State Gov. Report - OR Heading For Hotter Summers, More Fires, Less Water In Next 50 Years

[hatrack]

Global warming will likely change Oregon substantially, two new reports released Tuesday conclude, lengthening growing seasons on the upside but lowering summer water supplies, heating up salmon streams, increasing wildfires and heat waves, and squeezing crops optimized to fit a narrow temperature niche -- including the Willamette Valley's prized pinot noir wine grapes.

At just over 400 pages, the first legislatively mandated report from the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute attempts to spell out the likely regional effects of projected warmer temperatures and sea level increases, exacerbated by expected population growth. It drew on contributions from 70 university and government researchers throughout the Northwest. A separate 110-page report from state agency directors on how to adapt to climate change was also released Tuesday. Given the state's budget crunch, it proposes "only actions that involve little or no cost" for the short term.

Skeptics, including some of Oregon's Republican legislators, question climate models. And climate scientists acknowledge regional warming projections like Tuesday's are significantly less certain than continental estimates. This fall, a scientific summary issued by The Royal Society of Britain cited "little confidence in specific projections of future regional climate change."

Phil Mote, director of the climate change research institute at Oregon State University, agreed regional details can be fuzzy. But the general direction for Oregon and the Northwest is clear, he said, with no plausible scenario in which the region cools over the next 40 years. "Right now we're operating in this sort of murky time where we have a pretty good idea of the direction that things are changing, but not the rate or the magnitude," Mote said. "So we can give vague advice to say, consider building bigger culverts (to handle potential surges in stream flows), but we can't in most cases give precise values."

EDIT

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/11/oregon_faces_big_challenges_fr.html