Snowfall in Oregon is likely to decline 50% by 2100 under global warming according to a new state report. (U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service)
Oregonians born today are likely to experience a future of more drought, more rain and less snow under warming average global temperatures due to human-caused climate change.
That’s one conclusion in the 314-page Seventh Oregon Climate Assessment, which was published Wednesday and authored by more than 65 scientists, experts and engineers, including from Oregon State University, the Oregon Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Two engineers from Portland General Electric and Principle Power, a floating offshore wind company, also contributed.
The report, which stems from a 2007 legislative mandate, is used in statewide emergency and natural hazard planning, according to Erica Fleishman, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.
Fleishman told the Capital Chronicle that the latest report shows that data on climate change, and the climate modeling that can be done with it, has gotten increasingly precise at showing how, when and where temperature rises will lead to droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.
“There’s less uncertainty. We are increasingly confident this is the way things are headed,” she said.
More severe drought
The state is headed for longer and more severe annual droughts during the summer and an increase in heavy winter rains as opposed to snow, the report said. Precipitation in Oregon has been below average in 18 of the last 24 years, and snowfall in Oregon is projected to decline 50% by 2100 at current rates of global warming.
The average annual temperature in Oregon has increased 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution began just over a century ago and humans began pumping enormous amounts of heat trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. Scientists expect the average annual temperature in Oregon to rise at least 5 degrees in the next 50 years and 7.6 degrees by the end of the century if humans worldwide do not urgently begin reducing and ending the burning of fossil fuels.
Fleishman called the data showing declines in snow “sobering.”
“When I looked at projections of every part of the state losing 50% of snowpack by the end of the century I said some things,” she said. “But there is the capacity to prepare,” she said. “This isn’t going to happen next year, this is a trend. Knowing that, how over the next couple decades can industries in Oregon be responding to that?”
Other economic vulnerabilities identified in the report were posed by longer, more intense wildfire seasons, which depress forestland values and sales and lead to agriculture losses from major smoke events that make working outdoors unsafe and compromise the quality of products like wine grapes.
Potential for headway
Among the areas identified by the authors as ones where Oregon can make greater headway in curbing greenhouse gas emissions are protecting forests — which could be managed to increase their carbon capture and storage — and reforesting. Modeling shows that planting trees on less than 1% of Oregon’s land could help capture and store nearly 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050, equivalent to taking 3.7 million gas powered vehicles off the road for a year.
Other headway could be made in developing floating offshore wind turbines to generate clean energy on the Oregon coast, the authors found, though that’s been shelved for the foreseeable future by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management following mounting opposition from some coastal communities and tribes.
Changes in the climate have also led to recent changes in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which shows geographic ranges where plants can survive. In the updated map, many areas in the U.S. and some parts of Oregon have warmed up, and been reclassified as more amenable to crops that previously would have been killed off by frosts.
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