Feb 12, 2009, WA Climate Change Impacts Conference

I attended the Washington Climate Change Impacts Assessment Conference yesterday in Seattle. (Any other TAY'ers there?) The conference was well attended (over 500 people) and I thought it was very interesting and well organized.

The executive summary is available on line and it's worth a look:

cses.washington.edu/cig/files/waccia/wacciaexecsummary.pdf

Of greatest interest to skiers is Section 3: Hydrology and Water Resources. (It starts on p. 8 of the summary.) The projections of April 1 snowpack in the Cascades are worth looking at, especially with respect to lower elevation slopes and passes such as Snoqualmie.

I attended the breakout session on hydrology and the presentation by Marketa McGuire Elsner ("Implications of 21st Century Climate Change for the Hydrology of Washington State") contained more details and is also worth looking at. According to the organizers, all conference materials (presentation slides and audio recordings) will eventually be available here:

cses.washington.edu/cig/outreach/waccia/

Those materials don't seem to have been posted yet.

Here's the website for the UW's Climate Impacts Group, which was primarily responsible for the study:

cses.washington.edu/cig/

Read the articles in the Seattle papers yesterday-from what I understand the predictions are for less snowfall and more rain. Which, as a self interested snowboarder is bad enough. As a global citizen, the implications are a lot worse IMHO.

One interesting blurb concerned climate refugee's-

It's a term we should get used to, researchers warned on Thursday, predicting a flood of new residents driven north by heat waves, fires and other calamitous effects of global warming.

With one speaker raising the specter of a new migration on the scale of the Great Depression, state and county officials admitted they have barely started getting ready."

I'm either gonna show my age or my wet behind the ears nature, depending on your age, but based on riding midweek at Baker in 94 vs 08 I thought we were already getting climate refugee's in droves!

Looks like we're finally getting back to normal!

Question- If the Earth had an ideal thermostatic setting, what should it be?  I really don't know and am curious given it's fluctuation over the recent past (appx 3 million years) vs the vast majority of time the earth has existed. 

PS-  not to be confused with air, water, and land pollution by us (you, me, our family and friends, etc.) and our fellow world citizens ... these still need serious attention to be sure. :-[

.... For much of Earth's history, the world has been ice-free (even at the poles) but these iceless periods have been interrupted by several major glaciation periods (called glacial epochs) and we are in one now.   Each glacial epoch consists of multiple advances and retreats of ice fields.  These ice fields tend to wax and wane in approximate  100,000, 41,000, and 21,000 year cycles.  Each advance of ice is popularly known in the press as an "ice age" but it is important to note that these multiple events are just variations of the same glacial epoch.  The retreat of ice during a glacial epoch is called an inter-glacial period and this is our PRESENT DAY CLIMATE system..
The current Plio-Pleistocene Glacial Epoch had it's beginning about 3.2 million years ago and is probably linked to the tectonic construction of the Isthmus of Panama which prevented the circulation of Atlantic and Pacific waters and ultimately triggered a slow sequence of events that eventually led to cooling of the atmosphere and the formation of new ice fields by about 2.5 million years ago.
So far we have had around 15 to 20 individual major advances and subsequent retreats of the ice field in our current glacial epoch.  The last major advance of glacial ice peaked about 18,000 years ago and since that time the ice has generally been retreating (albeit with some short term interruptions).

It is worth remembering that our warm present day inter-glacial climate is the exception, not the rule during a glacial epoch.  For as much as 90% of the last 2 million years the ice fields on earth have been more extensive than they are today.
On the other hand, our the current glacial epoch and ice on earth and for the most part is also an abnormality.  Our present-day Arctic Ocean is about 10-15°C cooler than it was at the time of the dinosaurs for almost all of the time from about 2 to at least 200 million years ago (Ma) the surface temperature exceeded that of today...

Thx!

I'm currently in the beginning stages of my masters thesis looking at climate change and snowpack impacts around Mt Rainier......mostly Paradise and implications to the Nisqually flow regime. I find the Climate Impacts Group to be doing extremely important, scientific, yet approachable work and must give them the proper thanks. CIG is a great resource for a good read on climate and snowpack even if you are not studying it! I encourage everyone who is passionate about our snowpack to check it out at the links that Lowell has posted.

One interesting blurb concerned climate refugee's-

It's a term we should get used to, researchers warned on Thursday, predicting a flood of new residents driven north by heat waves, fires and other calamitous effects of global warming.

It's interesting that the press played up the notion of climate refugees. I don't know where that came from. There was no mention of that at the conference or in any of the literature that I briefly skimmed. My understanding is that the WA Climate Change Impact Assessment was heavily based on computer modeling for THIS region, driven by a couple of IPCC warming scenarios (not worse-case), followed by analysis by experts in various fields. The assessment was focused on climatic conditions in WA/OR/ID. Speculating about the behavior of people outside this region seems "out of character" for this assessment. Odd.

In any case, I'll echo alpymarr's sentiments. We're fortunate to have CIG doing this work. I think Washington is ahead of almost anywhere else in the world in the integrated, regional analysis of climate change impacts. The goal is to help policymakers plan for mitigation and adaptation.