Rising temps may leave Utah without enough snowpack to meet water needs
By: Judy Fahys
Imagine a Utah with skimpy winters; springs punctuated with more and more violent flash floods; longer, hotter summers; and a wildfire season that lasts spring to fall.
That's the scenario shaping up for the Intermountain West, according to a group of international climate scientists that released its latest report Friday.
Rob Gillies, director of the Utah Climate Center, said the findings give a clearer picture of what to expect and confirm trends scientists are already seeing.
"The exact details are not yet clear, but such shifts in regional climate will undoubtedly affect many ecosystems that support us as well as critical water resources we depend upon," he said.
"Since climate is a complex interconnected system, [the climate shift] may also deliver other surprising responses to the 'big experiment' [on global warming] that the human race is currently conducting."
Zeroing in on the changes worldwide, region by region, lies at the heart of the latest report. Called "Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability," it is the second in a series of four promised by an international panel of scientists. They pulled together hundreds of studies, pored over their conclusions for months and haggled over the final wording until minutes before releasing it Friday.
The latest report offers little for roughly half of Utahns who, when polled by The Salt Lake Tribune last fall, said they doubted global warming. Instead, it delivers more particulars for the other half of Utahns who believe that climate change is under way, and it describes how the effects of climate change are more severe and coming faster than previously understood.
Kathleen Miller, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and lead author on the chapter dedicated to water resources, said the American West can expect more drought, heat waves, flash flooding and wildfire - all tied to an overall temperature increase of between 4 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.
She suggested that the unusually low March snowfall, the surprisingly warm temperatures and the troubling early melt-off might well be "a sneak peek of what our future is going to look like."
"We can show you now," she said. "It's happening in our own backyards. Right here. Right now."
The implications are many - and troubling, Miller added. Warming means less water. Flooding means reservoirs fill too quickly with silt and, in turn, water has less oxygen and a greater likelihood of becoming choked with algae.
Other parts of the report suggest the health effects on humans will be experienced everywhere, including the West. Hotter summertime temperatures are bound to amplify ozone pollution, especially in urbanized areas, such as the Wasatch Front, that are heavily paved over.
Allergy sufferers should expect pollen counts to climb. High-elevation areas may see mosquito populations explode, and hantavirus may spread.
Susanne Moser, an NCAR scientist who contributed to the report's chapter on coastal systems, said people already are being forced to cope with the changes that are under way.
"No amount of mitigation of climate change will do anything about that," she said. "There are already a set of impacts we are going to experience."
At the same time, there are many ways to mitigate or minimize the increase in the pollution blamed for climate change - primarily the waste gases produced by fossil fuels like gasoline and coal.
Government could do more, for instance, by imposing tougher building standards, she said. Homes and businesses in the West generally do a poor job of keeping cold out in the winter and maintaining cool indoor temperatures in the summer.
Utah, in particular, would be a great place to tap into solar energy, she added.
"Our current track record is not so good," Moser said. "We tend not to be so proactive, but that could change."
Steve Christiansen, a Salt Lake City environmental lawyer who focuses on climate change, said the business community was prepared to hear the science panel's latest findings. In combination with two key rulings last week by the U.S. Supreme Court, they appear to nudge decision-makers toward policies that will give business more certainty to make plans for the future.
"All of those things have a cumulative effect of moving us toward a legislative solution," he said.
Interest in addressing climate change has been mounting in Utah. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, has brought together industry, environmentalists and regulators in his Blue Ribbon Advisory Council on Climate Change.
Meanwhile, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson has been an active advocate of local solutions, cutting his city's greenhouse gas emissions by more than 20 percent and organizing city leaders around the world. The Democrat also has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration, saying it has failed to lead the fight against climate change. His assessment of the most recent report was grim.
"There has been a distinct and dramatic increase in the severity of the consequences [of global warming] both in terms of what already has occurred and what is likely to occur in the future," he said. "It's a frustrating situation made so even more by the utter neglect of the U.S. government in fairly reversing the trend of disastrous consequences of global warming."
