Now The Fun Begins: Vermont Lawmakers Gov Wrangle Over Flood Legislation

The Vermont Legislature is working on a bill that backers hope will limit the kind of flood destruction the Green Mountain State saw last year. 

But the bill's future is iffy. 

As VTDigger tells us, the Vermont Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee voted 5-0 last month on S.213, a bill that require a state permit to build in river corridors.  

Sounds simple, right? If we don't construct new buildings where rivers flood, we won't have new structures to see damage from said flood. 

North Branch of the Winooski River in downtown 
Montpelier, Vermont on July 10, 2023. Photo was
taken less than three hours before the river inundated
the downtown, causing many millions of dollars
in property damage. Now, the Vermont legislature
is working on ways to boost flood resiliency 
in the age of climate change. 

As always, though, it's more complicated than that. 

There's more than just construction at stake in the legislation. As VTDigger explains:

"It would require the state to manage for a net gain of wetland acreage, and it would install measures ti improve dam safety, such as strengthening oversight and setting up funding mechanisms for emergency and nonemergency dam maintenance and removal."

Then there's process. S.213 needs to go through more committees then get a vote in the entire Senate. Plus, reports are, Gov. Phil Scott is not a big fan of this legislation.   

The big sticking point will probably be opposition to how the bill would shift management of development near waterways from municipalities to the state. That's where Gov. Scott's distaste for the legislation comes up

Scott said the bill would shift "responsibilities for certain types of land use regulation from Vermont municipalities to (the Agency of Natural Resources) that will put Vermonters in jeopardy of violating laws they don't even know exist."

Scott likes local control, and I see his point. People naturally chafe under state and federal regulation, and seem to trust the local leaders they run into at the the grocery or hardware store. 

But do flood-prone Vermont cities and towns have the wherewithal to manage development in and near flood plains, on top of trying to recover from the disasters that befell them last summer, and to a lesser extent in December?

VTDigger also reports people in the ANR believe they don't have the bandwidth and personnel to take on all these new responsibilities. 

Plus, ANR officials worry about environmental justice. Roughly a third of manufactured home parts in the state have a least some land in floodplains. People without resources would have trouble affording and sifting through the permit process.

Then again, people without resources would have trouble affording and sifting through the process of experiencing and recovering from a flood. 

The bottom line is the backers of the legislation are right that we need to take bold action to build every defense we can against the inevitable next big flood, made ever more possible with climate change. 

But that bold action is daunting when faced with the scope of the problem. Just that one flood last summer damaged around 4,000 Vermont homes and about 800 businesses. We're still managing the after effects of that, and at the same time we need to carefully plan for the next flood or storm?

Vermonters can walk and chew gum at the same time, but they can't also juggle flaming chainsaws, write the next Great American Novel, cure cancer and send people to Mars while walking and chewing that gum. 

This wrangling is a cautionary tale for states in the rest of the United States that will need to scramble to make new rules to build resilience against the effects of climate change.  Depending on where you are, these risks include but are not limited to more intense hurricanes, sea level rise, worse heat waves, wildfires, pollution and more unpredictable severe weather events. 

Vermont has a reputation for a relative level of political civility.  Sure, we have plenty of spats among elected officials, but things aren't nearly as weird and fraught as in other states. Hi there, Florida and Texas! 

We'll probably work out some compromises with the proposed flood legislation. Or, if Scott vetoes the bill, the heavily Democratic legislature might override it.   

Whether or not this all gets resolved, we'll still have plenty more legislative battles in Vermont and pretty much everywhere else as we reckon what to do with climate change.

 

Why We Need Television Meteorologists, But How Much Will They Have To Adapt?

Are weaather apps "just as good"
as television meteorologists?
I don't think so, but some 
people do, and the debate is on.

 Matthew Cappucci opened up a can of worms. So did Ana Kasparian. 

Yet the can of worms the two opened up is a healthy one. At least for weather geeks. And the general public who consume weather information, i.e. practically all of us. 

Ana Kasparian is the executive producer for the public affairs channel "The Young Turks" on YouTube. She recently tweeted "Blows my mind that local news still does weather. What are you guys doing? I can look p the 7 day forecast on my phone."

