B.C.'s pine beetles could infest forests all across Canada, MLA warns
DAWN WALTON | GLOBE AND MAIL
WILLIAMS LAKE, B.C. -- John Rustad said he didn't want to sound "all doom and gloom," but as he preached in an airplane hangar filled with officials from Alberta, the British Columbia MLA warned of an apocalypse.
An unusual blip showed up on provincial radar systems a few years ago, he said. It was a cloud of mountain pine beetles -- pests that have chewed through much of his province's interior forests and lopped at least $6-billion from the economy.
"If this wall gets to Alberta, this thing can go right across the country. You won't be able to stop it," said Mr. Rustad, who worked in the forest industry for 20 years around Prince George, the area he now represents in the legislature.
"It's not every day you get to see a natural disaster in slow motion. That's what we have here," he told the group.
British Columbia's beetle problem became an epidemic in short order.
In 1999, almost 165,000 hectares of forest were infested. By 2005, the number jumped to 8.7 million hectares.
Alberta is hoping to avoid a similar fate in its battle against the beetle. The bug has flown across the Rocky Mountains and has popped up along the eastern slopes from the southwest corner of Alberta all the way to an area north of Jasper National Park.
Industry and government officials, who met in Calgary over the weekend to find ways to protect 2 million hectares of Alberta's forests from the blight, had flown to Williams Lake, which is at the heart of B.C.'s pine beetle outbreak, to see the devastation first-hand.
From the air, forests of trees were a sea of red, orange and grey. The palette was broken by the occasional green tree and swaths of stumps where stands had been cut in a bid to prevent the spread of beetles to other timber stands.
Pine beetles, which are about half a centimetre long and feed largely on mature lodgepole and limber pines, had burrowed under the bark to build tunnel-like egg galleries. When the larvae hatched, they bored holes out through the bark and, in the summer, went on to attack other trees. Lethal is the blue-stain fungus that the beetle carried; it disrupted the water flow within the trees and eventually turned them blood-red. As the trees die, their colour fades to orange, then grey.
The infestation in B.C. is unprecedented and the beetles are moving to Alberta and the United States, said Allan Carroll, a scientist with the federal Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria.
Although the pine beetle is indigenous to the area, a perfect storm of factors set the stage for the catastrophe.
"We've inadvertently grown a mountain pine beetle smorgasbord," Dr. Carroll said.
Officials have been successful at forest-fire suppression, he said. The forestry industry in B.C. had bypassed lodgepole pine stands, allowing more trees to become the mature, preferred hosts for the beetles.
Since 1910, the total area of mature pine has tripled in the province.
And in the last century, the B.C. Interior has experienced an average minimum winter temperature jump of between 2.2 C and 2.6 C. Cold snaps are the best natural enemy of the pine beetle.
Now, global warming seems to be making the beetle a permanent fixture in places the pest was never previously seen, Dr. Carroll said.
Pine beetles tend to swarm Alberta in 20-year cycles. Traditionally, during those times, the few affected trees have been cut and burned.
But the threat is more ominous now.
In 1998, 10 infested lodgepole pine trees were found in Banff National Park. Two years later, 25 infested trees were spotted north of Jasper National Park. Two years after that, the pests were detected in 25 trees in Canmore, east of Banff.
In the past year, about 19,000 trees have been attacked across Alberta.
The province is cutting and burning every infected tree and those that could be susceptible to the pest.
"We have taken the most aggressive approach we can to limit the mountain pine beetle in our province and beyond," David Coutts, Alberta's Minister of Sustainable Resource Development, told reporters over the weekend.
Some researchers warn that the pine beetle could jump to jack pines and spread through Canada's boreal forest and into the northern territories and through to the Maritimes.
That's why Alberta and British Columbia have just jointly announced $17-million in funding to tackle the scourge along their shared boundary before the beetle spreads farther.
Alberta will also set up a new advisory committee. The announcements come on the heels of the federal budget, which pledged $400-million in funding related to the pine beetle.
Back in Williams Lake, Mr. Rustad said the funding will be a big help, but he added that the magnitude of the crisis could have been avoided if aggressive action was taken sooner. Instead, environmentalists criticized the notion of cutting and burning forests while government officials kept waiting for cold weather that would kill the bugs, he said.
Nate Bello, who is the mayor of Quesnel just to the north, said he remembers seeing little pockets of red trees to the west of his community 10 or 15 years ago.
Now, the forestry sector in his area is looking at losing about half its allowable cut because of the pine beetle.
"I'm glad people from Alberta are getting a head start. It's something we didn't have," he said. "The signs were there. People said we should have moved quicker."(+)
Monday, May 29, 2006
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Province has new tool against invasive plants
May 08 2006
Clearwater Times (http://www.clearwatertimes.com)
The Province has launched Canada's first web-based tool in the battle against invasive alien plants, Forests and Range Minister Rich Coleman and Agriculture and Lands Minister Pat Bell announced last week.
Left unchecked, invasive plants can cause crop and livestock losses, destroy wildlife habitat, crowd out endangered plant species and lower property values.
"Invasive alien plants threaten both our biodiversity and our economy," Coleman said. "Our timber and ranching industries depend on native species. Their loss due to the spread of non-native plants that are less valuable or even toxic puts these industries at risk. At the same time, alien plants push out native plants that sustain our wildlife and ecosystems."
The Invasive Alien Plants Program is a web-based data entry system and mapping tool. It will allow about 200 people working in government, industry and local weed committees to quickly and efficiently share information about where invasive plants are located, and what weed control treatments have been used. By sharing data, the agencies involved in invasive plant management will be able to prioritize work across B.C., prevent duplicated efforts and measure progress.
"This government is committed to working effectively and collaboratively on the problems of invasive plants," said Bell. "In 2004, we announced the Province would boost spending on invasive plants by over $3 million, to a total of $8 million over two years."
Agencies involved in the management of approximately 140 species of invasive plants in B.C. include the Ministries of Agriculture and Lands, Environment, Forests and Range, and Transportation as well as the Invasive Plant Council.
The government agencies form the Inter Ministry Invasive Plant Committee that manages invasive plants on Crown lands.
"This new web tool is a very positive development for all those involved in invasive plant issues," said Juliet Craig, co-ordinator of the Central Kootenay Invasive Plant Committee. "It gives all of us the ability to pull maps and find information whenever we need it, whether it's for conducting inventories, treatments or monitoring."
The public may access the application to produce maps showing the location of various weed species in B.C. The Invasive Alien Plant Program Application is available online at www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/invasive/
Clearwater Times (http://www.clearwatertimes.com)
The Province has launched Canada's first web-based tool in the battle against invasive alien plants, Forests and Range Minister Rich Coleman and Agriculture and Lands Minister Pat Bell announced last week.
Left unchecked, invasive plants can cause crop and livestock losses, destroy wildlife habitat, crowd out endangered plant species and lower property values.
"Invasive alien plants threaten both our biodiversity and our economy," Coleman said. "Our timber and ranching industries depend on native species. Their loss due to the spread of non-native plants that are less valuable or even toxic puts these industries at risk. At the same time, alien plants push out native plants that sustain our wildlife and ecosystems."
The Invasive Alien Plants Program is a web-based data entry system and mapping tool. It will allow about 200 people working in government, industry and local weed committees to quickly and efficiently share information about where invasive plants are located, and what weed control treatments have been used. By sharing data, the agencies involved in invasive plant management will be able to prioritize work across B.C., prevent duplicated efforts and measure progress.
"This government is committed to working effectively and collaboratively on the problems of invasive plants," said Bell. "In 2004, we announced the Province would boost spending on invasive plants by over $3 million, to a total of $8 million over two years."
Agencies involved in the management of approximately 140 species of invasive plants in B.C. include the Ministries of Agriculture and Lands, Environment, Forests and Range, and Transportation as well as the Invasive Plant Council.
The government agencies form the Inter Ministry Invasive Plant Committee that manages invasive plants on Crown lands.
"This new web tool is a very positive development for all those involved in invasive plant issues," said Juliet Craig, co-ordinator of the Central Kootenay Invasive Plant Committee. "It gives all of us the ability to pull maps and find information whenever we need it, whether it's for conducting inventories, treatments or monitoring."
The public may access the application to produce maps showing the location of various weed species in B.C. The Invasive Alien Plant Program Application is available online at www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/invasive/
Watch out for ash borer beetle
BY MICK ZAWISLAK | Daily Herald Staff Writer | Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Travelers are asked to avoid bringing home more than fond memories as the camping season gears up.
A consortium of agencies led by the Morton Arboretum for a third year is on alert for the emerald ash borer, a stealthy yet lethal pest that may lurk in piles of firewood.
Responsible for killing or sickening more than 15 million ash trees in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Ontario, Canada, land managers throughout northern Illinois want to tighten the net before the exotic, metallic green beetle can establish itself here.
"Right now, one of the biggest issues out there is firewood transportation," said Al Zelaya, forestry crew chief for the Lake County forest preserves. "It's an unregulated industry."
Those hoping to thwart the beetle fear campers who buy firewood at stands in neighboring states may unwittingly introduce the ash borer to Illinois.
"There is a lot of vigilance and concern because these things seem to be all around us," said Gina Tedesco, spokeswoman for the Morton Arboretum in Lisle.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who secured $11 million in federal funds to combat the Asian longhorn beetle, was briefed last month on what could become the latest natural threat.
Durbin will discuss the ash borer on his local access cable show and plans discussions with Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar.
