Word: snowpacks
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...there's another culprit behind the growing frequency of wildfires in California and elsewhere. As average temperatures climb, the mountain snowpack that waters much of the West thins and melts earlier, producing a longer and drier fire season. The spread of the tree-killing mountain pine beetle, aided by warmer winters, has turned millions of acres of Western forest into kindling. And as the flames burn, they'll reinforce climate change. A report published in the journal Science this spring found that not only are fires worsening as a result of climate change, but the CO[subscript 2] they release...
Diedrich's farm is located on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, traditionally a cornucopia of tomatoes, almonds, cantaloupe, pistachios and lettuces. The area around Firebaugh has been hit hard by a severe drought caused by two years of below-average rainfall, a diminished Sierra Nevada snowpack and new court-ordered environmental restrictions on pumping. Despite having officially recognized the drought on June 4, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has yet to declare a state of emergency that would lift some of the environmental restrictions on providing relief to the farmers - although he is pushing the state legislature to approve...
...areas like the Southwest to do anything but grow dryer still. The past several years have been among the dryest on record in the West, leaving the Colorado River - which supplies water to 30 million people - at its lowest level in 85 years of measurements. If the mountain snowpack that stores much of the water used by the West were to melt because of higher temperatures, all the reservoirs in the world might not be enough to keep the region wet. Even if the effects of climate change turn out to be milder than feared, the same population growth that...
...fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels...
Seattle mayor Greg Nickels has news for President George W. Bush: global warming is also "local" warming. So for Nickels and his constituents, climate change is about the Cascade Mountains, where the city gets its water and hydropower and where the snowpack has shrunk by half over the past 50 years. It's about the effect of Puget Sound's warmer waters on wild-salmon runs. It's about hotter summers cooking up more smog. It's about a rise in sea level that could flood Seattle's port. "The stakes are high--globally and locally," he says. "We need...