American West Heats Up, Prompting Actual Response to Global Warming

A big reason the United States has dragged its feet on climate change – besides aggressively myopic leadership, independent/isolationist (depending on how you want to spin it) tendencies with respect to world opinion, and an attitude that consuming as much as we want is good for us – is that the effects of climate change on the continental United States have been minimal. No longer:"American West Heating Nearly Twice As Fast As Rest Of World, New Analysis Shows".

The effects of global warming differ depending on location. Some parts of the world have experienced up to a ten degree average increase – but these places are often naturally colder and thus have less of a direct human impact. The melting permafrost in Alaska and Canada has created unseen levels of erosion and decimation of caribou herds (among other species); the warming temperatures allow mosquitoes to breed earlier and in more places, forcing caribou up to higher elevations to escape them where there is less food. Anyway, compared to heating in some parts of the world, heating at twice the rate in the American West is not that drastic. But it’s enough to put a lot of pressure on water supplies.

The rest of the world is a bit more edgy about global warming than we are because they are suffering the consequences. There are heat waves in Europe. Pacific Islanders are increasingly antsy about the imminent obliteration of their lands as ocean levels rise (especially given recent news that Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica is eroding at an unheard of rate – this won’t directly affect water levels, but serves as an indicator to how much warming affects the entire continent ). Glaciers, the primary above-ground water supply for people worldwide, are visibly shrinking. Mt. Kilimanjaro and others are at risk of losing their year-round snowcaps.

But in the continental United States, there’s hardly been a perceptible difference. At least, not ones that people care about: does my grandmother in North Dakota really want blizzards and snow up to the eaves of her house, like she experienced growing up? No. The positively balmy North Dakota winters are pleasing; it’s a hardship now to get more than a foot of snow.

So now that the effects of global warming are negatively affecting an area of the U.S. where a lot of people live, it’s getting political attention. The West has always had to deal with drought, which I think is the reason this is getting recognized as a global warming thing now rather than ten years ago. The drought conditions, too, have been the result of human behavior – people move to arid regions like Eastern Colorado and the middle of Arizona and expect that human ingenuity will allow them to have their pretty green lawns and non-native trees. They change the course of the Colorado River and others to feed those lawns, thus screwing over the people downriver, and then are surprised when it doesn’t work very well. Droughts get exacerbated and extended, and people fight with each other over water rights and have to cut down on consumption – the humanity!

A quick-heating West is the best thing that could happen to make the U.S. attack global warming more directly (other than, you know, the end of the Bush Administration). There are, finally, consequences for our consumption choices. Katrina spurred people to connect global warming and heavier storming, but there's not a distinct link between the two. (Plus we could have avoided a lot more damage if we hadn't destroyed the wetlands around New Orleans.) But for drought in the West, the cause of hotter temperatures is clear enough. Hence the America’s Climate Security Act, the first climate bill to ever escape Senate committee. Not only do Western states have a lot of political clout, they also have a history of water disputes – a problem best avoided, if the recent spat between Tennessee and Georgia didn’t remind us of that.