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?"(+)
