Salem Political Snark

Trump acting like a jerk in politicizing Los Angeles wildfires

No big surprise, but really disturbing nonetheless.

Donald Trump, who recently was elected president of the entire United States, all 50 of them, is acting like the non-empathetic jerk that he is by making completely unfounded criticisms of California's governor regarding the wildfires that are devastating the Los Angeles area.

If Trump had one ounce of decency in his flabby body, he'd be making statements like any other president-elect would. Like: "My heart goes out to everyone suffering from the fires in southern California. I assure you that once I become president I'll order my administration to do everything possible to help you and your communities recover from this disaster."

Here's a photo of part of the devastation caused by the wildfire that hit Pacific Palisades. Sure seems like every politician, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, would feel saddened by this image.

Reports I saw today said that the entire community of Pacific Palisades, which has about 25,000 people, essentially is destroyed. This includes the core of the town: two large grocery stores, high school, restaurants, churches, almost everything. It reminds me of the fire that destroyed the town of Lahaina on Maui, countless lives turned upside down by a wind-fueled wildfire.

Yet Trump is spouting lies about this disaster in a disgusting attempt to score political points. A Washington Post story, "As L.A. burns, Trump blames Newsom -- and California governor pushes back,"  says:

President-elect Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom clashed Wednesday over fires burning out of control in the Los Angeles area, injecting national politics into a growing crisis in the city that Vice President Kamala Harris calls home and that President Joe Biden was visiting for the birth of his great-grandson.

During a news conference Tuesday, Newsom had urged Trump not to “play any politics” during the “precious moments that we have to evacuate.”

But as the fires forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes and left at least five dead Wednesday, Trump sought to pin the catastrophe on Democratic governance, blaming Newsom’s water management decisions for the fires — an idea that water experts strongly disputed — and noting that some fire hydrants had run dry amid huge demand.

...Trump’s contention that Newsom’s water management decisions were to blame for the severity of the fires is not supported by the facts, multiple water experts told The Washington Post.

“There is no relationship between federal and state water management and the intensity of these fires or the ability of people to fight these fires,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank. Instead, he said, lack of rain and severe winds created dangerous conditions.

“Right now Southern California has ample water supplies, their reservoirs are full — they’re well above historical averages. They do a very good job of managing water. There is no shortage of water in Southern California, that’s just not true,” Mount added.

He said some hydrants are running dry not because the region ran out of water, but because pressure drops with high demand, making it harder to move water around.

Los Angeles’ vegetation, which is highly flammable, exacerbates the problems caused by dry conditions and high winds, said Matthew Hurteau, a forestry vegetation expert and professor at the University of New Mexico.

After two wet years, which led to increased vegetation growth, Los Angeles has received almost no rain since the spring of 2024. I heard a figure of 2/10 of an inch, which is next to nothing. So the vegetation was extremely dry. 

Then came the Santa Ana winds, gusting to as much as 100 miles an hour. The winds turbocharged the wildfires, causing them to grow rapidly. This is January. Usually the Santa Ana winds occur earlier. However, climate scientists predicted that global warming would cause the winds to become stronger and occur later.

Here's the abstract of that 2006 study. 

A new method based on global climate model pressure gradients was developed for identifying coastal high-wind fire weather conditions, such as the Santa Ana Occurrence (SAO). Application of this method for determining southern California Santa Ana wind occurrence resulted in a good correlation between derived large-scale SAOs and observed offshore winds during periods of low humidity. The projected change in the number of SAOs was analyzed using two global climate models, one a low temperature sensitivity and the other a middle-temperature sensitivity, both forced with low and high emission scenarios, for three future time periods. This initial analysis shows consistent shifts in SAO events from earlier (September–October) to later (November–December) in the season, suggesting that SAOs may significantly increase the extent of California coastal areas burned by wildfires, loss of life, and property.

Of course, Trump is a climate change denier. He wants the United States to produce more greenhouse gas pollution, not less. So Trump has neither the intelligence nor the willingness to grasp the truth about the Los Angeles wildfires: they're being stoked by rising temperatures. A Vox story says: 

Wildfires are a natural part of the landscape in California, but the danger they pose to the region is growing because more people are living in fire-prone areas. That increases the likelihood of igniting a blaze and the scale of the damage that occurs when a fire inevitably erupts. California’s growing wildfire threat has rocked the state’s insurance industry and forced regulators to allow insurers to price in the risk of worsening future catastrophes. At the same time, global average temperatures are rising due to climate change, which can prime more of the landscape to burn.

It will take a concerted effort on many fronts to mitigate the wildfire threat, including using more fire-resistant building materials, performing controlled burns to reduce fuels, changing where people live, improving forecasting, pricing insurance in line with the actual disaster risk, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.

