, make it impossible to determine with confidence how bad the future was going to be. The sour irony of that muttonheaded resistance to data is that, after four decades of being wrong, those people are almost right.

As of July 31, more than 25,000 firefighters are committed to 140 wildfires across the United States — over a million acres aflame. Eight people are dead in California, tens of thousands evacuated, smoke and pyroclastic clouds are visible from space. And all any fire scientist knows for sure is, it only gets worse from here. How much worse? Where? For whom? Experience can’t tell them. The scientists actually are uncertain.

Scientists who help policymakers plan for the future used to make an assumption. They called it stationarity, and the idea was that the extremes of environmental systems — rainfall, river levels, hurricane strength, wildfire damage — obeyed prior constraints. The past was prologue. Climate change has turned that assumption to ash. The fires burning across the western United States (and in Europe) prove that “stationarity is dead,” as a team of researchers (controversially) wrote in the journal Science a decade ago. They were talking about water; now it’s true for fire.

“We can no longer use the observed past as a guide. There’s no stable system that generates a measurable probability of events to use the past record to plan for the future,” says LeRoy Westerling, a management professor who studies wildfires at UC Merced. “Now we have to use physics and complex interactions to project how things could change.”

Wildfires were always part of a complex system. Climate change — carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases raising the overall temperature of the planet — added to the complexity. The implications of that will play out for millennia. “On top of that is interaction between the climate system, the ecosystem, and how we manage our land use,” Westerling says. “That intersection is very complex, and even more difficult to predict. When I say there’s no new normal, I mean it. The climate will be changing with probably an accelerating pace for the rest of the lives of everyone who is alive today.”

That’s not to say there’s nothing more to learn or do. To the contrary, more data on fire behavior will help researchers build models of what might happen. They’ll look at how best to handle “fuel management,” or the removal of flammable plant matter desiccated by climate change-powered heat waves and drought. More research will help with how to build less flammable buildings, and to identify places where buildings maybe shouldn’t be in the first place. Of course, that all presumes policymakers will listen and act. They haven’t yet. “People talk about ‘resilience,’ they talk about ‘hardening,’” Westerling says. “But we’ve been talking about climate change and risks like wildfire for decades now and haven’t made a whole lot of headway outside of the scientific and management communities.”

It’s true. At least two decades ago — perhaps as long as a century — fire researchers were warning that increasing atmospheric CO2 would mean bigger wildfires. History confirmed at least the latter hypothesis; using data like fire scars and tree ring sizes, researchers have shown that before Europeans came to North America, fires were relatively frequent but relatively small, and indigenous people like the Pueblo used lots of wood for fuel and small-diameter trees for construction. When the Spaniards arrived, spreading disease and forcing people out of their villages, the population crashed by perhaps as much as 90 percent and the forests went back to their natural fire pattern — less frequent, low intensity, and widespread. By the late 19th century, the land changed to livestock grazing and its users had no tolerance for fire at all.

“So in the late 20th and early 21st century, with these hot droughts, fires are ripping now with a severity and ferocity that’s unprecedented,” says Tom Swetnam, a dendrochronologist who did a lot of that tree-ring work. A fire in the Jemez Mountains Swetnam studies burned 40,000 acres in 12 hours, a “horizontal roll vortex fire” that had two wind-driven counter-rotating vortices of flame. “That thing left a canopy hole with no trees over 30,000 acres. A giant hole with no trees,” he says. “There’s no archaeological evidence of that happening in at least 500 years.”

Swetnam actually lives in a fire-prone landscape in New Mexico — right in the proverbial wildland-urban interface, as he says. He knows it’s more dangerous than ever. “It’s sad. It’s worrying. Many of us have been predicting that we were going to see these kinds of events if the temperature continued to rise,” Swetnam says. “We’re seeing our scariest predictions coming true.”