"It's not a problem yet in Illinois, but we know it will be," said Durbin spokeswoman Christina Angarola.
Meanwhile, forest preserve, park district, municipal and other officials continue the search.
For example, about $29,000 has been requested in the proposed Lake County forest preserve budget for tree maintenance. A public information program on the ash borer also is planned, and district leaders will hear more Friday regarding the potential regional impact.
"We probably will be doing more things in terms of (tree) inventory, trying to get a handle on our resources and the risk," Zayala said.
Last year, 160 "trap trees" were set at about 100 sites in DuPage, Will, Kendall, Kane, Lake, McHenry, Winnebago, Boone and parts of Cook counties. No borers were found, but that hasn't lessened the anxiety.
Ash trees are popular in residential settings because they grow quickly and are durable. Morton estimates 20 percent of all trees in the Chicago area's urban landscape are ash.
Developers turned to ash as a replacement for Dutch Elms, Zayala said, and new areas would be especially susceptible to the ash borer, he added.
"That's where it's going to be a big problem," he said.
The borer is small and hard to see. Larvae destroy trees from the inside out and the damage can take years to show.
The borer was first identified in the U.S. in 2002 in southeastern Michigan. Experts say it may have been in the Detroit area 10 to 15 years before then.
"That's the scary thing about this pest," Zayala said. It was found in Ohio in 2003 and northern Indiana in 2004.
It is believed to have arrived on wood packing material carried in cargo ships or airplanes originating in Asia.
Zayala urged Illinois residents to buy firewood locally or use up their supply on site if purchased elsewhere.
Trees dying from the top down, or D-shaped exit holes in the trunk or branches are indicators that should be reported to authorities.
mzawislak@dailyherald.com
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Garlic Mustard Casts a Pall on the Forest
May 2, 2006 | Observatory | The New York Times
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
In drama, the uninvited visitor is a common plot device. Everyone is getting along swimmingly until a new character arrives and upsets the apple cart. Things quickly fall apart.
Garlic mustard, a tall weed native to Europe that was introduced to the United States in the late 1800's, is a bit like that uninvited visitor. Researchers have found that it disrupts a healthy relationship between hardwood tree seedlings and soil fungi, with results that can be disastrous for a forest.
Like other scientists, Kristina A. Stinson, who studies invasive plants as a research associate at the Harvard Forest, Harvard's ecology and conservation research center in Petersham, Mass., had noticed that native trees suffered in the presence of garlic mustard. "We thought their dependence on native fungi might play a role," Dr. Stinson said.
Many plants make use of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which form an elaborate network of filaments throughout the soil. These fungi are a diverse group, but they all have one thing in common: they help plants take up nutrients from the soil, getting carbon in return.
Garlic mustard is a member of the mustard family, "one of the very few families that do not need to associate with mycorrhizal fungi at all," Dr. Stinson said. These species produce chemicals that have antifungal properties. Native mustards have been around long enough, she suggested, that the mycorrhizal fungi have learned to live with them. But the fungi haven't had time to adapt to garlic mustard. "It basically is killing off the fungi," she said.
In a study using soils from a forest in Ontario, Dr. Stinson and colleagues found that sugar maple and other hardwood seedlings grew much slower when the soil came from an area infested with garlic mustard than from a mustard-free area. The findings are published in the journal Public Library of Science Biology.
In studying invasive species, scientists often see a direct effect. Invasive cane toads in Australia, for example, wipe out snakes and other predators that try to eat them. But garlic mustard displays a mechanism that, so far at least, appears to be unique. "It's really a demonstration of how 'the enemy of my friend is also my enemy,' " Dr. Stinson said. By killing fungi, "it's disrupting this longstanding native mutualism."
Garlic mustard has now spread through 30 states, from Maine to Oregon, and into Canada. "When this plant shows up in a forest, the tree species themselves that become the canopy are most at risk," Dr. Stinson said. "That could have tremendous impact by changing the composition of the forest."
While the effect might not be immediate, it will occur nonetheless. "Our experiment was on seedlings," Dr. Stinson said. "But those are the future generations of forests."
Salty Logs
Modern humans may consume too much sodium, but modern gorillas often find it hard to get enough. Tropical soils tend to be deficient in the mineral and, as a result, these and other forest-dwelling primates don't get much in the plants they eat.
So they supplement their diet in different ways. Lowland gorillas, for instance, are known to hang out in swampy areas in forest clearings where there are more sodium-rich plants. But mountain gorillas have been found to have a stranger source of sodium: rotting wood.
In addition to their regular diet of leaves, stems, bark and fruits, mountain gorillas for years have been observed to eat decayed stumps and logs. Other primates, including chimpanzees and mountain monkeys, are known to eat them, too.
Rotting wood doesn't have much protein or sugar, so the behavior puzzled. Jessica M. Rothman and her colleagues at Cornell University set out to see if there was a nutritional reason for it. They studied mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda.
As reported last week in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers found that the gorillas ate decayed wood at least once a month. The pieces eaten contained much higher amounts of sodium than the usual components of their diet, and logs and parts of stumps that the gorillas avoided had far less sodium than those that were consumed.
Bad for the Birds?
Most of the debate over genetically modified crops focuses on concerns about food safety and the potential effect of transgenic material on the environment.
But researchers in Britain have looked at a much narrower issue regarding the growing of herbicide-tolerant G.M. crops: their effect on partridges, sparrows, finches and other seed-eating birds that make their homes on farmlands.
The researchers report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that the use of broader-spectrum herbicides (chemicals that can kill just about everything except the food plant) on these crops can sharply reduce the amount of weed seeds, an important food source for the birds.
The researchers, from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other groups, used data from studies that compared transgenic and conventional crops and analyzed the results for the diets of 17 bird species. They found that with transgenic beets and oilseed rape (canola is a variant of it), there was significantly less weed seed available to most of the species.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, with transgenic corn there was more seed available, though the amount was significant for only seven of the bird species. While the broad-spectrum herbicide used for corn kills more types of weeds, it doesn't do as good a job of killing them as the herbicides used with conventional corn. (+)
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
In drama, the uninvited visitor is a common plot device. Everyone is getting along swimmingly until a new character arrives and upsets the apple cart. Things quickly fall apart.
Garlic mustard, a tall weed native to Europe that was introduced to the United States in the late 1800's, is a bit like that uninvited visitor. Researchers have found that it disrupts a healthy relationship between hardwood tree seedlings and soil fungi, with results that can be disastrous for a forest.
Like other scientists, Kristina A. Stinson, who studies invasive plants as a research associate at the Harvard Forest, Harvard's ecology and conservation research center in Petersham, Mass., had noticed that native trees suffered in the presence of garlic mustard. "We thought their dependence on native fungi might play a role," Dr. Stinson said.
Many plants make use of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which form an elaborate network of filaments throughout the soil. These fungi are a diverse group, but they all have one thing in common: they help plants take up nutrients from the soil, getting carbon in return.
Garlic mustard is a member of the mustard family, "one of the very few families that do not need to associate with mycorrhizal fungi at all," Dr. Stinson said. These species produce chemicals that have antifungal properties. Native mustards have been around long enough, she suggested, that the mycorrhizal fungi have learned to live with them. But the fungi haven't had time to adapt to garlic mustard. "It basically is killing off the fungi," she said.
In a study using soils from a forest in Ontario, Dr. Stinson and colleagues found that sugar maple and other hardwood seedlings grew much slower when the soil came from an area infested with garlic mustard than from a mustard-free area. The findings are published in the journal Public Library of Science Biology.
In studying invasive species, scientists often see a direct effect. Invasive cane toads in Australia, for example, wipe out snakes and other predators that try to eat them. But garlic mustard displays a mechanism that, so far at least, appears to be unique. "It's really a demonstration of how 'the enemy of my friend is also my enemy,' " Dr. Stinson said. By killing fungi, "it's disrupting this longstanding native mutualism."
Garlic mustard has now spread through 30 states, from Maine to Oregon, and into Canada. "When this plant shows up in a forest, the tree species themselves that become the canopy are most at risk," Dr. Stinson said. "That could have tremendous impact by changing the composition of the forest."
While the effect might not be immediate, it will occur nonetheless. "Our experiment was on seedlings," Dr. Stinson said. "But those are the future generations of forests."
Salty Logs
Modern humans may consume too much sodium, but modern gorillas often find it hard to get enough. Tropical soils tend to be deficient in the mineral and, as a result, these and other forest-dwelling primates don't get much in the plants they eat.
So they supplement their diet in different ways. Lowland gorillas, for instance, are known to hang out in swampy areas in forest clearings where there are more sodium-rich plants. But mountain gorillas have been found to have a stranger source of sodium: rotting wood.
In addition to their regular diet of leaves, stems, bark and fruits, mountain gorillas for years have been observed to eat decayed stumps and logs. Other primates, including chimpanzees and mountain monkeys, are known to eat them, too.
Rotting wood doesn't have much protein or sugar, so the behavior puzzled. Jessica M. Rothman and her colleagues at Cornell University set out to see if there was a nutritional reason for it. They studied mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda.
As reported last week in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers found that the gorillas ate decayed wood at least once a month. The pieces eaten contained much higher amounts of sodium than the usual components of their diet, and logs and parts of stumps that the gorillas avoided had far less sodium than those that were consumed.
Bad for the Birds?
Most of the debate over genetically modified crops focuses on concerns about food safety and the potential effect of transgenic material on the environment.