Climate is best reason to vote for Harris, and nobody's talking about it

There are many strange things about the current presidential campaign, including: how Harris suddenly became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew; how the Republican Party could happily get behind Trump, a convicted felon who lost the last election; how neither campaign is speaking much about the climate crisis, even though it is by far the most important long-term issue. 

I've watched all of Harris' debates and major speeches. Her silence on global warming is deafening. So is Trump's, but that's to be expected.

Based on his first term in office, and what he's saying now, if Trump is elected it's a certainty that he will try to undo all of the Biden/Harris accomplishments aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, once again withdraw the United States from international efforts to combat human-caused climate change, and give free rein to the oil and gas industry to, as he puts it, "Drill, drill, drill."

Yet long after the current furors over securing our southern border, protecting our democracy, and reducing inflation have been forgotten, the climate crisis will still be the most important long-term issue affecting the United States and the world.

So how is it that Kamala Harris has made this such an insignificant part of her campaign?

I expect this from Trump, not from Harris. I've been thinking that because fracking supposedly is a big deal to Pennsylvania voters, an important swing state, and Harris was attacked by Trump for saying in the 2020 presidential primary that she wanted to ban fracking, Harris is avoiding talking about climate change because it runs the risk of bringing back fracking as a campaign issue.

(Currently Harris says that she's OK with fracking, because she's learned that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced even if fracking continues -- a pretty weak explanation of why she's changed her mind.)

However, an essay by climate activist Bill McKibben in the October 28 issue of The New Yorker casts the climate change silence of the Harris campaign in a rosier light. Here's an excerpt:

This month, in the journal BioScience, a group of the world’s leading climate experts warned, “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”

Not that you’d know it from this year’s Presidential campaign. Vice-President Kamala Harris, since becoming the Democratic nominee, has spoken very little about climate change. To the degree that a transition from fossil fuel has been discussed at all, it’s been in the form of her assuring Pennsylvanians that she won’t interfere with fracking. She has spoken about creating green jobs, but not much else.

The reasons are fairly clear. First, the Democratic Party essentially had no primary season. Biden faced only token challenge, and when he stepped down Harris was nominated by acclamation, so activists had no chance to elevate climate change to a crucial electoral issue, as they had done in 2020.

Remember the backdrop: Greta Thunberg’s movement had crested in the fall of 2019, with some six million people marching in protests around the world. In this country, the Sunrise Movement was pushing a Green New Deal. The governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who was also briefly a Presidential candidate, called that time a “magic moment” for climate politics.

NBC reported, “Climate change has recently shot to the top of polls of issues that Democratic voters care about in the presidential primary, rivaling for the first time longstanding bread-and-butter topics like health care.” Harris, in her primary bid, said that global warming “represents an existential threat to who we are as a species.” Biden, after winning the nomination, secured Senator Bernie Sanders’s support by committing to work with him on climate initiatives.

The second reason for the relative silence this year is that Biden, in fact, largely kept to his commitment. He somehow persuaded the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which finally devoted serious federal money to an energy transition. His need for Senator Joe Manchin’s vote meant that the bill included gifts to the fossil-fuel industry, but it has nonetheless unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from heat pumps and E.V. chargers to battery factories.

The basic stance of mainstream environmentalists now is that the country is more or less on the right track. They assume that, if Harris wins, many of the people driving policy in the White House will remain in place and that, in four more years, the momentum behind clean energy will be unstoppable. The fossil-fuel industry apparently assumes the same thing: it has been raising money at Spindletop rates for Trump, who has promised to “drill, drill, drill” and has noted, “I hate wind.” The choice is so obvious that Harris doesn’t really need to say much. But, if she’s elected, she’s going to have to do a lot.

That's for sure. I found an article by Elizabeth Colbert in the October 14 issue of The New Yorker to be super-scary. Here's passages about tipping points in "When the Arctic Melts: What the fate of Greenland means for the rest of the Earth."

Most scientists believe that ice ages—there have been at least ten of them over the past two and half million years—are initiated and terminated by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbit, caused by, among other factors, the tug of Jupiter and Saturn. But orbital shifts produce only slight changes in the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of the globe at different times of the year.

Such slight variations are insufficient to explain the growth and subsequent retreat of massive ice sheets. Rather, it seems, the orbital shifts act like a trigger, setting off other processes—feedbacks—that greatly amplify their effect.

One relatively straightforward feedback features albedo, from the Latin word for “whiteness.” Ice and especially snow have a high albedo. They reflect lots of sunlight back to space. Thus, as an ice sheet grows, the planet absorbs less energy. This has a cooling effect, which encourages the buildup of more snow and ice, which results in more reflectivity, and so on. Start to melt an ice sheet and the same cycle spins in reverse.

