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Meltdown
Millions of moviegoers flooded theaters Memorial Day weekend to watch the end of the world, as depicted in the movie, The Day After Tomorrow. (According to the-numbers.com, it was the biggest Memorial Day weekend opening for any film, ever). A smaller flood of news stories, along with op-eds and press releases from scientists, warned that the movie didn't depict what global warming is generally expected to do to the planet, even among the direst of scientifically debated scenarios. "If you want to start poking holes at this film with the science, you're going to end up with Swiss cheese," says Tony Leiserowitz, a Eugene researcher who has focused on the issue of human-caused climate disruption for more than a decade. But, he adds, "You'll still have cheese; there's still something there, even if there's a lot of holes in it." Humongous hurricanes aren't likely to suck down the troposphere and flash freeze the Empire State Building — or Mount Pisgah. Over at the coast, true tidal waves would be caused by undersea earthquakes, not by big winds. But ocean circulation around the globe does keep the Northern Hemisphere warm, especially around the north Atlantic, just as Dennis Quaid told the Dick Cheney look-alike in the film. Fresh water from melting polar glaciers could disrupt or halt that great conveyor belt — some say it already is slowing down, causing major cooling at northern lattitudes. There is a strong scientific consensus that boosting carbon — by burning carbon-rich oil, gas, coal — is holding in heat, making the planet progressively warmer and leading to potentially dire climate disruptions. That warming may not proceed slowly, giving us and the rest of life on Earth a lot of time to adapt. It won't happen over the course of 10 days as the movie shows. But it could happen over the course of 10 years, or 100. "People need to know that we're not going to be able to one day say 'Climate change happened, it happened last week, and here's what you can expect to see,'" says Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with NOAA-Fisheries in Newport. "We can't ever say that." There's a fair bit of uncertainty about details and predictions, which is where the debate comes in. Here are six things you need to know about what is believed, what is happening now and what is being done as we burn our carbon and experiment in disrupting the climate of our world.
1. EXPECT MORE EXTREME WEATHER Meteorologists can't predict next weekend's weather all that accurately, so imagine how unreliable predictions of the next 50 years can be. But scientists generally agree on the broad outlines. Storms will worsen and become more frequent. Drought, along with famine and desertification, will become more common and persistent in many areas, while flooding will grow in others. Agriculture belts will likely move toward the poles. Diseases such as dengue fever and bug-borne malaria and Lyme disease may proliferate in new, northerly locales. Closer to home, Northwest scientists expect global warming to make our seasonal wet and dry periods more extreme. Philip Mote, Washington's state climatologist and lead author of the regional assessment sponsored by the U.S. Global Climate Research Group, says our already dry summers will get warmer and water in streams will diminish. Winters will see big rainstorms but less snow. That translates into more winter flooding and less water storage — bad news for summer drinking water, for fish, for agriculture and for forests — and more work for firefighters.
2. GLOBAL WARMING IS CHANGING THINGS NOW The Day After Tomorrow also was right that the effects of global warming aren't just your grandchildren's problem. Researchers are finding growing evidence of it happening today, changes best explained by rising temperatures. The line on the mountains where trees give way to rock and ice is moving uphill. Species ranging from marine invertebrates to terrestrial butterflies are migrating northward. Spring is coming earlier, based on long-term records, with evidence ranging from the date the first migratory songbirds appear to the first open lilac flowers. And while most scientists doing this research won't definitively tie their findings to global warming, they do say these examples are exactly what the computer models indicate will happen in a warming world. The most dramatic finding is in the mountains, which usually store abundant winter water as snow and dole it out slowly through the dry summer. Mote has looked at Northwest snowpack going back to the 1930s, and compared it with more recent observations. His conclusion: Our snowpack is going away. As much as 60 percent could be gone by 2050. Field sites in Oregon — Mote maintains more than 100 of them, many near Eugene — show an even worse picture. "It turns out of all the places in the Northwest, the Oregon Cascades have seen the largest declines in spring snowpack," Mote says. Between 1950 and 1997, snowpack on Mary's Peak near Corvallis dropped 100 percent, from 10-15 inches down to slush. Mote's McKenzie site, higher and in the Cascades, saw only a 31 percent drop. Santiam Junction, at 3,750 feet, saw an 80 percent drop. Red Butte, due east of Eugene, saw a 66 percent loss at 4,560 feet and a 77 percent loss at 4,000 feet.