But researchers in Britain have looked at a much narrower issue regarding the growing of herbicide-tolerant G.M. crops: their effect on partridges, sparrows, finches and other seed-eating birds that make their homes on farmlands.
The researchers report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that the use of broader-spectrum herbicides (chemicals that can kill just about everything except the food plant) on these crops can sharply reduce the amount of weed seeds, an important food source for the birds.
The researchers, from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other groups, used data from studies that compared transgenic and conventional crops and analyzed the results for the diets of 17 bird species. They found that with transgenic beets and oilseed rape (canola is a variant of it), there was significantly less weed seed available to most of the species.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, with transgenic corn there was more seed available, though the amount was significant for only seven of the bird species. While the broad-spectrum herbicide used for corn kills more types of weeds, it doesn't do as good a job of killing them as the herbicides used with conventional corn. (+)
The hots, for you-Climate change comes to town
From the City Newspaper website: rochester.gyrosite.com
POSTED ON MAY 3, 2006:
By Krestia DeGeorge
The planet is warming up. What does that mean for Rochester?
The short answer is that nobody really knows.
A climate is a complex thing. Change one little part of it and you may change the whole thing --- and in unpredictable ways. Still, that doesn't mean scientists can't make some sound educated guesses about what could happen. And if any of those guesses prove accurate, the Rochester of tomorrow could be a very different place from the one we know today.
Despite the complexity of all the systems involved, there are a few easy places to begin to understand the effects of climate change in Rochester.
When it comes to deducing what the weather of tomorrow might be like, it's helpful to start with the weather of today. That's where Dr. Jose Maliekal comes in. A professor at Brockport for the past 15 years, Maliekal has a PhD in meteorology, and focuses many of his classes on climatology and climate change. He's careful to point out the inherent uncertainty in making predictions based on current predictions.
Throughout the course of an interview with City Newspaper, he kept adding qualifiers like "You never know these things for sure" and "No one can say for sure." Part of that uncertainty comes from the fact that changing a single variable has the potential to result in multiple outcomes, some of them radically different from one another. Maliekal illustrates what he means with an example:
Say you have a temperature increase. Warming increases evaporation, pumping more moisture into the atmosphere. One of two things could happen to that water vapor. First, it could form low-lying clouds. Those clouds, in turn, would have a cooling effect, blocking radiation from the sun that would otherwise heat things up. In that case, such a change would be self-correcting.
But let's say that instead of forming low clouds, the extra water in the atmosphere forms high clouds. "High clouds tend to have a warming effect," says Maliekal, since they trap existing warmth and let more of the sun's rays in. That "could accelerate the warming trend we have in place," says Maliekal. Instead of self-correcting, the system would be self-reinforcing.
(A process similar to the latter scenario has contributed to the global warming now taking place, Maliekal says. Typically, the earth reflects about 30 percent of the sun's radiation into space. Some of that is reflected off the icy surface of glaciers. With glaciers around the planet receding as temperatures rise, there's less ice to reflect radiation, and more gets absorbed by the planet, further raising surface temperatures.)
It's complex possibilities like this that lead Maliekal to say that "no one can say for sure what is going to happen," before quickly adding "We do, however, have some reasonable hypotheses about what could happen."
So what are those hypotheses? Here's one of the more surprising ones: "Should the climate change, there is the possibility that lake effect would increase," says Maliekal.
Lake-effect snow is produced when there are extreme disparities in temperature between the lake water and the atmosphere above it, he explains. If the LakeOntario is storing more heat from the atmosphere during the spring and summer and losing less during the fall and winter, its overall temperature will be warmer.
That means that, assuming we still get periods of cold arctic air, there's a higher likelihood that the area will experience the temperature disparities that create lake effect snow. (Not everyone agrees with Maliekal on this point. In 2000 the University of Michigan's Peter Sousounis authored a paper suggesting that the temperature could rise high enough that even our cold spells might no longer be cold enough to trigger the lake effect.)
But there are plenty of other changes that are likely to be less pronounced, or less surprising.
Ice cover on the Great Lakes and smaller bodies of water is dwindling, for example. (With the exception of the shallow Erie, the Great Lakes rarely freeze over completely, but cover around the shorelines has been shrinking.) What does that mean? "No one can say for sure," says Maliekal.
The same is true for the yearly hydrological cycles the Great Lakes go through. The lakes tend to swell in the spring, with rains and snowmelt runoff, then ebb to seasonal lows in the autumn months.
"Studies have shown that in recent years there has been a shift in that pattern," says Maliekal. Both the spring rise and the fall drop are happening earlier in the year. And no one's sure what that trend might mean if it continues.
Other likely changes to the local environment come with more obvious consequences. For instance, Maliekal says that Rochester, like the rest of the Great LakesBasin, will become a drier place overall. That will lead to higher extremes, he says. We'll experience both "slightly prolonged droughts and increased flooding."
The higher temperatures and relatively scarcer availability of water will affect agriculture, but it will also affect water levels in the Great Lakes. They could drop by as much as 3 feet in the next 50 years.
That change may, in fact, be the one that has the biggest impact on daily human activity in the Great Lakes basin. Ironically, while ocean shorelines around the world will be encroaching on human settlements as sea levels rise, here in the Great Lakes water levels will likely fall. In fact, Environment Canada, the branch of the Canadian government that tracks these things, estimates that the outflow of the St. Lawrence River, which drains all of the Great Lakes basin, could diminish by as much 20 percent.
The reason for the divergent fate of coastlines between oceans and inland bodies of fresh water like the Great Lakes is that the lakes are well above sea level (LakeOntario's elevation is 243 feet). And they won't receive any outflow from the melting glaciers and polar ice caps that will swell the world's oceans. None of those are in the Great Lakes' watershed.
And while droughts and lower water levels will become the norm, some of the water we still get could become more of a problem, since it will come more often in the form of extreme events, like thunderstorms. That, combined with a drier landscape, will mean more frequent and destructive flooding. With more floods and storms, erosion will become a larger problem than it is today, threatening things like agriculture and the value of waterfront homes.
Lower levels on the Great Lakes could also have an impact on commercial navigation. That in itself won't mean much to Rochester, which hasn't relied on commercial shipping as an important part of our economy in a long time. But the pressures on shipping could have some indirect impacts on this region. Environment Canada warns that dredging channels to keep commercial shipping moving apace might stir up dangerous toxic chemicals. Since plenty of the Great Lakes navigational infrastructure is upstream from Rochester, our community's LakeOntario public water intakes would be at risk.
Lower lake levels in the Great Lakes could also hit one other sector pretty hard: hydroelectric power generation. If water outflows decrease, massive projects like those along the Niagara River and Gorge near Buffalo and along the St. Lawrence in Massena could see their ability to generate power diminished, even while energy demands, if they follow today's trends, continue to spiral upward.
Besides the change in lake levels, there's one other area that stands to see a dramatic impact: the region's flora. In fact, plants are already starting to undergo changes as a result of warming that's already occurred.
Grapes are blooming an average of 6 days earlier than they did in the 1960s, while the average bloom dates for apples has shifted 8 days earlier over the same period. For lilacs, it's four days earlier. (At that rate, we'll be looking at an April Lilac Festival in the not-too-distant future.)
Plant ecologist David Wolfe has witnessed, and in some cases documented, these changes. Wolfe is a professor at Cornell's School of Agriculture, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that farmers are among the most concerned about these trends.
"Agriculture is very dependent on the weather," says Wolfe. "This might be a harmless thing," he adds, but his list of concerns seems to undermines that.
For starters, believe it or not, there's the problem of frost.
"One concern is that if the weather's getting better earlier, you could actually have increased frost damage," says Wolfe. Sound counterintuitive? It's not. While average temperatures are getting warmer, coaxing flowers to bloom earlier, that doesn't mean that extreme temperatures will become any less extreme. (Last week's temperatures that flirted with the freezing mark illustrate his point.)
That means that plants germinating and flowering ever earlier run an increasingly higher risk of being killed or damaged by late spring frosts.
The changing temperatures also hold the potential to play havoc on traditionally cold-weather crops in another way. It's a process called "vernalization." That's a fancy scientific term for something akin to hibernation in some plants.
"They need a certain number of days during the winter where the temperature remains low," says Wolfe. And those days have to be consecutive, not spread out over the course of a winter, Wolfe says. Exactly how many days, and what the threshold temperature is, varies from plant to plant, but the basics remain the same. The plant requires those conditions to produce the hormones it needs. If that doesn't happen, the plant's growth --- and the crop it yields --- can suffer. Apples are one prominent local crop that is subject to this biological requirement.
Blueberries and winter wheat are two other examples. And like the ever-earlier bloom dates, this effect is already happening now.
"For years with warmer winters we get lower apple yields," says Wolfe. "I think this past winter was [mild] enough to have that kind of effect."
The way in which global warming is occurring specifically in Western New York exacerbates this problem. While average temperatures have increased about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit globally in the past century, they're up by 1.8 degrees here. Look just at winter temperatures, though, and the increase in average temperatures jumps to 2.8 degrees, says Wolfe.
Of course, all that warming isn't all bad. There are a few positive outcomes to be had, like extended growing seasons, which may eventually allow crops historically grown further south to thrive here. And one industry in particular stands poised to reap a good deal of benefits:
"There's anecdotal evidence that this is actually good for grapes," says Wolfe.
While North America has a few native varieties of grape, he notes, these are too sweet to be favored by serious winemakers for anything more than a few novelty wines. Instead, the wine industry favors the traditional European strain of the fruit, vitus vinifera. In the past, that might have been a problem.
