The Environment Report

by Bob Allen for The Environment Report

A hard freeze has wiped out a big portion of the cherry crop in Northwest Michigan this spring.  The area produces more than half the state’s cherries that end up in desserts, juice and as dried fruit.

An historic early warm-up in March left fruit trees vulnerable to frost once the weather turned cooler again.

Temperatures broke records for the month of March across the Great Lakes region.

Climate researchers say there’s never been anything like it going back more than a hundred years.

“We’re seeing history made before our eyes at least in terms of climatology.”

Jeff Andresen is the state’s climatologist and professor of geography at Michigan State.

“And in some ways if we look at where our vegetation is and how advanced it is, it’s probably a month ahead of where it typically is.”

Andresen is careful to point out that this year’s early warm-up is an extreme weather event.

He says it far outpaces the previous warmest March on record in 1945.

He can’t say it’s a direct result of climate change.

But it fits the predicted long term pattern of change that includes extreme fluctuations.

During one period, there were several straight days of above 80 degree daytime highs and nighttime temperatures in the 60's.

At the time, Nikki Rothwell was checking the cherry trees at the Northwest Michigan Horticultural Research Center in Leelanau County.

And she was seeing day-to-day changes in the fruit buds that are highly unusual.

“It’s just been uncanny. When I go out and look at those trees I look at what we saw yesterday in development and then I look at what we saw today in development and it actually looks like it kinda jumped to the next stage of development.”

Normally, that kind of growth would take weeks to occur.

But, Rothwell says, it’s hard to tell what’s normal anymore.

There’s a trend over the last 30 years of earlier spring warm-ups by as much as seven to 10 days, on average.

But the last date for a killing freeze has not moved earlier to keep pace.

Jeff Andresen at Michigan State has done a lot of that research.

With the extremely early warm-up this year, the fruit buds advanced to a stage of development that left them very vulnerable to temperatures below freezing.

And, as Andresen says, it was highly likely that temperatures would return to more springtime norms.

“There has never been a spring season, April, May or June, in which we have not observed freezing temperatures, or actually hard freezes. It’s never happened.”

And sure enough, on the last Sunday night in March, there was a prolonged freeze with strong winds and temperatures in the mid-20's.

It hit the heavy fruit growing areas in Leelanau County particularly hard.  

Frances Otto manages Cherry Bay Orchards north of Suttons Bay.

“I’d say we’ve got at least a 90% crop loss.” 

The official numbers for the Northwest region are losses of tart cherries in the 50 to 70% range.

Southwestern Michigan and the areas midway up the west coast haven’t been hit as hard.

But there have been more overnight frosts around the time of the full moon that continued to do significant damage to other fruits as well, such as apples, peaches and plums.

And there are other concerns besides a freeze.

Nikki Rothwell of the Horticultural Research Center says growers had to start spraying orchards to kill fungus that was released early because of the warm-up.

“There’s going to be a challenge to fight off more insects, more generations of insects and a longer season of fighting those pathogens.”

And there’s another problem for farmers who still may have a crop.

The fruit blossoms have a short window for pollination.

But now that more normal spring temperatures are back, it’s too cool for honeybees to fly.

A group of planners and designers is arguing that we need to rethink the way we make our buildings. The U.S. Green Building Council and the University of Michigan recently put out a report. It’s called Green Building and Climate Resilience.

It says design teams should start making buildings that are better suited to a changing climate. That could mean redesigning heating and cooling and stormwater systems, and it could mean changing landscaping.

Larissa Larsen is the lead author of the report. We met up on a corner in Ann Arbor to take a look at a new high rise apartment building that’s going up…

(construction sound)

“This looks like a fairly traditional apartment building and that’s completely fine. We want to start thinking that this building is going to be inhabiting conditions that are different than what has been in Michigan for a long time.”

RW: “One of the things that stood out to me was when you wrote ‘while climate has always been integrated into building professions, our codes, standards and practices typically assume the future will be similar to the past.’ What do you mean by that?”

The report: Green Buildings and Climate Resilience

Great Lakes Climate 101

Climate change indicators from the EPA

Transcript

LL: “In architecture, they use something called the typical meteorological year, and it’s a way to understand what we think are going to be the needs of the building from a heating, and cooling perspective, a consumption perspective, really. And it’s based on information from 1970. Well, we know in Ann Arbor, that in 1970, spring came about a week to 14 days later than it comes now. So we’ve got to make sure that the information we’re feeding into the models to generate what are the right sizes of equipment and capacity of those systems? We need to change that up. And so we actually anticipate not only what it is today, but looking ahead, what is it going to be in 2040, 2070, the end of the century?”

