What impact is climate change having on the coastal areas of Olympic National Park? The following 14-minute video takes a look at that question.
Climate change will have many of its first impacts to our coasts and intertidal communities. This film highlights Dr. Steven Fradkin, coastal ecologist at Olympic National Park and his work monitoring intertidal life.
Comments
And his conclusion is.....???? The area looks pretty much like it did 200 years ago.
How old are you, EC?;-)
Old enough to think for myself. Old enough to look, listen, analyze and reach a conclusion based on the facts and not emotion. But what is the point of the question? Its not your normal style.
Well, the point of the question is how do you know what coastal conditions were two centuries ago? Were acid levels in the Pacific the same then as they are now? If not, how is ocean acidification affecting shellfish? Have there been changes over the past 200 years to winter and spring precipitation (both form and amount), and if so, how has it affected salmon runs?
http://www.fs.fed.us/ccrc/topics/salmon-trout.shtml
And...
http://www.npafc.org/new/publications/Special%20Publications/LRMP_Synthe...
I don't. But the conclusion wasn't mine, it was the conclusion of Dr. Steven Fradkin.
I am glad we have climate change, one perpetual season would be boring. Some new taxes will fix everything.
EC, that wasn't his conclusion. I think you're taking things a bit out of context. That comment was in describing the outward appearance of the Olympic NP coast.
He also said the salmon fisheries have been depleted from what they once were, and that "With climate change, when you have these periods where the temperature rises, it is going to change the fundamental nature of this ecosystem." To monitor that change, they have set up grids along the intertidal zones.
"The thing about climate change," he noted, "is that there's no one particular item which is a smoking gun, so you can't look any one particular instance, one particular heat wave event, one particular storm, and say aha, this is proof of climate change. Proof of climate change is taken over a longer period of time."
And that's where the monitoring that's being done in Olympic comes into play.
No emotion there. And the additional citations I pulled out provide some facts that further buttress his point. His research could add to that. Now, if you have another set of facts....
But I don't believe he attributed that to climate change. That is more a factor of over fishing and dammed rivers.
Maybe, but what is so surprising about that? Climate has changed since day one. I kept waiting for him to provide the evidence that the ecosystem was being affected and that man was the cause. It never came.
Nevertheless, I appreciate his work and enjoyed the videography.