[Platform-fossilfuels] Report Details Effects of Climate Change Across U.S.

[John Andrews]

[[The Dept. of Agriculture finally admits that global warming is happening
and that its big.  Some good quotes. - John]]

Report Details Effects of Climate Change Across U.S.

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A U.S. report notes that emissions from burning fossil fuels have already
translated into more frequent forest fires, especially in the West, where a
tanker helicopter over Torrance County, N.M., dropped water earlier this
month.
A U.S. report notes that emissions from burning fossil fuels have already
translated into more frequent forest fires, especially in the West, where a
tanker helicopter over Torrance County, N.M., dropped water earlier this
month. (Photo: Roberto E. Rosales/AP)

Global warming is already affecting the nation's forests, water resources,
farmland and wildlife, and will have serious negative consequences over the
next 25 to 50 years, according to a report issued yesterday by the federal
government.

The scientific assessment by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which
was commissioned by the Agriculture Department and carried out by 38
scientists inside and outside the government, provides the most detailed
look in nearly eight years at how climate change is reshaping the American
landscape. The report, which runs 193 pages and synthesizes a thousand
scientific papers, highlights how human-generated carbon dioxide emissions
from burning fossil fuels have already translated into more frequent forest
fires, reduced snowpack and increased drought, especially in the West.

Anthony C. Janetos, director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute
of the University of Maryland and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
said the document aims to inform federal resource managers and dispel the
public's perception that global warming will not be felt until years from
now.

"They imagine all these ecological impacts are in some distant future," said
Janetos, one of the lead authors, who noted that many animals and plants
have shifted their migratory and blooming patterns to reflect recent changes
in temperature. "They're not in some distant future. We're experiencing them
now."

The document concludes that Americans must face the fact that many of these
changes are locked in even if the country takes significant steps to cut
emissions in the coming decades.

"Climate change is currently impacting the nation's ecosystems and services
in significant ways, and those alterations are very likely to accelerate in
the future, in some cases dramatically," the report says. "Even under the
most optimistic CO2emission scenarios, important changes in sea level,
regional and super-regional temperatures and precipitation patterns will
have profound effects."

Richard Moss, vice president and managing director for climate change at the
advocacy group World Wildlife Fund, said in an interview that the report
represents "the very first upfront acknowledgment from the administration
that we are already experiencing climate change impacts."

As recently as July 2007, the administration submitted a report to the
United Nations that omitted any discussion of how global warming will affect
wildfires, heat waves, agriculture or snowpack.

Moss, who led the U.S. Climate Change Science Program coordination office
during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, praised the program for
producing the analysis, which is part of a long-delayed series of official
climate reports. "At the same time," he added, "we all need to be looking at
how the administration now intends to use the results of this information,
because it really is worrisome."

The researchers said that of 1,598 animal species examined in more than 800
studies, nearly 60 percent were found to have been affected by climate
change.

In addition, the number and frequency of forest fires and insect outbreaks
are "increasing in the interior West, the Southwest, and Alaska," while
"precipitation, stream flow, and stream temperatures are increasing in most
of the continental United States" and snowpack is declining in the West.

The Agriculture Department, the study's lead sponsor, issued a statement
yesterday highlighting some of the report's findings for farmers, noting
that the higher temperatures mean that grain and oilseed crops will mature
more rapidly but face an increased risk of failure and "will negatively
affect livestock."

"The report issued today provides practical information that will help
landowners and resource managers make better decisions to address the risks
of climate change," said Agriculture Department chief economist Joseph
Glauber.

Agriculture Department spokesman William Hohenstein said the department is
already incorporating climate change into all of its national forest
management plans, and it is drafting a strategic research plan aimed at
coping with global warming. "We will use this as a springboard in terms of
identifying the questions we're going to focus on" for the strategic plan,
he said of the report.

Peter Backlund, another of the report's lead authors and director of
research relations at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in
an interview that the Departments of Agriculture and Interior and other
federal agencies will be tested by changing climate conditions on both
public and private land.

"This is going to be a big challenge for agencies that haven't traditionally
been big players in climate," Backlund said, adding the government's
monitoring systems can chart major changes but are insufficient to serve as
a climate warning system. "We lack the ability to identify the more subtle
changes that are happening that could be much larger in the future. . . .
We're pulling this information from systems that weren't designed to look at
that."

The report predicts that some of the nation's most valued landscapes may
change radically in the near future as precipitation and weather patterns
continue to shift.

"Management of Western reservoir systems is very likely to become more
challenging as runoff patterns continue to change," it states. "Arid areas
are very likely to experience increased erosion and fire risk. In arid
ecosystems that have not co-evolved with a fire cycle, the probability of
loss of iconic, charismatic megaflora such as Saguaro cacti and Joshua trees
will greatly increase."

One of the greatest challenges land managers will face over the next few
decades, Janetos said, is uncertainty.

"You can't really assume anymore the climate is going to be familiar or
similar to what we've seen over the 20th century," he said. "We're moving
into new territory."