Snowpack declines in Rockies unusual compared to past

deltamrey wrote: Small changes to warmer can be very positive. We are in high desert and that is a concern if the temps rise. BUT the only losers I see at this point are the dollar driven resorts........I feel for the employees but these are not high skill jobs as a rule and they can easily retrain.

Not the only losers - people depend on the water from snow melt - all the way from here to CA, and not just for recreational sports.
http://www.countercurrents.org/climatep ... 081210.htm
USGS Press Release:
http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/U ... turies.cfm

The warming and snowpack decline are projected to worsen through the 21st century, foreshadowing a strain on water supplies. Runoff from winter snowpack – layers of snow that accumulate at high altitude – accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western United States.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2009/01/2 ... ust-bowls/
NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/1 ... ore-244161

For the record, it was the possibility of losing the Sierra snowpack in the second half of the century that led our Nobel prize-winning Energy Secretary to warn in 2009, “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

SS109 wrote: What some people see as invasion of non-native species, I see as adaptation and more diverse eco-systems.
We were warned that humans were driving wildlife away with home building, but I am seeing wildlife adapting pretty quickly to suburban and urban enviroments.

Instead of having 3 bad winters out of 5, we will see 2. Will that be a radical change, or just slight adjustments?

But are ecosystems really going to get more diverse, or more uniform? And will species be able to adapt quickly enough? It's an area of study that is less well-populated with studies, but most indications are that more species than not face struggles, if not outright extinction, in face of rapid climate change.
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2006/11/14/biology/

AV8OR wrote: (Looks) like more Tree-hugging hippie B.S.

How's those false reports on global warming working out???

Do you have evidence that refutes the current science? FYI, here's an interactive map that indicates the publication of climate reports that are pro-AGW, anti-AGW, or neutral. Check out the numbers side-by-side, year-by-year. The take-home message is that from the year 1824 to 2007 the number of neutral papers outnumbered those that were pro-AGW. And both vastly outnumbered those that do not support the AGW science - not because of bias, but because the evidence isn't there.

Lionshead2010 wrote: Oh, I thought you were talking about the snow pack just west of the Continental Divide. You know, the one that's flooding all the major rivers in the western part of our state. The one estimated at something like 250% of normal. Yes, that one.

No, the study describes from where they sampled and it is a range from Canada through southern CO.

Lionshead2010 wrote: If not, I'm not sure what to do about it, do you? I mean really.....what do you propose to do? Just curious. I don't see government or any other mortal powers doing much about either phenomenon

We need to create the political will in our elected officials to actually start doing something about this, concurrent with modifying our own personal energy uses and lifestyles to reduce our carbon footprint.

http://www.millionlettermarch.org/index.php
[youtube:3jrzv3vn][/youtube:3jrzv3vn]

Then look to see what you can do yourself:
http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/minimisecfp.html

http://www.truth-out.org/perils-ignorin ... 1307762521
The Perils of Ignoring Science
Friday 10 June 2011
by: Michael Winship

In a June 4 article headlined "A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself," the Times reported, "The great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble... Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming."

The World Bank estimates that there may be as many as 940 million hungry people this year. The international relief agency Oxfam projects already high food prices more than doubling by 2030 with perhaps half of that spike due to climate change. With those increases could come hoarding, gouging, panic buying and food riots like those that led to the overthrow of the Haitian government in 2008.

Nor is it just our food supply that has climate change breathing hot and heavy down our collective necks. City and state planners also are examining its impact on urban centers and preparing for the worst. A May 22 Times article notes, "Climate scientists have told city planners that based on current trends, Chicago will feel more like Baton Rouge than a Northern metropolis before the end of this century...In Chicago’s case, scientists project that if global carbon emissions continue at their current pace, the Second City would have summers "like the Deep South, with as many as 72 days over 90 degrees before the end of the century. For most of the 20th century, the city averaged fewer than 15...The increasing occurrences of freezes and thaws (the root of potholes) would cause billions of dollars’ worth of deterioration to building facades, bridges and roads. Termites, never previously able to withstand Chicago’s winters, would start gorging on wooden frames."