Now, that's a great way to raise the hackles of meteorologists everywhere. A stupid, amateurish phone app that relies on algorithms to forecast the weather is not as good as a real life meteorologist, right?

Well..........

Cappucci is a young, smart television meteorologist for Fox 5 in Washington DC and is also a writer for the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang.

So he looked at this, in depth, for Capital Weather Gang.

As Cappucci notes, meteorologists immediately took umbrage with Kaparian's tweet. 

Response to Kasparian's tweet were swift from the weather community, and often quite pithy like this one from Bryan Wilson (@Dual Doppler)  

"Blows my mind the Young Turks still does politics. What are you guys doing? I can look up current events on my phone."  

It got even worse when Kasparian doubled down when somebody noted that people watch The Weather Channel religiously. 

She said: "Exactly...there's an entire channel dedicated to weather. Can we actually get some reporting on news in the community that matters? People bragging about the weather report being the highest rated part of local news is not the flex they think it is."

As many meteorologists pointed out, Kasparian lives in southern California, where it's rarely anything other than sunny and in the 70s.  Most of us live in the real world where temperatures crash from the 70s to below freezing in a flash. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, hail storms and other nasty stuff intrude constantly.  Especially in the "fly-over" states.

A lot of us caught a real whiff of elitism in Kasparian's weather app tweets.

Plus there's practical issues with apps. Especially in emergencies. 

An app can't tell you exactly which neighborhood the tornado will hit next, how high the hurricane storm surge will get, whether the Volkswagon-sized hail will hit or miss Farmer John's fields, and whether the ice storm will keep your power out for a day or a week. 

Television meteorologist can do all that and often do.  Meteorologists held up as an example James Spann, the folksy, veteran Alabama television meteorologist who's credited with saving hundreds, maybe thousands of lives over recent decades as he guided viewers through the state's regular and disastrous tornado outbreaks, including the epic April, 2011 outbreak, among the worst in American history. 

However, we can't get away from the fact that a tornado doesn't go through your neighborhood every day, a hurricane won't blow away your city this week, and chances are your house will not float away in a massive flood the day after tomorrow.

The television meteorologists also give us context. Why is it snowing so hard at the other end of the state and now here? Why wasn't that rainstorm yesterday as bad as predicted? And most important these days, was that awful storm last week boosted by climate change?

Most of the time, though, local television meteorologists end up telling us that temperatures will be seasonable today, but there's a chance of showers so bring your umbrella!

Yawn. You can easily argue your weather app can handle the fact it will be 52 degrees with a 40 percent chance of showers.

This is where Cappucci musters a bit of sympathy for Kasparian's arguments. He writes:

"Kasparian certainly could have phrased her tweet differently or exhibited better understanding of what TV meteorologists do.  But there's some truth to the uncomfortable point she's making: Weather apps to a big part what has historically been a local meteorologists's job."

It's true that local meteorologists have enormous value, but Cappucci introduces a yeah, but:

"Weather apps are becoming pretty darn good, and in an era that features machine learning, it won't be long before weather models and apps eclipse the abilities of human forecasters. Nowadays, we even get wireless emergency alerts delivered to our phones that can wake us up and tell us to seek shelter."

Cappucci argues that television meteorologists need to be, well, punchier. 

"Local TV meteorologists can't expect to survive just standing in front of numbers, panels and day-part graphics. That's like just narrating what the app produces. Viewers don't need someone standing and pointing at the same thing their phone can spit out. Sure, the forecast from your local TV station might be 5 or even 10 percent better than that of a high-quality weather app, but odds are viewers won't notice the difference."

Ouch. So do we need a song and dance during the 6 o'clock weather segment on your local Eyewitless newscast?

Your local TV meteorologist is a scientist, not an entertainer. We expect Lady Gaga to awe us with her singing voice and concert performances. We don't expect Lady Gaga to explain how orographic lift is enhancing snow showers around Jay Peak.

Which means we shouldn't expect our local TV meteorologists to put on that song and dance. That's not their job. We just want them to tell us whether I can mow the lawn tomorrow before the scattered thundershowers arrive.

