As the West Warms: Watching Our Home Burn
Abstract
Mountain environments have been shown to be particularly sensitive to changes in climate because they are places with sharp vertical gradients, which result in the stacking of natural ecotones with elevation. The impact of global climate change in mountainous regions may lead to rapid and irreversible changes in a number of areas; these range from major changes in the seasonal hydrographs of meltwater-driven streams affecting communities that depend on the melting of frozen precipitation for their water supplies, to increases in large and intense forest fires, arising from a combination of factors that include increasing temperature and insect outbreaks, to changes in growing seasons and species extinction. In the last 10 years, rising temperatures occurring during a period of diminished precipitation in the western United States has led to unprecedented drought conditions—the most widespread severe drought in the period of instrumental records. An examination of the available climate record suggests that the US, and in particular the West, may be entering, or perhaps is in the midst of a period of rapid warming. The combination of much warmer than normal temperature, likely driven by global warming, and a drier than normal period, regardless of its cause, may result in more frequent and widespread western droughts, with all its attendant consequences of enhanced wildfire risk, water supply problems, and a host of other environmental threats. Results from recent climate model simulations underscores the potential threat to the western United States resulting from greenhouse-gas-induced global warming. I will examine the latest set of climate records from both the North and South American Cordillera, highlighting some impacts already evident in many areas. Although some political action has been taken to address the issue of global warming impacts on western society, the actions to date have been largely in the nature of calls to mitigate some of the expected impacts.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2006
- Bibcode:
- 2006AGUFM.C31C..01D
- Keywords:
-
- 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions (1218;
- 1843;
- 3322);
- 1632 Land cover change;
- 1637 Regional climate change;
- 1862 Sediment transport (4558);
- 1863 Snow and ice (0736;
- 0738;
- 0776;
- 1827)