John Schwartz

The case turns on the claim that Exxon kept a secret set of financial books that seriously underestimated the costs of potential climate change regulation while claiming publicly that it was taking such factors into account. It follows a sprawling investigation that included millions of pages of documents and allegations of a chief executive’s secret email account.

In his opening statement, Kevin Wallace, a lawyer with the New York Attorney General’s Office, argued that “the gap between what Exxon said it was doing and was actually doing was significant, and had an impact on the bottom line.”

While “we are not telling Exxon how to run its business,” Wallace said in closing, the company, he said, “has to be honest with investors.”

Representing Exxon, attorney Ted Wells Jr. said in a vehement opening statement that while the company has long acknowledged climate change is real, “climate change does not permit the New York Attorney General to bring a meritless complaint, and one that is so unconnected from the truth.”

The case is only the second climate-change lawsuit to reach trial in the United States, but it could be a bellwether for the long line of other suits awaiting trial that are intended to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for the costs of climate change.

The lawsuit was filed last year by the New York Attorney General’s Office and claims that the oil industry giant engaged in a yearslong “fraudulent scheme” that “in effect erected a Potemkin village to create the illusion that it had fully considered the risks of future climate change regulation and had factored those risks into its business operations.” The deception “exposed the company to greater risk from climate change regulation than investors were led to believe,” according to the lawsuit.

Exxon has vigorously fought the charges, and maintains that the government’s theory of its financial tools is flawed at best and, at worst, disingenuous. “The evidence will show Exxon Mobil did not commit securities fraud, did not make any misleading statements,” Wells said. “Exxon Mobil did nothing wrong.”

He called the company’s procedures “robust,” and accused the attorney general’s office of engaging in a politically motivated effort to “vilify” the company with lies.

Before the trial began, about 50 protesters stood in front of the courthouse with signs and an enormous banner that read “CLIMATE CRISIS #ExxonKnew MAKE THEM PAY.”

More than 1,000 climate change lawsuits have been filed in the United States, said Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia University Law School. (The first was brought more than a decade ago by automotive industry companies to challenge Vermont’s ability to set emissions standards.)

What the Exxon case is not about is whether climate change is real, or caused by human activities — or Exxon’s efforts over decades to muddy the public discussion of climate change while its own research showed the urgency of the issue. Those topics are “what everyone thought it was going to be when the investigation started,” Gerrard said. Instead, the case will focus on narrower, more technical grounds, he said.

Exxon has long conducted research into climate change, and published much of it in the scientific literature. In 2015, Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times used materials from corporate archives to show the extent of that research and how it was used in long-term planning, even while the company was funding groups that sought to spread doubt about climate science.

Exxon pledged to stop funding such groups in the mid-2000s, and now says that it accepts the science and the need for action to blunt the worst effects. The company supported the Paris climate deal, the global pact aimed at reducing emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

The state filed the lawsuit last year. Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, has been pursuing a similar investigation and is expected to file a lawsuit soon.

In recent filings, New York said that for years, the company “repeatedly represented that it expected governments to adopt more costly and stringent climate change regulations over the coming decades” for projects like those that would extract oil from Canadian tar sands.

“Exxon Mobil’s statements would have led a reasonable investor to believe that it used this cost of carbon in projecting the costs associated with the company’s emissions from its investments and operations,” the state said. “But Exxon Mobil did no such thing.”

The suit claims the company used a lower cost of carbon in its internal estimates — and when employees did try to apply the publicly disclosed higher costs, the resulting price tags were so high that the company “instructed its employees not to apply those costs.” The result was that “Exxon Mobil made its assets appear significantly more secure than they really were, which had a material impact on its share price.” The emphasis on shareholder value is crucial to the state’s legal authority under the Martin Act, New York’s sweeping shareholder protection law.

Justice Barry R. Ostrager of New York state Supreme Court, who is presiding over the case, has thrown out most of the claims of selective political prosecution as potential defenses in the case. Exxon has pursued those claims in a separate federal court case that is now before the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, after a federal district judge ruled forcefully against the company’s arguments.

The case comes to trial as other lawsuits over climate change are making their way through the courts. In two cases involving the city of Baltimore and the state of Rhode Island, the industry has asked the Supreme Court to intervene before the process of discovery begins. The Supreme Court ruled against the companies on Tuesday, allowing the cases to proceed. And a federal case brought on behalf of young plaintiffs against the government of the United States for not fighting climate change, which was supposed to begin a year ago, is caught up in procedural appeals at the Ninth Circuit that could conceivably derail it.

If the state prevails, it could prove to be expensive for Exxon Mobil. A state expert has estimated the cost to shareholders of Exxon Mobil’s actions at somewhere between about $476 million and $1.6 billion. (The company posted earnings of $20.8 billion for 2019.)

