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The warm winds of change.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

More mosquitoes, better tomatoes, worse skiing, different wines, fewer salmon.

Welcome to the future in Lane County, according to climate change experts.

The planet is warming up, they say, thanks in part to our reliance on machines from cars to coal plants that spew heat-trapping emissions into the atmosphere.

Recent surveys reveal some confusion among ordinary people about climate change and what to do about it.

The United States has balked at signing onto international agreements to limit greenhouse gas emissions, most recently at a December conference in Montreal. But in Oregon, policymakers aren't waiting for leadership from Washington, D.C. They are making decisions right now about how to curb the gases that are contributing to planetary warming.

Researchers point to several signals that buttress the case for climate change:

Global temperatures have increased since instrument records began in 1861. Increases in the Northern Hemisphere in the past decade are likely greater than any in the last 1,000 years, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, a worldwide body of scientists. Nighttime minimum temperatures increased at twice the rate of daytime maximums.

Sea levels have risen between 4 and 8 inches in the past century.

Arctic sea ice has thinned by 40 percent in late summer and early autumn in recent decades, and nonpolar glaciers are in widespread retreat.

The growing season, particularly in northern latitudes, has increased by one to four days per decade during the past 40 years.

Global warming skeptics believe these changes all fall within the normal cycles of the Earth's notoriously capricious climate. This is the planet, after all, that has snapped from ice age to heat wave within a decade when conditions were right.

But the consensus among most scientists studying the climate, the Earth's biological systems and its geologic past, is that evidence for human-influenced climate change is powerful. They say that while there are plenty of uncertainties...

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