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Risser Prize Symposium: Climate Change Hits Home
Climate change heralds wildfires, rising waters: Stanford panel cites local impacts of global warming
Palo Alto Online, Dec 4, 2008
If greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate the San Francisco Bay will inundate 240 square miles of area lowlands, including East Palo Alto, San Francisco Airport and parts of Silicon Valley, by the end of the century. Intense floods that historically occurred once a century will come once a decade and Northern California will experience more and larger wildfires, as it already has. This scenario was painted by policy planners and scientists Wednesday at a Stanford panel titled "Climate Change Hits Home." The panel honored environmental journalist Anton Caputo, who won the 2008 Risser Prize for his series on local impacts of climate change for the San Antonio Express-News. "We're going to have to build levees – a lot of them," Will Travis, Executive Director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, said. "They're going to have to be big and strong enough to hold back rising seas and storms and do it in an earthquake." Travis displayed a map of the bay highlighting areas of projected inundation. "We hope our maps will bring home the message that global warming isn't just a problem if you're a polar bear in Alaska," he said. "Even if we're effective at reducing greenhouse gases, it's still going to get warmer for at least 50 years and the water will continue to rise. We need a new plan for the bay that anticipates climate changes and helps us get ready to adapt. "The cost will be huge, but the price of moving aggressively now is a fraction of what it will be if we do nothing." Biologist Terry Root, senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment, reviewed biological data on climate change, including the shifting of the rock-dwelling pika population from altitudes of 7,800 feet to 9,500 feet, and the increasingly early annual appearance of the sandhill crane in Northern Michigan. Root was a lead author of the wildlife section of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rising temperatures threaten habitats and could lead to the extinction of 20 to 30 percent of known species, Root said. "We truly are standing at the brink of a mass extinction event that's being caused by just one species," she said. Philippe Cohen, Administrative Director of Stanford's 1,200-acre Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, said many of the 60 to 70 research projects conducted each year on the preserve concern how ecosystems are responding to climate change, particularly how elevated carbon-dioxide levels affect grasslands. This past spring was the driest spring on record for Jasper Ridge, he said. Travis said that despite the dire scenario, he's optimistic that the Bay Area possesses the wealth and talent to lead the world in solving climate change, citing agreements under which California is providing green technology and equipment to China. "Admittedly what we do here is a tiny fraction of what needs to be done on planet earth, but we can provide ideas and leadership for around the world," he said. The climate change panel, open to the public, was sponsored by Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West and the Knight Fellowship Program. |
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