3. MORE ATMOSPHERIC WARMING MAY HARM TIMBER, AGRICULTURE AND ECOSYSTEMS There's little debate that carbon levels are expected to double from pre-industrial levels by 2050. Many people see that fact as the silver lining of global-warming scenarios because extra carbon is thought to boost food production — commercial greenhouses routinely pump in extra carbon dioxide to make plants more lush for sale. But a growing body of underreported science shows that doubling carbon makes many plants grow faster, but apparently not better. Nancy Tuchman, a professor of stream ecology at Loyola University of Chicago, has been studying the effects of doubled carbon levels on the food quality of deciduous tree leaves. Those leaves fall into streams, forming the base of the food chain there. What she's found is that the trees grow faster with more carbon dioxide, but their nutritional value to the food chain plummets. The trees gorge on carbon, but they are limited by lower levels of nitrogen in the soil. The extra carbon lets the plants make more phenolics — undigestible compounds that serve as a defense mechanism against leaf eaters. Also, less nitrogen means less grist for making protein, so anything that relies on these leaves for food has to eat more to gain less. Tuchman has documented this diminished nutrition up the stream food chain — from microorganisms and fungi to insects and fish. This effect has been shown to include many of the foods humans eat, including mainstays such as broccoli and Brussels sprouts, carrots and potatoes, tomatoes and apples. (Wheat, barley and many staple grains appear unaffected.) If carbon levels keep rising, diminished nutrition will likely show up in plant-eating animals as well, including those many animals that humans depend on for food. Doubled carbon dioxide could also be bad news for timber. Tuchman explains that trees grow faster, but their cell walls are elongated and thinner, translating into weaker lumber. The science can't be completely definitive. These effects have been shown in controlled experiments, but it could look different — for better or worse — in a complex, planet-wide system.
4. MOST AMERICANS WANT TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM, AT LEAST SOMEWHAT Tony Leiserowitz, who works with Decision Research in Eugene, has some good news: Most Americans believe global warming is a problem and think the government should tackle it. Armed with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Leiserowitz surveyed Americans around the country about global warming and policies to curb it. "I found to my surprise that there was quite strong public support for a variety of national policies," he says. And that support came from all points along the political spectrum.
Three quarters of respondents said they were concerned about global warming, 90 percent said the U.S. should take steps to lower greenhouse-gas emissions, and 71 percent favored shifting the roughly $5 billion of annual fossil-fuel subsidies to support renewable energy. Eighty-eight percent favored signing the Kyoto protocol, which calls for reducing U.S. carbon emissions 7 percent by 2010, and 76 percent favored reducing those emissions even if developing nations such as China and India don't — the major reason the federal government withheld its support of the Kyoto treaty. But Leiserowitz found the same people balked when it came to actions that would cost them more personally. He found that 78 percent of respondents opposed a 60-cent gas tax to discourage driving and cut emissions. Only 31 percent were willing to support a business-energy tax that would cost a family of four an extra $380 per year. A small majority, 54 percent, was willing to impose a gas-guzzler tax that would add $1,000 to the cost of a $20,000 car or SUV with gas mileage below 25 miles per gallon. Despite strong general support, Leiserowitz concludes, "People are a long way from being convinced that they need to personally sacrifice to achieve those goals. I don't think people have a good sense yet of the scale of the problem, or the kinds of commitments that will be required to solve it at the societal level." His latest NSF grant is to study the effects of The Day After Tomorrow on public perceptions of climate change.