Ann E. Carlson, co-director of the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles law school who has consulted pro bono with attorneys in some of the state and local cases, said if the state proves what it is claiming, “this is a company that has been engaged in denial and deception across several fronts, and I think that denial might be coming back to haunt them and may end up costing them millions and even billions of dollars.”

This article originally appeared in

Fossil Fuels on Trial: New York's Lawsuit Against Exxon Begins

After four years of legal sparring and finger-pointing, oil-industry giant Exxon Mobil went to court on Tuesday to face charges that the company lied to shareholders and to the public about the costs and consequences of climate change.

This, in itself, is unheard-of. She is a Murdoch, a member of the billionaire family that controls influential news organizations on three continents, and Murdochs rarely talk to the outside press. Kathryn Murdoch is married to James Murdoch, the younger son of Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch and her husband, however, are stepping out of their family’s shadow. He had once risen to dominance in the companies, only to lose a closely watched power struggle to his brother, Lachlan. As he neared the height of his influence — in the empire, and with his father — James was running the British satellite television service Sky while nudging the company into green initiatives. In 2006, he even invited Al Gore to speak at a Fox corporate retreat in Pebble Beach, California.

But Lachlan, whose politics are more in line with those of his father, saw his star rise as James’ fell. This year, after Fox sold assets to Disney, including 21st Century Fox, for $71.3 billion, James left the company, with his portion of the proceeds coming to a reported $2 billion.

Now James and Kathryn Murdoch are claiming their independence from the more conservative arm of the family.

James Murdoch recently spoke with The New Yorker for a brief article in which he acknowledged that “There are views I really disagree with on Fox,” referring to Fox News, the channel that was his father’s brainchild and which is known for its lineup of popular conservative hosts.

And, in a series of interviews with The New York Times beginning in May, Kathryn Murdoch has stepped out further, in order to bring attention to the fight against climate change. That means countering the efforts of those who block progress by stoking partisan rancor or by attempting to muddy the scientific consensus that climate change is happening now, and it is driven by human activity.

The Murdoch empire and Fox News have long had a substantial role in that muddying and stoking.

So this could be awkward. But to Kathryn Murdoch, it is all part of her moment to go public on some 13 years of behind-the-scenes climate activism. “I’m very comfortable staying in the background and continuing to work quietly,” she said, but “I’ve decided doing that means I’m not working hard enough, I’m not doing everything in my power to do.”

Murdoch said that she actually got the inspiration to take on climate change from that Al Gore talk at the Fox retreat in 2006. The former vice president presented a version of the slide show that had just been turned into the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

In particular, the urgency of the climate crisis jolted her. “I decided to switch everything I was doing,” she said. “I wanted to be able to look my children in the eye and say ‘I did everything I could.’”

Now, working with the nonpartisan group Unite America, she is connecting like-minded organizations that are trying to overhaul the democratic process of voting to make it less likely to reward partisanship. She is also raising funds to ensure that the network will be effective.

She and her husband have already invested millions in their work toward these ends, and are “anchor funders” in the larger plan, she said, with an ultimate goal that she characterized as being in the “nine figures.” (While she declined to be more specific, the lowest nine-figure number is $100 million.)

“I’m not saying I have all the answers — I don’t,” she said, “But what I know and what I feel very strongly is that sitting around not doing anything is the wrong answer.”

Kathryn Murdoch’s public comments confirm what many who closely watch the intricacies and intrigues of the Murdoch empire have long believed: that she is more progressive than many other members of the family. (She calls herself a “radical centrist.”)

Her approach is bipartisan, but it is also clear that one party has been more resistant to action. “There hasn’t been a Republican answer on climate change,” Murdoch said. “There’s just been denial and walking away from the problem. There needs to be one.”

To those who defend climate science and warn of the risks that global warming poses, her emergence and use of her fortune and network of powerful friends and her famous name — which she describes as a “double-edged sword” — is welcome.

“Murdoch media are notorious amongst climate scientists for their constant stream of misinformation on climate change,” said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “I can see how a thinking person who marries into that family might feel an urge to counter at least a little bit of the damage they do.”

Fox News did not respond to requests for comment.

Her early climate work included taking a position in 2008 with the newly formed Clinton Climate Initiative, part of the Clinton Foundation established by the former president. As for her family connections, “I was certainly aware that the other Murdochs are conservative,” the founder of the climate initiative, Ira Magaziner, said, but “it didn’t matter.” At the time, he noted, many Republicans, including Mitt Romney, had spoken about the need to deal with climate change.

Over the years, she has worked with organizations whose approaches to environmental action align with her own. She joined the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that often collaborates with industry on climate issues. In 2014 she and her husband created the Quadrivium Foundation (the word means “crossroads”) to fund their programs. One of those is SciLine, an independent nonprofit service that connects reporters with scientists and provides fact sheets on topics in the news like a primer in August on hurricanes and climate change.