Fire researchers have been hollering about the potential consequences for fires of climate change combined with land use for at least as long as hurricane and flood researchers have been doing the same. It hasn’t kept people from building houses on the Houston floodplain and constructing poorly-planned levees along the Mississippi, and it hasn’t kept people from building houses up next to forests and letting undergrowth and small trees clump together — all while temperatures rise.

“Some of the fires are unusual, but the reason it seems more unusual is that there are people around to see it — fire whorls, large vortices, there are plenty of examples of those,” says Mark Finney, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service. “But some things are changing.” Drought and temperature are worse. Sprawl is worse. “The worst fires haven’t happened yet,” Finney says. “The Sierra Nevada is primed for this kind of thing, and those kinds of fires would be truly unprecedented for those kinds of ecosystems in the past thousands of years.”

So what happens next? The Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests of the west burn, and then don’t come back? They convert to grassland? That hasn’t happened in thousands of years where the Giant Sequoia grow. So … install sprinklers in Sequoia National Forest? “I’m only the latest generation to be frustrated,” Finney says. “At least two, maybe three generations before me experienced exactly the same frustration.” Nobody listened to them, either. And now the latest generation isn’t really sure what’s going to happen next.

(GRIST)

Iran’s rial currency hits record lows, the regime is contending both with the country’s increasingly disenchanted residents turning on the theocratic government in Tehran, and with pressures from abroad. The nuclear deal that promised economic relief also appears to be collapsing, even as the country continues its costly military support of the Syrian government and rebel Houthi fighters in Yemen.

Protests have been breaking out in dozens of cities and towns over the past six months, some rounds of disorder lasting several days. This week alone, large demonstrations have been reported in Tehran, Shiraz, Ahavz, Mashhad and Isfahan.

Some protests have taken place sporadically and some have been well-organized, some have been isolated and others spread to several cities near-simultaneously. December and January saw some of the largest protests occurring in around 80 cities all on the same day. During another spike in activity in June, demonstrations even reached Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, a national symbol of Iran and one of the focal points for the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iranian protesters shout slogans during a demonstration in central Tehran on June 25.ATTA KENARE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The crashing rial has sent the cost of living in Iran through the roof. On Sunday, the currency fell to a new low—112,000 per U.S. dollar on the unofficial market, down from about 97,500 rials on Saturday,Reuters reported. The currency has lost around half its value since April.

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action(JCPOA) nuclear deal is a key factor in recent economic woes. Iran was slapped with crippling economic sanctions from 2006 onward in an effort to convince its leaders to end their nuclear ambitions.

By lifting these punishments, the JCPOA was supposed to herald a new era of investment and profitability for Iran. But this has not come to pass, and now Iranians are waiting for the first round of new sanctions on August 7. More protests will be expected immediately after, and the security forces will no doubt be preparing additional deployments to get ahead of any mass disturbances.

And if that wasn't enough, some areas of the country are suffering from an extended drought. Residents of the central city of Isfahan and Khuzestan province in the west have been particularly affected, and say unusually dry weather is being exacerbated by government mismanagement. Farmers have alleged that local officials allow the water to be diverted in exchange for bribes. Drought can badly destabilize a country, as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad found in the lead-up to his country’s ongoing civil war.

An Iranian woman raises her fist amid the smoke of tear gas at the University of Tehran during a protest driven by anger over economic problems, in the capital Tehran, on December 30, 2017.STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

"Complete fatigue"

Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, believes the protests are being driven by a mixture of severe economic troubles, disappointment with what President Hassan Rouhani has been able to deliver and frustration at ingrained political corruption. The2017 Corruption Perception Index placed Iran 130th out of 180 countries based on analysis by experts and businesspeople. The country scored an individual score of 30, wherein 0 means highly corrupt and 100 very clean.

Tehran’s growing regional influence—buoyed by its involvement in conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen—has upset its foreign rivals and frustrated its citizens, increasingly struggling to afford day-to-day expenses. This has given extra ammunition to those who want change at the top levels of government.

