Capital Press: Cold facts and second looks

December 29, 2006

The cold, hard facts from columns of arctic ice, buttressed by complex mathematical models computer-assisted researchers generate, show the Earth's climate is changing.

A rise in temperature is tagged as driving that change.

Implications aren't clear-cut. Just two years ago, when English oceanographers took a snapshot of warm- and cool-water circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, some jumped to the conclusion that rapid changes telegraphed the setup for a new European Ice Age.

All of that unraveled last month when near-continuous data gathered by a network of buoys deployed in the North Atlantic showed lots of variability, but no hint of a "falling off the cliff" type of climate shift.

"Scientific honesty would require records for decades," oceanographer Carl Wunsch of Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in a Nov. 17 Science magazine report. "How do you go about doing science when you need decades of record?"

Where there are decades of record, indicators do indeed show change, and most climate scientists believe gradual temperature increases spiked upward due to interaction between gas in the atmosphere above the Earth and inbound radiant energy from the Sun. Ever so slowly, insects of the subtropics are moving north.

Even the powerful jetstream winds in the stratosphere that shape Northern Hemisphere weather seem on a northward trend. Scientists are scrambling to figure out what it means.

Disharmony and dirt

In Nairobi last month, nations that signed on to the Kyoto Protocol for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions - thought to be key to reducing warming trends that spiked 30 years ago - wrangled over what to do after 2012, when the initial agreement ends.

"Sometimes it's not easy to solve problems among the three parties in government (in Germany)," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told Reuters the day before the conference broke up.

"Here you have 189 (nations), and it's difficult to find solutions."

The Kyoto deal, made in 1997, hasn't been ratified in the United States, where the Bush administration sees targets for limiting emissions as constraints on business. But states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency work at limits, nonetheless.

The EPA last month said 77 percent of the nation's petroleum refineries are under some form of enforcement order leading to reduced emissions.

And what was once a "wild idea" among scientists, purposefully inserting particulate matter in the atmosphere to block solar radiation - the source of much of the Earth's heat - is back in vogue this winter.

There's a natural screen on incoming solar radiation caused by dust, volcanic ash and other particulate matter that blocks a portion of the sun's rays.

Science magazine, reporting on Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen's suggestion of emitting haze to slow global warming, used the headline "Pollute the planet for climate's sake?"

Crutzen isn't the first to come up with the idea. More than 30 years ago Russian Mikhail Budyko postulated the Earth-cooling effect of sun-reflecting particles seeded in the stratosphere.

The difference is that Crutzen is a Nobel-winning atmospheric scientist. His paper in the August edition of Climate Change magazine ushered in debate on how a protective haze might be maintained.

Crutzen, by the way, thinks a build-your-own haze project is a bad idea.

"Daunting practical aspects aside, the latest - although preliminary - climate modeling hints that shading the globe to counteract greenhouse warming could actually work," Richard A. Kerr wrote in the Oct. 20 Science report.

Continuing developments

Earlier this year, as the East Oregonian Publishing Group laid out the first two reports on climate change, we learned that:

n A shift in winds in the summer of 2005 halted upwelling along the Oregon Coast, turning stretches of the Pacific Ocean into a dead zone with little oxygen, no food for fish and other creatures of the marine ecosystem. No one will say that shift in wind is a product of climate change, but they do say Pacific Ocean circulation is ever-changing.

n Some computer models predict gradual warming, with a host of regional impacts, for the foreseeable future. Other models show a gradual rise in sea level as warming melts glacial ice into water. Shrinkage of mountain snowpack causes concern.

Amy Snover, from University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group, told this year's Climate Friendly Farming symposium at Pullman, Wash., that less snow in the mountains means irrigation reservoirs won't be full as often, and as precipitation patterns alter, more winter storms will dump rainfall in quantities that increase periodic flooding.

The rise in global temperatures is documented, "and it's happening 'most everywhere," said Nate Mantua, part of the Climate Impacts Group research team in Seattle.

n Another UW climate researcher, Qiang Fu, working with colleagues in China, found that over the past 27 years, the jetstream in the atmosphere over the Pacific is drifting northward. The jetstream drives weather in the subtropics and influences Northern Hemisphere precipitation patterns around the globe.

n Bill Pennell, an atmospheric researcher who spent 27 years studying climate change at the Pacific Northwest Regional Laboratory in Richland, Wash., called the 21st century's unfolding change in climate "the most difficult environmental problem to face this planet."

n Because changes are gradual, and impacts apparently vary from geographic location to geographic location, people, animals and vegetation have time to adjust - if they can. But Helmuth Rogg, an Oregon Department of Agriculture entomologist, said insects are seen "where they haven't been before." Some insects, he said "are affected very quickly, and they begin to react very quickly … or they won't make it."

n For plants in the Northern Hemisphere, the near future may be bright with more rain and an increase in carbon dioxide. That's the conclusion of the U.S. Global Change Research project that published much of its work in 2000 and updated some information four years later.

CO2 is a plant fertilizer, delivered through the air. More CO2, combined with sunlight, yields more sugar, the energy base for a plant or tree.

Rich Roseberg, an Oregon State University agronomist based at the Klamath Experiment Station in Southern Oregon, says the U.S. report "got it about right."

He did nearly a decade of plant and tree growth research for a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation climate change project. "The changes are, so far, happening so slowly that plant breeders are concentrating on disease resistance," Roseberg said.

Irrigation questions

But if bugs and plants have time to adjust to new climate, hydrologists aren't so sure about the West's irrigation system. Out in the Great Plains, for example, there's more than one reservoir that, by the time it was built, precipitation patterns shifted and expected groundwater inflows failed to materialize leaving near-empty lake beds. In late summer, the governors of Washington, Oregon and California signed a three-state ocean research agreement that by 2007 should lead to a coordinated research plan into issues such as the 2005 dead zone. Last year, the same governors agreed to curtail auto emissions on the theory that it will help fight rising temperatures.

"Just as our Western states have started to work together to fight global warming and protect our air, we now join forces to make sure we are doing everything in our power to maintain clean water and beaches along our coast," California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said as Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski and Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire joined him by satellite video from the Pacific Northwest.

Public response

You'll read in this special report on climate change that there's a difference of opinion on what ought to be done in the face of rising temperatures. For some Christians in the West and elsewhere, it comes down to the biblical instruction that God made humans stewards of the Earth.

"Where is the greatest risk from making the wrong decision?" Warren Aney of Portland, chairman of the Ecojustice Team of the Presbytery of the Cascades, asked in a recent post on the Internet.

"If we decide that climate change is not occurring and that we will therefore take no action, the benefits of being right are greatly outweighed by the risks associated with being wrong."

Aney is a retired wildlife biologist.

The much-viewed movie "An Inconvenient Truth," narrated by former Vice President Al Gore, ends with a plea for individuals to save energy.

That also makes sense by lowering personal spending.

But as Kulongoski learned when he asked last year's Oregon Legislature to adopt California tailpipe emission standards, at the government level controversy is certain. The Legislature passed a resolution banning state spending to reduce greenhouse gases, and Kulongoski had to use his veto to kill it.

There's also debate about approach. Should government encourage voluntary curtailment of greenhouse gas emissions, or ought it to follow the formal enforcement-order route as EPA did with petroleum refineries?

What can you do personally? Climatologist Greg Jones at Southern Oregon University in Ashland walks to work, gives talks on the implications of climate change, and even worries about the small things in society such as dependence on plastics for instruments as widely used as ballpoint pens.

Lessening the use of things that contribute to greenhouse gasses, however minor they seem to an individual, can add up to big savings in global emissions, he said.