She decided, however, that spreading scientific knowledge might not be enough. People already understand that the planet is warming and that humans are the cause. The deeper problem, she said, is that the government of the United States is not doing anything about it.

She took a deep dive into possible solutions to partisan deadlock and reviewed the players in the diffuse field known as democracy reform: Small groups that push for changes in the electoral system.

Some of the avenues her groups are pursuing include ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of their preference. Proponents of this method argue that it reduces the tendency of primaries to reward candidates who work mainly to energize their base, and favors candidates who have the broadest appeal. She is also interested in initiatives to restrict gerrymandering and increase access to voting through proposals like automatic registration, as well as open primaries, in which voters do not need to declare their party affiliation.

Charles Wheelan, founder of Unite America, said that because of Kathryn Murdoch’s surname, “it’s fair to say that in some quarters our relationship raises a few eyebrows.” But he also calls her “an important ambassador” to the wealthy and powerful, someone who can tell them, as a peer: “Look, if you really want to make the world better for your grandchildren, fix politics.”

Sounding a note of skepticism, Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University Law School and an expert on constitutional law and democracy, said that democracy reform efforts were laudable but a long shot. They “might have effects at the margins,” he said, but “these reforms are not likely to fundamentally transform our politics from this hyperpolarized era we’ve been in for nearly 40 years.”

Murdoch said that one reason such groups may not have had much of an effect so far is a lack of funds. Potential donors, she said, are enthusiastic. She has already held dinners in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, with more planned in Washington and Boston. “Everyone is so panicked about the situation and wants to help, but doesn’t know what to do.”

It is possible that her husband’s career at Fox is not over. Some who watch the company closely speculate that James Murdoch could attempt a return after his father’s death. The brothers have traded places before: Lachlan Murdoch left the company in 2005 after his father sided with other executives he had clashed with.

As a family member, James Murdoch is a beneficiary of the trust that holds controlling stock, which cannot be sold to outsiders. Last year, James tried to sell the stock to Lachlan in order to make a full break, but Lachlan declined.

A Fox News under James Murdoch could still be conservative, but would almost certainly be less intransigent on issues like climate change. At a crucial moment, in 2016, when Roger Ailes was pushed out of the company over his treatment of women, James Murdoch favored a more traditional news executive, the CBS president David Rhodes, for the job. Instead, his father took the helm for a time, and the network moved more solidly into a position of supporting Donald Trump.

When asked what might have been had her husband controlled the company then, Kathryn Murdoch declined to speculate, simply saying, “I think James has shown himself to be a very different leader from his father.”

Her focus not on such hypotheticals, but on a present challenge. She said she still had “a lot of hope” that we are capable of solving the climate crisis. “But we don’t yet have the political will.”

Kathryn Murdoch Steps Out of the Family Shadow to Fight Climate Change

Kathryn Murdoch is sitting with a reporter in her offices in the West Village, talking about climate change and democracy.

Houston, Monday, July 21—Men have landed and walked on the moon.

It is deceptively simple. It has heft. As he recalled in a recent interview: “That word, the ‘moon.’ It was the code word for inaccessible, unreachable.”

This opening sentence, he said, put the amazing shift in humanity’s perception of the moon into terms of everyday life that any reader could relate to: “Not only have we reached it, but we walked on it!”

We all walk. It is, literally, a pedestrian thing. But this is walking made glorious: “Landed. And walked. On the moon.”

This is the story behind that story, which even today can wow a reader with the excitement of the moment: how it was reported and how Wilford — a giant of science writing and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner — turned a technically challenging human achievement into a narrative suffused with drama, felicitous language and even humor.

The lede — the word is an artifact of the days of Linotype machines and is used to distinguish the leading sentence of an article from the metal used in those days to form type — was also un-Timesian, especially in 1969. Wilford had been hired away from Time magazine in 1965 to take on the space beat.

The editor who hired him, Harrison Salisbury, told him that The Times did not “want someone to write a science story or a flight story or an engineering story.” He recalls Salisbury saying that the moon landing should be “a story of a big adventure.”

Salisbury was part of a faction of editors who were looking to “put some life into The Times,” Wilford recalled. But the newsroom was also still filled with “old-fashioned shirt-sleeve editors who went by the old book.”

So Wilford was not just worried about the first eight words of the article. He was also concerned about whether the old guard would require him to come up with something more stuffy and clunky.

“I was deathly afraid they were going to want me to do some kind of old-fashioned, ‘who what when and where’ lede, and I did not want that,” he said.

Another thing he did not want was “to have ‘historic’ in the lede,” he said. “It’s a lame way to say something is important.”

