The Pacific Northwest may think of itself as a privileged corner of America, surrounded entirely by envy, but global warming has not spared the region, according to the new National Climate Assessment released Tuesday by the White House.
“Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington state and maple syrup producers in Vermont are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of recent experience,” said the new report, prepared by a large team of scientists from in and outside the government.
The cause of these impacts, and those felt from coastal planners from Florida to Inuit villages in Arctic Alaska have a central cause — the actions of man.
“The global warning of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels,” the assessment concluded.
“Extreme events” are on the rise, said the report, and that is not limited to hurricanes striking Florida and the Gulf Coast, or tornadoes ripping apart towns in Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The extreme striking the West, and the Northwest, is fire. Winter snow packs are lower, the melt takes place earlier, and summer temperatures are higher earlier.
“Climate change is leading to longer and more intense wild land fire seasons, the dangers to urban areas increase substantially,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, formerly the CEO of Seattle-based Recreational Equipment Inc.
The assessment looks at a variety of regional impacts.
It notes that the pine bark beetle, reproducing in greater numbers due to warmer winters, has destroyed millions of acres of forest, from the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska to interior British Columbia, to high-elevation white bark pine forests in the Rockies.
“Climate change will alter Northwest forests by increasing wildlife risk, insect and disease outbreaks, and by forcing longer term shifts in forest types and species,” the assessment argued.
And, it added, the shortening of winter in the Northwest, and shrinking of snow packs, will have “far reaching ecological and socioeconomic consequences.”
The Obama administration made a big deal of the assessment, inviting TV weather forecasters to the White House for brief interviews with the president.
In turn, ex-Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino on Fox News said that the forecasters should be asking Obama about the 2012 terrorist assault on the U.S. embassy compound in Benghazi.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, an outspoken advocate of action on climate change, treated the assessment as a wake-up call. Last week, Inslee announced a wide-ranging if vague program to reduce carbon emissions. He wants utilities to stop using coal to generate electricity and buildings to use energy more efficiently.
“Reduced snow pack threatens essential water resources for communities and agricultural industries in places like the Yakima Valley,” Inslee said. “Hotter, drier forests are driving increased and more devastating wildfires in places like Cle Elum and Wenatchee.
“And ocean acidification threatens our historic shellfish industry and salmon fisheries in places like Shelton and Mason County. This assessment confirms that the costs of inaction on climate change are unacceptable for our state’ and our children’s future.
With energy legislation blocked in Congress, President Obama has vowed to use his executive powers to limit emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
A far-reaching agreement to increase mileage efficiency in cars and SUVs, worked out with Detroit’s auto manufacturers, is a major unsung achievement by the Obama administration.
Far more controversial, however, is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to force reductions in emissions by older, coal-burning power plants. Republicans in Congress have charged that Obama is waging a “war on coal.”
With use of its polluting product on the decline, the coal industry is seeking new overseas markets in China. It wants to create massive export ports, one at Cherry Point north of Ferndale and the other at Longview on the Columbia River.
Global warming has generated some gaseous doubters. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., as gone further and charged that climate change itself is “a hoax,” influenced by scientists’ pursuit of research dollars.
The oil and coal industries have even turned to the strategy pursued by Big Tobacco after the 1964 Surgeon General’s report that cigarettes cause cancer. The industry stalled for years, arguing that there was no scientific “consensus” and that further evidence needed to be developed.
The assessment takes dead-aim at the delay strategy.
“Climate change, once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” it argued.