Today, feedbacks are, to put it mildly, a growing concern. A report published last year by more than two hundred researchers from around the world noted that many of the systems that determine the climate exhibit nonlinear behavior. Such systems may “shift to a very different state, often abruptly or irreversibly, as a result of self-sustaining feedbacks.” The researchers identified two dozen potential “tipping systems,” among them the Greenland ice sheet.

At a certain point, the report warned, feedbacks could become so powerful that, even if CO2 emissions were cut dramatically and temperatures stabilized, the ice sheet would continue to shrink, possibly until it collapsed. The “best estimate” of when this critical threshold will be reached is when average global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius—roughly three degrees Fahrenheit—above preindustrial levels. Even after that line is crossed, it will take many centuries for the changes set in motion to play out.

Still, as a practical matter, there will be no going back. When it comes to tipping systems, the future is in our hands until it isn’t.

...Climate change is not like other problems, and that is part of the problem. What it lacks in vividness and immediacy it makes up for in reach. Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone.

Owner of property where Liberty Fire began allowed use of ATVs that started fire

Thanks to an informative story by Capi Lynn in today's print edition of the Statesman Journal, we learned the cause of the August 23, 2023 brush fire in south Salem known as the Liberty Fire, because it was adjacent to Liberty Road.

The fire grabbed the attention of me and our neighbors out here in rural south Salem because we live off of Liberty Road about five miles from where the fire started. Yes, that's quite a ways, but brush fires can move very rapidly under windy conditions.

And of course the fire was of vastly more concern to the people living near the Liberty Fire. Fortunately, quick competent fire fighting work led to only 50 acres being burned, with no homes lost, though quite a few people had to evacuate their homes.

That's the good news. The bad news in the Statesman Journal story, which I found deeply disturbing, was that Terry Kelly, the owner of the property where the fire started, allowed his grandchildren to ride ATVs in tall grass, which caused the fire.

The [Salem Fire Department] report confirms what the newspaper reported the day after the fire. It originated in a field at 6331 Liberty Road S. and was caused by the hot exhaust of an ATV contacting dry vegetation.

The property owner is listed on the report as Terry Kelly, a local developer familiar to many in Salem. He is a former partner in Pence/Kelly Construction and Creekside Golf Club.

Kelly also is listed in the Liberty Fire report as a witness. He did not respond to an interview request.

It's too bad that Kelly wouldn't talk to the Statesman Journal, because he has a lot to answer for. Kelly talked with an investigator from the Fire Department on the day of the fire. He said that he'd given permission to his grandchildren to ride ATVs on the property. While they were taking a lunch break, the fire broke out.

There's essentially no doubt that the ATVs started the fire. A neighbor saw black spots behind the ATVs, with the fire becoming clearly evident soon after.

The Fire Department ruled out the other two possible causes: there was no evidence of a power line starting the fire, and no evidence that sunlight hitting glass in the grassy field started the fire, as Kelly hypothesized. The investigator searched for glass in the field and didn't find any.

Hopefully Terry Kelly will talk to a reporter before too long, because the public needs to understand what was going through his mind when he allowed his grandchildren to ride ATVs on his property. All the signs pointed to him needing to tell them a big loud NO!

-- the ATV's were operated in tall dry grass
-- four 100 degree days happened in Salem the week before
-- Marion County had said that ATVs could only be used on improved roads, except for farming
-- local officials had warned about increasing fire danger

Check out these visual facts about electric vehicles in Oregon

They (whoever they is) say that a picture is worth a thousand words.

So rather than describe last Friday's Salem City Club presentation about electric vehicles in Oregon, I figured it would be better to share some screenshots from the report the presentation was based on, the Oregon Department of Energy's 2023 Biennial Zero Emission Vehicle Report.

I didn't read the report. I just looked at the pictures and chose the ones that I thought were most interesting and could be grasped at a glance. My commentary will be brief.

BEV stands for Battery Electric Vehicle. PHEV stands for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle. Registrations for each are trending up nicely.

Yay, Oregon. We lag only California in the percentage of electric vehicle registrations in the first quarter of 2023, about 17% in our state based on my viewing of this chart.

Tesla is the leading seller in Oregon, but accounts for less than half of electric vehicle sales.

Two forecasts of electric vehicle registrations show that by 2035 they're expected to account for about 80% of all registrations, with that becoming 100% or close to it by 2050.


PGE forecasts of electric vehicle adoption are becoming increasingly optimistic.

Not surprisingly, electricity is way less carbon intensive than gasoline and diesel. It isn't zero because quite a bit of electricity in Oregon still comes from fossil fuel sources.

In 2021 electricity made up a very small percentage of transportation fuel consumption in Oregon. It must be somewhat higher now.

Early adopters drive initial electric vehicle purchases. The problem then becomes enticing more reluctant people to get on the EV bandwagon.