"They have a little trouble with our historical winter climate," Wolfe says of the vitus vinifera grape. Temperatures of 12 degrees below Fahrenheit or lower damage the vines of the imported variety, he explains.
"We've had very, very few winters where it got that cold" since the 1970s, says Wolfe. That's about the same time wine production really took off in the Finger Lakes, he says.
Still, the downsides for agriculture probably outweigh the benefits. One reason: in addition to the challenges to plants that are built into their own biology, warming will bring a whole host of changes that they may be ill-equipped to deal with.
One of the gravest potential threats along these lines is invasive species. Insects and plant diseases, which can wipe out species of plants, and other plants species, which can out-compete them, may be able to move into a territory as climatic conditions change.
"Insects, diseases, and weeds that are currently south of us will be with us," says Wolfe.
That's a potential threat to all plant species, but typical agricultural crops may be among the most vulnerable, since "a lot of crop species have been genetically programmed to remain a certain size," explains Wolfe. That genetic programming puts crop plants at a disadvantage when competing with wild plants, which can rapidly adapt to changing conditions.
To make matters worse, "weeds will benefit a lot from warming temperatures" and higher levels of carbon dioxide, says Wolfe. "People would have to use more herbicide, since weeds would be healthier," he adds, a practice that has its own environmental effects.
Another possible problem for plants is the change in precipitation patterns.
"It's more difficult to predict precipitation than temperature," says Wolfe. Like Maliekal, he expects to see a general decrease in store for this region, with the exception of extreme events during the summer months.
"Although you might get the same amount of water as in the past, if you get it all in a few chunks you could see some short-term droughts," he says. And in areas that are outside the lake-effect belt, a decrease in snow cover could deprive the soil of insulation. That's means more freezing and thawing through out the course of the winter. While that's not good for plants, it could be even more disruptive for microbes that live in the soil. Their complex relationship with plants who share their soil is still a mystery.
"We don't really know what it does, but it has an impact," he says.
Yet another potential problem for plants is the increased heat itself. Plants, especially cold-weather crops, can suffer from something called "heat stress," which as the name implies, weakens the plant and can potentially reduce crop yields. It also means the plants will require more water, hence more irrigation, even while supplies of the precious resource will be dwindling.
(Although not as well versed on the animal side of farming, Wolfe says that the dairy industry will face similar problems, since cattle like a cool climate and are also vulnerable to heat stress. Temperatures between 45 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit are optimal for milk production. "Farmers can probably adapt," he says, "but it becomes expensive.")
All this potential for change is troubling, since all of us depend on agriculture for our food.
Food costs may go up a bit, but Wolfe says he doesn't foresee huge price spikes. And some food production may actually come back to the area for a variety of reasons. In addition to higher fuel costs, which may make shipping fruit from California (not to mention New Zealand) less profitable, our area will have relatively more water than many other breadbasket regions.
And as the temperature continues to inch upward, crops' ranges will swing northward. (How does a nice crate of Finger Lakes oranges sound?) While many of us will not see such changes in our lifetimes, that doesn't mean farmers can ignore them for now.
"Farmers are going to have to adapt," which may include making expensive investments in new equipment, says Wolfe. "Farmers who are growing cabbage today might be growing something else."
That sounds fine in theory, but at some point farmers are going to have to make the leap from one crop to another, and the process could be messy. Farmers will essentially have to make guesses about whether to change crops and when.
"Some will guess right and some would guess wrong," he says. Those decisions may await farmers in the not-to-distant future, perhaps in as little as 10 to 20 years, Wolfe says.
Yet despite that assessment, he's still relatively upbeat about the future of agriculture here.
"I don't think it's totally doom and gloom for agriculture," says Wolfe. "It'd be a little more doom and gloom" for the southeastern United States, he says, but farmers here will be able to adapt for the most part.
"The agricultural community is poised to take advantage of this opportunity," he says.
If all this still sounds remote and abstract, consider the parallel effects that changes in vegetation will have on the average homeowner. Grass and other ornamental plants will be subject to the same problems of heat stress and its attendant demand for more watering. And they'll all face the same onslaught of healthier weeds and invasive plants, insects, and diseases. (More pesticide, anyone?)
Another nasty surprise that a warming trend has in store for us: "Almost certainly the allergy season will be coming earlier," says Wolfe, since major culprits like ragweed do quite well in heat.
It's less clear how natural ecosystems will handle the shift in climate.
"The fabric of our forests and natural ecosystems is going to change," says Wolfe. But it's difficult to predict exactly how.
"It'll happen slowly, I think," says Wolfe. "Over 10 to 50 years, we're likely to see a big change." That's the time period it takes for a new generation of trees to grow up.
Some of those changes may be subtle, but others probably will not. Maples, for instance, which are responsible for almost all the brilliant colors we witness here each fall, could be out-competed here. (Imagine a fall of dull brown and wan yellow.)
Like the farm, lawn, and garden ecosystems tended to by humans, natural areas face a host of new pest and competitors.
"They could become more and more dominated by invasive species," says Wolfe.
And like the climate itself, ecosystems are complex, which means small shifts can leave them vulnerable to big changes.
"One of the complicating factors is that every species is different" in its sensitivity to climatic changes, says Wolfe. "That creates the problem of synchrony." Wolfe is talking about the timing of the finely-tuned mechanisms that ecosystems evolved over time to sustain themselves. For example, if flowering plants continue to bloom earlier each year, but the bees they rely on to pollinate them don't adjust as quickly, those plants might not be able to reproduce.
"That would be devastating to a plant," Wolfe says. Such looming possibilities mean that ecosystems "could be pretty badly disrupted."
Hot flashes
What to expect --- when you're expecting climate change:
• More (or less) lake effect snow
• Uglier fall foliage
• Fewer (and less healthy) apples and apple orchards
• Better wine and more varieties of it
• A bigger, badder allergy season
• More expensive food
• More local food
• More floods
• More droughts
• More bugs
• Fewer (and more scraggly) lawns
• Scarcer water
• Less hydroelectric power
POSTED ON MAY 3, 2006:
By Krestia DeGeorge
The planet is warming up. What does that mean for Rochester?
The short answer is that nobody really knows.
A climate is a complex thing. Change one little part of it and you may change the whole thing --- and in unpredictable ways. Still, that doesn't mean scientists can't make some sound educated guesses about what could happen. And if any of those guesses prove accurate, the Rochester of tomorrow could be a very different place from the one we know today.
Despite the complexity of all the systems involved, there are a few easy places to begin to understand the effects of climate change in Rochester.
When it comes to deducing what the weather of tomorrow might be like, it's helpful to start with the weather of today. That's where Dr. Jose Maliekal comes in. A professor at Brockport for the past 15 years, Maliekal has a PhD in meteorology, and focuses many of his classes on climatology and climate change. He's careful to point out the inherent uncertainty in making predictions based on current predictions.
Throughout the course of an interview with City Newspaper, he kept adding qualifiers like "You never know these things for sure" and "No one can say for sure." Part of that uncertainty comes from the fact that changing a single variable has the potential to result in multiple outcomes, some of them radically different from one another. Maliekal illustrates what he means with an example:
Say you have a temperature increase. Warming increases evaporation, pumping more moisture into the atmosphere. One of two things could happen to that water vapor. First, it could form low-lying clouds. Those clouds, in turn, would have a cooling effect, blocking radiation from the sun that would otherwise heat things up. In that case, such a change would be self-correcting.
But let's say that instead of forming low clouds, the extra water in the atmosphere forms high clouds. "High clouds tend to have a warming effect," says Maliekal, since they trap existing warmth and let more of the sun's rays in. That "could accelerate the warming trend we have in place," says Maliekal. Instead of self-correcting, the system would be self-reinforcing.
(A process similar to the latter scenario has contributed to the global warming now taking place, Maliekal says. Typically, the earth reflects about 30 percent of the sun's radiation into space. Some of that is reflected off the icy surface of glaciers. With glaciers around the planet receding as temperatures rise, there's less ice to reflect radiation, and more gets absorbed by the planet, further raising surface temperatures.)
It's complex possibilities like this that lead Maliekal to say that "no one can say for sure what is going to happen," before quickly adding "We do, however, have some reasonable hypotheses about what could happen."
So what are those hypotheses? Here's one of the more surprising ones: "Should the climate change, there is the possibility that lake effect would increase," says Maliekal.
Lake-effect snow is produced when there are extreme disparities in temperature between the lake water and the atmosphere above it, he explains. If the LakeOntario is storing more heat from the atmosphere during the spring and summer and losing less during the fall and winter, its overall temperature will be warmer.
That means that, assuming we still get periods of cold arctic air, there's a higher likelihood that the area will experience the temperature disparities that create lake effect snow. (Not everyone agrees with Maliekal on this point. In 2000 the University of Michigan's Peter Sousounis authored a paper suggesting that the temperature could rise high enough that even our cold spells might no longer be cold enough to trigger the lake effect.)
But there are plenty of other changes that are likely to be less pronounced, or less surprising.
Ice cover on the Great Lakes and smaller bodies of water is dwindling, for example. (With the exception of the shallow Erie, the Great Lakes rarely freeze over completely, but cover around the shorelines has been shrinking.) What does that mean? "No one can say for sure," says Maliekal.
The same is true for the yearly hydrological cycles the Great Lakes go through. The lakes tend to swell in the spring, with rains and snowmelt runoff, then ebb to seasonal lows in the autumn months.
