The Pacific NW will be impacted by Climate Change too.
Global climate change report: Impacts on Oregon, Pacific Northwest
by Stuart Tomlinson, Oregonian.com -- May 06, 2014
Reduced snowpacks, less water for irrigation, drought-related wildfires, rising sea levels and insect-infested timber.
Those are just a few of the impacts of climate disruption that could affect Oregonians, two environmental groups warned Tuesday.
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According to the regional report, temperatures are projected to increase 3.3 degrees by 2070 and 9.7 degrees by 2099, "depending largely on total global emissions of heat-trapping gases."
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Diminished snowpacks mean less water not only for agriculture, but power generation, municipal water supplies and recreation.
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In many ways it's already --
impacting. Just ask any NW snowpack hydrologist. Those mountain snows have been
below normal for a while now. Some years drastically so. This leads to longer and more severe fire seasons, as well.
Who needs trees, and flowing rivers anyways? Or glaciers, or hydro-electric power? Or bountiful harvests?
Certainly not the good folks of the Pacific NW.
The New York Times puts It this way: Climate Change IS already happening.
U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods
by Justin Gillis, nytimes.com -- May 6 2014
The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.
Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.
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Who minds longer and more intense Heat Waves anyway?
Certainly not the residents of one of the nation's largest "heat islands."
Now would they?
And Senator Harry Reid
puts it this way:
Reid: Kochs ‘main causes’ of climate change [with Video]
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“While the Koch brothers admit to not being experts on the matter, these billionaire oil tycoons are certainly experts at contributing to climate change. That’s what they do very well. They are one of the main causes of this. Not a cause, one of the main causes,” Reid said.
Now in his fifth month of flogging the billionaire conservative benefactors on the Senate floor, Reid dubbed them “multizillionaires” on Wednesday and mockingly applauded their spokeswoman for saying the Kochs and the energy conglomerate that they run aren’t experts on climate science. Wealthy liberal investor Tom Steyer challenged the Kochs to a debate on climate change last week in a full-page newspaper advertisement, but they declined to take him up on it.
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But who needs the 'multizillionaires' Koch Brothers, mucking up the political works, anyways?
Certainly not the good people of America, who want to leave to their children more than a raging dust bowl, charred remnants of lush forests, and withered crops -- not worth the effort to harvest them.
But that would be their problem, right? Not the Koch's, and their humble "lack of expertize" on all things climate-related.
They're just zillionaires, expressing buying bigger opinions, than us 'ordinary folks' could ever dream of, in our work-a-day lifetimes.