On Dec 12, 12:39 pm, "BillP" wrote:
"HK" wrote in message

...

At least 75% of those in warming denial seem to be folks who would be
****ed off if Al Gore were proven right on anything.

Algore didn't invent global warming- Margaret Thatcher did.

Snowpack in peril
By Betsy Mason
STAFF WRITER

Article Launched: 12/12/2007 03:00:48 AM PST


Click photo to enlargeA lone skier travels past one of three snow
making machines spraying a new layer onto ski runs at...12Dwindling
snowpack, earlier stream flow and rising temperatures in the western
United States can be attributed directly to human activity and will
seriously affect California's water supply, perhaps in a matter of
decades, according to new research.
For the first time, scientists have linked several specific trends in
a regional water cycle to global climate change caused by greenhouse
gas emissions. Since 1950, the Sierra snowpack has decreased by about
20 percent, the temperature in the Rocky Mountains has gone up 3
degrees, and spring water flow in the Columbia River has decreased
significantly.

"These signals are the same no matter where you go in the West,"
marine physicist Tim Barnett of Scripps Institution of Oceanography
said Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union
in San Francisco. "We've got a real serious problem."

By scaling down global climate models to bring greater detail of the
region, a team of scientists led by Barnett and atmospheric scientist
Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory projected these trends
into the future and found a grim picture for the west. By about 2040,
the Colorado Rockies will be nearly barren of snow as early as April 1
each year. And a similar story will play out in the Sierra. As
temperature rises, the snowpack will disappear earlier, leading to a
shift in peak stream flows to earlier in the year.

This could be a significant problem for California, where the water
supply already is


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performing a precarious balancing act. The state's reservoirs are
filled during the rainy winter season, and as they are drawn down in
the spring, melting snow from the Sierra Nevada replenishes them.
"Mother Nature is acting like a tremendous reservoir for us," Barnett
said.

His research shows that that reservoir will shrink in the future and,
more problematically, will melt too early in the season.

This will not only leave California without much of its critical
spring refill, it also will put reservoirs at a greater risk of
flooding as mel****er arrives before the reservoir levels have gone
down enough to accommodate it.

"It's the timing that's the problem," he said.

The team tested the accuracy of their climate models against past
trends, and it was able to closely match actual changes in snowpack,
stream flow and temperature.

Team members then used the models to find the cause of the changes and
found a distinct human fingerprint. Without adding past human
greenhouse gas emissions into the equation, they could not get the
models to reflect reality.

"No matter what we did, we couldn't really shake this robust
conclusion that a human influence on these three variables was
identifiable," Santer said. "No matter how we cut the cake, no matter
how hard we tried to look at the uncertainties and quantify them, we
could not get a 'no' result, no detection of a fingerprint."

Santer worries that much of California's water supply infrastructure
was built when climate was relatively stable.

"It's not stable any more," he said.

Barnett is frustrated by the lack of preparation for the changes that
are coming and by the federal government's inaction.

"Global warming is already impacting us. We're getting hit now. The
question is how big will the hit be in the future," he said.

Adaptation will be important because the greenhouse gases already in
the atmosphere will continue to heat up the globe for several decades.
Meanwhile, global emissions continue to rise.

"For someone who's got seven grandkids, that scares the hell out of
me," Barnett said. "I've had a look at the future, and I don't like
it."