RW: “How is the climate expected to change in the Great Lakes region?”

LL: “In this region, we’re expecting warmer temperatures; more extreme heat events. Now, depending on what happens with emissions scenarios, people are thinking Michigan could emulate more of a situation like Kentucky all the way to the most extreme emissions scenarios, say, it might even be like northern Texas, which is a little amazing to me. So we’re going to see an increase in the number and size of drought prone areas, so we’ve got to need to be thinking pretty strategically how we want to use water in our buildings and equally as important, outside our buildings for landscape purposes.”

RW: “How do design teams hedge their bets and design for an uncertain future?”

LL: “One of the things we came upon in this report is a lot of the techniques we’re encouraging people to do are good things to do no matter what. One of the things I’m interested in is reflective surfaces. They don’t trap, hold and re-emit the heat, but they actually bounce it back. Another strategy is pervious pavement. That’s pavement that is very similar in appearance to asphalt but it actually has pores. That allows water to move through it. Not only is that good for stormwater or on-site water management, but we also think then it allows for evapotranspiration. Some of the water from the soil can actually move back through the pores and be a cooling effect on the surrounding area.

And then just good, honest site planning. Thinking about the floodplain. Our floodplains may be expanding and many communities right now are redrawing their floodplains to look at this. We don’t want to be putting buildings in those places if we’re anticipating that we may have more intense rain events.”

RW: “Larissa Larsen is an associate professor in the urban and regional planning program at the University of Michigan. Thank you so much.”

LL: “Oh, thank you, Rebecca.”

Coyotes have been making themselves at home in cities all over the country.    They’ve been showing up in big cities like Chicago and Detroit, and in a lot of suburban areas. 

But we don’t know a whole lot about Michigan’s urban coyotes.

A small research team from Wayne State University is trying to find out as much as they can.

But to do this… they have to act like urban coyotes… and become nocturnal.  Bill Dodge is a PhD candidate at Wayne State.  He heads up the research team. 

“They’ve found in other studies that coyotes especially around humans become much more nocturnal than say, out West.”

Dodge invited me to tag along on their 6pm to midnight shift one Friday night a few weeks ago. 

I met up with the group in a parking lot in northeast Oakland County. 

Bill Dodge puts on a headset and pulls an antenna and a mess of cables out of his trunk.

“I’m getting a signal on him but it’s really weak…”

They’re tracking a radio collared coyote that they trapped last summer.   

“We’ll go down the road a ways and take a listen to see if he’s closer.”

The team takes precautions to keep from being spotted by other people… as they cruise around these neighborhoods.

Holly Hadac volunteers with the coyote study.  She’s also a retired sheriff’s deputy.  She points out the red cellophane covering her car’s interior lights.

“My interior lights don’t go on when I start the car up.  I’ve got all the lights in my car blocked out, and that way keeps me incognito with what I’m doing.  So we keep our coyote safe so nobody knows where he is.”

“If someone doesn’t like coyotes, they might look for him.”

She says they’re worried someone might kill their research subject.

We drive around for a few hours… stopping to listen.

Usually… you’ll hear scientists refer to their study subjects by number.  But they’ve given this coyote a nickname.  They call him Lance.

When they get a clear signal from Lance’s collar they take compass bearings.  When they have three good points they can triangulate his location.

The team rarely sees Lance… and they don’t hear him very often either.  But halfway through the shift… we’re out in a big open field… when we hear him.  And he’s not alone… he has a mate.

“Yeah those are coyotes.  That’s definitely them.”

We listen for a long time, out in the dark. 

The night turns quiet again and we pile back into the cars.

We stop at a fast food restaurant and Bill Dodge pulls out his tracking equipment.  They’re mapping Lance’s movements to get an idea of what kind of habitat he likes.  So far, he moves around a lot at night… crossing a backyard here or there to get to a wooded patch or a wetland.

“We have found that he does cross major highways.  He has also used quite a few power line corridors.  So there’s a lot of connectivity in this area between these different habitat patches that he’s been using.”

And Dodge says urban coyotes spend a lot of the night hunting for food.  But he says they’re finding coyotes are not eating pets (but he does recommend keeping an eye on cats and small dogs when you let them outside, especially at night).

“Most of their diet consists of small rodents such as mice and voles they also eat rabbits a lot and we have found deer hair.”

And he says in Michigan, coyotes tend to be afraid of people.

“The ones we catch are just so afraid of us that they fall over when we approach them.  They’ll stay away from people.  Nobody has to worry about their small children.”

After my visit, the team caught and radio collared three more coyotes.  They’re hoping to get a better handle on how coyotes are surviving in the city… because like it or not, they’re part of urban life.

