All this wheezing, sneezing, heat exhaustion, and various disease vectors are expected to cost the state a lot of money. The numbers broken down by Climate Leadership Initiative and ECONorthwest look like this: Under a high-emissions scenario, health care costs attributed to global warming are expected to rise by $1.3 billion by 2040, and $2.6 billion by 2080. There go your savings.
Continued from pg. 13
instead of snow. That translates into more frequent and more extreme winter and springtime floods and an even less reliable snow savings account. If that weren’t bad enough, these moisture zones are climbing ever higher year by year. As a general rule of thumb, for every 2 degree rise, expect the zones to gain another 500 feet in elevation. And while climatologists are reluctant to make estimates past 2100, our water problems won’t stop at that calendar date. A group called Willamette Water 2100 is currently trying to figure out just how many people might be affected and what the potential economic impacts will be. Solutions discussed by the group include rationing water and discouraging consumption by upping its price tag. The group is also examining possible storage solutions. Despite this, Willamette Water 2100’s Roy Haggerty warns we should expect legal fights over water—especially between farmers and city dwellers. But fear not, Portlander, your water already comes mostly from rainwater. The city also uses an aquifer that’s replenished by rain and the Columbia River. Just don’t be shocked if your neighbors envy you. Things will be way crummier in the Willamette Valley and worse still east of the Cascades.
Health
I
f you’re an average Portlander—median age 36—chances are you’ll live to see many of these changes. So consider yourself at the halfway point between what is and what will be. By mid-century, if you’re doing well, you’ll be retired or thinking about retiring. You’ll also be the right age to suffer in our brave new world. As agriculture becomes more dependent on irrigation, expect more insectborne diseases like West Nile to lurk in the state’s ditches. Rising temperatures also mean increased chances of heat stroke, which you, as an old fogey, will be particularly susceptible to. By midcentury—and, end of century should you live so long—expect the air quality to be much worse. The rise in atmospheric CO2 will make the region’s plants more productive and that means more pollen blowing about. Molds will also be on the rise, and there will be smoke. By mid-century, the Pacific Northwest should expect 78 percent more of its forests burned in fires. By the end of the century, the scenario is bleaker with the total incinerated area jumping 500 percent from today’s levels. As the infernos spread, expect potential damage to watersheds, which will muck up your drinking water. And as mentioned, fires will worsen the state’s air quality. But if you think you can avoid the poor air by staying out of the allergen-packed valley and the smoldering hills, think again. The reason is ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in urban smog. This “bad” ozone (as opposed to the good ozone in the stratosphere) forms when sunlight cooks volatile organic compounds from human—mostly tailpipe— exhaust, and natural sources with nitrogen oxides. The resulting ozone gas is
7,100 FT
,
5
The Ocean
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4,600
known to trigger asthma attacks especially among children. But because ozone is heat sensitive, says Portland State University researcher Kelley Barsanti,
unless we do everything right and outlaw cars and even some ozone-enabling vegetation from Portland, a warmer future still equals more ozone.
CLIMATOLOGISTS CAN’T DECIDE if Oregon’s getting wetter or drier. If we’re moving into a wetter world, future precipitation will most likely fall in the winter, while our summers will be drier. And more crucial still, what precipitation we do get is more likely to descend as rain—not snow. That tiny factoid could lead to water scarcities even if we get wetter. It could also mean Oregonians will ght over our sparse water.
2100 :500% MORE
2050: 78%
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2012
y the end of the century, Oregon will weather more thunderstorms, hail, and even tornados than ever before. And the land will look different. By then, plants more common in Southern Oregon—including Ponderosa pines and deciduous trees—will have endured their slow trudge northward. The Douglas firs will still be there, but in the mountains overlooking the valley, the sub-alpine firs will have vanished with the snow. But the biggest changes by far will happen on the coast. In fact they’re happening already. In July 2002, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife received a deluge of reports from Oregon crabbers that their traps were coming up full of dead crabs. Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) later concluded the sea critters were suffocating to death because there wasn’t enough oxygen in their coastal waters. Called hypoxia, this choking sea-life phenomenon isn’t just an issue in Oregon, it’s global. While most hypoxia originates when fertilizer runoff feeds algae blooms (which in turn suck up water’s dissolved oxygen, thereby suffocating fish and producing “dead zones”), Oregon’s hypoxia, says OSU researcher Jack Barth, appears to be overwhelmingly climate-change driven, and, he says, we’re not the only ones dealing with this problem. Rising global temperatures are keeping the world’s oceans from collecting oxygen. Basically, our oceans are full of currents going this way and that, and rising temperatures are decelerating their natural circulation. Seawater that reaches Oregon today is taking longer to get here than ever before. On its slow journey it loses oxygen. The water’s also less oxygenated because it’s warmer, and warmer water holds less oxygen. As a consequence, hypoxic dead zones have started appearing off the world’s coasts, including our own. “The more we study this, the more we see consistent change across the globe,” says Barth, “the more it lends itself to a climate-change scenario.” What this means for Oregon’s fisheries is still unknown. Fish seem to flee the oxygendeprived waters when they can, while the less mobile invertebrates are considerably less lucky. Barth says he and others haven’t quite pinned hypoxia on humancaused climate change—yet. But a closely related phenomenon has our fingerprints all over it. Atmospheric CO2 is now wandering into our oceans, and in the process, Oregon’s coastal waters are becoming more acidic. The phenomenon was first noticed here several years ago when a Tillamook shellfish hatchery experienced a massive decline in its larval oyster populations. It Continued on pg. 17
September 27, 2012 Portland Mercury 15