Global warming would alter our local climate drastically By Robert Miller THE NEWS-TIMES
In the coming decades, our winters will be short, wet and anemic and summers will be long and hot -- like Maryland or, more on the stifling side, like South Carolina. People will change the way they live: forsaking their skis and toboggans for bikes and depending more than ever on air-conditioning. They'll find themselves prey to new diseases. Some businesses will wither, others perhaps, will thrive. Connecticut's coastline will be altered dramatically. The mix of trees in its forests will change. So will its plants, birds and big mammals, its amphibians and fish. It will be subject to many more dramatic storms -- drenching rains, even hurricanes. Those all are the local consequences of global warming. Scientists have been predicting its onset for years. Some say it's already begun. "We're seeing huge, whole scale changes now," said Michael Klemens, a herpetologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo. "There are tremendous changes." But a report issued this month by the Union of Concerned Scientists focused on the nine states of the Northeast -- the six New England states and New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey -- and predicted a change akin to living in Raleigh or Charleston rather than Hartford or Albany. This could be tempered by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by about 3 percent a year. Under the best scenario, said Katherine Hayhoe, one of the co-authors of the report, Massachusetts and Connecticut would have a climate like Maryland's by the end of the century. If our production of fossil fuel emissions goes unchanged, it would be more like South Carolina. "Vermont could be like northern West Virginia," Hayhoe said. "Or it could be like the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee." That could mean the region's annual snowfall, now at about 40 inches a year in Connecticut, would be reduced by half by century's end. It would also mean earlier springs, later falls, annual periods of drought, and warmer, shallower rivers -- hard places for cold-water species like trout to survive. Spring would start three weeks earlier and fall would end three weeks later. "It's as if we're picking New England up and moving it south," Hawhoe said. "I don't like it," said Robert Thorson, a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. "I prefer cool summers and real winters." The report was issued last week by Northeast Climate Impact Assessment, a partnership of 14 national scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists. It used both existing meteorological data gathered from government weather stations and models climatologists have already written to study long-term global warming, with the global models matching the predictions made for the Northeast. Higher temperatures All scientists have reached a consensus that the world is warming. Some question whether there's a correlation between this warming and man-made carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels -- the chief greenhouse gas -- pointing out the Earth's climate has gone through great swings in temperature in the past. But by and large, the scientists who have studied both the rise in temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions have tied the two together, saying the rapid rise in temperatures they're now seeing can't be attributed to other, long-term cycles. Peter Frumhoff, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists Global Environmental Program said the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now the highest it's been in 700,000 years. "We've looked at more than 100 centuries of natural variability," Frumhoff said. "We looked at solar variability, volcanic eruptions. That variability in no way explains the temperature changes we're seeing." "The data on this is very good," said Joel Gordes of West Hartford, a former state legislator and energy consultant for more than 30 years. And, they said, a change is going to come. Thomas Philbrick, a professor of biology at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, talks about biomes -- all the interrelated plants and animals that live in a certain climate. "You change the climate, you change the biome," Philbrick said. Water rising Scientists are now seeing some of those changes. Michael Klemens, who created the Metropolitan Conservation Alliance headquartered in Ridgefield to save wildlife habitat in the Northeast, said he's seen amphibians breeding earlier, often with disastrous results. A warm spell in February will signal them to move to vernal pools to breed. If a hard cold snap follows, the vernal pools freeze and the breeding amphibians die. "These things are abnormal events," he said. And while birds and beasts can move north if it grows too warm in Connecticut, he said, amphibians and turtles and snakes aren't the types to migrate far. If there are major changes in their habitat, they'll be the first to suffer. "That's why they're the canaries in the coal mine," he said. Johan Verekamp, the Harold Stearns professor of earth science at Wesleyan University in Middletown and chairman of its environmental studies department, said his