You can learn more about urban coyotes in this report on the "Ghosts in the Cities," a large long-term study of coyotes in the Chicago area by Ohio State University.

by Peter Payette for The Environment Report

The people who manage salmon in Lake Michigan will have to decide soon how many fish to put into the lake.  The salmon fishery is a manmade industry in the Great Lakes.  It’s produced by planting millions and millions of fish in the lakes.  But keeping the salmon population in balance with the food supply is a challenge these days.  And some scientists are raising new questions about the salmon’s demise in Lake Huron and whether that can be stopped in Lake Michigan.  

Salmon were brought in from the Pacific Ocean.

Some fish have learned to breed in the wild but historically, if you caught a salmon in the Great Lakes, it was born in a tank.

But by 2002, that was no longer true in Lake Huron.  That year, researchers observed something they didn’t believe, at first.  Four out of every five salmon were  wild.

Jim Johnson is a state fisheries biologist based in Alpena.  He says they assumed there was something wrong with the data.

“And we thought maybe it was a tick that would stabilize later on. But every year since then it’s been about 80 percent. It wasn’t just a flash in the pan it was a permanent change.”

The change might sound like good news: more fish.

But there were too many, far too many.

They ran out of food and died off.

Today, the once famous salmon fishery in  Lake Huron is pretty much gone.

And Jim Johnson says it all happened rather suddenly.

“The Great Lakes are big waters; you think of things happening slowly in such big waters.  This was relatively rapid.”

What happened in Lake Huron was the fish adapted well to some rivers in Georgian Bay.

Johnson estimates that while the state was putting three million fish in the lake each year, as many as 14 million wild fish would be born in Georgian Bay.

That overwhelmed the food supply of the whole lake.

You might say that the salmon, an exotic fish, became an invasive species in Lake Huron and wrecked the food web.

Recently, scientists have begun to talk about the fact that Lakes Huron and Michigan are connected by the Straits of Mackinac.

They know fish pass through the Straits but have generally believed it’s a minor factor.

But one scientist in particular is now questioning that assumption.

Rick Clark does research through Michigan State University.  Clark noticed something unusual about fishing in Lake Michigan during the past decade.

He says the fishing has been nearly as good as it was back in the eighties: the best fishing ever on Lake Michigan.

But anglers spend about half as much time fishing as they did back then.

“So that meant that half the number of fishermen were catching just as many fish. Which is hard to explain except that there must’ve been more fish out in the lake.”

His hypothesis is that lots of fish born in Lake Huron are coming over to feed in Lake Michigan.

It’s a just a hypothesis, but it’s a troubling one.

Clark says if millions of wild salmon are coming over from Georgian Bay, the salmon fishery in Lake Michigan could collapse too.

But Mark Ebener doesn’t think that’s happening.

He’s a fisheries biologist for the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority.

Ebener says the salmon fishing is horrible in Lake Huron right now.

“If there really was (sic) that many wild fish being produced in Lake Huron and particularly in Georgian Bay and moving into Lake Michigan, we would see substantial better fisheries than what we see… they’re not going to make a beeline for Georgian Bay into Lake Michigan.”

Ebener says it would take centuries for the salmon to develop such a specific migration pattern.

But the managers of Lake Michigan are anxious about this very possibility.

And it is something of a wildcard as they decide how to maintain the state’s prized salmon fishery.

You can listen to this Environment Report series: The Collapse of the Salmon Economy to learn more.

This year, federal regulators will keep a close eye on the Palisades Nuclear
Power Plant. The plant had three safety violations last year. That makes
it one of only four nuclear plants in the nation with such a bad safety
rating.

Lindsey Smith reports people who live by the plant near South Haven are still trying to figure out what the safety violations mean to them:

About 700 people work at Palisades every day. It’s one of the largest employers in Van Buren County. The plant is the county’s largest taxpayer too, with money going to a number of public schools, libraries, a hospital and local governments.

But the recent safety violations make some people who live nearby uncomfortable.

“My name’s Barbara Geisler. I live on a farm here outside of Bangor with my husband. And I’m Maynard Kauffman and I feel really nice about this place because it’s prime farmland.”

Geisler and Kauffman’s 22 acre farm has rich black soil. It lies about 11
miles away from the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant.

Kauffman didn’t think too much about the plant when he bought his farm back
in 1973, two years after the plant opened.

But by 2005, when plant operators began asking regulators to renew their
operating license, Kauffman and Geisler were at the plant protesting the
renewal.

“And with a lot of people carrying signs ‘shut it down, shut it down’ and then it was after that that we decided when we built our house not to use nuclear energy for electricity.”