"Studies have shown that in recent years there has been a shift in that pattern," says Maliekal. Both the spring rise and the fall drop are happening earlier in the year. And no one's sure what that trend might mean if it continues.
Other likely changes to the local environment come with more obvious consequences. For instance, Maliekal says that Rochester, like the rest of the Great LakesBasin, will become a drier place overall. That will lead to higher extremes, he says. We'll experience both "slightly prolonged droughts and increased flooding."
The higher temperatures and relatively scarcer availability of water will affect agriculture, but it will also affect water levels in the Great Lakes. They could drop by as much as 3 feet in the next 50 years.
That change may, in fact, be the one that has the biggest impact on daily human activity in the Great Lakes basin. Ironically, while ocean shorelines around the world will be encroaching on human settlements as sea levels rise, here in the Great Lakes water levels will likely fall. In fact, Environment Canada, the branch of the Canadian government that tracks these things, estimates that the outflow of the St. Lawrence River, which drains all of the Great Lakes basin, could diminish by as much 20 percent.
The reason for the divergent fate of coastlines between oceans and inland bodies of fresh water like the Great Lakes is that the lakes are well above sea level (LakeOntario's elevation is 243 feet). And they won't receive any outflow from the melting glaciers and polar ice caps that will swell the world's oceans. None of those are in the Great Lakes' watershed.
And while droughts and lower water levels will become the norm, some of the water we still get could become more of a problem, since it will come more often in the form of extreme events, like thunderstorms. That, combined with a drier landscape, will mean more frequent and destructive flooding. With more floods and storms, erosion will become a larger problem than it is today, threatening things like agriculture and the value of waterfront homes.
Lower levels on the Great Lakes could also have an impact on commercial navigation. That in itself won't mean much to Rochester, which hasn't relied on commercial shipping as an important part of our economy in a long time. But the pressures on shipping could have some indirect impacts on this region. Environment Canada warns that dredging channels to keep commercial shipping moving apace might stir up dangerous toxic chemicals. Since plenty of the Great Lakes navigational infrastructure is upstream from Rochester, our community's LakeOntario public water intakes would be at risk.
Lower lake levels in the Great Lakes could also hit one other sector pretty hard: hydroelectric power generation. If water outflows decrease, massive projects like those along the Niagara River and Gorge near Buffalo and along the St. Lawrence in Massena could see their ability to generate power diminished, even while energy demands, if they follow today's trends, continue to spiral upward.
Besides the change in lake levels, there's one other area that stands to see a dramatic impact: the region's flora. In fact, plants are already starting to undergo changes as a result of warming that's already occurred.
Grapes are blooming an average of 6 days earlier than they did in the 1960s, while the average bloom dates for apples has shifted 8 days earlier over the same period. For lilacs, it's four days earlier. (At that rate, we'll be looking at an April Lilac Festival in the not-too-distant future.)
Plant ecologist David Wolfe has witnessed, and in some cases documented, these changes. Wolfe is a professor at Cornell's School of Agriculture, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that farmers are among the most concerned about these trends.
"Agriculture is very dependent on the weather," says Wolfe. "This might be a harmless thing," he adds, but his list of concerns seems to undermines that.
For starters, believe it or not, there's the problem of frost.
"One concern is that if the weather's getting better earlier, you could actually have increased frost damage," says Wolfe. Sound counterintuitive? It's not. While average temperatures are getting warmer, coaxing flowers to bloom earlier, that doesn't mean that extreme temperatures will become any less extreme. (Last week's temperatures that flirted with the freezing mark illustrate his point.)
That means that plants germinating and flowering ever earlier run an increasingly higher risk of being killed or damaged by late spring frosts.
The changing temperatures also hold the potential to play havoc on traditionally cold-weather crops in another way. It's a process called "vernalization." That's a fancy scientific term for something akin to hibernation in some plants.
"They need a certain number of days during the winter where the temperature remains low," says Wolfe. And those days have to be consecutive, not spread out over the course of a winter, Wolfe says. Exactly how many days, and what the threshold temperature is, varies from plant to plant, but the basics remain the same. The plant requires those conditions to produce the hormones it needs. If that doesn't happen, the plant's growth --- and the crop it yields --- can suffer. Apples are one prominent local crop that is subject to this biological requirement.
Blueberries and winter wheat are two other examples. And like the ever-earlier bloom dates, this effect is already happening now.
"For years with warmer winters we get lower apple yields," says Wolfe. "I think this past winter was [mild] enough to have that kind of effect."
The way in which global warming is occurring specifically in Western New York exacerbates this problem. While average temperatures have increased about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit globally in the past century, they're up by 1.8 degrees here. Look just at winter temperatures, though, and the increase in average temperatures jumps to 2.8 degrees, says Wolfe.
Of course, all that warming isn't all bad. There are a few positive outcomes to be had, like extended growing seasons, which may eventually allow crops historically grown further south to thrive here. And one industry in particular stands poised to reap a good deal of benefits:
"There's anecdotal evidence that this is actually good for grapes," says Wolfe.
While North America has a few native varieties of grape, he notes, these are too sweet to be favored by serious winemakers for anything more than a few novelty wines. Instead, the wine industry favors the traditional European strain of the fruit, vitus vinifera. In the past, that might have been a problem.
"They have a little trouble with our historical winter climate," Wolfe says of the vitus vinifera grape. Temperatures of 12 degrees below Fahrenheit or lower damage the vines of the imported variety, he explains.
"We've had very, very few winters where it got that cold" since the 1970s, says Wolfe. That's about the same time wine production really took off in the Finger Lakes, he says.
Still, the downsides for agriculture probably outweigh the benefits. One reason: in addition to the challenges to plants that are built into their own biology, warming will bring a whole host of changes that they may be ill-equipped to deal with.
One of the gravest potential threats along these lines is invasive species. Insects and plant diseases, which can wipe out species of plants, and other plants species, which can out-compete them, may be able to move into a territory as climatic conditions change.
"Insects, diseases, and weeds that are currently south of us will be with us," says Wolfe.
That's a potential threat to all plant species, but typical agricultural crops may be among the most vulnerable, since "a lot of crop species have been genetically programmed to remain a certain size," explains Wolfe. That genetic programming puts crop plants at a disadvantage when competing with wild plants, which can rapidly adapt to changing conditions.
To make matters worse, "weeds will benefit a lot from warming temperatures" and higher levels of carbon dioxide, says Wolfe. "People would have to use more herbicide, since weeds would be healthier," he adds, a practice that has its own environmental effects.
Another possible problem for plants is the change in precipitation patterns.
"It's more difficult to predict precipitation than temperature," says Wolfe. Like Maliekal, he expects to see a general decrease in store for this region, with the exception of extreme events during the summer months.
"Although you might get the same amount of water as in the past, if you get it all in a few chunks you could see some short-term droughts," he says. And in areas that are outside the lake-effect belt, a decrease in snow cover could deprive the soil of insulation. That's means more freezing and thawing through out the course of the winter. While that's not good for plants, it could be even more disruptive for microbes that live in the soil. Their complex relationship with plants who share their soil is still a mystery.
"We don't really know what it does, but it has an impact," he says.
Yet another potential problem for plants is the increased heat itself. Plants, especially cold-weather crops, can suffer from something called "heat stress," which as the name implies, weakens the plant and can potentially reduce crop yields. It also means the plants will require more water, hence more irrigation, even while supplies of the precious resource will be dwindling.
(Although not as well versed on the animal side of farming, Wolfe says that the dairy industry will face similar problems, since cattle like a cool climate and are also vulnerable to heat stress. Temperatures between 45 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit are optimal for milk production. "Farmers can probably adapt," he says, "but it becomes expensive.")
All this potential for change is troubling, since all of us depend on agriculture for our food.
Food costs may go up a bit, but Wolfe says he doesn't foresee huge price spikes. And some food production may actually come back to the area for a variety of reasons. In addition to higher fuel costs, which may make shipping fruit from California (not to mention New Zealand) less profitable, our area will have relatively more water than many other breadbasket regions.
And as the temperature continues to inch upward, crops' ranges will swing northward. (How does a nice crate of Finger Lakes oranges sound?) While many of us will not see such changes in our lifetimes, that doesn't mean farmers can ignore them for now.
"Farmers are going to have to adapt," which may include making expensive investments in new equipment, says Wolfe. "Farmers who are growing cabbage today might be growing something else."
That sounds fine in theory, but at some point farmers are going to have to make the leap from one crop to another, and the process could be messy. Farmers will essentially have to make guesses about whether to change crops and when.
"Some will guess right and some would guess wrong," he says. Those decisions may await farmers in the not-to-distant future, perhaps in as little as 10 to 20 years, Wolfe says.
Yet despite that assessment, he's still relatively upbeat about the future of agriculture here.
"I don't think it's totally doom and gloom for agriculture," says Wolfe. "It'd be a little more doom and gloom" for the southeastern United States, he says, but farmers here will be able to adapt for the most part.
"The agricultural community is poised to take advantage of this opportunity," he says.
If all this still sounds remote and abstract, consider the parallel effects that changes in vegetation will have on the average homeowner. Grass and other ornamental plants will be subject to the same problems of heat stress and its attendant demand for more watering. And they'll all face the same onslaught of healthier weeds and invasive plants, insects, and diseases. (More pesticide, anyone?)
Another nasty surprise that a warming trend has in store for us: "Almost certainly the allergy season will be coming earlier," says Wolfe, since major culprits like ragweed do quite well in heat.