Interesting breakdown of who is most likely to consider getting an electric vehicle.

This chart shows the primary reason owners give for purchasing their electric vehicle.

Charging logistics, range, and cost are the top barriers to electric vehicle purchases.

Sometimes you hear that electric vehicles are so carbon intensive to manufacture, they're worse for the environment than gasoline vehicles. Not true. Burning gasoline leads to lots more emissions over the life cycle of a vehicle.


Charging availability is a major problem for increasing electric vehicle sales. This needs to change as soon as possible.

Climate change was scariest moment of Republican debate

To preserve my mental health, I've been watching my recording of the first Republican presidential debate in short chunks. So far I'm up to an hour of the two hour debate. 

The scariest moment of the debate that I've seen so far -- and I'm pretty sure it will remain on top of my fear factor after I've seen the whole thing -- was the horrendous answers given to a question posed by a young Republican. He said:

Polls consistently show that young people's number one issue is climate change. How would you, as both president of the United States and a leader of the Republican Party, calm their fears that the party doesn't care about climate change?

Well, the eight candidates onstage (Trump didn't take part) did very little, next to nothing in fact, to calm those fears. Which is strange politically, since young people obviously are an important voting bloc. 

They're going to be around long after older voters are dead and gone. Which helps explain why they're so concerned about climate change: young people are going to deal with the consequences of global warming the longest.

The Fox News moderators asked for a show of hands of those candidates who believe human behavior is causing climate change. Which, it is, obviously. I'll let an AP story tell the tale of what happened next.

The eight Republican presidential candidates on the debate stage were asked to raise their hands if they believed human behavior is causing climate change.

Not a single hand went up.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shut down the question and attacked the “corporate media.” Echoing the words of former President Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy called climate change “a hoax” and a “wet blanket on our economy.” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., insisted that more serious environmental threats are coming from China, India and Africa.

Just one Republican, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said during Wednesday night’s debate in Milwaukee that climate change “is real.”

A day later, frustrated leaders in the GOP’s small but growing movement of environmental activists said their party must do better. In fact, some young conservatives confronted Ramaswamy at a gathering after the debate and told him his answer was particularly unhelpful

“We’re getting to a point where Republicans are losing winnable elections because they’re alienating people that care about climate change,” Christopher Barnard, the Republican president of the American Conservation Coalition, the largest conservative environmental group in the nation, said Thursday.

As the 2024 presidential contest begins in earnest, the Republican Party is struggling to reconcile rising concerns about climate change — especially young people — with the GOP’s older base, which largely rejects climate science as a liberal conspiracy theory. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that heat-trapping gases released from the combustion of fossil fuels are pushing up global temperatures, upending weather patterns and endangering animal species.

...The presidential debate “underscored the fact that one of the two parties (the GOP) not only refuses to act on the climate crisis, but refuses to even acknowledge it exists,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said in an email. “It is a disqualifying position on the defining challenge of our time.”

“The party will lose a huge chunk of voters, especially women and younger voters if it adopts this stance,” he said.

Here's a video of the climate change portion of the debate.

And here's a photo of a clump of oak trees on the upper part of our rural south Salem property that I took this afternoon. We've lived here for 33 years. I don't recall ever seeing oak leaves turning brown and falling off the trees in freaking August. 

Oaks aren't supposed to lose their leaves anywhere near this early. It's still summer, not fall. But we haven't gotten any measurable rain for quite a few months, not since May, I'm pretty sure. And it's been considerably hotter than usual. 

"Usual" is a word that we'll be increasingly discarding as global warming hits harder and harder. That's why it was so disturbing to have the Republican presidential candidates be so dismissive of climate change. 

That may fly with most Republican primary voters. It's a recipe for disaster for our one and only planet.

Time for Salem to ban fireworks, sale and use

Yesterday the City of Salem banned the use of fireworks, as did two fire districts adjoining Salem. Now the City Council should implement a permanent ban on the sale and use of fireworks.

The reasons given for yesterday's ban only scratch the surface of what's wrong with fireworks. Sure, high temperatures, low humidity, and wind gusts make setting off fireworks especially dangerous in terms of starting fires.

But those conditions are the new normal for early July in this era of rapidly accelerating global warming. Yesterday, Tuesday July 4, was the hottest day on record for our planet. The average worldwide temperature broke the record set just the day before. And not just by a little, by three tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. 

CNN — This week saw the hottest global temperature ever recorded, according to data from two climate tracking agencies.

On Monday, the average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), the highest in the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s data, which goes back to 1979. On Tuesday, it climbed even further, reaching 17.18 degrees Celsius. The previous record of 16.92 degrees Celsius was set in August 2016.

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service on Wednesday also tweeted that Monday’s global temperature was a record in its data set.

