Global Climate Change:  It’s He-eeere!

By Chip Young

Rhode Island focuses on GCC in two major events

The message that is being sent in Rhode Island about climate change is to the point:  If you don’t want to believe in it globally, believe in it locally.  Because it is already right here.

Two current local events have and will help point out the seriousness of the issue to Rhode Islanders.

On August 21, our own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse presided over an official briefing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on “Global Warming’s Impacts on Narragansett Bay” at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography.  The big statement from the presenters?  “Unequivocal.” That one word projected on a huge, single slide by GSO associate dean and international climate change expert, Kate Moran. As in the opinion of the vast majority of world’s scientific community is unequivocal that global climate change exists and that humans are the cause of global warming.

Sticking with the brevity idea, here’s a good deal of what came out of the presentations and back-and-forth prompted by questions from Sheldon Whitehouse, which should have the impact of two-by-four to the forehead.  Remember these little items when the yahoos begin blathering, “There’s your global warming for you!” if we start experiencing an extremely cold winter this year, oblivious to the fact that a major feature of global climate is amplified swings in weather conditions—like, say, a nice summer and then extra cold winter.

Just the facts, ma’am.  Narragansett Bay’s average temperature has increased two degrees in the last 30 years.  In ecological terms, that is a huge jump.  The Bay is now becoming like a Mid-Atlantic estuary, along the lines of Chesapeake Bay or those in North Carolina.  Warmer temperatures make the possibility of lower oxygen levels in the water more likely—think suffocating fish and large fish kills.  Fisheries populations are adapting and changing, possibly for better, possibly for worse, but both economically and ecologically.  Predatory jellyfish that consume fish larvae before they can grow up are in the Bay earlier and longer.  Whoops.

How about sea level rise? It is already creeping up on us, no pun intended. Take a look at the graphic at the top of this piece, a vision of Providence in 2100.  Everything now under that layer of blue is underwater.  Check out the mid-upper left, where the State House is.  Hey, we’ll be able to have “Waterfire” on the first floor of the Providence Place Mall!  How convenient.  Plus, State House workers will have their own little riverside beach to relax on during lunch break.  Sweet.

But let’s up the ante on what you are seeing.  Scientists are often portrayed as hysterical Chicken Littles, running around screaming horror and destruction to whoever will listen.  But the predictions that scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading body on GCC, made about this frightening factor in 2000 are now considered extremely conservative based on what we are actually seeing occur via satellite observations.  And that doesn’t even take into account the startling new impact of increasing loss of ice sheets in Greenland or glaciers in the Antarctic, which aren’t even included in the already threatening equation.  For naysayers on global warming, it is kind of like one of them flipping the bird to an average-looking guy in a traffic incident, and finding out he is an Ultimate Fighting champion.

Behind the scenes, sea level rise as the result of global warming is being taken very seriously by state and municipal planners and the business community.  Want to build a waterfront restaurant in Newport?  Better put it on Spring Street, which runs parallel to Thames Street up the hill from Newport Harbor, because that’s where the water will be heading by 2100.  (See the graphic below.)  Need upgrades to the wastewater treatment plant at Field’s Point in Providence?  You might not want to invest millions of dollars in a sewage facility that figures to be underwater.  That’s right, “Coming soon to your neighborhood…”  And if you have been waiting to retire and buy that little cottage on the salt pond in Misquamicut?  What salt pond?  Those barrier beaches that form them will be where the waves are breaking over the sandbars out there in a few decades.  Surf’s up, gang.

One of Senator Whitehouse’s telling points during his committee briefing was in response to what business and industry always refer to as the prohibitive cost of doing what is needed to reduce the human impacts that create global warming.  He observed, “It would be nice to put a price tag on what happens if we do nothing.”  Get out your calculators and raise the alarm, ladies and gents.  If you don’t, we’ll have to pay a very wet piper.

GET SMART!

If you want to learn lots and lots more about global warming and climate change, the information is coming to you this fall in a very interesting and understandable manner via the University’s Rhode Island’s 2008 Honors Colloquium, “People and Planet—Global Environmental Change.”  The series of free, weekly events featuring international experts and URI faculty members will run from September 9 to December 9.  Most events will take place on Tuesday evenings at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chafee Social Science Center on the Kingston campus.

“It won’t be an indictment of how we got to where we are,” says URI professor, occasional Gamm Theater director, and Little Rhody all around creative ace Judith Swift, one of the Colloquium’s coordinators.  “Instead, we will look to the future on these issues—what do we know, what do we need to know, what are we going to do to address it, and what are the consequences of those choices.”

This is going to be a treat, as not only will this will venture into science as we knew it when Mr. Wizard ruled the educational arena, there will be a touch of John Waters meets Al Gore thrown in.  Or haven’t you ever seen a cabaret act based upon coastal ecological functions?  Other entertaining ways to learn more about problems staring us right in the grill are URI faculty members who will use documentary film clips to unwrap the GCC arguments in a discussion entitled “The Great Global Warming Hoax?”, and examining excerpts from Hollywood movies to interpret climate change issues through the respective lenses of a scientist and a cinema buff.

People and Planet —Global Environmental Change, kicks off on September 9 with the renowned Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change.  For more info on all aspects of what should be a great ongoing event, go to URI Honors Colloquium, or contact the URI Honors Center at (401) 874-2381.

Be there or be square.