It's less clear how natural ecosystems will handle the shift in climate.
"The fabric of our forests and natural ecosystems is going to change," says Wolfe. But it's difficult to predict exactly how.
"It'll happen slowly, I think," says Wolfe. "Over 10 to 50 years, we're likely to see a big change." That's the time period it takes for a new generation of trees to grow up.
Some of those changes may be subtle, but others probably will not. Maples, for instance, which are responsible for almost all the brilliant colors we witness here each fall, could be out-competed here. (Imagine a fall of dull brown and wan yellow.)
Like the farm, lawn, and garden ecosystems tended to by humans, natural areas face a host of new pest and competitors.
"They could become more and more dominated by invasive species," says Wolfe.
And like the climate itself, ecosystems are complex, which means small shifts can leave them vulnerable to big changes.
"One of the complicating factors is that every species is different" in its sensitivity to climatic changes, says Wolfe. "That creates the problem of synchrony." Wolfe is talking about the timing of the finely-tuned mechanisms that ecosystems evolved over time to sustain themselves. For example, if flowering plants continue to bloom earlier each year, but the bees they rely on to pollinate them don't adjust as quickly, those plants might not be able to reproduce.
"That would be devastating to a plant," Wolfe says. Such looming possibilities mean that ecosystems "could be pretty badly disrupted."
Hot flashes
What to expect --- when you're expecting climate change:
• More (or less) lake effect snow
• Uglier fall foliage
• Fewer (and less healthy) apples and apple orchards
• Better wine and more varieties of it
• A bigger, badder allergy season
• More expensive food
• More local food
• More floods
• More droughts
• More bugs
• Fewer (and more scraggly) lawns
• Scarcer water
• Less hydroelectric power
Monday, May 01, 2006
Abitibi’s foreign fibre sale worries local leaders
By KELLY LOUISEIZE
Near Thunder Bay – The sale of large tracts of private forest land to a United States forest management company has unions, mayors and community leaders worried about the economic and environmental well-being of Canadian forests and their regions.
Abitibi Consolidated’s decision to sell off 196,000 hectares of its privately-owned timberlands near Thunder Bay for $55 million to North Star Forest Ltd., a subsidiary of Wagner Forest Management Ltd., may be a sign of a growing trend, according to an industry official.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union wants the fibre to stay in Canada so it can help to create and sustain jobs.
Kenora Mayor David Canfield wants whatever fibre is collected from Abitibi’s private and Crown land to be allocated to the Kenora Forest Product mill for their expansion, should their mill become idle. In other words, he wants the region’s supply to stay in the region.
Tembec Inc. and Domtar Inc. will be selling land in the Spruce Falls area, which is in the middle of the Gorden forests. Alain Guindon, president of the Gorden Cosens Survival Committee, wants the fibre to be processed in the area as well.
Natural Resources Minister David Ramsay confirms multi-national lumber companies are increasingly buying up private land in Ontario.
Eighty-seven per cent of the province’s land is Crown-owned, according to Ramsay, who adds the percentage of Northern Ontario land owned by the Crown is higher still.
“There are some privately held forest companies purchasing land, but there is not much of it out there,” he says.
Canadian fibre being bought up by multi-nationals with no vested interest in providing jobs or long-term growth for the province, must be a regional concern, officials say.
“It concerns me too,” Ramsay says.
That was the reason the ministry entered into a bidding process for Abitibi’s private timberlands outside Thunder Bay.
“We were in the game,” Ramsay says. “I didn’t let this go, we tried to purchase it.”
The National Bank of Canada put in a higher bid than what was accepted. The terms and conditions, including environmental assessment considerations, attached to the sale prevented the province from becoming the successful bidder, he says. Abitibi needed the transaction completed by the end of their fiscal year, which coincides with the calendar year. Time ran out.
Ramsay says he will be assessing the private lands in northeastern Ontario to determine the market value and whether bidding is necessary.
The first sales of Crown land to private interests took place with the construction of this country’s railways. Today, companies usually acquire the property today by purchasing existing plant operations.
www.mnr.gov.on.ca
www.abitibiconsolidated.com
Near Thunder Bay – The sale of large tracts of private forest land to a United States forest management company has unions, mayors and community leaders worried about the economic and environmental well-being of Canadian forests and their regions.
Abitibi Consolidated’s decision to sell off 196,000 hectares of its privately-owned timberlands near Thunder Bay for $55 million to North Star Forest Ltd., a subsidiary of Wagner Forest Management Ltd., may be a sign of a growing trend, according to an industry official.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union wants the fibre to stay in Canada so it can help to create and sustain jobs.
Kenora Mayor David Canfield wants whatever fibre is collected from Abitibi’s private and Crown land to be allocated to the Kenora Forest Product mill for their expansion, should their mill become idle. In other words, he wants the region’s supply to stay in the region.
Tembec Inc. and Domtar Inc. will be selling land in the Spruce Falls area, which is in the middle of the Gorden forests. Alain Guindon, president of the Gorden Cosens Survival Committee, wants the fibre to be processed in the area as well.
Natural Resources Minister David Ramsay confirms multi-national lumber companies are increasingly buying up private land in Ontario.
Eighty-seven per cent of the province’s land is Crown-owned, according to Ramsay, who adds the percentage of Northern Ontario land owned by the Crown is higher still.
“There are some privately held forest companies purchasing land, but there is not much of it out there,” he says.
Canadian fibre being bought up by multi-nationals with no vested interest in providing jobs or long-term growth for the province, must be a regional concern, officials say.
“It concerns me too,” Ramsay says.
That was the reason the ministry entered into a bidding process for Abitibi’s private timberlands outside Thunder Bay.
“We were in the game,” Ramsay says. “I didn’t let this go, we tried to purchase it.”
The National Bank of Canada put in a higher bid than what was accepted. The terms and conditions, including environmental assessment considerations, attached to the sale prevented the province from becoming the successful bidder, he says. Abitibi needed the transaction completed by the end of their fiscal year, which coincides with the calendar year. Time ran out.
Ramsay says he will be assessing the private lands in northeastern Ontario to determine the market value and whether bidding is necessary.
The first sales of Crown land to private interests took place with the construction of this country’s railways. Today, companies usually acquire the property today by purchasing existing plant operations.
www.mnr.gov.on.ca
www.abitibiconsolidated.com
Global warming already visible
MARIAN GAIL BROWN mgbrown@ctpost.com | Connecticut Post Online
Connecticut's fall foliage — a kaleidoscope of crimson, orange and gold-tinted leaves — would vanish. Forget tapping the maples for syrup. That industry would die here.
Portions of Interstate 95 might be underwater unless the state commits to raising them. And the same holds true for some of Metro-North's most low-lying tracks hugging the coastline and an untold number of buildings with historic preservation status.
Those are among the scenarios that scientists and the Environmental Protection Agency paint about the possible effects of global warming in Connecticut in coming decades.
But the predictions aren't all bad.
Connecticut farmers might raise a wider variety of fruit and vegetables, including some types never before contemplated in the Constitution State because the growing season would lengthen.
And snowbirds — those people who flee the North to winter in Florida — might never leave Connecticut. That's because the climate here might resemble Georgia's warmth, even in the dead of January.
Many scientists claim that global warming — which has pushed the average global surface temperature from 56.6 degrees in 1880 to 57.96 degrees in 2005 — is caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, trapped in the atmosphere.
Naturally occurring carbon dioxide keeps the planet warm enough to be livable. But too much carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, many scientists and the EPA warn, is amplifying the Earth's natural greenhouse tendencies.
"Since the pre-industrial era, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased more than 30 percent," the EPA states in "Climate Change and Connecticut," the agency's 2000 assessment of how global warming might affect Connecticut.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that humankind is leaving a "discernible" influence on climate that is "unlikely to be entirely natural in origin." The IPCC went so far as to state in a recent report that "there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Scientists, researchers and environmentalists who ascribe to the IPCC's viewpoint say evidence that the planet is heating up and will continue to become warmer in some places and (ironically) cooler in others.
The state Department of Environmental Protection statistics show that sea surface temperatures along New England's southern coast and off Long Island Sound rose 1.6 degrees between 1880 and 2001. The DEP's figures are based on records that date back to the shipping industry more than a century ago, as well as the DEP's own Long Island Sound trawling studies.
Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies Dean Gus Speth believes it's still possible to reverse or slow some of the harshest global warming projections. That's why he wrote "Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment," to provide a roadmap to get on with that task.
Speth's interest in the environment dates back to 1969 when he helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was just out of law school and anxious to make a positive mark on the environment. Through more than a dozen lawsuits, Speth and the NRDC challenged strip-mining and forest clear-cutting.
Those environmental lawsuits prompted President Jimmy Carter to appoint Speth to the Council on Environmental Quality, which drafted the country's first long-range assessment of how global warming' would affect the nation by 2000.
Many of the predictions in the council's 2000 Report to the President — about the level of greenhouse gas emissions, for instance — have come to pass, Speth notes with mixed emotions in his book.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest level in 420,000 years, Speth states in "Red Sky at Morning." Unless there is intervention soon, by the latter half of this century, Speth says, half of the nation's lands will no longer be able to sustain the kind of plants and animals that now inhabit them.
Some projections call for the maple and birch trees that enliven the fall foliage in Connecticut and New England to disappear entirely.