Wilford called his editor at the time in New York, Henry Lieberman, to clear the way for the unconventional line, with its ring of authority, of history, of a new age in human activity. “I told him what I wanted to do and why, and I said, ‘Do you think that’s going to be all right?’”

He said Lieberman replied, “Well, I’ll run that by the editors.”

“I guess that he did, I never heard any more,” Wilford added. “I took nothing as a positive answer.”

He then went on to the kind of stylistic flourishes he has always been known for, as in his segue into one of Neil Armstrong’s immortal quotes:

Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four-legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time.

Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old civilian commander, radioed to earth and the Mission Control room here:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Wilford reported on the launch in Florida, arriving days before with other Times reporters, all working in a rusty trailer that the newspaper maintained at the Kennedy Space Center press site.

He wrote three versions of the article that night for successive editions of The Times. By deadline of the first edition, the astronauts had landed but not exited the lunar module; by the third edition, two astronauts’ boots had touched the gritty soil of the moon. There was no email; to get his article to New York, Wilford banged it out on a typewriter and then read each word over the phone, making small changes on the fly as he read, to the “recording room,” where transcriptionists quickly typed up pages and passed them to editors.

But after writing up the launch in Florida, there was the problem of how to cover the transition of management of the spacecraft to Mission Control in Houston. For earlier launches, Wilford often ended up on a late-night flight. This launch was different. So the publisher of The Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, “let us use his private jet.” After meeting the newspaper’s deadlines, they traveled speedily and in luxury to Houston.

In Houston, the setup for reporters was different, but Wilford still had his desk, his background materials and his yellow pad with notes about what to expect from the mission — elements of the day-by-day flight plan that he could track as things went along.

His preparation for this reporting was extensive; he had even “flown” a simulator of the lunar lander to get a feel for what Armstrong was up against in piloting the spidery craft. Wilford repeatedly crashed the vehicle.

Wilford’s storytelling switched back and forth in time between the landing and the moon walk, to a congratulatory phone call from President Richard M. Nixon, then back to the details of stepping down to the surface. Then he deftly transitioned to a stirring paean to exploration:

On the second step from the top, he pulled a lanyard that released a fold-down equipment compartment on the side of the lunar module. This deployed the television camera that transmitted the dramatic pictures of man’s first steps on the moon.

American Dream Fulfilled

It was man’s first landing on another world, the realization of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination. The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man’s reach, the first port of call in this new age of spacefaring.

“I started using ‘spacefaring’ even before the lunar landing,” Wilford said; he was drawn to the word’s historical echoes. “Seafaring, spacefaring — it’s part of the same thrust.”

The structure of the article was determined in part by an editorial requirement to get the details of the landing and first steps on the moon, and the call from Nixon, “before the jump” — that is, within the part of the article that can be read on the front page. And he found space for flashes of dry humor, as well:

They turned on the electrical power, checked all the switch settings on the cockpit panel and checked communications with the command ship and the ground controllers. Everything was “nominal,” as the spacemen say.

“Eagle has wings,” Mr. Armstrong replied.

The two ships were then only a few feet apart. But at 2:12 P.M., Colonel Collins fired the command ship’s maneuvering rockets to move about two miles away and in a slightly different orbit from the lunar module.

“It looks like you’ve got a fine-looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact you’re upside down,” Colonel Collins commented, watching the spidery lunar module receding in the distance.

“Somebody’s upside down,” Mr. Armstrong replied.

What is “up” and what is “down” is never quite clear in the absence of landmarks and the sensation of gravity’s pull.

At Mission Control’s press area, Wilford wore earphones to hear the public affairs officer’s commentary and watched closed-circuit television to see what the spaceship’s cameras were showing.

He kept his ears attuned to whenever anything fresh and amusing occurred, such as that exchange between Armstrong and Michael Collins.

“If you hear a particularly good quote, if you have anything that helps to give some narrative connection to events, you make a quick, scribbly note that no one but me could decipher,” he said. “I didn’t tape the air-to-ground, and you didn’t usually get a transcript of air-to-ground until several hours later.”

The most dramatic element of the landing — the need to fly farther than planned to find a safer landing place — was overshadowed at the time, Wilford recalled, by a series of alarms from the lander’s computers that mission controllers safely disregarded. The search for a landing spot was described in detail at a briefing later in the evening, and he worked it into the article’s chronology of events:

The brownish-gray panorama rushed below them — myriad craters, hills and ridges, deep cracks and ancient rubble on the moon, which Dr. Robert Jastrow, the space agency scientist, called the “Rosetta Stone of life.”

“You’re ‘go’ for landing,” Mission Control informed the two men.

The Eagle closed in, dropping about 20 feet a second, until it was hovering almost directly over the landing area at an altitude of 500 feet.

