Climate change problems are happening sooner than expected | Guest Opinion

In the early 2000s, the Department of Energy funded a group of scientists at several national laboratories and universities, including Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to conduct a study of how climate change might affect water resources and ecosystems in the western U.S. We focused on the first half of the 21st Century, and the results were published in the journal Climatic Change (Volume 62, Nos. 1-3, Jan./Feb. 2004). I was co-editor of that issue.

As I was driving north through the smoke from Bend to Pasco on September 11, I started thinking about this study. I pulled it off the shelf when I got home and looked at the conclusions. Regarding wildfires, we wrote, “increases in summer temperature and decreases in summer humidity … show a substantial increase in fire danger over much of the West.” But we concluded that the greatest danger would be in those parts of our region that were already affected by forest and range fires — the northern Rockies, Great Basin, and the Southwest.

We never dreamed, and the spatial resolution of the models 20 years ago could not show, that this danger would extend to the humid side of the Cascades and coastal mountains of California.

There were other important conclusions as well, including:

▪  Increasing inability of the Colorado River system to meet future demands for water.

▪  Increasing inability to meet the future water delivery requirements in central California.

▪  Increasing inability to meet conflicting demands for hydropower production and fish migration in the Columbia River system, and

▪  Decreases in average winter snowpack, earlier runoff, and higher water temperatures in smaller snowmelt-driven rivers leading to less reliable water supplies for summer irrigation and increasing problems in sustaining endangered fish populations.

At the time, we saw these problems largely playing out in the second quarter of this century. But we were mistaken. These problems are beginning to plague us now.

If we have learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that we ignore the insights of objective science at our peril. Hoping that unwelcome things will just go away or assuming that dealing with them can be put off to the future, only guarantees that they will become more difficult and more expensive to address when that future arrives.

If you looked out the window or stepped outside to take a breath the weekend of September 12 to 13, you would have noticed that the consequences of climate change are occurring now.

The costs are coming due now. We have passed the point where we must begin to take serious actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. If we do not, we will be left with fewer options for addressing the problem, and these options will become even more expensive and disruptive to our economy and our society. This is a problem that cannot be put off any longer. The future is now.

This story was originally published September 28, 2020 at 1:23 PM with the headline "Climate change problems are happening sooner than expected | Guest Opinion."