Researchers are developing strains of rice and wheat more resistant to heat, drought, flood and rising levels of carbon dioxide....[But] That takes cash

http://www.grist.org/climate-change/201 ... e-all-week
The most powerful climate video you’ll see all week
by Grist
11 Jun 2011
Climate Change

Bill McKibben published a must-read op-ed in The Washington Post last month about the connection between climate change and recent extreme weather events. Now Stephen Thomson has combined McKibben's words with striking footage of the events he writes about.

[youtube:3jrzv3vn][/youtube:3jrzv3vn]

http://tcktcktck.org/2011/06/counting-h ... aced-2010/
Counting the human effects of climate change: 42.3 million people displaced in 2010
- Posted on June 14, 2011 by Heather Libby

As we have said time and time again, climate change will not wait for global negotiations. A new report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre confirmed this again last week with the release of “Displacement due to natural hazard-induced disasters 2009-2010”. The results are shocking. In 2010, 42 million people were forced from their homes by natural disasters, led by storms and floods in China and Pakistan. For reference, this number is almost equivalent to the population of Spain.

From Reuters:
The report states that “large-scale disasters dominated the global figures and the world’s attention. They caused more than 90 percent of total displacement reported in 2009 and 2010. Over three years from 2008 to 2010, 86 disasters displaced 100,000 or more people, including 18 ‘mega-disasters’ which each displaced from one million people up to over 15 million in the case of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the 2010 floods in China. These mega-disasters, despite being relatively few, strongly influenced the total global estimate for each year and their impacts accounted, in large part, for differences between the years.”

“We must now reconsider our approach” to help people uprooted by global warming, he said in a speech, adding that he considered environmental degradation and climate change to be “the defining challenge of our times.”

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011 ... -community
Climate Change You Can See
— By Lauren Ellis
| Mon Jun. 13, 2011

Ever come across someone who wants visual proof that climate change is real? Well, now it's at your fingertips. Thanks to a joint effort by California universities and research centers , the California Energy Commission , and Google, Golden State residents now have access to a brand new interactive tool that showcases the effects of climate change. The website, Cal-Adapt.org , culls a wealth of information from the the state's scientific community and reformats it into easy-to-use charts and maps.

You can tailor the data to your specific location and voilá: The website will generate personalized local climate snapshots, wildlife risk areas, and sea level changes. Adjust the scale at the top of the tools section and you'll see changes between decades. The site's aim is to make the information publicly available, so your results can be easily downloaded .

And this website is full of extra goodies: There's a massive publication archive dating back to the 1980s that includes climate articles on electricity demand , shrinking beaches , and intensifying heat waves . The "What is California Doing About Climate Change" section is embarrassingly scant, but as a consolation prize, Cal-Adapt is launching the Historic Photo Hunt Challenge . In a Geocaching fashion, Cal-Adapt will send out the GPS coordinates of photos taken in the 1920s and 1930s.

http://www.grist.org/climate-change/201 ... mal-is-hot
NOAA: The new normal is hot
Default badge avatar for Joseph Romm
by Joseph Romm
14 Jun 2011

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center has just released an overview of its new "1981-2010 Climate Normals" [PDF]. Meteorologist Paul Douglas, founder and CEO of Broadcast Weather, explains what this means:

NOAA just released the latest climate "normals" for the USA. When you hear the "average high" or "average low", it's a running, 30-year average. Data was just updated to show the first decade of the 21st century ... For a look at how the new normals were calculated click here [PDF] -- the full data set is set to be released on July 1. For continuity the same 5,053 weather observation sites were used. Averaged together (all reporting stations) the inclusion of the 2000-2010 data showed a 0.6 degrees F warming trend nationwide for the latest, running, 30-year averages.

Why does winter warming in the West matter? We've already seen the new U.S. Geological Survey study that found global warming is driving Rockies snowpack loss unrivaled in 800 years, which threatens western water supplies. Then we have the voracious bark beetle, which just loves milder winters.

