Computerized projections of western United States snowfall levels in 2050 compared to present day. [Scripps News]
The SF Chronicle emblazoned its front page real estate, full width, above the fold, with an article on water, snow pack, rising oceans and state-wide planning — or the lack of it.
While an article inside celebrates this winter’s snow-pack as being well above average, the long term history and prognosis aren’t as good. [And in fact, if rain still coming arrives in warmer weather this snow pack will shrink overnight.] Water is wandering from its habitual patterns and disrupting the human patterns so dependent on it.
California and Bay Area cities must start planning now for new and costly systems to control increasing runoff from urban storms, springtime floods from swollen rivers and rising sea levels as they invade lowlands, all as a result of global warming, climate scientists and water experts warn.
Climate change, they say, will result in thinner winter snowpacks in the Sierra and other Western mountains. As snow packs melt earlier each spring, the melt water will increase river flows and raise new threats of floods. Even a small rise in sea levels could threaten cities and farmland in low-lying areas, like the Delta and Silicon Valley.
New urban systems to handle winter storm runoff, new designs for dams and flood control structures, and higher dikes and levees around lands that even now lie below sea level will be needed, the scientists argue.
The impetus for the article, and a good deal of the information in it, comes from the latest edition of Scripps News, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, summarizing new computer modeling of water, weather and climate.
The study focused on the western United States because of its large and growing population in a generally dry region where battles over water are becoming increasingly common. The researchers report that the declines in snowpack, warming air temperatures and earlier spring river runoff that are already seen in the region are well explained by climate impacts expected from greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions from human activities.
This follows by a few days another front page Chronicle article about the collapse of the fall salmon run into the Central Valley.
The Central Valley fall run of chinook salmon apparently has collapsed, portending sharp fishing restrictions and rising prices for consumers while providing further evidence that the state’s water demands are causing widespread ecological damage.
… At its peak, the fall run has numbered hundreds of thousands of fish, exceeding 800,000 in some years. But this year the preliminary count has put the number at 90,000 adults returning to spawn in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries. During the past decade, the number of returning fish has never fallen below 250,000.
I, for one, would like to hear a lot more from the candidates about their perceptions, ideas and plans for these ominous events . Obama mentioned climate change in the one-on-one debate with Clinton once, in passing. Not perfunctorily but still, in passing. New Cabinet post? How about Secretary for Getting Right With the World?
Roosevelt created multiple and successive “boards” to deal with US response to WW II, from the War Resources Board to the Office of War Mobilization. The effects of climate change will be as enormous in many parts of the world as the war was. Those effects will have to be confronted, and not just by calls to stop shooting wolves, or to clean up your beaches. It will be more difficult today than in 1942 to enlist industry and citizen. The images of enemy guns creates the will to build bigger guns. That’s easy. The response to hurricanes and drought is not as easy. The enemy is ourselves and it is nature’s blowback we have to deal with. But it is past time for alarm alone. Leadership, forecasting, planning, institutionalization, life-changing all have to happen at record speeds.
You could pummel the candidates with questions for starters.