Experts warn that the record could be broken several more times this year. Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in a Twitter post on Tuesday that the world “may well see a few even warmer days over the next 6 weeks.”

I give credit to Salem's new City Manager, Keith Stahley, for banning fireworks this year, something the previous City Manager, Steve Powers, refused to do in 2021 when July 4 also was marked by drought and high heat. Now it's time to make the ban permanent. 

On July 4, 2021 I marked the occasion by writing a blog post about how bad fireworks are.

In brief, they start fires; they cause trauma to pets; they scare wildlife; they create highly toxic gases and pollutants that poison the air, the water and the soil; and one more that I neglected to include in the post: they harm veterans with PTSD and others who are triggered by loud explosions. 

Here's some recent fireworks-related comments from a popular Facebook page dealing with issues concerning the Salem City Council.

We've said before that the escalating illegal fireworks issue would lead to a total ban of all fireworks because for years now they've just thumbed their noses at complaints about no enforcement of illegal fireworks laws. To the point where it's ongoing for months at all hours. The 3rd was horrifically loud. Last night even SPD was talking about dangerous "massive explosions." City of Salem needs to start confiscating and ticketing. It's ridiculous.
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I completely agree. For all intents and purposes, Salem has allowed illegal fireworks to become legal, through years of lack of enforcement. A ban on legal fireworks today, while laudable, has done nothing to curb the bombs and other illegal projectiles from going off this afternoon.
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Last year the Salem Police Chief said that SPD would not be enforcing fireworks ordinances. This year the Fire Marshall issued a ban on all but organized (eg the City of Salem fireworks at the Fairgrounds) displays and then immediately went on to say don't report those who are illegally setting-off fireworks! The result of these bizaar actions of Salem's officialdom is just what we would suspect: fireworks use has gone off the scale! In my Wesst Salem neighborhood there are this evening constant explosions of very large fireworks.
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We spent part of last night with the dog in his thunder vest and a sedative, but it took him a while to calm down. This am I was out before 10 picking berries and sure enough, a loud boom which set off the dog and irritated the hell out of me. Frankly, I don't care why the damn things get banned, but this nonsense needs to end. I have come to dislike this holiday when it should just be a nice time to have a summer BBQ without sounding like we are in a war zone.
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We had two solid hours of a neighbor launching illegal fireworks from an illegal mortar launcher last night. There is no longer any fear of consequences…it’s right out in the open.
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I have always loved fireworks, but watching how my pets cower with the booms, and hearing of the fright faced by small children and individuals with PTSD, and seeing the danger they pose to vegetation, wildlife, and structures, makes me now want them banned. We don’t need personal fireworks or even public displays. Let’s ban them in Salem. Please!
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It sounded like a major battle going on across the street in the church parking lot. Plus it was a major clean up for the day care workers this morning.

It's crazy that the City of Salem allows the sale of fireworks at lots of stands set up all around town, and apparently has zero enforcement against illegal fireworks, then issues a ban on setting off fireworks on the very day of July 4, which means hardly anyone knows about the ban, and even if they did know, they've already bought their fireworks so are going to set them off anyway -- especially since there are no consequences for doing this.

Many cities in Oregon have banned fireworks. Salem should join them. Back in 2021 this was the list that I reported on in my blog post. 

These are the Oregon cities and counties that have banned fireworks: Portland (and bans sales), Multnomah County (and bans sales), Milwaukie (and bans sales), Tigard, Tualatin, Gresham, West Linn, Hood River, The Dalles, Newberg, unincorporated Clackamas County, Bend. Most of these places, like Salem, are in northwest Oregon. They have almost exactly the same weather and fire risk level.

Oregon's snow and cold fits with global warming

This morning my wife and I woke up to a winter wonderland.

Our ten acres in rural south Salem looked beautiful, as did most of the rest of western Oregon after arctic air flowing southward collided with a low pressure disturbance rolling into the northwest from the Gulf of Alaska.

But with that beauty came a lot of problems. Many accidents on roads and freeways. Clogged traffic as people traveled the day after Christmas. And for us, five and a half inches of snow on our steep, long driveway.

After lunch I got out our ergonomic snow shovel (with a curved handle). It took me a bit more than two hours to clear our driveway, aided some by my wife. It's simple labor, pushing the snow from the middle of our driveway off to one side, then pushing more snow from the middle to the other side.

I've done this quite a few times during the 31 years we've lived at our house. Shoveling snow is good exercise. It relieves my snowstorm anxiety -- will the power go out? can our cars get up the driveway? -- when I stop worrying and start shoveling.

This time, though, my thoughts weren't as relaxed as they usually are. As I wrote about yesterday on my churchless blog, one reason was a form of PTSD following a nasty ice storm last February that left us without power for twelve days and lots of tree damage.

