Originally published December 1 2005
Scientists discuss the ramifications of a warming climate in the Pacific Northwest
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
According to scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle, the climate of the Pacific Northwest is heating up faster than any other place on earth.
Annual patters of stream flow are changing in ways that could adversely impact irrigation, domestic water supplies, fish runs, and hydropower production, while increasing the risk of forest fires and tree-killing insects.
"Even the most conservative scenarios show the climate of the Pacific Northwest warming significantly more than was experienced during the 20th century," the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group reported last week.
The Puget Sound region warmed at a rate "substantially greater" than that of Earth's average surface air temperature, the scientists found.
"This is often talked about as something that's going to happen," says Mr. Ack.
Global warming "is likely to impose significant economic costs," 52 leading economists from around the country warned in a recent letter to government and business officials in Oregon.
That's mainly because of diminishing snowpacks due to warmer winter temperatures.
"Climate change is an additional stress to systems that have already been affected and changed by human activities," says Amy Snover, a research scientist and member of the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group.
Since February, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has been pushing his colleagues in city halls around the country to sign the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.
That pact commits them to meet or exceed the Kyoto Protocol standards, reducing greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
While it still relies heavily on hydropower dams for electricity (which have environmental problems of a different sort - mainly profound damage to ecosystems that support endangered salmon and other wildlife), Washington State has been building wind farms in its wide-open spaces east of the Cascade Mountains.
With help from two new light-rail public transit lines, the planting of some 750,000 carbon-absorbing trees, financial incentives for energy-efficient "green" buildings, and weatherization of more than 10,000 apartments and houses, per capita emissions in Portland dropped 13 percent over the past 10 years.
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