Alireza Nader, until recently internaional policy analyst for the Rand corporation and today CEO of the NRG consulting firm, believes the dissatisfaction has already morphed into an anti-regime uprising. “It has many different reasons, but I think the root of it is just complete fatigue for the Islamic Republic because it is so dysfunctional and corrupt,” he told Newsweek. “It's much more than just having to do with economics or the collapse of the currency,” he suggested.

The demonstrations differ from previous actions such as the mass protests that followed the disputed2009 presidential election results and came to be known as the Green Movement. Then, non-violence was a key part of the movement. Organizers would even teach demonstrators how to avoid confrontation and remove those who were trying to create trouble. But now, protesters are setting fire to banks, taking over police stations and regularly clashing with police in the streets.

The 2009 movement was student-led, upper-middle-class and Tehran-centric, said Trita Parsi, founder and president emeritus of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The organization represents American-Iranians and works towards improved dialogue between the two countries. NIAClobbied hard for the JCPOA, rallying support for the deal in Congress and working to block groups demanding deeper sanctions on Iran.

This time around, Parsi said, dissenters are being drawn from a wider pool, including “a poorer segment of the population that is politically involved, usually seen as the core base of the support for the regime itself—which in some ways is more worrisome for the regime.”

Geranmayeh agreed, noting protesters are drawn from across the regime's support base, whether that means the working classes or more rural communities. This broader support demonstrates that these protests are “more endemic than the ones we saw in 2009,” she explained.

Iranian students scuffle with police at the University of Tehran during a demonstration driven by anger over economic problems, in the capital Tehran on December 30, 2017.STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Iran has one of the youngest populations in the world, and around 60 percent of the country is under the age of 30. Iran’s youth were not alive when the corrupt Shah was overthrown, and Islamic theocracy is all they have known. Many appear ready for a change, and Geranmayeh said a significant portion of the demonstrators are under the age of 25. “A new generation of people in Iran is becoming politically aware,” Nader said.

A movement without leaders

Parsi believes the regime is closing ranks. Qasem Soleimani, a Major General in the country’s Revolutionary Guards and commander of its covert Quds Force, has been pushed to the fore. Soleimani, who commands respect from across the political spectrum, last week warned Trump that military action against this nation would be costly. “Seeing them putting him forward gives the impression that they're closing ranks and unifying rather than panicking,” Parsi suggested.

An Iranian girl walks across the Zayandeh Rud river in Isfahan, which now runs dry due to water extraction before it reaches the city, on April 11. The water shortage is threatening the livelihoods of farmers.ATTA KENARE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The disturbances will likely continue for “quite some time,” Parsi said. He warned that the bad situation will only get worse as the economic forecast worsens. And Geranmayeh noted that if November's oil sanctions are as harsh as those imposed on the country in 2011, they could hit 40 percent of the Iranian government's revenue. She believes the protests will “keep happening in bursts across the country,” especially as economic conditions get steadily worse.

Nevertheless, Parsi added, the elements needed for a “pre-revolutionary scenario” have not emerged. This would require improved connectivity between different sections of society, political coalitions and a unified anti-regime political agenda. “They may emerge, but for them to emerge it requires some degree of leadership, and we don't see a degree of leadership at all,” Parsi said.

The only real alternatives to Iran's establishment political figures “are outside of the country and they have quite minimal support inside the country,” Geranmayeh said. “That makes it more difficult for these protests to turn into the tsunami wave that the government can't control.”

Iran's powerful security forces stand in the way of the protesters. Dozens of people have been reported killed in demonstrations across the country, the real number likely higher than the regime admits. “If they were to decide to really clamp down hard, I think we would see a very, very nasty situation,” Parsi said.

So far, it would appear neither Rouhani nor the security forces wish to crack down hard. Rouhani's reformist base would be outraged by state-ordered violence, while continued public embarrassment for the relatively liberal president might play into the hands of the more traditionalist security establishment. If a unified movement coalesces and begins gaining dangerous momentum, “I don't think people have may big doubts that the security establishment will come in very forcefully at that stage,” Geranmayeh said.