"Every projection on the future of forests in Connecticut show significant maple forests vanishing from the landscape, moving out to Canada," Speth says during an interview from his Yale office. "Ecological modeling indicates that if climate change is not slowed by the end of this century, it will largely eliminate maple trees, as well as kill New England's maple sugar industry.
"The last foliage season was a miserable one, colorwise," he says. "Although you can't take one season and extrapolate from that & the long-term evidence exists that this will impact our forests — whether we have them and what trees populate them."
Speth bases his views on research by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the U.S. National Assessment Synthesis Team and the federal Department of Energy's International Energy Outlook report. The EPA's 2000 report supports Seth's assessment on how Connecticut's foliage may change in decades to come. "Maple-dominated, hardwood forests could give way to forests dominated by oaks and conifers, species more tolerant of higher temperatures," according to the EPA's Climate and Policy Assessment Division. Moreover, "this change would diminish the brilliant autumn foliage as the contributions of maples declines," the EPA says, adding that statewide "as much as 30-to-60-percent of the hardwood forests could be replaced by warmer-climate forests with a mix of pines and hardwoods."
Lonny Lippsett, managing editor of Oceanus magazine at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, agrees.
"Those predictions about foliage are consistent with the theories I've seen in the literature," Lippsett says. "Global warming does not mean that trees will disappear, but it suggests that these maples would be replaced by other species that thrive in warmer climates." Warming water
The effects of global warming are not only on the land, but swirling in the air and the water.
Predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and findings from the Hadley Centre's climate model project that by 2100 because of greenhouse gases, Connecticut's average annual temperature may increase about 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
While Connecticut is expected to become a warmer state, authorities believe it will also be wetter. Experts predict annual precipitation will increase between 10 to 20 percent, with most of that uptick arriving in the winter in the form of snow.
Two times since 1976, in 1999 and 2002, water temperature on the bottom of Long Island Sound spiked higher than 69 degrees Fahrenheit.
Each spike corresponds with widespread lobster die-offs, followed by parasitic disease outbreaks that crippled the shellfish industry in Connecticut.
The DEP's annual fish census, conducted since the 1980s, shows crustaceans aren't the only creatures affected by warmer water. Winter flounder populations have plummeted more than 83 percent between 1980 and 2005.
"Experts believe that the trend toward warmer water temperatures has led to a decline of cold-water species like winter flounder," DEP Spokesman Dennis Schain says.
Commercial landings dropped 75 percent, from more than 1 million pounds of fish during that period to less than 250,000 pounds. And the recreational harvest fell 99.5 percent in those 25 years from a million fish to a paltry 5,000 pounds.
Research conducted by the University of Connecticut under a DEP grant shows that many native fish species, from winter flounder, to smelt and tomcod, are rapidly disappearing from Long Island Sound. At the same time, some 19 "warm water temperate" species, such as moonfish, hickory shad and northern sea robin and smallmouth flounder, which are not heavily fished in Connecticut, are thriving.
Budget commitments
On the national level, a total of 17 federal agencies are estimated to share more than $5 billion for climate change research. Currently, the EPA has an $18.6 million budget for climate change research, and is projected to have another $17.5 million under President Bush's 2007 budget request. Congress has yet to act on that request.
"The Bush Administration has an unparalleled financial, international and domestic commitment to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions," EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson says in the EPA's April greenhouse gas inventory report. Jennifer Wood, a spokeswoman for the EPA echoes Johnson's words. "The president has spoken repeatedly over the past five years on his view of climate change as a serious issue that must be addressed with global, long-term efforts, informed by the best available science."
It's easy to see that global warming is hot even outside the scientific and academic communities.
There's a documentary, "The Great Warming;" two heavy-hitter books, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" and Australian biologist Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers," and a movie and book about Al Gore's crusade against global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." Getting it wrong?
But not every scientist believes global warming is an alarming phenomenon.
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT in Cambridge who studies climate change using satellites and ground radar in the tropics, says the ecological models are skewed because they don't adequately measure cloud cover, water vapor in the atmosphere or turbulence.
"The models fail because they all get precipitation wrong," Lindzen says. "They all get the amount and placement of clouds wrong. And getting it right is crucial to gauging the effect of carbon dioxide," Lindzen says, adding that his views are not in step with what politicians and environmentalists want to hear.
Lindzen's past research received funding from the EPA, the federal Department of Energy and NASA's Goddard Space Institute in New York. These days, his primary funding comes from the federal Department of Energy.
"To get funding today, scientists have to keep to the line that a severe problem is possible" because of global warming. "They don't have to endorse the alarmist view per se, but they can't firmly oppose it," Lindzen says. When researchers submit grant proposals, they'll say they want to model clouds or something innocuous like that that belies the nature of their research, he says. "We never had to do that before. When you say you want to look at the sensitivity of climate and the possibility of negative feedbacks, which are things that reduce greenhouse gases, then you are working on something that goes against the paradigm." Lindzen disputes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assertion that scientists now agree that human activity is forcing the levels of greenhouse gases way beyond what they naturally might be.
"I was at the IPCC and I do not recall them taking any survey among scientists to reach that conclusion," Lindzen says. "There were 2,000 scientists there, and I don't know they could make such a statement. I'd have an easier time believing that old Dentyne commercial that 'four-out-five dentists recommended it' than this. That commercial, at least, has some truth to it."
Greenhouse gases aren't to blame for climate change, Lindzen says. Changes in temperature are cyclical. Jeffrey P. Osleeb, chairman of the UConn Department of Geography, pays keen attention to global warming. His interest stems from five years of study on global warming's impact on infrastructure, such as transportation and buildings and his days as an economist with the U.S. Department of Energy, where he worked on large-scale energy models.
"Twenty-eight percent of Connecticut's population lives within 3 miles of the coastline," Osleeb says. "As the sea level rises, what we will be seeing in Connecticut is a dramatic change in the coastline. This will all happen not hundreds of years from now but within this century there will be a narrowing of the state by some hundreds of yards. It's probable that communities that aren't coastal now will become so."
Sea levels are projected to rise as global warming continues because the polar ice caps, which for centuries reflected solar energy, are melting. And glaciers are sliding into the oceans, raising their levels, like ice cubes dropped into a glass.
Sea levels are predicted to rise 3 feet or more along much of the Connecticut and the New England coastline, flooding, then inundating, and in some cases, obliterating whole swaths of land.
The EPA's models of Connecticut and its coastline already have documented a sea-level rise of about 8 inches per century, and its long-range forecast for 2100 indicates that Connecticut's sea level "is likely to rise another 22 inches."
Just a 2-foot rise along Long Island Sound by the end of the century means "buildings along the coast would be underwater. And some highways, too," Osleeb says, citing research by NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Interstate 95 is a good candidate for being inundated underwater in parts."
Osleeb is seeking a $3 million grant as part of the Surface Area Flood Evaluation Coastal Optimization and Analysis of Structural Technologies and Storms, a Federal Emergency Management Administration program. The money will allow researchers to determine which buildings and infrastructure are threatened by global warming and develop plans that states can use to address them.
"Some highways and railroads might need to be elevated or moved. It's the same thing for buildings, except that where you are dealing with historic ones, the question is if they can't be raised can they or should they be moved," Osleeb says. "With any of this remediation, there will be significant cost. It's a bit like triage, you have to decide what you can save and what you want to save and at what cost."
What's the price tag for global-warming-proof government facilities, historic structures and interstate highways?
"It'll be billions," Osleeb says. "And maybe a lot more than that — expended to deal with this problem. And the planning for this, the scenarios we need to put together with all of the inventory of roads, transportation that's vulnerable and scenarios, needs to begin soon — within the next 10 years — if we want to address this in a planned, coordinated fashion."
Osleeb bristles at Lindzen's assertions that scientists are exaggerating global warming's impact on climate change.
"First and foremost, there are very few scientists who say that the impacts are being exaggerated. Certainly not the scientists" on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Osleeb says. "If I am wrong, it will mean that the United States has spent resources incorrectly. If they are wrong, it could mean the end of human life as we know it. Which is the greater risk?"(+)
Connecticut's fall foliage — a kaleidoscope of crimson, orange and gold-tinted leaves — would vanish. Forget tapping the maples for syrup. That industry would die here.
Portions of Interstate 95 might be underwater unless the state commits to raising them. And the same holds true for some of Metro-North's most low-lying tracks hugging the coastline and an untold number of buildings with historic preservation status.
Those are among the scenarios that scientists and the Environmental Protection Agency paint about the possible effects of global warming in Connecticut in coming decades.
But the predictions aren't all bad.
Connecticut farmers might raise a wider variety of fruit and vegetables, including some types never before contemplated in the Constitution State because the growing season would lengthen.
And snowbirds — those people who flee the North to winter in Florida — might never leave Connecticut. That's because the climate here might resemble Georgia's warmth, even in the dead of January.
Many scientists claim that global warming — which has pushed the average global surface temperature from 56.6 degrees in 1880 to 57.96 degrees in 2005 — is caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, trapped in the atmosphere.
Naturally occurring carbon dioxide keeps the planet warm enough to be livable. But too much carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, many scientists and the EPA warn, is amplifying the Earth's natural greenhouse tendencies.
"Since the pre-industrial era, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased more than 30 percent," the EPA states in "Climate Change and Connecticut," the agency's 2000 assessment of how global warming might affect Connecticut.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that humankind is leaving a "discernible" influence on climate that is "unlikely to be entirely natural in origin." The IPCC went so far as to state in a recent report that "there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Scientists, researchers and environmentalists who ascribe to the IPCC's viewpoint say evidence that the planet is heating up and will continue to become warmer in some places and (ironically) cooler in others.