Its floor was littered with boulders.

It was when the craft reached an altitude of 300 feet that Mr. Armstrong took over semimanual control for the rest of the way. The computer continued to have control of the rocket firing, but the astronaut could adjust the craft’s hovering position.

He was expected to take over such control anyway, but the sight of a crater looming ahead at the touchdown point made it imperative.

As Mr. Armstrong said later, “The auto-targeting was taking us right into a football field- sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks.”

For about 90 seconds, he peered through the window in search of a clear touchdown point. Using the lever at his right hand, he tilted the vehicle forward to redirect the firing of the maneuvering jets and thus shift its hovering position.

Finally, Mr. Armstrong found the spot he liked, and the blue light on the cockpit flashed to indicate that five-foot-long probes, like curb feelers, on three of the four legs had touched the surface.

“Contact light,” Mr. Armstrong radioed.

He pressed a button marked “Stop” and reported, “O.K., engine stop.”

There were a few more cryptic messages of functions performed.

Then Maj. Charles M. Duke, the capsule communicator in the control room, radioed to the two astronauts: “We copy you down, Eagle.”

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

“Roger, Tranquility,” Major Duke replied. “We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We are breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

Throughout the piece, Wilford alternated between lyrical passages and those rich in scientific information and data, framed in ways that could grip the reader. These lines about Armstrong’s heartbeat speak volumes:

Although Mr. Armstrong is known as a man of few words, his heartbeats told of his excitement upon leading man’s first landing on the moon.

At the time of the descent rocket ignition, his heartbeat rate registered 110 a minute — 77 is normal for him — and it shot up to 156 at touchdown.

Stephen Dubner, a co-author of the “Freakonomics” book series, has called this “one of the most elegant little uses of data I can recall seeing in a news article,” adding, “Someday I would like to write two sentences as good as those.”

Near the end of the article, Wilford returned to Collins, still orbiting the moon as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the surface:

At the time of the landing, Colonel Collins was riding the command ship Columbia about 65 miles overhead.

Mission Control informed the colonel, “Eagle is at Tranquility.

“Yea, I heard the whole thing,” Colonel Collins, the man who went so far but not all the way, replied. “Fantastic.”

Wilford recalled that the return to Collins was an attempt to bring some balance to the distribution of glory, an act of empathy for a man as alone as any human has ever been.

“I still think of what Collins must have been thinking,” he said. “He’s up there in orbit. And Armstrong and Aldrin are landing on the moon, walking on the moon, and you think if something happens that they can’t come back, he has no choice. He can’t rescue them. He has to make the flight back on his own. That would have been the hardest thing in the world, I think.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-john-noble-wilford.html" id="50fa6a83-a7c3-396e-a8ed-9d6a6b5c6b82">The New York Times</a>.

John Noble Wilford knew that he was writing one of the most important stories of the century: The first human landing on another world. His article — for the front page of The New York Times on July 21, 1969, needed to begin with a sentence that conveyed the immensity of the moment. And so, after the launch on July 16, but before the landing, he spent a sleepless night trying to come up with an opening sentence, known in the journalism business as a lede:

The Story of 8 Unforgettable Words About Apollo 11

The night before the waters flowed over the backbreakingly stacked sandbags, Guckert recalled, “I walked into the house, and looked at my wife and said, ‘We’re going to lose the campus.’” In all, the raging waters caused $750 million in flood damage, with $36 million in equipment lost in one building alone. Twenty-two major buildings were damaged, some of them irreparably; a quarter of the school’s classroom space was lost, and one-sixth of the university’s 2.6 million square feet of space was closed. The level of flooding “was unfathomable to those of us who lived through the previous record flood” of 1993, said Rod Lehnertz, the university’s senior vice president for finance and operations.

Now Guckert has a side gig. He travels the country, telling other institutions what he and the University of Iowa have learned from the disaster, and explaining how others can prepare for the worst. Guckert said that in a changing world, people might not know what the worst could mean.

In his talks, he presents the lessons he learned from the 2008 flood, with slides titled “Plan for your next disaster, not your last one” and “Plan for Failure (Because Mother Nature Always Wins).”

Climate change is already affecting extreme weather events around the world. Hurricanes are wetter, and wildfires are bigger. And scientists expect conditions to get worse over time.

Little wonder, then, that Guckert said that his presentations were increasingly in demand: “I’ve gotten more requests in the last five years than the first five.” His audiences are realizing that they have to be prepared for events they haven’t seen before, or even thought were possible.