Sure, snow is different from ice. I knew that this storm would be much less serious than the one earlier in the year. Still...

As I cleared the snow from our driveway I found myself thinking about global warming, which really should be called global climate change, because the effects of rising greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere can include much more than warming.

Like, unusual cold spells. And unusual snow amounts.

It's rare for us to get over five inches of snow in a single day, with several inches more falling after sunset, and the snow is still coming down.

While I was shoveling away this afternoon, occasionally the sun would come out and I'd feel better. But then the snow would return. I'd think, "What if it ever snows heavily for an entire week, or even longer, with bitter cold preventing it from melting?"

This isn't an idle worry.

It's the sort of thing that will become more common as global climate change is increasingly serious. Drought. Flooding. Tornadoes. Blizzards. Hurricanes. Extreme weather already is becoming commonplace, and it will increase in frequency as greenhouse gas emissions continue to mount up.

I'm not saying that Oregon's current cold and snow was caused by climate change.

It's difficult to attribute most individual weather events to global climate change. However, it's well known that polar vortexes, where the jet stream bends markedly southward, allowing arctic air to flow into the United States, will be more common with climate change/global warming.

After I finished shoveling the snow off our driveway, I took our dog for her usual late afternoon walk. As we got to the end of a trail and reached the street that leads back to our house, I was thankful that I didn't have my iPhone with me.

Because if I did, I would have been tempted to get it out and take a photo of the buck with an impressive set of antlers standing in the snow on the other side of the road, nestled  between two oak trees. Instead, I was able to savor the moment without technology intruding.

He was looking right at us. That moment was like a painting brought to life. "Buck standing in snow." As the dog and I walked onto the road, the buck ran off, with a doe following him. It was a special moment. I was grateful to see this gorgeous creature.

Who was a part of nature, not of our human world. Moments like this remind me that we humans are unique among all other animal species in our capacity to massively screw up the natural environment that we, like the deer, depend on to sustain our life.

The buck is fortunate not to have his mind filled with thoughts of catastrophe caused by reckless disregard of our place in nature. My mind is different. I just hope enough other human minds wake up to the need to deal with global climate change before it is too late to make a difference.

Thirty-acre Meyer Farm property in south Salem may be developed

If you drive past Trader Joe's on Hilfiker Lane SE, on your left you'll see a surprising urban sight: thirty acres of beautiful undeveloped land. 

Unfortunately, there's a decent chance that before too long this property will become thirty acres of much less beautiful developed land.

But not if a group of people devoted to seeing the land remain as natural as possible succeed in their effort to stop the planned subdivision. Consider joining the Friends of The Meyer Farm Facebook group if you share their goal.

The Statesman Journal has done some good reporting on plans for the Meyer Farm. Family intrigue is involved. Here's some excerpts from "Subdivision, tree removal proposed for historic 30-acre  Meyer Farm in southeast Salem."

A proposal to turn nearly 30 acres of pastoral land in southeast Salem into a 138-lot, single-family residential subdivision has been filed with the city, and the public comment period ends at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 1.

The property in question, 4540 Pringle Road SE, is known as the Meyer Farm. A five-minute walk from one of the busiest thoroughfares in town, it features mostly open space with a large oak grove, a creek and views of the Cascades.

...Geoffrey James, land use chair for Morningside, posted its concerns on the "Friends of The Meyer Farm" Facebook Group page.

The group, created in April 2021, wants to save what it identifies as a historically significant urban farm, which includes an 1854 barn and a 1915 farmhouse. It is the last remaining parcel from Joseph Waldo's Donation Land Claim of 1852.

Complicating the proposal is the fact that the Henry A. Meyer Revocable Living Trust, which owns the property, has been mired in a trust dispute in Marion County Circuit Court for more than two years. The next scheduled proceeding is a status check hearing on Monday, Oct. 4, in Judge Thomas Hart's courtroom.

Henry Meyers' descendants, including five living children, have been split on selling the property, and complaints of trust mismanagement have surfaced.

The trustees were removed and the court appointed a successor trustee, attorney Michelle M. Morrow, around October 2020. Morrow's attorney, David L. Carlson, signed to authorize the filing of the subdivision application.

It's decidedly weird that what sounds like a caretaker trustee, Michelle Morrow, decided to take the side of the Meyer family that wants to develop the property, entering into an agreement with a Portland real estate developer, Martin Kehoe of Kehoe Northwest Properties.

This seems to almost guarantee a legal battle between Morrow, Kehoe, and the Meyer family members who favor the 30 acres becoming a subdivision, and the Meyer family members who want the land to remain much as it is -- perhaps becoming a city park.

I've recently started watching the streaming series Succession, which is about the intense family struggle to determine who gets to carry on the legacy of Logan Roy, a man in his 80's who founded the huge business that may or may not be wrested out of his control.

