You may recall the Washington Post‘s editorial page editor coming to his senses (briefly) in April 2011, writing, “The GOP’s climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.”

But that was apparently no reason for the paper to stop deluding its readers with the umpteenth piece of disinformation from resident anti-scientist George Will. While many studies have shown climate change has worsened wildfires, drought, and deluges, Will mocked the President’s inaugural remarks:

He says that “the threat of climate change” is apparent in “raging fires,” “crippling drought” and “more powerful storms.” Are fires raging now more than ever? (There were a third fewer U.S. wildfires in 2012 than in 2006.) Are the number and severity of fires determined by climate change rather than forestry and land-use practices?

2006? Seriously, George Will — and blinkered editors at the Washpost?  If you wonder why in Hell (and High Water) Will just happens to pick the year 2006, you need look no further than the above graph of annual U.S. acreage burned from the National Fire Center (via Tamino).

For Will and the Washpost, the “decline” since the record-smashing 2006 disproves climate change. In Will’s logic, unless ever year is worse than the previous year in all respects, humans are not suffering the effects of global warming.

We have moved beyond a time when such op-eds should be seen as just the outgrowth of a polarized political system. George Will, with the support of the Washington Post, is spreading disinformation whose goal is to delay or stop efforts to deal with climate change. If these efforts are successful, they will cause billions of people to needlessly suffer. As President Obama said, such Willful denial of “the overwhelming judgment of science” can only be seen as an effort to “Betray Our Children And Future Generations.”

Shame on George Will and the Washington Post. While it would be trivial to debunk Will’s entire piece, wasting everyone’s time is a key goal of disinformers like Will, so I’ll just focus on the fires.

Will coyly asks, “Are the number and severity of fires determined by climate change rather than forestry and land-use practices?” The key debater’s word there is “determined.” It should be “increased.”

The goal of disinformers and their media allies is to create a straw man whereby those who accept the overwhelming judgment of science are accused of saying global warming is the sole cause of a given extreme event, rather than an aggravating cause.

Will, a pedant of the worst kind, doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know. There is a large and growing literature that global warming is increasing the number and severity of wildfires in this country — and that it is going to get much, much worse. A 2006 cover story in the prestigious journal Science magazine, “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity
explains:

We compiled a comprehensive database of large wildfires in western United States forestssince 1970 and compared it with hydroclimatic and land-surface data. Here, we show that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt.

Even worse, the wildfire threat is poised to grow, causing a feedback effect that accelerates global warming. The 2006 study concluded:

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Graphic depiction of the amount of sunlight above and underneath the Arctic sea ice. The growing coverage of the ice by darker meltponds increases the share of sunlight [that] passes the sea ice. That means, the space underneath the ice becomes brighter and warmer. Furthermore less sunlight is refleced back into the atmosphere. Graphic: Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener Institute news release

The Arctic sea ice has not only declined over the past decade but has also become distinctly thinner and younger. Researchers are now observing mainly thin, first-year ice floes which are extensively covered with melt ponds in the summer months where once metre-thick, multi-year ice used to float. Sea ice physicists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have now measured the light transmission through the Arctic sea ice for the first time on a large scale, enabling them to quantify consequences of this change. They come to the conclusion that in places where melt water collects on the ice, far more sunlight and therefore energy is able to penetrate the ice than is the case for white ice without ponds. The consequence is that the ice is absorbing more solar heat, is melting faster, and more light is available for the ecosystems in and below the ice. The researchers have now published these new findings in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.

In recent years he and his team have observed a strikingly large number of melt ponds during summer expeditions to the central Arctic. Virtually half of the one-year ice was covered with melt ponds. Scientists attribute this observation to climate change. “The ice cover of the Arctic Ocean has been undergoing fundamental change for some years. Thick, multi-year ice is virtually nowhere to be found any more. Instead, more than 50 per cent of the ice cover now consists of thin one-year ice on which the melt water is particularly widespread. The decisive aspect here is the smoother surface of this young ice, permitting the melt water to spread over large areas and form a network of many individual melt ponds”, explains Marcel Nicolaus. By contrast, the older ice has a rougher surface which has been formed over the years by the constant motion of the floe and innumerable collisions. Far fewer and smaller ponds formed on this uneven surface which were, however, considerably deeper than the flat ponds on the younger ice.

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Oak Park and Korea Smart Grid Institute sign agreement

The village of Oak Park, a suburb west of Chicago, was recently selected from a list of competing volunteer neighborhoods to be the test site for smart grid technology.

The project is a joint venture between the Korean Smart Grid Institute and the Institute for Sustainable Energy Development, and will involve placing a set of twelve or thirteen 3-kilowatt solar panels, along with a battery system, on the roofs of 100 residential and 100 multifamily buildings. They’ll also all be linked up to an electrical grid boasting smart meters, and once the test run of the system is over the building owners will get to keep the installations, worth $20,000 to $30,000 a pop.

Oak Park’s sustainability manager, K.C. Poulos, sat down with Grist for an interview about the project that ran on Friday. The hope, as she put it, is to demonstrate new ways to generate, transmit, and use electricity — providing greater efficiencies, lower costs to consumers, and hopefully the seed bed for a more sustainable energy economy:

[The Korean Smart Grid Institute] did the demonstration on an island in South Korea called Jeju Island. It’s kind of like their Hawaii — it’s a resort area. They were able to put up a demonstration that showed how distributed generation like solar can be connected to a network operations center. All of these houses got battery storage so when you weren’t using your solar power in the house, you could store it in a battery system. When the grid on that island became overloaded with demand, the network operating system could send messages to those households saying, “You need to use to your battery. We’re going to take all of the energy from your solar panels for the next four hours and put them right on the grid. And then we will send you a check next month. Thank you very much for letting us buy your power for four hours.” [...]

The [scenario for Oak Park homeowners] we talk about the most is this idea of collecting the solar energy during the day and storing it in the battery and then having the house run on the battery at night so you’re completely offline at night and the battery provides a phantom load — your clocks, TV. Your energy load is pretty low at night but that means you’re not taking anything off the grid. So you’re reducing your bill right there.

Then let’s say there’s an outage in your neighborhood. What we want these systems to be able to do is operate off the battery so these houses can stay somewhat energized. It’s only a three kilowatt system on the house so it’s not like you could have every appliance running at the same time. You’ll have enough for lights, fans, and the refrigerator or A/C. But at least you’re online still and you’re not losing an entire freezer of meat. [...]

The [average number of outages] for Oak Park is 45 minutes per year. What the number doesn’t tell you about is the stories I hear when [residents] call up on day three of still not having power. Then I get calls from restaurants. You’re talking about an entire week’s or month’s inventory gone.

The total bill for the project will be $5 to $6 million, though Oak Park itself will not have to pay the tab. Half the cost will be covered by the South Korean research institute, and the other by the ISED’s efforts to secure government funding. Oak Park’s residents are instead agreeing to participate in the project, to allow workers to set up the installations on their homes, and to allow data about their power usage to be gathered and transmitted digitally for further study and development of the technology. The information will be collected as an aggregate in order to help protect individuals’ privacy, and to keep the experiment consumer-oriented.

As with other smart grid systems, the Oak Park project will allow for two way communication between consumers and the grid hub, which will lessen the chances of outages and help improve efficiency of energy use.