With flooding along the Mississippi River at record levels in parts of Iowa, an 11-year-old disaster has much to teach about what it takes to recover. Parts of western Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and nearby states, including Native American reservations, are cleaning up from recent intense flooding. The city of Davenport, Iowa, has been inundated by a levee breach, and last Friday, the Coast Guard temporarily closed the Mississippi River near St. Louis to boat and barge traffic because of high water levels, a blow to the multibillion-dollar shipping industry that uses the river.

The story of Iowa’s effort to restore its campus shows how hard it is to come back from a disaster, even with the university’s myriad resources. While the school reopened quickly with makeshift power and cramped facilities, it took eight years to fully rebuild. And 11 years later, the school’s art museum has yet to be replaced.

Flooding is a complex phenomenon that depends on many factors, including the lay of the land, development and the amount of precipitation, as well as the ability of the ground to soak up water. But climate change is, increasingly, part of the mix, said Larry Weber, a professor of engineering at the University of Iowa and a co-founder of the Iowa Flood Center, an internationally recognized resource that the state legislature created at the school after the 2008 flood.

Research has shown an increase in the frequency of flood events in parts of Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest. The Iowa Flood Center estimates that what was once considered a 500-year flood in Iowa City is now an 80-year flood, meaning the probability of a flood of that magnitude occurring in any given year has risen from 0.2 percent to 1.25 percent.

Back in 2008, Guckert and thousands of volunteers had been working to fight the rising Iowa River for more than a week, and it looked as if the makeshift defenses would hold.

Three inches of rain fell in less than an hour, and forced the school to tell its workers to stand down. By the next morning, the river had overwhelmed the makeshift barriers. The level of water in Hancher Auditorium, the school’s largest performance space, would rise to more than a foot above the stage, and moved up the slope of the audience seats, reaching Row O.

Floodwaters knocked out the university’s power plant, inundated the Iowa Memorial Union’s basement, which housed the school bookstore, and badly damaged the school’s art museum. (Though a herculean effort in the preceding days had gotten thousands of pieces, including the museum’s well-regarded collection of African art and a Jackson Pollock piece, to safety.) Many buildings sitting high enough to avoid being flooded from ground level got water in their basements when the steam tunnels that connect campus buildings became a conduit for damage.

The destruction would have been far less severe if the school had listened to advice offered more than 100 years before. The school, expanding from the small amount of land given to it by the state when the capital moved to Des Moines in the 1850s, had been warned in 1905 by its landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers, not to build close to the water.

Squeezed by a growing city around it, however, the university built critical facilities close by. “It struggled to find the land that it did,” said Charles Connerly, the director of the school of urban and regional planning at the university, “and some of them turned out to be bad choices,” he said.

Waterside construction expanded after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the Coralville Dam upstream in 1958.

The dam “gave them a sense of safety,” Connerly said, but “in the end, that was not the case.” In 2008, the dam slowed the water and allowed more time to prepare, and even reduced the level of flooding that might have otherwise occurred. (Nearby Cedar Rapids had no such protection on its Cedar River, and the damage to that city was enormous.) But the Coralville Dam could not control nature. And the waters came.

In the ensuing years, the school replaced two structures that had been destroyed, including Hancher Auditorium, which it rebuilt at a safer elevation. Some of the damaged architectural gems on the campus, including an art building designed by Steven Holl, are now protected by barriers that can be erected and put in place in a matter of days. The Iowa Memorial Union had a sunken courtyard facing the water before the flood; now a high patio sits atop a flood barrier, protecting the building and giving the university community commanding views of the waterway.

Working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get the federal portion of rebuilding costs was “a challenge,” recalled Sally Mason, the president of the university during the flood and its aftermath. The complications included navigating arcane federal rules and dealing with a changing cast of officials. That the process ended up a success story is a testament to the university’s persistence, patience and the deployment of the university’s resources to address the problems.

Jerald L. Schnoor, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, noted that the school’s success suggested what such crises could mean for places without similar resources and expertise: “You can imagine if you’re the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, how hard it is to come back from these events.”

The school has come under criticism for its decision to continue building in the floodplain, including a 1,000-bed dormitory near the water. An extensive 2016 study, which is co-authored by Connerly, argued that such decisions mean “the University’s historical mistakes may be compounded rather than negated.” School officials said, however, that the university built the dormitory, like other new and repaired buildings near the water, at a higher elevation than it previously required, designing it to be quickly repaired if water strikes and without important equipment or facilities on the ground floor.

In his presentations around the nation, Guckert shows slides that depict efforts to protect the school before the 2008 flood, and the startling images of the aftermath. He tells the audience to lay in the supplies for fighting floods, because when a crisis hits a region, everyone is scrambling for sandbags, pumps and generators.

But many people don’t like to hear bad news, said Weber, the flood expert, recalling a speech he gave in the western part of Iowa in 2009 on the newly founded Iowa Flood Center. A man in the audience said, “As far as I’m concerned, you may as well call it the Eastern Iowa Flood Center, because here on the Missouri River, we don’t flood.” The man has since been proven wrong.

