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Tribal Hunting Student Files |
Global Warming Hits Home
By Dr. Eban Goodstein
Floating down the Tualatin, it’s hard to imagine that activities as distant as emissions from a coal plant in France or deforestation in Brazil could, within our children’s lifetimes, fundamentally alter the nature of both our local river and its surrounding watershed. Yet if global warming from the emission of greenhouse gasses continues unabated, changes to the river’s ecosystem will be devastating.
According to a new regional climate model by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana could expect wetter winters, averaging three degrees warmer. In Washington and Oregon, the snowpack could be reduced by 50% to 60%, with the average snowline in the Cascades receding up slope from its current 3,000 feet to 4,100 feet.
Half the snowpack means much less late summer water for salmon, irrigators, and hydropower—all of this in a region likely to be supporting twice the current population. In addition, winter floods, like the one that overwhelmed downtown Tualatin two years ago, will worsen. Further up the watershed, glaciers will dwindle, loss of biodiversity and species extinction will accelerate, forests and alpine meadows will shrink in size, and fires and pest outbreaks will intensify. Where the river meets the ocean, it will find sea level rise battering coastal communities and destroying estuaries.
Oregonians have fought many battles, and won a few victories to preserve what is good and beautiful about our state. All of these accomplishments will be gravely threatened by a few degrees of climate change; they will simply be undone if we push the planet into a more severe warming.
What is to be done? Fortunately, there is concrete action that all of us can take: we must persuade Senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith to vote for the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.
To learn more about global warming and strategies for advancing the Kyoto Treaty, plan to attend the teach-in and rally at PSU on Sunday, April 11. To find out more, contact west@lclark.edu, or visit the Kyoto Now! web site, currently under construction, at: www.kyotonow.org.
Eban Goodstein is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College and a founding member of Kyoto Now!