The state Department of Environmental Protection statistics show that sea surface temperatures along New England's southern coast and off Long Island Sound rose 1.6 degrees between 1880 and 2001. The DEP's figures are based on records that date back to the shipping industry more than a century ago, as well as the DEP's own Long Island Sound trawling studies.
Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies Dean Gus Speth believes it's still possible to reverse or slow some of the harshest global warming projections. That's why he wrote "Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment," to provide a roadmap to get on with that task.
Speth's interest in the environment dates back to 1969 when he helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was just out of law school and anxious to make a positive mark on the environment. Through more than a dozen lawsuits, Speth and the NRDC challenged strip-mining and forest clear-cutting.
Those environmental lawsuits prompted President Jimmy Carter to appoint Speth to the Council on Environmental Quality, which drafted the country's first long-range assessment of how global warming' would affect the nation by 2000.
Many of the predictions in the council's 2000 Report to the President — about the level of greenhouse gas emissions, for instance — have come to pass, Speth notes with mixed emotions in his book.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest level in 420,000 years, Speth states in "Red Sky at Morning." Unless there is intervention soon, by the latter half of this century, Speth says, half of the nation's lands will no longer be able to sustain the kind of plants and animals that now inhabit them.
Some projections call for the maple and birch trees that enliven the fall foliage in Connecticut and New England to disappear entirely.
"Every projection on the future of forests in Connecticut show significant maple forests vanishing from the landscape, moving out to Canada," Speth says during an interview from his Yale office. "Ecological modeling indicates that if climate change is not slowed by the end of this century, it will largely eliminate maple trees, as well as kill New England's maple sugar industry.
"The last foliage season was a miserable one, colorwise," he says. "Although you can't take one season and extrapolate from that & the long-term evidence exists that this will impact our forests — whether we have them and what trees populate them."
Speth bases his views on research by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the U.S. National Assessment Synthesis Team and the federal Department of Energy's International Energy Outlook report. The EPA's 2000 report supports Seth's assessment on how Connecticut's foliage may change in decades to come. "Maple-dominated, hardwood forests could give way to forests dominated by oaks and conifers, species more tolerant of higher temperatures," according to the EPA's Climate and Policy Assessment Division. Moreover, "this change would diminish the brilliant autumn foliage as the contributions of maples declines," the EPA says, adding that statewide "as much as 30-to-60-percent of the hardwood forests could be replaced by warmer-climate forests with a mix of pines and hardwoods."
Lonny Lippsett, managing editor of Oceanus magazine at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, agrees.
"Those predictions about foliage are consistent with the theories I've seen in the literature," Lippsett says. "Global warming does not mean that trees will disappear, but it suggests that these maples would be replaced by other species that thrive in warmer climates." Warming water
The effects of global warming are not only on the land, but swirling in the air and the water.
Predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and findings from the Hadley Centre's climate model project that by 2100 because of greenhouse gases, Connecticut's average annual temperature may increase about 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
While Connecticut is expected to become a warmer state, authorities believe it will also be wetter. Experts predict annual precipitation will increase between 10 to 20 percent, with most of that uptick arriving in the winter in the form of snow.
Two times since 1976, in 1999 and 2002, water temperature on the bottom of Long Island Sound spiked higher than 69 degrees Fahrenheit.
Each spike corresponds with widespread lobster die-offs, followed by parasitic disease outbreaks that crippled the shellfish industry in Connecticut.
The DEP's annual fish census, conducted since the 1980s, shows crustaceans aren't the only creatures affected by warmer water. Winter flounder populations have plummeted more than 83 percent between 1980 and 2005.
"Experts believe that the trend toward warmer water temperatures has led to a decline of cold-water species like winter flounder," DEP Spokesman Dennis Schain says.
Commercial landings dropped 75 percent, from more than 1 million pounds of fish during that period to less than 250,000 pounds. And the recreational harvest fell 99.5 percent in those 25 years from a million fish to a paltry 5,000 pounds.
Research conducted by the University of Connecticut under a DEP grant shows that many native fish species, from winter flounder, to smelt and tomcod, are rapidly disappearing from Long Island Sound. At the same time, some 19 "warm water temperate" species, such as moonfish, hickory shad and northern sea robin and smallmouth flounder, which are not heavily fished in Connecticut, are thriving.
Budget commitments
On the national level, a total of 17 federal agencies are estimated to share more than $5 billion for climate change research. Currently, the EPA has an $18.6 million budget for climate change research, and is projected to have another $17.5 million under President Bush's 2007 budget request. Congress has yet to act on that request.
"The Bush Administration has an unparalleled financial, international and domestic commitment to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions," EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson says in the EPA's April greenhouse gas inventory report. Jennifer Wood, a spokeswoman for the EPA echoes Johnson's words. "The president has spoken repeatedly over the past five years on his view of climate change as a serious issue that must be addressed with global, long-term efforts, informed by the best available science."
It's easy to see that global warming is hot even outside the scientific and academic communities.
There's a documentary, "The Great Warming;" two heavy-hitter books, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" and Australian biologist Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers," and a movie and book about Al Gore's crusade against global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." Getting it wrong?
But not every scientist believes global warming is an alarming phenomenon.
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT in Cambridge who studies climate change using satellites and ground radar in the tropics, says the ecological models are skewed because they don't adequately measure cloud cover, water vapor in the atmosphere or turbulence.
"The models fail because they all get precipitation wrong," Lindzen says. "They all get the amount and placement of clouds wrong. And getting it right is crucial to gauging the effect of carbon dioxide," Lindzen says, adding that his views are not in step with what politicians and environmentalists want to hear.
Lindzen's past research received funding from the EPA, the federal Department of Energy and NASA's Goddard Space Institute in New York. These days, his primary funding comes from the federal Department of Energy.
"To get funding today, scientists have to keep to the line that a severe problem is possible" because of global warming. "They don't have to endorse the alarmist view per se, but they can't firmly oppose it," Lindzen says. When researchers submit grant proposals, they'll say they want to model clouds or something innocuous like that that belies the nature of their research, he says. "We never had to do that before. When you say you want to look at the sensitivity of climate and the possibility of negative feedbacks, which are things that reduce greenhouse gases, then you are working on something that goes against the paradigm." Lindzen disputes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assertion that scientists now agree that human activity is forcing the levels of greenhouse gases way beyond what they naturally might be.
"I was at the IPCC and I do not recall them taking any survey among scientists to reach that conclusion," Lindzen says. "There were 2,000 scientists there, and I don't know they could make such a statement. I'd have an easier time believing that old Dentyne commercial that 'four-out-five dentists recommended it' than this. That commercial, at least, has some truth to it."
Greenhouse gases aren't to blame for climate change, Lindzen says. Changes in temperature are cyclical. Jeffrey P. Osleeb, chairman of the UConn Department of Geography, pays keen attention to global warming. His interest stems from five years of study on global warming's impact on infrastructure, such as transportation and buildings and his days as an economist with the U.S. Department of Energy, where he worked on large-scale energy models.
"Twenty-eight percent of Connecticut's population lives within 3 miles of the coastline," Osleeb says. "As the sea level rises, what we will be seeing in Connecticut is a dramatic change in the coastline. This will all happen not hundreds of years from now but within this century there will be a narrowing of the state by some hundreds of yards. It's probable that communities that aren't coastal now will become so."
Sea levels are projected to rise as global warming continues because the polar ice caps, which for centuries reflected solar energy, are melting. And glaciers are sliding into the oceans, raising their levels, like ice cubes dropped into a glass.
Sea levels are predicted to rise 3 feet or more along much of the Connecticut and the New England coastline, flooding, then inundating, and in some cases, obliterating whole swaths of land.
The EPA's models of Connecticut and its coastline already have documented a sea-level rise of about 8 inches per century, and its long-range forecast for 2100 indicates that Connecticut's sea level "is likely to rise another 22 inches."
Just a 2-foot rise along Long Island Sound by the end of the century means "buildings along the coast would be underwater. And some highways, too," Osleeb says, citing research by NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Interstate 95 is a good candidate for being inundated underwater in parts."
Osleeb is seeking a $3 million grant as part of the Surface Area Flood Evaluation Coastal Optimization and Analysis of Structural Technologies and Storms, a Federal Emergency Management Administration program. The money will allow researchers to determine which buildings and infrastructure are threatened by global warming and develop plans that states can use to address them.
"Some highways and railroads might need to be elevated or moved. It's the same thing for buildings, except that where you are dealing with historic ones, the question is if they can't be raised can they or should they be moved," Osleeb says. "With any of this remediation, there will be significant cost. It's a bit like triage, you have to decide what you can save and what you want to save and at what cost."
What's the price tag for global-warming-proof government facilities, historic structures and interstate highways?
"It'll be billions," Osleeb says. "And maybe a lot more than that — expended to deal with this problem. And the planning for this, the scenarios we need to put together with all of the inventory of roads, transportation that's vulnerable and scenarios, needs to begin soon — within the next 10 years — if we want to address this in a planned, coordinated fashion."
Osleeb bristles at Lindzen's assertions that scientists are exaggerating global warming's impact on climate change.
"First and foremost, there are very few scientists who say that the impacts are being exaggerated. Certainly not the scientists" on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Osleeb says. "If I am wrong, it will mean that the United States has spent resources incorrectly. If they are wrong, it could mean the end of human life as we know it. Which is the greater risk?"(+)
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)