Of all the lessons from 2008, perhaps the most important is that “mother nature’s changing on us,” Lehnertz said, and although the campus is better protected than ever before, “you can never feel quite comfortable about something you don’t control,” he said.

As Guckert put it, “We haven’t seen our worst flood yet.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/climate/iowa-floods-disasters-lessons-learned.html" id="80c0cf17-5d15-3693-a6c0-ef6dba03fc0f">The New York Times</a>.

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Don Guckert’s job is keeping the buildings on the University of Iowa’s charming campus up and running, and safe. His most important lessons came from the worst days of his career, in June 2008, when the waters of the Iowa River washed across the campus, causing catastrophic damage.

In a Flood-Prone State, Past Disasters Have Lessons to Teach

— The first thing to understand: It’s complicated.

Each flood is its own phenomenon, tied to the specific circumstances in the area.

“Flooding is complex,” Deke Arndt, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Thursday in a briefing on the potentially dire flood season.

“It has to do with precipitation falling to the ground,” Arndt said, “but also with the way that water is managed and the surface hydrology — how it flows across the land and is collected and runs off.”

The question of water management involves the building and maintenance of dams, levees, reservoirs and spillways. The “surface hydrology” part is about the landscape and how it affects the flow of water (for example, places rich in steep hills and valleys like Vermont can see severe destruction from intense rain events). And the development of housing, malls and other paved-over areas reduces the amount of open land that can absorb runoff.

There are many other possible factors. The late-winter flooding in the Midwest, for example, involved large amounts of rain falling on frozen ground with high accumulations of snow. The rain helped melt the snow, and the frozen ground could not soak up the flow, causing enormous runoff.

— So, does climate change play a role?

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: It’s still complicated.

These places have flooded before, and they will flood again. Still, large amounts of rain can increase the likelihood of flooding, and more heavy precipitation over the long term “is an expected and observed consequence of climate change,” Arndt wrote in an email.

That is primarily because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and that means more precipitation.

Actually saying that climate change had a pronounced effect on a specific flooding event, like the one in the Midwest, would come after a long period of analysis with the tools of attribution science. “There’s going to need to be a lot of homework done between now and when we can give a definitive answer,” Arndt said during the briefing.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&amp;M; University, said that climate change has a pervasive effect underlying extreme weather phenomena. “I think we have to move past the question of, ‘Is climate change affecting the weather?'” he said. “Of course it is.”

The question to be answered by attribution science, he said, is, “How was it affected by climate change?”

— Why is more flooding expected this spring?

More water is on the way. “The major flooding we’ve already experienced across the lower Missouri and the middle to lower Mississippi Valley is a preview of what we expect through the rest of the spring,” said Mary C. Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service. “In fact, we expect the flooding will get worse, and become more widespread.”

Forecasters are basing those predictions on the expectation that much of the continental United States will receive above-average precipitation this spring. This extra rain and melting snow will combine with what is left of the current floodwaters, which “will prolong and expand flooding, especially in the central and southern U.S.,” NOAA said in its Spring Outlook advisory.

The agency also evaluated of a number of other factors, “including current conditions of snowpack, drought, soil moisture, frost depth, stream flow and precipitation.”

Heavy precipitation can be a good thing. California has emerged from seven years of drought, and recent snow has brought a measure of relief to those dependent on waters from the Colorado River.

But as Edward Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, put it, “This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities.”

— What are we supposed to do about it?

As the Scouts tell us, be prepared. On a community level, that means having defenses in place to keep water away from homes and businesses; preventing people from building in harm’s way; and even moving those at the highest risk of flooding.

The Association of State Floodplain Managers crowed a little about the success of Beatrice, Nebraska, along those lines:

“Nothing to see here folks (because Beatrice, Nebraska acquired homes in the floodplain and put in a park),” it wrote on Twitter. “Current flooding not having a negative impact in this community.”

Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland who led a major report on the devastating 1993 floods in the Midwest, said that community leaders had to ask themselves, in an increasingly uncertain world, what the worst that could happen might be and do their best to prepare for it.

“It’s recognizing there’s a bump in the road ahead, and what are we going to do when we get to that bump — are we going to be prepared for that?” he said.

— What about individuals? What about me?

Flood safety is everyone’s business. It’s crucial to know your own level of risk. You can determine whether your home is in a flood plain by entering your address in the search tool offered by the FEMA flood map service center.

If the waters do come, you should have a plan for evacuation or a safe place to go, and a way to protect valuables and critical documents from damage. You can find more information on the federal site Ready.gov, including tips for creating an emergency kit with medical supplies, batteries and other essentials in case you need to get out. Similar information can be found at other sites, including one maintained by the American Red Cross.