Trouble with Trump

From an international perspective, the Trump White House “was already positioned to take a tougher approach to Iran well before the protests broke out,” Dalia Dassa Kaye, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told Newsweek. “But the protests no doubt provided more fodder for Trump’s escalation against Iran with the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear agreement and now a mounting pressure campaign to isolate Iran,” she said.

Senior administration officials such as national security adviser John Bolton, presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have all been bullish in recent comments on the Iranian regime. For Kaye, this shows the White House thinks Iran is vulnerable.

Iranians burn an image of U.S. President Donald Trump during an anti-American demonstration outside the former U.S. embassy in the capital Tehran on May 9.ATTA KENARE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Of course, such pressure carries its own risks. A more isolated Iran with no nuclear restrictions could be more dangerous than the current scenario. “The risks of the current U.S. approach are high, but the Trump administration appears to be doubling down on it,” Kaye said.

But rather than forcing Iran to the negotiating table, initiating regime change or even going to war, Parsi argued that the Trump administration might be considering another option—regime collapse with no replacement government. This could fit the goals of Saudi Arabian and Israeli leaders, with whom Trump is forging a new Middle East alliance.

“Nothing would shift the balance of power in Saudi Arabia's favor more than Iran essentially disintegrating into chaos," Parsi suggested. “An Iran with a proper democratic government, frankly would become a much more potent rival of Saudi Arabia.”

Given the chaos observed in disintegrating states like Somalia, Libya and Syria, Parsi went on, “everyone else would be terrified of it.” But for the Trump administration and some of its Middle Eastern allies, Iran’s collapse might offer a more beneficial scenario than either containment or regime change.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani attends a meeting with Muslim leaders and scholars in Hyderabad, India, on February 15. Rouhani is facing protests at home and U.S.-led pressure from abroad.REUTERS/DANISH SIDDIQUI

Iran is no stranger to upheaval, war or protest. The Islamic Republic has weathered four decades of challenges, and so far, muddled its way through them all. That said, Geranmayeh believes the country's sense of national unity and cohesion is under threat. “People are so disgruntled and so disillusioned that the external threat of Trump may not be enough to hold the country together,” she explained.

“It is no longer enough—as these protests have shown—to keep blaming all the problems of the country on America, and sanctions, and foreign powers,” Geranmayeh continued. Iranians are no longer buying it. They are demanding more transparency, accountability and better management of the country's finances.

If Iran's leaders can salvage something from the JCPOA, it may be enough to get the country through to 2020, when the Trump threat will either be removed or reinforced. For Geranmayeh, the country is in trouble, but not in peril. “I really don't fall into the camp that thinks the collapse is around the corner—this is the line that in Washington D.C. we've been getting told for about 40 years now,” she concluded.


(Newsweek)

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — When Nicaraguan paramilitaries stripped him naked and pushed him into a gravelike hole, Marco Noel Novoa assumed his life would end soon.

The 26-year-old student was an active participant in the protests of Nicaragua’s powerful president, Daniel Ortega. He helped occupy a university. He collected money for the opposition. And he was an American citizen — born in Macon, Ga. — in the middle of a conflict for which the State Department has denounced Ortega’s government and demanded an end to state-sponsored violence.

U.S. citizen Marco Novoa is seen in Sri
Lanka in 2016. He says he was kidnapped
and tortured in May by Nicaraguan
paramilitary members. (Marco Novoa)

With guns trained on him, Novoa said, he cried out in desperation, hurling insults at Ortega and calling for a free Nicaragua.

“I was thinking I was going to die,” Novoa said in an interview weeks later. “And those were my last words.”

Nicaraguans have watched paramilitaries — plainclothes militiamen who appear to be working in close coordination with government security forces — fight pitched battles against protesters since an uprising against Ortega’s gov­ernment began three months ago. They have burned homes, businesses and university buildings. But there is a less visible side to the violence: These roving bands of masked gunmen have quietly kidnapped and tortured dissidents like ­Novoa. Some 600 people have been captured by armed groups and have disappeared, according to the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights.

