Report: USA faces huge changes as climate warms
Pastor Dale Morgan
Report: USA faces huge changes as climate warms*
By Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS — Chicago and Los Angeles will likely to face increasing
heat waves. Severe storm surges could hit New York and Boston. And
cities that rely on melting snow for water may run into serious shortages.
These are some of the findings about North America in a report by
hundreds of scientists that try to explain how global warming is
changing life on Earth. The scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change released a summary of their findings on global warming
last Friday and outlined details of the report focusing on various
regions on Tuesday.
According to the panel, global warming is already having an effect on
daily life but when the Earth gets a few degrees hotter, the current
inconvenience could give way to danger and even death.
And North America will not escape the impact of climate change, and the
impact will be felt from Florida and Texas to Alaska and Canada's
Northwest Territories, the panel said.
"Canada and the United States are, despite being strong economies with
the financial power to cope, facing many of the same impacts that are
projected for the rest of the world," Achim Steiner, executive director
of the U.N. Environment Program which co-founded the panel, said in a
statement.
He said the findings underline that the best way to reduce the effects
of global warming is "deep and decisive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions
to avoid dangerous climate change in the first place."
The panel warned that shifts in rainfall patterns, melting glaciers,
rising temperatures, increased demand and reduced supplies of water in
some places are likely to increase tensions between users — industry,
agriculture and a growing population.
"Heavily-utilized water systems of the western U.S. and Canada, such as
the Columbia River, that rely on capturing snowmelt runoff, will be
especially vulnerable," the report said.
A temperature warming of a few degrees by the 2040s is likely to sharply
reduce summer flows, at a time of rising demand, it said.
By then, the panel estimated that Portland, Oregon, will require over 26
million additional cubic meters of water as a result of climate change
and population growth, but the Columbia River's summer supply will have
dropped by an estimated 5 million cubic meters.
Meanwhile, it said, just over 40% of the water supply to southern
California is likely to be vulnerable by the 2020s due to losses of the
Sierra Nevada and Colorado River basin snowpacks.
The panel also said "lower levels in the Great Lakes are likely to
influence many sectors" and exacerbate controversies over diverting
water to cities such as Chicago, and the competing demands of water
quality, lake-based transport, and drought mitigation.
Cities could also be at risk from high tides and storm surges, it said.
Near the end of the 21st century, under a strong warming scenario, the
New York City area could be hit by increasingly damaging floods from
surges, "putting much of the region's infrastructure at risk," the panel
said.
Boston's transportation network may also be at risk from a sea level
rise and the increased probability of a powerful storm surge, it said.
As for the impact of rising temperatures, the panel said a 25% increase
in heat waves is projected for Chicago later this century, while the
number of heat-wave days in Los Angeles is projected to increase from
the current 12 per year to between 44 and nearly 100.
By the mid-21st century, regions in Alaska and Canada's Northwestern
Territories are likely to be at "moderate to high risk" due to coastal
erosion and thawing of permafrost including the report said.
North American producers of wood and timber could suffer losses of
between $1 billion and $2 billion a year during the 21st century if
climate change also sparks changes in diseases, insect attacks and
forest fires, the panel said.