Consider flood insurance, even if you’re not in an area of high risk. The National Flood Insurance Program has more information.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/climate/what-causes-floods.html" id="68996269-e37f-3681-a58b-6eb7853e6548">The New York Times</a>.

Heavy Rain, Catastrophic Floods and Complications of Climate Change

With floods submerging expanses of the Midwest and government scientists warning that this spring could bring a historic flood season in the United States, it’s natural to ask why it is happening. What causes catastrophic flooding? And what is the role of climate change?

Nearly two-thirds of the Lower 48 states will have an elevated risk of some flooding from now until May, and 25 states could experience “major or moderate flooding,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The flooding this year could be worse than anything we’ve seen in recent years, even worse than the historic floods of 1993 and 2011,” said Mary C. Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service, in a conference call with reporters. The major flooding already experienced in Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa and elsewhere is “a preview of what we expect throughout the rest of the spring,” she said.

Some 13 million people could be exposed to major flooding in their communities, said Edward Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center. This flood season is “potentially unprecedented,” he said, and more than 200 million people could experience some flooding in their communities.

Scientists have said that increasing rainfall in the Midwest is a predictable consequence of climate change, since a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which comes down as precipitation. The current flooding in the Missouri River basin and beyond has been caused in part by heavy rains, but has been further complicated by other factors, like frozen ground that kept water from being absorbed.

The basins of the Upper Mississippi and the Red River of the North have already been hit with rain and snow this spring of up to twice normal levels.

Further expected rainfall and melting snow will add to that flooding and extend it through the central and southern United States. NOAA identified the greatest risks for moderate to major flooding in the upper, middle and lower Mississippi River basins; the Red River of the North; the Great Lakes; and the eastern Missouri River, lower Ohio River, lower Cumberland River and Tennessee River basins.

The National Weather Service describes moderate flooding as involving some inundation of structures and roads near streams, with some evacuations; major flooding involves extensive inundation of structures and roads and significant evacuations.

Government scientists said that much of the United States east of the Mississippi River, as well as parts of California and Nevada, could expect to see minor flooding in the spring.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/climate/climate-change-flooding.html" id="a341d25e-8a6d-31b7-a5ed-32c5ba757caa">The New York Times</a>.

25 States Are at Risk of Serious Flooding This Spring, U.S. Forecast Says

Vast areas of the United States are at risk of flooding this spring, even as Nebraska and other Midwestern states are already reeling from record-breaking late-winter floods, federal scientists said Thursday.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, his academic home for 67 years. It said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Broecker, a geologist by training whose questing mind led him to rove from field to field, had an uncanny ability to draw a comprehensive understanding of the Earth’s climate system from research into the oceans, the atmosphere, the planet’s ice and more.

He gave early warning of a planetary crisis if humans continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He published a landmark scientific paper in 1975 that asked in its title, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”

A blunt man, Broecker (pronounced “broker”) had a knack for phrasemaking. He was fond of saying, “The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.” He meant that the climate is unpredictable, sensitive to small changes and susceptible to major shifts with startling speed.

He also coined the term “the global conveyor” for the important ocean currents that circulate warm water around the globe; that phrase, too, remains in use today.

Broecker pioneered techniques using carbon isotopes and other trace elements to map the world’s ocean currents; those techniques made their way into an expanding body of knowledge in many other fields, even archaeology.

Dr. Wallace S. Broecker, one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about climate change and the researcher who popularized the term “global warming,” died Monday in Manhattan. He was 87.

John Schwartz

Articles written by the author

Fossil Fuels on Trial: New York's Lawsuit Against Exxon Begins

Kathryn Murdoch Steps Out of the Family Shadow to Fight Climate Change

The Story of 8 Unforgettable Words About Apollo 11

In a Flood-Prone State, Past Disasters Have Lessons to Teach

Heavy Rain, Catastrophic Floods and Complications of Climate Change

25 States Are at Risk of Serious Flooding This Spring, U.S. Forecast Says

Wallace Broecker, 87, Dies; Sounded Early Warning on Climate Change

Global Warming Concerns Rise Among Americans in New Poll

Record Numbers of Americans Say They Care About Global Warming, Poll Finds

After a Natural Disaster, Is It Better to Rebuild or Retreat?

Cities Struggle to Face New Disasters

More Floods and More Droughts: Climate Change Delivers Both

More Floods and More Droughts: Climate Change Delivers Both

We went to the moon, why can't we solve climate change?

As floods keep coming, cities pay residents to move

25 states are at risk of serious flooding this spring, U.S. forecast says

Amid 19-year drought, states sign deal to conserve Colorado River water

Building a blockbuster: Behind the scenes with T. Rex

Why a border wall could mean trouble for wildlife