5. OREGON IS A LEADER IN BATTLING GLOBAL WARMING There's more good news: Oregon is taking important and ground-breaking strides to lower its contribution to climate change. In 1997, the Oregon Legislature unanimously required new power plants to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below the best available technology — or help fund measures to reduce carbon in other ways. The law was the first of its kind in the U.S.; Washington state recently followed with its own version. New power plants basically multiply their extra carbon by a dollar figure set by law. All to date have given that money to Climate Trust, a Portland-based nonprofit, which in turn funds carbon-cutting projects on the ground. Mike Burnett, Climate Trust's executive director, says his group has put $5 million into about 10 projects so far, including stimulating wind power in Oregon and planting trees along the Deschutes River. Many other projects are in the Portland metro area, including low-income weatherization, timing traffic signals to reduce idling at red lights and new green buildings. "Some of the most efficient buildings in the world are being built in Portland under our program," Burnett says. These efforts don't entirely do the job. In fact, Climate Trust is only offsetting about one third of the carbon it's paid to offset, Burnett says, because these projects cost more than the law requires power producers to pay. Oregon also is participating in regional efforts, and in September 2003 joined forces with the other West Coast states to take combined action. The agreement among the three governors is the second of its kind in the nation, following a 2001 action by governors in the Northeast and some eastern Canadian provincial leaders to tackle climate change after President George W. Bush backed away from his campaign promise to regulate carbon.
Under the agreement, the three West Coast states could begin to implement cap-and-trade schemes for carbon — companies emitting too much carbon could buy credits from companies emitting less. The states also could work together to encourage development of renewable energy, and combine vehicle purchases to green state fleets with hybrid cars and tires that help vehicles use less fuel. Cities are taking their own initiatives. Portland, Corvallis and a number of Washington municipalities have joined Cities for Climate Protection, committing to cleaning up their carbon act. Eugene didn't join when the opportunity came around four years ago, but Councilman David Kelly says the city is nevertheless doing what it can. "In broad terms, obviously global warming is a serious issue that both government and the private sector should be working on aggressively," he says. "The city of Eugene government has certainly got an ethic of environmental sensitivity." He cites efforts including improving the energy efficiency of existing city buildings, designing new buildings such as the library based on green building principles and buying hybrid vehicles for the city fleet. In the last two months, Eugene switched its diesel vehicles to biodeisel. "Certainly we could always do better," Kelly says. "But the bottom line to me is what are the day-to-day actions of the city government rather than what have we signed or not signed." Scientists are banding together, too. West Coast ocean researchers expect $500 million in federal funding in 2007 to establish an Integrated Ocean Observing System, which will help catch new signs of climate change. And even Oregon's landmark land-use laws help, by reducing sprawl and the driving that accompanies it. "The largest part of our greenhouse-gas problem here on the West Coast is transportation, and that really ties back to land use," says Patrick Mazza of Climate Solutions in Seattle, a nonprofit that advocates for policies and actions that reduce greenhouse gasses. "If you have a poor-mileage vehicle that only gets 20 miles to the gallon, you're basically popping out a little carbon dioxide brick onto the road every 20 miles."
6. THERE'S MORE WORK TO BE DONE Although Oregon is leading many innovations, Mazza says "I have to admit that California is kicking our butt." California offers major support for solar innovations, and is working to implement controversial caps on carbon emissions from cars. And very significantly, California requires that 20 percent of all energy used in the state by 2017 must come from renewable energy sources such as wind or solar — a move that will drive development of those technologies. Twelve other states have similar standards, including Texas, where the law was signed, ironically, by then-Gov. Bush. Not everyone agrees. George Taylor, Oregon's state climatologist based at OSU in Corvallis, says conservation is good, and adapting to weather extremes can only help. But Taylor doesn't believe humans are changing world weather and so doesn't favor putting money into reducing carbon at the expense of reducing sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide — or making sure more people have access to clean water. "I don't think the science of global warming is settled, even though some people say it is," Taylor says. "I don't necessarily feel that I'm correct on this issue, but I think at the very least that this is an issue that has at least two sides." But Mazza believes that cleaning up carbon dioxide has many benefits, not just to slow global warming. "Even if we weren't confronted by climate change … we'd want to find better and cleaner ways to power our vehicles, and ways we don't have to use our vehicles as much," he says. "We'd want to figure out ways to generate our electricity more cleanly. There're so many benefits to this." Orna Izakson is a former contributing editor to EW, and recently published a chapter in the book Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change (Jim Motavalli, ed., Routledge, 2004) on the effects of a changing climate on marine ecology along the California coast.
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