Novoa spent seven days in captivity in late May, and he said he endured regular beatings, electric shocks, mock executions and waterboarding. The torture reached its most severe point, he said, when his captors sodomized him using a metal mortar tube of the type that protesters have been firing at government forces during the past three months of upheaval in Nicaragua.

“They took my humanity,” he said.

Novoa’s account could not be independently verified but was corroborated by his father. His medical reports, viewed by The Washington Post, were consistent with the injuries he described. Novoa and his family fled Nicaragua and are in the United States. Ortega has denied that paramilitary forces are carrying out violence on behalf of his government. Nicaragua’s National Police did not respond to a written request for comment about Novoa’s case.

His story is echoed in reports by human rights groups and other victims of abuse and torture at the hands of pro-government forces. In some places, the paramilitaries have gone house to house hunting protesters and participated in “illegal detentions, forced disappearances, and executions,” the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights said in a July report.

“It is impossible that [paramilitaries] could operate without the direct participation of the state,” said Gonzalo Carrion, the legal director of the organization. “They are an apparatus of repression and terror.”

A pro-government caravan drives through Diriamba, Nicaragua, in support of President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista National Liberation Front or FSLN.(Joshua Partlow/The Washington Post)

The Trump administration has been increasingly critical of Ortega’s government as the conflict has progressed. In July, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions against three top Nicaraguan officials. On Monday, the White House said in a statement that “President Ortega and Vice President Murillo are ultimately responsible for the pro-government parapolice that have brutalized their own people.”

So far, human rights groups estimate that as many as 450 people have been killed since the protests began in April amid a groundswell of anger over social security reforms and general frustrations that Ortega’s government had eroded democratic institutions while enriching himself and his family. More than 2,800 have been injured, according to the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights.

Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla during Nicaragua’s civil war who is in his fourth term as president, has denied collaboration between the government and the paramilitary forces and has referred to these gunmen as “voluntary police.” Ortega has said in televised interviews in recent weeks that these forces are organized by other political parties, including opponents of the government, and receive funding from drug traffickers and the United States.

“They are not paramilitaries,” Ortega told CNN on Monday. “They are citizens defending themselves.”

President Daniel Ortega, center, speaks July 19 in Managua during the celebration of the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. Nicaragua’s paramilitary forces include ex-Sandinista combatants, experts say. (Rodrigo Sura/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Felix Maradiaga, a Harvard-trained academic and former top Nicaraguan government official, was leading a focus group discussing nonviolence inside a restaurant in the town of Leon when a few dozen men marched into the room. Maradiaga had been accused by a top police commander of being a mastermind behind the protests, something he denies. The militiamen who entered the restaurant July 11 began shouting “assassin” at him.

“They began to throw glasses, tables, chairs,” he recalled.

The men pounced on Mara­diaga and dislocated his jaw, broke his nose and injured three fingers.

On Twitter, Francisco Palmieri, principal deputy assistant sec­retary for Western Hemisphere ­affairs at the State Department, condemned the assault on Maradiaga and the ­“brazen gov’t-sponsored violence & intimidation.”

Maradiaga said that the government’s public criticism of him is terrifying.

“It’s basically a death sentence,” he said.

[How Nicaragua’s new revolution took shape]

Nicaragua’s paramilitary forces are a motley band of current and former soldiers and police, ex-Sandinista combatants from the 1980s civil war, local officials, neighborhood-level party loy­alists, and Ortega supporters young and old, according to ­security experts and human rights groups.

The paramilitaries travel in convoys of trucks, at times flying red-and-black flags of the ruling Sandinista party, and brandish AK-47s and other guns. Those who have seen them say that their organized patrols, on foot and in vehicles, and their familiarity with weaponry suggest prior military or police training.

“It’s difficult to pin down their numbers, but they have a national presence,” said Roberto Cajina, a security expert in Nicaragua.

