A major new report from a Cambridge, Mass.-based consortium of top scientists calling itself the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA), itself a two-year collaboration between the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and a team of more than 50 scientists and economists, has pinpointed probable effects from current climate change trends in our area, including the loss of the Catskills and Berkshire region ski industries, increased summer droughts and winter flooding, greater turbidity in New York City’s drinking water (likely requiring long-avoided filtration), and the inundation of waterfront infrastructure throughout the Hudson Valley – including most of the region’s current railroad lines.
“Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast,” officially released on July 11, is plainspoken in its doomsday message, with its only lightness coming in a choice between a “Higher-Emissions Scenario,” as seems currently likely, and a “Lower-Emissions Scenario” alternative should mitigation efforts begin in the immediate future on a wide-scale basis. Those choices, the report points out, focus on ways we utilize energy, transportation and overall land-use as tools to temper the extent and severity of climate changes the scientific community is currently seeing as inevitable.
“Global warming represents an enormous challenge, but we can meet it if we act swiftly,” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at UCS and chair of the NECIA team, in a press release accompanying the new report’s release earlier this month. “Our response to global warming in the next few years will shape the climate our children and grandchildren inherit.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists began as a collaboration between students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and is now an alliance of more than 200,000 citizens and scientists generally respected, in its own words, as “the reliable source for independent scientific analysis … in both Washington D.C. and state capitals.”
Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment is overseen by scientists working at Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and the University of Illinois.
The group’s new report looks at general effects throughout the Northeast along with state-by-state analyses of current trends and mitigation scenarios. A series of dramatic graphics accompanying the report shows maps of the region shifting down the Eastern seaboard as climate changes, with our area taking on the weather patterns of Maryland, then Virginia, and eventually central Georgia should things not change.
How hot is hot?
“Winters in the Northeast could warm by 8°F to 12°F and summers by 6°F to 14°F above historic levels by late this century,” the report notes. “But under the lower-emission scenario, temperatures during Northeast winters are projected to warm only 5°F to 8°F above historic levels by late-century, and summers by just 3°F to 7°F.” Similarly, with global sea level conservatively projected to rise 10 to 23 inches under the higher-emissions scenario and 7 to 14 inches under the lower-emissions scenario, new flooding patterns are expected all the way up the Hudson to Albany, not to forget major impacts in the New York City area.
Other key impacts outlined include major cuts in what remains of the region’s dairy industry, based on losses in cow’s milk production due to increased heat; major losses to fruit harvests and maple syrup production, as well as major weed and pest problems; retreating shorelines on Long Island and Cape Cod, and a possible loss of the Island of Nantucket; and a collapse of the greater region’s fishing industry.
Droughts of one to three months apiece are pegged to become more normal each summer in the Catskills, with corresponding flooding from increased rain on top of snowfall each winter.
Belleayre Water Slide World!
Key to economic considerations for our own region are projected impacts on the winter sports industry that currently supports tourism in the Catskills, as well as those traveling up and down the Thruway.
“Under the higher-emissions scenario, only western Maine is projected to retain a reliable ski season by the end of the century, and only northern New Hampshire would support a snowmobiling season longer than two months,” reads the report. “Under the lower-emissions scenario, reliable ski seasons can be expected through this century in the North Country of New York and parts of Vermont and New Hampshire, in addition to western Maine.”
As evidence of the climate changes it is predicting, and hoping governmental and business entities start taking note of in their future planning processes, the report states that temperatures have been warming half a degree Fahrenheit per decade since 1970, with winter temperatures going up 1.3 degrees F over that same period. In addition, they point out significant hikes in the number of days with temperatures over 90 degrees F in recent years, longer growing seasons, “less winter precipitation falling as snow and more as rain,” earlier breakup of winter ice on lakes and rivers, earlier spring snowmelt, and rising sea surface temperatures and sea levels.
The scenarios the report outlines “represent strikingly different emissions choices that societies may make,” while simultaneously noting that refusals to change patterns on a global basis could result in scenarios even worse than those outlined.
A simultaneous report issued early last week noted the failure of our nation’s southern states, for example, to start looking at alternative fuels for their energy consumption, as well as continuing delay on the part of the Bush administration to work with other countries on the acknowledged problems.
“This report accentuates information that’s been coming into public consciousness more and more and demonstrates that there are going to be serious economic repercussions, as well as ecological and lifestyle impacts, from what is occurring,” said Ned Sullivan, executive director of Scenic Hudson, with regard to the new report this week. “It’s critical that government and organizations and individuals identify strategies to both head it off and begin to adapt to these impacts.”
Sullivan pointed to two recent developments – that much of the current information was brought up at a Hudson Valley Climate Change conference hosted by the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and other organizations in Poughkeepsie last December, and that new Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s recently announced creation of an expanded 12-person DEC Division on Climate Change headed by former American Lung Association executive Peter Iwanowicz – as signs of changing perceptions.
Yet he added that much more needs to be done, at all levels.
“We are looking at each of our program areas to see how we can better work to effect major changes,” said Sullivan, pointing out how all waterfront development now needs closer scrutiny in terms of climate change. What is currently shoreline, or estuary wetlands serving a buffer function, needs to be re-imagined at a higher altitude, he said. Similarly, infrastructure such as wastewater treatment plants, docks and fuel storage tanks will eventually need to be moved – along with our rail lines, most probably.
“The trains have a very challenging time ahead of them,” he said, raising an issue not even touched upon much in the new climate change reports.
Calls to local ski resort owners and managers throughout the region last winter, when warm temperatures pushed the industry’s number of active skiing days below the 100-day mark most see as the cutoff for profitability, saw most saying it was a problem they’d deal with … eventually.
Ninety-year-old Hunter Mountain owner Orville Slutsky spoke about the problems lying as much with perception as with snowmaking ability. If people don’t think they’re in a winter area, and start thinking like folks in the South, they’ll stop thinking of heading out for the region’s day-use-oriented ski areas, he said. Worse, if people aren’t headed up the Thruway to Vermont, and only flying to their ski destinations, the entire winter tourism bubble is likely to burst, he said last winter.
State-owned Belleayre Mountain manager Tony Lanza, meanwhile, said he didn’t want to even discuss climate change, seeing it as “a political issue” that he wished would just go away.
A ray of hope
Yet all is not quite so dire, even though the impacts discussed in the new report have not yet been seriously dealt with by local governments outside the Town of Woodstock, which recently passed a referendum promising to make itself “carbon neutral” within the coming decade.
“Although the task of reducing emissions may seem daunting, the nation achieved a similarly rapid energy transformation only a century ago as it shifted from gaslights and buggies to electricity and cars over a few short decades,” the new report concludes. Decision-makers can help the region adapt through policies and management actions that reduce our exposure to climate risks such as catastrophic flooding and also increase the ability of vulnerable sectors and communities to cope with ongoing changes and recover from extreme events or disasters. For each adaptation measure considered, policy makers and managers must carefully assess the potential barriers, costs, and unintended social and environmental consequences.”
A big order, in other words. But doable.
“The very character of the Northeast is at stake,” it wraps up. “The time to act is now.”
For more on what’s predicted, as well as what’s being proscribed, the new report and a complete list of collaborating scientists and economists are available at www.climatechoices.org/ne/resources_ne/nereport.html.