Reading this latest on the climate change issue and the dire sense of urgency that permeates it can be seen in context by putting the immensity and complexity of the various forces that make up what constitutes the global climate.
Whether you rely on spiritual, scientific, or a combination of both, in your thoughts around the issue, it is clear that there are so many imponderables that acting too quickly—regardless of the urgent actions demanded from those who clearly operate from one agenda, and the relax, don’t-worry attitude—from those clearly operating from another agenda; it doesn’t hurt to think about the possible relative insignificance of temperature changes being documented over only a few centuries in a global system millions of years old.
Monitoring the meltdown
By Samantha Young
Associated Press
January 22, 2007
Editor’s note: This is the first in a year-long Associated Press series exploring the implications of climate change for California and the challenges in addressing them.
The January wind whips down from the peaks that ring the northwest shore of Lake Tahoe, the snapping cold and snow-covered grandeur of the mountains providing a somewhat misleading backdrop to Brant Allen’s task.
While all around him are the certain signs of winter, the marine biologist is reading other signs that tell him winters in the Sierra Nevada aren’t what they used to be.
At the end of a wooden pier, he checks a metal box filled with wires and computer chips that gauge the temperature in the nation’s deepest glacial lake. The data recorded at this pier and at four buoys tell an alarming story of a lake that has been warming gradually over the past three decades, due at least in part to global climate change that scientists say has led to shorter winters in the Sierra.
The potential consequences of those changing winters are profound, for Lake Tahoe and all of California, especially as temperatures are predicted to rise markedly over the next century.
What those changes might be and how the nation’s most populous and geographically diverse state will prepare for them is the subject of increasingly intense debate. California’s economy, geography and search for solutions also has made it a model for the nation and the world.
Throughout California, rising temperatures threaten to transform a landscape that ranges from the Joshua trees of the Mojave Desert to the redwoods of the North Coast. In doing so, drastic challenges are expected for a population expected to reach 55 million by 2050, from the millions who live in coastal cities to the farmers who have made California the nation’s top agricultural state.
The forecast is dim: diminished snowpacks that melt too early, causing floods and water shortages; submerged coastal homes and eroded beaches as sea levels rise; crops unable to survive in longer, hotter summers; charred forests that fall victim to more intense wildfires.
“It’s not a place where we would be comfortable,” said Connie Millar, an historic scientist at the U.S. Forest Service. “If we don’t lasso this thing, it could ramp up into catastrophic conditions.”
In wine country, for example, high temperatures could ripen grapes up to two months early, affecting the quality of the grapes behind a $3.2 billion industry.
“What types of grapes would be able to be grown would perhaps change the types of wine that would be able to be produced,” said Dave Whitmer, agricultural commissioner for Napa County.
Rising temperature mean a rising snow line
The Earth’s temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, with the rate of warming tripling in the last three decades. Last year was the warmest on record in the U.S., a year that saw California suffer through a withering summer heat wave.
Nowhere else in California are the signs of climate change more evident than in the Sierra, the 400-mile long range that provides the snowpack essential for the state’s water supply.