Paramilitaries ransacked Catholic churches in several cities after government supporters ­accused churches of giving refuge to protesters, whom the ­government considers criminals and terrorists.

“They get to act totally outside the law,” said Tanya Mroczek-Amador, chief executive of Corner of Love, a religious organization based in Washington state that imports medicine to Nicaragua and whose church near the northern city of Matagalpa was shot at by paramilitaries during a recent service. “They’re hunting down doctors and people providing medicine.”

Paramilitary members burst into the Basilica of San Sebastian in Diriamba, Nicaragua, on July 9. Graffiti was left on the facade of the church. (Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images)

The Basilica of San Sebastian is among several churches ransacked after government supporters accused them of giving refuge to protesters. (Jorge Torres/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

“Thank God the population rose up and took away the barricades,” said Abbali Barahona, an official in the Diriamba mayor’s office, as he waited in the town plaza for a pro-government caravan to begin. The protesters, he said, are “lazy criminals.”

As he spoke, a couple dozen masked militiamen carrying rifles took up positions guarding the basilica and central plaza before escorting the caravan on its journey.

“Paramilitaries don’t exist here,” Barahona said.

The paramilitaries came for Novoa as he was collecting money. On the evening of May 24, he recalled, a few dozen masked gunmen surrounded a house in Managua where Novoa had been told that a friend’s father wanted to make a donation. He was quickly captured, beaten, blindfolded and gagged with a chemical-soaked rag that was duct-taped in place, he said.

“They throw me in the truck. They put a pistol on my neck. And a pistol on my back,” he said. “They tell me if I move, I’m going to get shot.”

Novoa grew up all over the world — the United States, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Australia, Malaysia. The son of a tobacco company employee, he moved back to Nicaragua for high school and college. He was about a month away from graduating from American University in Managua when the protests began.

Anti-Ortega rebels restore a cross that was taken down by pro-Ortega paramilitaries in July. Protests against Ortega began in April amid anger over social security reforms and frustrations that democracy has been eroded. (Juan Carlos/for The Washington Post)

He joined marches along with classmates, but his conviction deepened when he saw pro-government forces attacking students and volunteers inside the Managua Metropolitan Cathedral with guns and tear gas.

“We were trying to protect ourselves. They were shooting at us with real bullets,” Novoa told me when I met him in April inside the Polytechnic University, which he and other student protesters had seized at the time. “It’s like Tiananmen Square.”

When he was captured later, Novoa said, he was taken to a place he came to believe was a private prison on a farm somewhere near the capital. He was kept naked in a small, dirt-floored cell, and he could hear several other prisoners. In moments when his blindfold slipped, Novoa said he identified policemen along with the plainclothes gunmen inside.

During his days in captivity, Novoa said he was regularly doused with water and shocked with a stun gun. During one session, a guard broke his right ankle with the butt of a rifle. During another, his captors waterboarded him, he said, strapping him to a wooden contraption, his feet elevated, and poured water over his mouth and nose.

Later, he said, a group of guards came into his cell, threw him against the wall, and shoved a metal mortar tube into his rectum.

“And they kicked it inside until I bled,” he said. “I was crying. I was saying — I remember the words — I was saying: ‘God, why are you doing this? Why do I deserve this?’ ”

A young anti-Ortega rebel prays in support of Masaya. So far, human rights groups estimate that as many as 450 people have been killed and over 2,800 have been injured since the protests began. (Juan Carlos/for The Washington Post)

Novoa said he was dropped off on the side of the road in Managua on the evening of May 31. He stumbled to a nearby security guard, called his parents and was taken to the Vivian Pellas hospital. His hospital report notes his broken ankle and effects of “psychological and physical aggression” due to kidnapping.

Now that he is out of Nicaragua, Novoa thinks that his status as an American citizen, from an upper-class family, may have been the only thing that saved his life.

“I’m a U.S. citizen, and that’s what I got,” he said. “Imagine just being Nicaraguan.”

Ismael Lopez Ocampo in Managua and Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

(The Washington Post)