students are now studying the level of Long Island Sound. They have found it is rising three times faster now than it has for centuries, even when natural variability and the gradual sinking of the state's coastline are taken into effect. Scientists attribute the rise in sea level to the melting of the polar ice caps and the ice sheet covering Greenland. This melting is now accelerating. As the sea water rises, Verekamp said, it could swallow up and destroy the state's coastal marshes. And these marshes cannot retreat backwards to meet that rise. There's no room. "They'd run into I-95 or a baseball stadium," Verekamp said. These marshes are the great incubators of marine life. They're also natural buffers, which will be needed if there's more violent coastal storms and hurricanes because of global warming. "Look at Hurricane Katrina," Verekamp said. "All the coast creeks and flat land absorbed a lot of energy." Tree species will change The warming could affect the trees in the forest. Graeme Berlyn, professor of forest management at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Science, said it might mean that we would have southern species, like poplar and magnolia and pin oaks, mixed in with our hardwood species, and sugar maples might yield to red maples. But forests have been changing for the past 12,000 years, Berlyn said. "I'm very cautious about making predictions," he said. "There's no such thing as a cooperative ecosystem," said UConn's Thorson. "Every plant is trying to succeed. If it gets warmer, and certain plants do better in that climate, they'll succeed." But both Thorson and Berlyn said the greater impact on the region's forest could be southern fungal diseases and plant-damaging pests that until recently, haven't been able to hack northern winters. "In British Columbia, the pine beetles used to have one batch of young a year," Berlyn said. "Now, they're having two." Shore birds at risk The state's bird population is already changing, with southern species like mockingbirds and red-bellied woodpeckers moving here over the last half-century, said Patrick Comins, director of bird conservation with Audubon Connecticut. Some of this may be due to a change in food supplies -- mockingbirds like the fruit of the multiflora rose, an invasive plant that's now established throughout the region. But it may also be due to gradual warming. Comins said the state species at greatest risk are some shoreline birds -- piping plover, least terns, salt marsh sharp-tailed sparrows. If Long Island Sound rises enough, he said, it will destroy their nesting grounds. "If the high tides rise by an inch, that could flood the high-tide marshes," he said. "That's where the salt marsh sharp-tailed sparrow lives." Effect on business The human impact of global warming would affect all segments of the human population, said energy consultant Joel Gordes. Hotter summers mean more air-conditioners and a greater load on the state's already overtaxed electricity transmission system. If there are regular brownouts, companies that depend on steady electricity may pull out of the state, he said, or never move here. The state's insurance industry could be hammered by the cost of paying for a string of major hurricanes. And the state's ski industry could shut down. "If there's a lot more rain, it means towns have to pay to rebuild their storm sewers to handle the new capacity," he said. "That's municipal money that doesn't get spent on other things." Gordes said without cold, hard winters, disease-carrying insects, like mosquitoes and ticks, could increase their survival rates. That means more Lyme disease and West Nile virus, and the chance of southern diseases -- malaria or dengue fever -- moving north. Extended heat waves could mean more people going to the hospital with heat stroke. But Gordes said there are also businesses, like the state's growing fuel cell and gas turbine industry, that could thrive as the region tries to move away from fossil fuel-producing sources of energy. "This is where we should be heading," he said. What we can do Scientists now believe that because of the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, global warming is already underway. Some states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, have formed a pact to first cap and then reduce greenhouse gases by 2030. William Moomaw, director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University in Boston, and one of the scientists who participated in the regional report on global warming, said the region's hope of mitigating the impact of global warming -- not stopping it -- depends on reducing greenhouse emission by 3 percent a year. That's an achievable goal, he said. "It means driving 40 miles a month less," he said. "It means driving hybrid cars and replacing old appliances with energy-efficient ones. It means adding insulation to buildings and changing our building codes to reduce greenhouse gases. There's a lot of things we can do. "If we take them step by step, by the end of the century, we'll wonder what all the fuss was about." # Contact Robert Miller at bmillernewstimes.com or (203) 731-3345. this story has been read 952 times To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