Instead, the farm is powered by two small scale wind turbines and a solar panel. Kauffman says it gives him a good feeling knowing none of their energy is coming from coal, natural gas or the Palisades plant. But the two still have a bad feeling about Palisades. They’re worried about the steel vessel that contains the actual nuclear reactor. That vessel is the oldest in the country.

“If you just have one accident and if it were only one in a million, it is a cost that we don’t want to have to bear.”

The company that operates the plant, Entergy, will need to update the steel
vessel or prove that it can withstand further use in order to keep operating
past 2017.

But that vessel issue is actually separate from the safety violations the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued Palisades last year. In all, the plant
had four unplanned reactor shutdowns, resulting in significant safety
violations.

“Were there mistakes made? Yes there were. And those have been corrected.”

That’s Mark Savage, a Palisades spokesperson.

“But did they operate safely at all times? Yes they did. Was there any consequences involved that would’ve harmed equipment or harmed people? No there were not.”

At the NRC’s annual assessment meeting in South Haven last night, another Entergy official said safety improvements have already been made. He says human errors, the main cause of the safety violations issued last year, have declined.

But the NRC’s Acting Regional Administrator Cindy Peterson says the company will still be under close surveillance this year.

“Quite frankly we won’t be satisfied until your performance improves.”

The NRC says the safety problems at Palisades are uncommon, but not enough to warrant a shutdown. They too insist the plant is operating safely, and if it weren’t the agency would and could shut it down.

NRC inspectors will spend thousands of man hours at the plant this year and beyond, until Entergy can prove the safety culture at Palisades is up to federal regulators’ standards.

For the Environment Report, I’m Lindsey Smith in South Haven.

Big wind farms generate not just power but a lot of controversy. There’s been quite a debate in northern Michigan recently about the effects on safety, health, property values and the landscape. Smaller scale projects called community wind are designed to avoid those criticisms. But, as Bob Allen reports, there are still roadblocks:

Northport is a picturesque village that sits near the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula. For the past two years, a group of residents there, mostly retirees, has been working to put up one small wind turbine.

Doug McInnis says the opportunity just about fell into their laps.

“There was this unique spot. There was a hill. And it’s near right where you want to put the energy. We’re right near a substation. I mean all these things come together and it just says, hey, this is a natural.”

The village owns the hill that rises just behind its new sewage treatment plant. From the hilltop, the turbine will supply half the electricity for the plant. It will be a fraction of the size of new commercial turbines.

State maps show that Leelanau Township has the best sites for wind energy in the Lower Peninsula.

McInnis says the group wants to do something now that will benefit their community for years to come.

“People are concerned about the future generations. And if we don’t start thinking and moving in other directions I don’t know what’s going to happen. It ain’t gonna be good.”

But moving in the direction of renewable energy even for a small village is not easy. The Northport energy group has some pretty impressive credentials, though.

McInnis is a former aerospace engineer. Another member is a retired automotive engineer.

They formed a private company and put up their own money to finance the turbine, along with more than a dozen other investors.

That allows them to use federal tax credits and incentives that would not be available to the village.

The investors expect to make their money back, plus four percent, in about ten years. After that, they’ll turn the windmill over to the village free and clear.

Then the turbine is expected to cut Northport’s energy bill by about $30,000 a year for at least ten years.

Despite the benefits of local owners generating clean energy and using it on site, community wind projects are rare in Michigan.

And Steve Smiley says it’s because the state makes them difficult to do.

“Every time we turn a corner someone’s putting up a wall in front of us.”

Smiley is the project manager for the Northport turbine.

He says, under state rules, there’s an incentive to keep these projects smaller by paying less for the electricity as the projects get bigger.

Originally, he wanted the Northport turbine to be twice as big but that meant less money for the electricity it would generate.

And Smiley says if state rules required a fair price for all community wind it be a lot easier to do.

“We wouldn’t have to go through tons and tons of paperwork and complications and have twenty or thirty people involved for a year just to try to do a piddly little project.”

But it’s not just state rules that stymie community wind. Sometimes local governments make it difficult. Emmet County, for instance, has a very strict noise limit for wind turbines.

That’s meant Chris Stahl had to jump through extra hoops to develop a small windmill for a farm and community kitchen near Cross Village. Stahl is president of Lake Effect Energy in Harbor Springs.

He was able to get around the county restriction by having neighboring landowners agree to a higher noise limit. But it means he has to install meters to keep track of sound at their property lines.

“We haven’t even broke ground on the project yet and we’re already over budget due to the sixteen month process to get the permits and also to buy the additional sound metering equipment.”

Stahl believes community wind will catch on as barriers are broken down and people see how it works.

For the Environment Report, I’m Bob Allen.