When you think about threats to national parks, you can point to air pollution, water pollution, development on a park's boundaries, and genetic bottlenecks affecting a park's wildlife. But few people seem to think about climate change.
Indeed, climate change is neither sexy nor glamorous, and judging from how many folks read Traveler posts about climate change and the parks, not too many folks care to hear about it. Well, the National Parks Conservation Association wants you to start thinking about it.
During a House subcommittee meeting held in California today, NPCA representatives testified that their organization views climate change as the "greatest threat" to the national parks. Indeed, researchers predict Glacier National Park will lose all of its glaciers within 20 years, and some models suggest Joshua Tree National Park will have no living Joshua trees left within a century.
During this morning's field hearing, held just outside Joshua Tree, NPCA's California Desert Office program manager, Mike Cipra, told the representatives that national parks are already showing the effects of climate change. Some are seeing less snow and rainfall, others are dealing with increased pests and disease, some are being confronted by abnormal flooding and fires, and there's a shift in the habitat ranges of plants and animals, he said.
The bottom line, said Mr. Cipra, is that Congress needs to provide funding to help wildlife and ecosystems adapt to climate change while also taking steps to slow global warming by limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
He said NPCA supports providing the National Park Service with a dedicated funding stream for this need, such as could be provided from a percentage of profits raised by the sale of carbon pollution allowances under a cap-and-trade policy. Such funding would allow land managers to plan long-term and ecosystem-wide instead of making piecemeal changes with limited effect, he said. The cost would be far outweighed by the economic benefits of having working ecosystems and protecting keystone species, added Mr. Cipra.
"As Americans, we have faced tremendous environmental challenges before," the NPCA representative testified. "We met these challenges with courage, with urgency, and with a coordinated response. ...Our health and economic future depends on how we meet this challenge."
To listen to a podcast about the dangers climate change is posing to Joshua Tree, click here.
Comments
The glaciers at Glacier National Park are not going to vanish in twenty years, the leading researcher reinterpreted his own data and now says they will be gone by 2020: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090302-glaciers-melting.... - That is eleven years from now. The same time span as looking back to 1998. No more glaciers in a mountain area means no or at least much less run off in the creeks and streams. And the little water will have a much higher temperature. This is a drastic change for all aquatic ecosystems and and an important one for all the other life forms.
Oh my! The humanity! The glaciers are melting, the glaciers are melting!
Uh...nuthin we can do. The only thing we can do is plug all the vents and fumaroles in Yellowstone, as well as Redoubt, Kilauea, ...well you get the picture.
Get a life, environmentalists!
These comments show why there is so little interest in Climate Change. Too many people believe it's a myth. Media are at fault in this case.. So much data comes from NASA and NOAA that demonstrates climate change. So much has pointed directly to human related causes. And yet this information is not commonly disseminated by the major news media.
It just isn't all that attractive so to do.
Thus, we have comments coming from lack of information.
Global Warming is real. It is human-caused. It can be mitigated, although some of the results may be irreversible, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
We need an informed public; then we ought to be able to bring about a solution.
Let's put aside the question of whether humans are driving climate change/global warming and approach this issue from another direction.
Here are some givens:
* The Rocky Mountain West is under siege of a mountain pine beetle attack of historic proportions.
* Waters in Yellowstone National Park in recent summers have become so warm that the park suspended fishing in some streams to reduce stress on the fisheries.
* Episodes of coral bleaching, driven in part by warmer waters and aided by disease, are inflicting damage on reefs around the world.
* Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at record levels, and ice sheets in the Antarctic are collapsing at amazing rates.
* Oyster beds in the Chesapeake Bay are a fraction of the size that existed when Capt. John Smith piloted his ship up the bay in 1608, in part due to harvesting, pollution, and diseases enabled by warmer waters.
* Heavy metals and pesticides are polluting the high country of national parks in the West.
* As MRC noted, as glaciers melt away and snowpacks evaporate earlier and earlier, there will be downstream ramifications not only for wildlife, fisheries, and vegetation but also for human communities that depend on runoff. We're not talking merely aesthetic changes.
I use these examples to point out that there is change under way out there across the globe. In the case of those instances that some would say are simply natural cycles, the additional stresses applied by those things that are human-caused (ie, heavy metal and pesticide distributions, higher ozone levels caused by power plant emissions, introduction of non-native species via sea-going ship ballast discharges) exacerbate things.
With that accepted, is it wrong for agencies and individuals alike to strive to lessen their impacts on the environment in whatever manner possible? Or should we simply accept that change is inescapable and let's party like it's 1999?
Kurt, I don't know what more you can do to convince people that global warming is for real. There are some individuals would rather bury their heads in the sand like an ostrich and pretend there's absolutely no global warming crises at all, but just simply a little change in mother natures atmospheric chemistry...and nothing more. It's that same old lackadaisical attitude that gets us into trouble with profound ignorance and old style provincial thinking that coincides with the flat earth society...and that global warming is nothing more then benign subtle change in wind direction. Caveman thinking is still here!
I fear you are right, Anonymous. In some ways it seems to be an immature effort to deny responsibility for what is likely to be a worldwide crisis. We are all culpable. The ostrich-style denial is likely to prevent effective mitigation until it is literally too late. Indeed, we may have already passed the point of no return with rapidly increasing melting of northern permafrost and release of enormous quantities of methane gas.
I want to thank Bob Krumenaker for commenting and speaking out on National Parks Traveler. It's rare for career employees of the NPS to go public, even on issues as important as global warming.
It's astounding to me, given the preponderance of scientific evidence, to see how many are in denial over the fact that our Earth is experiencing an increase in average temperatures at an unprecedented rate. Global warming will do much more than melt glaciers (the evidence of which is more than convincing) and cause sea levals to rise. Rapid shifts in climate will ultimately affect the distribution and abundance of native flora and fauna inside parks and beyond their boundaries. The cause of this warming is not variations in the solar output, as some insist, but the presence of increased levels of greenhouse gases from anthropogenic sources.
The NPS has an important role to play in educating the public about potential threats to park resources. I'm glad Bob has chosen to speak out and weigh in on this topic. Thanks too for the links to authoritative sources of information for more detailed reading.
Owen Hoffman
Oak Ridge, TN 37830
What do you naysayers think happens to the planet when we put so much carbon into the atmosphere? Do you think there is no global climate repsonse?