It'll be interesting to see whether the Meyer Farm saga reaches anywhere near that level of family conflict. 

Another Statesman Journal story, "Future of historic SE Salem Meyer Farm hinges on trust dispute, subdivision approval," describes the twists and turns of family control of the property. Excerpts:

Descendants of Henry Meyer have been fighting over the future of the farm for more than two years, split on whether to sell the land or maintain their father and grandfather's legacy for future generations.

...The trust was supposed to be dissolved 20 years after his death — Henry died May 30, 2000, at the age of 84 — but began to unravel before then.

At the time, it was managed primarily by Tim Meyer, one of the sons, an international banker and co-owner of Salem-based Kettle Chips. He was a co-trustee helping plan for the dissolution in 2018, outlining options that included transferring the farm and trust assets to a family-owned LLC, according to one sibling.

Most of the siblings served as a co-trustee at one time or another.

Tim died in April of that year before he could implement any plan, and successor trustees allegedly made plans to sell the farm without consulting all siblings.

Peter Meyer, another son of Henry's who lives in New York, filed a petition in August 2019 in Marion County Circuit Court alleging the successor trustees abused their discretionary authority and engaged in "reckless misconduct" and "willful wrongdoing" in violation of the trust. The petition asked that they be removed and cease and desist all activities to sell the property.

Exhibits filed with the court include a redacted July 2019 letter of intent for the purchase and sale of the farm for a projected 240-unit single-family development for $5.75 million.

Multiple objections, counterclaims and cross petitions have been made in court since.

The court removed the trustees, with no finding of fault or liability, and named a new successor trustee in late 2020, an attorney not related to the family. Up until that point, the trust had been managed by descendants of Henry.

Even though the family drama adds some special spice to the Meyer Farm issue, the backdrop against which it will play out is familiar.

The 30 acres is within Salem's urban growth boundary. Oregon's pioneering land use system uses that boundary to protect farm and forest land near cities that otherwise would be overtaken by unfettered development.

(Witness Phoenix, Houston, and many other cities with a checkerboard style of sprawl caused by developers seeking cheaper land outside the city limits.)

So progressives like me are faced with a quandary about proposed subdivisions such as this one. We support dense urbanization because this is the most efficient use of scarce land inside an urban growth boundary.

But we also have a fondness for nature, and compassion for neighbors of the Meyer Farm who enjoy  having all that nearby open space.

I speak as someone who has lived on ten acres in rural south Salem, about six miles from the city limits, for the past 31 years.

Nature is tremendously healing. My wife and I can walk out of our back yard onto trails that lead through our natural property, across a small creek, past a stand of large trees, to a nine-acre community lake.

It's wonderful to have all this close at hand. It helps keep me as (questionably) sane as I am.

I want city dwellers to also have easy access to semi-wild spaces like the Meyer Farm. There has to be a balance between dense urban development and making sure enough natural open space remains for people living in a city to enjoy.

The Meyer Farm property is special, maybe totally unique in Salem, given its size, beauty, and history. It shouldn't become a subdivision unless strong efforts to preserve it as a natural area end up failing.

Here's a screenshot I made of a satellite image of the Meyer Farm property using Google Maps on my iPhone. The 30 acres is the undeveloped square in the center of the image. 

Comparing the image above with the proposed subdivision map below, you can see that most of the trees on the property would be cut down.

Open space is shown in the upper left of the subdivision map, so much of that dense stand of trees apparently would remain. Of course, Friends of the Meyer Farm are arguing that all of the trees should be saved by leaving the property natural. Or as natural as possible, if it were to become a park.

City Council needs to strengthen Climate Action Plan

I admire how the Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger told it like it is in a recent post about the Salem Climate Action Plan that's up for discussion by the City Council on Monday.

This is a devastating criticism from someone who knows what he's talking about. The Breakfast on Bikes blogger has followed progress on the Climate Action Plan much more closely than I have, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been a longtime crusade for him.

So when he says it's a dud, the City Council needs to wake up and pay attention. There's still time to alter the plan to be a non-dud. But only if the blogger's critique is taken seriously. I urge you to read the entire blog post. Here's some excerpts.

If the plan is going to be at all serious, more than a Potemkin plan for show, it's clear that Council needs to stage an intervention and redirect the planning process to ensure the plan is reasonably likely to meet the goals.

Principals and an Enthusiasm Gap?

One of the biggest problems with the Climate Action Plan process has been demonstrated recently. The principal City planners don't appear to believe in it. When Staff have been given the opportunity to lean into the plan, they leaned away. They may say "climate matters," but their actions show they may not actually believe this.