Climate change inherently favors invasive pests. A 2008 Nature study looked at the beetle's warming-driven devastation in British Columbia and concluded, "This impact converted the forest from a small net carbon sink to a large net carbon source." Last year, a Montana entomologist said of the bark beetle infestation: "A couple of degrees warmer could create multiple generations a year. If that happens, I expect it would be a disaster for all of our pine populations."

The summer maximum temps do not appear to have risen quite as rapidly as the winter minimums: But don't worry, the real summer heat is yet to come .

We are, after all, on track to warm up to 20 times more this century, than than we did in the last three decades.

Viking, you probably missed this earlier thread: Global Warming: The Fight's About Policy, NOT The Science.
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(which, BTW, not a single person ever addressed my points about CO2 levels and its effects and why that's the nuts-and-bolts of the problem...)

Your post here reiterates the common argument, that climatologists are pushing to control your lives with government interference. The questions of what policies to implement that will have the best effect at mitigating, without hurting the economy, are important questions, and ones that are not meant to be answered by the science. But they are critical for us to begin to have seriously and with intention. I would personally like to see people addressing this problem with their own behaviors/lifestyle changes, but honestly, that's not going to be enough - we need top-down regulation, like it or not. And the sooner conservatives get on board with this, and supply helpful input, not just useless rhetoric, the sooner we can address this problem without it costing more, socially or economically.

OmniScience wrote: Based on your myriad of threads regarding this topic, and what appears to be an obsession or yours, I have serious doubts that you would listen to anything anyone had to say. I find it hilarious that you make this completely wrong assumption about me, without paying any attention to how I've addressed people since day 1 of being part of community forums. I absolutely do read, consider, and analyze everything that anyone posts. If you're going to change my mind, you need to do it with credible data backed up by rational, logical thinking - and I encourage that debate! You seem to be completely convinced by computer models, poorly understood complex variables, discount what we definitely do not know (today's 'global cooling' thread links are a good example), and disregard the 10's of thousands of scientists who do not agree with the AGW science or it's agenda. I have never said that I am completely convinced, that I have all of the answers, am resistant to considering other viewpoints, am unwilling to change my mind if credible data and hypotheses begin to be put forth that explain the current warming being caused by a source other than greenhouse gases, or have ever touted the computer models as being the be-all, end-all of the strength of the accumulated data. On the contrary, it is the weight of paleoclimate data, and the physics behind greenhouse gases, that has convinced me more. As of yet, no one has adequately done that, not civilian or climate denier. And I'd love to see your source for it being tens of thousands of scientists who do not agree with AGW.

The fight is about the science and it is about policy. When it comes to policies like Cap and Trade, which are the ultimate goal of your AGW agenda, it is clear that science is being used, under the guise of 'saving the planet', to drive societies toward more government control and massive profits for companies like General Investment Management (owned by guess who?). Furthermore, Cap and Trade policies will do nothing to have any effect on the climate because there is no possible accurate means of monitoring the sources, and more importantly, under current proposals, the companies will continue to pollute anyway; it is basically a shell game. Again, you aren't even reading what I've posted, as I've said multiple times, and the Million Letter Campaign emphasizes, that Cap-and-Trade is NOT the way to go. (So who's the one guilty of not listening?) When you make statements like this

OmniScience wrote: More evidence of how little we know about the sun and it's influence on our planet.

that just tells me that you haven't bothered educating yourself about the current state of the science, and merely make regurgitated talking point comments.
The quotes that you cut and pasted show that as well - you're letting others do your thinking for you. How about spending time reading my crude summary of the problem of CO2 increasing in the atmosphere, it's physical effects, and critiquing that or the myriad of links that I've provided that explain the science and the weaknesses behind what's known - it's all there, nothing hidden.[/color]

If this truly were an obsession, it would be the only thing that I post about. Feel free to search my posts, here, at 285freetalk, and at Pinecam to check for yourself if I am that one-dimensional. Yes, I view it as the most urgent and serious problem facing us today, and as few others discuss it I feel the need to pick up the slack. And until I convince people to start writing to their representatives, and joining in the movement to address this issue, both personally and politically, I will not stop posting about it. I'm fighting for the quality of life that I, my kids, and their kids will be facing - if you want me to shut up about it, then convince me otherwise with sound scientific data! :thumbsup: