Global Warming and the West Policy Issues

Maybe you’ve been thinking: If I don’t live on the coast, rising sea levels won’t flood my backyard, and a warmer winter on the high plains doesn’t sound so bad. What’s so wrong with global warming?

For the inland West, one answer is fire. ABC News recently reported:

This year, wildfires have already burned more than 3 million acres — more than three times the average at this time of year.
Many scientists say that these fires fit exactly into the pattern predicted for global warming and that it's likely to get, on average, even drier and hotter.
Over the last month, ABC News has traveled through the San Bernardino Mountains, Western Sierras, and Rockies to find out what scientists and firefighters make of the new flames they must now face.
The size and ferocity of these wildfires plaguing the West right now — many growing in size every hour — astonishes even experienced fire chiefs like Mat Fratus of the San Bernardino City Fire Department.
"I had talked to people who had been in the fire service their entire career, and not only this fire, but fires in preceding years, because of the drought, because of the fuel conditions, they produced fire behavior, flame links, intensities that we had never really experienced before," Fratus said.
"And everything we had to throw at it, we did. And it just seemed to burn right through us," Fratus said.
Today's wildfires are part of a worsening pattern most everywhere.
Since 1970, the number of major wildfires has soared not only in North America but around the world.
Scientists report that global warming means mountains lose winter snowpack weeks ahead of time, from the Himalayas to California Sierras.
"The snow is melting earlier in the year at very regular intervals now, and we're getting much longer fire seasons. It dries out much more than before," said Anthony Westerling, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The economic cost of these new fires is many billions of dollars. No one knows exactly how much, except that the rapid new development seems bound to make it much worse.
"It appears that global warming is an issue that is not going to subside or go away anytime soon," he said. "What we thought was the anomaly will soon become the rule."

If that isn’t enough, think more droughts, more heat-related health problems, and tropical diseases moving north, not to mention the decline of the West’s ski industry.

And next time you fill up at the pump, remember that when a stronger than normal hurricane season brought on by global warming smashes the Gulf Coast oil rigs, underwater pipelines, and refineries, the cost of gas goes way up all over the country.

I don’t claim to be a climatology expert, but I do know that when the National Academy of Sciences speaks, we should be listening, and to ignore the best scientists in the country is to bury our heads in the increasingly hot sands.

Leo Brown | July 5, 2006 | Comment on This Post (2 so far) Permalink: Global Warming and the West Policy Issues

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