Thursday, June 26, 2008

California Air Resources Board: Scoping plan Coyote Gulch remembers the bumper stickers that said, "Don't Californicate Colorado." Now we find ourselves wishing for California's sensible policies on greenhouse gases. grist writes, "How do you return greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 while promoting jobs, competitiveness, and public health? Conservatives in the U.S. Senate think it can't be done. California knows it can. The Air Resources Board has just published their "Scoping Plan." How do they cut 169 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2020? Efficiency, efficiency, renewables, renewables, and even some conservation: Given that the single biggest source of California's GHG emissions is transportation, surging oil prices will make it that much easier for them to achieve this target and increase the savings for California consumers and businesses." "cc" 5:50:48 PM     Climate Change: The earth is a beautifully complex system Here's a recap of the recent conference hosted by the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains (Cirmount), from The Durango Telegraph. From the article: The conference, which was hosted by the Mountain Studies Institute June 9-12, attracted more than 120 scientists from across the West, as well as assorted others. The conference was sponsored by the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains, or Cirmount. The goal of the group, in part, is to create a better and expanded network of monitoring stations in high mountain locations. Colorado has only two mountain monitoring stations - one at Niwot, northwest of Boulder, and another in Senator Beck Basin, between Silverton and Telluride, which is maintained by Chris Landry's Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies. The argument for research stations is that the mountains are like canaries in coal mines. In this case, they serve as early predictors of change to come to lower elevations. Already, high-mountain temperatures have increased far faster than in the valleys. Dozens of presentations on topics related to this and other warming-related issues, were given in Silverton's tin-ceilinged town hall over the course of the three days. Some ideas, though simple in expression, were complex in implications. Such was the case with water. Between 60 to 80 percent of precipitation in the West arrives in the mountains in the form of snow. Even drizzly Seattle depends upon snow in the Cascades. Most impressive of all is the Colorado River Basin, which includes the Animas, Dolores, Uncompaghre and other rivers that cascade off the flanks of the San Juan Mountains. The Colorado River and its tributaries provide vital sustenance for everywhere, from the haciendas of San Diego to the cornfields of Nebraska, up to 34 million people by some estimates. Water managers have always assumed they were planning for a future that looked like the past. In the West, that's a limited rear-view mirror, with only 100, maybe 150, years of records. But new evidence of climate change is forcing a firm nudge to the idea that the future won't necessarily look like the past. What the future is almost sure to bring is more heat - much more than the rise of recent decades. "The American West will be the epicenter for warming," said Roger Pulwarty, of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder. Whether the future will bring more snow, or less, remains uncertain. Warmer clouds can carry 30 percent more precipitation, which might mean lots of snow. Unlike the computer models that show heat, forecasts regarding precipitation are more murky. The only clear message is that winter will, on average, be much shorter - as it already is in California's Sierra Nevada, where runoff is typically 20 days shorter. More isolated sampling also finds earlier runoff over the last 30 years in Colorado, but with a stronger signal in the San Juans. One of the problems with forecasting precipitation as the globe warms is the coarseness of computer models. While several dozen models show broad trends, such as heat, precipitation in the West depends so much upon the interaction with mountains. Earlier computer models showed the Rocky Mountains as only slight bumps, like the highest point in Kansas. But now, computer scientists are working to come up with finer-scale models, which instead of showing grids every 50 kilometers, show them every few kilometers. That still isn't the sort of resolution that will show the verticality of an Eolus, Vestal Peak or El Diente, but it will be a marked improvement. "cc" 7:23:31 AM

© Copyright 2009 John Orr. Last update: 3/15/09; 3:39:46 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.