Panel: Hour is late for climate
Source: Providence Journal
August 22, 2008
NARRAGANSETT - Not long ago, a national association of state health officials endorsed the scientific consensus on climate change and called for strong governmental responses. U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said he asked for the group's minority report on the topic and was told there was none.
Health officials in every state recognize the existence of climate change and the problems it raises. But why, Whitehouse asked, is there not the same consensus among the nation's leaders?
"Every day, I sit across an array of senators who range from casually indifferent to those who think this is all a big hoax," said Whitehouse. The skeptics, he added, are backed by an entire industry marketing doubt.
"I don't want people to look back years from now and say we did nothing," Whitehouse added. "What can we do?"
Yesterday, Whitehouse didn't hear many political answers, but he did gather a lot of scientific warnings about climate change as he chaired an official field briefing for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography on the Bay Campus.
He scheduled the hearing on the fifth anniversary of a massive fish kill in Greenwich Bay - one that triggered a wide-ranging new scheme to better manage state waters. In the last week, more dead fish have been found in the upper Bay, probably killed by low oxygen conditions.
Roughly nine years ago, when climate change was more of an academic issue than a public one, the late Sen. John H. Chafee scheduled a similar committee hearing. His was at Brown University and attendance was sparse. Chafee worried then that it might take years for the political system to respond in any meaningful way. But he was optimistic that it would respond.
Yesterday's hearing filled a large auditorium and then some. And it comes just months before an election that many believe will put into office a new Congress that finally will enact a federal program to reduce greenhouse gases.
Yesterday's speakers said action can't come soon enough. They included Kate Moran, director of the Marine Geomechanics Laboratory at the oceanography school; Jon C. Boothroyd, state geologist and geology professor at URI; Grover Fugate, executive director of the state Coastal Resources Management Council; John Torgan, baykeeper for Save the Bay; and Caroly Shumway, director of Conservation Science at The Nature Conservancy.
Moran said recent observations document melting of sea ice and glaciers at faster rates than any models predicted.
Summer ice cover on the Arctic Ocean was 23 percent less in 2007 than it was just the year before, Moran said. And when the ice goes, the ocean absorbs more heat.
"Clearly, all the observations point to the unequivocal fact that climate change is happening and humans are the cause," said Moran. Sea level is rising, she said; the uncertainty is by how much.
Fugate said his state coastal agency is amending regulations and plans to restrict coastal development in anticipation of 3 to 5 feet of sea level rise. If predictions of seas rising 20 feet by the end of the century are correct, all the South County barrier beaches and much of the metro area shorelines would simply be inundated as the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier is overtopped, he said.
Boothroyd said that when he takes his geology students to Misquamicut, he directs them to a point on utility poles 10 feet off the ground. That's how high the storm surge from the Hurricane of '38 was when it wiped out much of Misquamicut, East Matunuck and Oakland Beach, Boothroyd said.
Soon, a storm of similar strength could bring even bigger surges, Boothroyd said.
With modern warning systems, he said, we shouldn't see as many deaths as the Hurricane of '38 caused - nearly 700.
"But we'll see horrendous property damage, and it will happen in neighborhoods people thought were safe."
Shumway said her late grandfather, famed oceanographer Roger Revelle, first testified before Congress about climate change 29 years ago, and Al Gore described him as an inspiration for his efforts.
"But the urgency simply didn't come across then," Shumway said.
To get the word out on the urgency of the climate change problem now, Moran said, she speaks to groups of citizens whenever she can, and she urges other scientists to do so as well.