Even so, Cappucci argues:

"I firmly believe that for the industry to survive and to serve audiences effectively, we have to be either more or different.  Gone are the days of simply putting together a weather forecast and standing between a green screen and a TV camera to present it. The market is saturated with decent forecasts, and why would people watch TV at a designated when they can just access the same thing on their phones. That's where more or different comes in." 

Easy for Cappucci to say. The dude is loaded with personality, even if it's on the endearingly geeky side. That's not a slam against him. It's honestly refreshing when a weather person comes off as well, a person. 

Most television weather people seem personable enough.  You need a sense of humor in that business anyway especially when the foot of snow that was supposed to fall on Killington failed to materialize.

Luckily, local television news directors, at least in my opinion, seem to be giving their meteorologists more leeway so that they can explain technical meteorological science and climate change in a way that a distracted, tired and non-geeky person can understand, even enjoy. 

I don't think the big debate between Kasparian and her weather app and the meteorologists is settled. I for one, am old school, and would rather have a good television weather personality explain to me what's going on out there. 

Weather apps have their place, for sure. But frankly, if Kasparian ever wants the full weather story, she's definitely missing out with her app. 

 

Maybe Those Winter Storms Were NOT Caused By Jet Stream Made Weird By Climate Change

There's new debate over the specific mechanisms causing
intense winter snaps in places like the U.S. and
Europe despite an overall warming climate.

A theory about sharp winter storms and cold waves made paradoxically worse by a warming climate just took a big blow. 

I've mentioned this idea several times before during rough winter weather in the past, but here's a recap:

The theory is that the Arctic is warming faster than the mid-latitudes. That reduces the contrast in temperature between the far North and places down here. 

The reduced temperature contrast slows the jet stream, making it more prone to having bigger twists and turns along its path.  Occasional bigger southward dips in this jet stream regime would create a few intense cold snaps and winter storms, despite an overall warming climate. 

This idea gets floated a lot, like during the big Texas freeze and winter storm back in February. And it really does make sense. 

Except that new research suggests this whole wavy jet stream scenario isn't happening after all. Or at least isn't happening as much as some first though. 

The journal Science published an article recently about this new research.

As Science states:

"Now, the most comprehensive modeling investigation into this link has delivered the heaviest blow yet: Even after the massive sea ice loss expected by midcentury, the polar jet stream will only weaken by tiny amounts - at most only 10% of the natural swings. And in today's world, the influence of ice loss on winter weather is negligible, says James Screen, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter and the co-leader of the investigation."

The thought that a fast warming Arctic would screw around with the jet stream gained notice in 2012 through a paper by scientists Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus that examined this idea.

Francis and Vavrus had detected a weakening of the jet stream between the 1980s and the early 2010s that bolstered their theory of a more lame, meandering jet stream causing occasional extreme winter events in North America and Europe.

That weakening trend has since petered out even as carbon emissions and climate change continued unabated.

Of course, as Science notes, something else might be going on in the overall warmer atmosphere that is causing those occasional, intense, record breaking winter cold snaps that are interrupting our warmer winters now and then. 

Is less sea ice, combined with a trend for more snow over recent decades in Siberia, causing stratospheric disruptions. Those stratospheric disruptions mess with the polar vortex.  The polar vortex - a giant whirl of cold normally in the Arctic - then gets blown to pieces temporarily, helping send frigid air from the North Pole to places like Texas or Great Britain. 

Or, maybe atmospheric rivers - channels of warm, wet air - heading toward the Arctic more frequently, somehow displacing the normal icy air up there and sending it southward to torture the snow birds in normally temperate climates?

All this uncertainty proves the following: The basic science of climate change is settled science. Anyone who still believes the climate is not changing because of carbon emissions is either a crackpot or lying. 

However, the detailed mechanisms of this warming - how it affects specific weather events, specific locations and specific aspects of our complicated atmosphere - still need lots of study.

It's important to do so, because the more understanding we have of the deep details of climate change, the better society will be at anticipating and reacting to the negative effects of what we're doing to the atmosphere.