Blake Borgeson, in blog form

In case you didn’t catch this, there was an article today in the New York Times outlining the major points in a Bush Administration climate change report, commissioned in 2003 and released today, signed by 3 cabinet members. On the map you can see the projected increase and decrease in annual rainfall for different areas of the country, and the journalist also pulled out the following interesting conclusion:

The West will not only face a dearth of water, but also large shifts in when it is available. Water supplies there will be transformed by midcentury, with mountain snows that provided a steady flow of runoff for irrigation and reservoirs dwindling. That flow will be replaced by rainfall that comes at times and in amounts that make it hard to manage, the report and authors said.

Also, to put this into context, “the report’s emphasis [is] on the next 25 to 50 years, when shifts in emissions are unlikely to make much of a difference in climate trends.” So there’s not much we can do about it, in the authors’ view.

So it’s understandable but important that not only will the amount of precipitation be changing a lot, but the type and timing of that precipitation is likely to change dramatically, so much so that I’d guess skiing in the rockies will be dramatically affected. And keep in mind that this conclusion comes from a review of recent climate change studies, summarized and signed off on by the Bush Administration. We’ve come a long way in a few years.

This is of course not to say that a good chance of not being able to ski in the continental US within a few decades is up there with the biggest ramifications of climate change. It just drives the point home that life is going to be measurably different a few decades from now in many ways we may not yet realize–we won’t just be able to crank up the a/c a bit in the summer and enjoy the milder winter and be done with it. And it seems it’s already too late to stop some of those significant changes.

[Source: New Climate Report Foresees Big Changes in Water Supplies and Agriculture – NYTimes.com]