In one case, when City Staff had a direct opportunity to coordinate and integrate climate planning with other formal planning activities, they not only passed on that, they acted as if climate didn't matter and even hindered other, more important activities.

...Separately, in a Salem Reporter article on climate, the other principal City planner had every opportunity to say, "here are the most important things we can do to reduce emissions," and instead they said we "need to build more resiliency." We need to endure and adapt to the climate emergency, not prevent its worst excesses, they appear to think.

...Nowhere Near a Plan for 50% Reduction by 2035

So as we near the end of this process for a Climate Action Plan, it turns out we are far from a plan. We have wishes and hopes only.

...Council should step in and give stronger direction so that we have a plan with reasonable expectations for success.

On Monday City Councilors should grill staff and consultants about why the Climate Action Plan doesn't come close to meeting the greenhouse gas emission goals set by the council, and why there's an undue emphasis on resiliency as global warming ravages the planet, rather than on reducing Salem's contributions to global warming.

Here's how I put it in a December 2020 blog post, "Salem Climate Action Plan is going in wrong direction." Sadly, there hasn't been a change in direction. 

Very disappointing. But not surprising.

City of Salem staff have a long history of ignoring what the City Council and citizens want, instead substituting their own bad ideas for good ones.

So here we go again...

The City Council wants a Salem Climate Action Plan to specify how we're doing to do our part in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions that are literally cooking our planet. Recently these goals were approved by the council.

By 2035, Salem’s greenhouse gas emissions shall be reduced to 50% of the citywide greenhouse gas emissions for the baseline year of 2016, and by 2050, Salem should be carbon neutral.

OK. One would think that the Climate Action Plan process would be focused on how these goals are to be achieved.

But whoever the proverbial "One" is, they will be shocked to find that so far, what's being talked about is how Salem should deal with the nasty effects of climate change, not how the city's carbon footprint can be reduced.

I don't know who is responsible for this fiasco, but the Climate Action Plan needs to get back on track as soon as possible. It's astounding that the current "envisioning" exercise is for people to say how Salem can be resilient by 2050, not how Salem can be carbon neutral by 2050.

This is a major test for the 6-3 progressive majority on the City Council.

It's one thing for them to let city staff have their way on less important issues. It's a whole other thing if the six progressives allow the Climate Action Plan to fail at achieving the greenhouse gas emission goals set by the Council. 

Because, you know, it's just the fate of human civilization that's at stake here.

Otherwise, I guess, no big deal if city staff and the hired consultants want to foist a "business as usual" Climate Action Plan onto the citizenry, assuming an acquiescent City Council will go along with it. Hopefully this won't happen at Monday's work session.

Chris Hayes features extreme Oregon heat on MSNBC

This afternoon I felt good for a couple of reasons. Marine air coming from the south finally lowered Salem-area temperature from about 113 to the mid 90s. 

And the first 20 minutes of MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes featured the crazily high Northwest temperatures we've been suffering through as obvious evidence that dealing with climate change has to be the top priority in any Congressional infrastructure bill or bills.

So that's one good thing that came out of the past three days, when an amazing number of cities in Oregon and Washington not only broke their all-time high temperature record -- that record was demolished in, not surprisingly, a record-breaking fashion.

Meaning, as Treena Jensen, a meteorologist with the Portland office of the National Weather Service told Hayes, a town in Washington state broke its all-time high temperature record by 11 degrees, the largest difference between two record highs ever seen in the United States. 

Hopefully the nation will see this hugely unusual Northwest weather pattern as a shocking example of how climate change is leading to extreme weather events that normally would be extremely rare, but will be disturbingly frequent as global warming increases. 

A CBS News story says:

The heat wave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans. By one measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000 year event — which means that if you could live in this particular spot for 1,000 years, you'd likely only experience a heat dome like this once, if ever.  

...Turns out, the models were correct and we should expect extreme heat waves, even unprecedented ones like this to become more routine. "There is no context really, in the sense that there is no analog in our past for what we are likely to see this week," says Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and author of the new book "The New Climate War."

But calling it a new normal does not suffice says Mann, "Some people called this a 'new normal. But it is worse than that," explained Mann. "We will continue to see more and more extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods as long as we continue to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions." 

You can see the All In With Chris Hayes segment about Northwest temperatures at the beginning of this video.

The segment features an interview with Washington Governor Jay Insleee about the imperative to make climate change front and center in every discussion of our nation's infrastructure needs.

Inslee said that $350 billion for fighting climate change was stripped out of the bipartisan infrastructure proposal agreed to by a group of moderate Democratic and Republican senators. That isn't nearly enough, yet it was too much for those senators.

Which makes it a necessity for Congressional Democrats to include that money, and hopefully much more, in another infrastructure bill that will have to be passed with only Democratic votes via reconciliation to avoid the inevitable GOP filibuster.