Global warming: Want to see Northwest impacts? Just look around

Living in a corner of America powered, irrigated and inspired by water, we ought to treat Tuesday's report released by the White House, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, as a wake-up call and cold shower.
"We are the alpha and the omega of global warming," said Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., who helped write a flawed -- but needed -- bill to change national energy policy. It's pending in the House.
Want to know how climate change is changing America? Read the report. Want its bottom line: "Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced." Changes "are expected to increase."
Want to see impacts on the Northwest? Just look around, something that global-warming skeptics resolutely refuse to do.
Global warming is shrinking the winter snowpack. A smaller snowpack means reduction in the runoff that sustains our river flows, makes the desert bloom, allows salmon to reach and return from the ocean, and powers the world's greatest hydroelectric system.
The consequences don't end when our rivers reach salt water.
"Climate change and ocean acidification are already having major impacts on Washington: Our $100 million shellfish industry is in crisis after four years of oyster reproductive failure from ocean acidification," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
If oyster beds are in peril, so are salmon-spawning streams. One third of current habitat for Northwest salmon and other cold-water fish will be lost in this century, or so finds the report.
What critters will most likely be conflicted? Us. Just look at the legal and political battles that have broken out in years of low stream flow on the Columbia, Snake and Klamath rivers.
Irrigators in the Klamath Basin cried one season that they lacked water to grow crops. A year later, the Bush administration tipped scales in irrigators' favor, and caused a massive salmon kill in a warm, low-flowing Klamath River.
Climate change is going to require a lot of hard thinking, which better begin right now.
"The worst response for all the user/sectors is, given the certainty of intensified conflict, to hunker down to defend 'my slice of the shrinking pie,'" opined Pat Ford of Save Our Wild Salmon.
"Global warming's accumulated impacts on our waters are best viewed as a vise, steadily tightening on all water users regardless of past ideology, who's right, and past power relations. A shift is needed, away from old Western 'water is for fighting' lens, to a shared solutions, shared sacrifice, shared shortage lens."
The Northwest shares climate impacts with its neighbors in the West.
Alaska has warmed at more than twice the rate of the rest of the country, its annual average temperature up 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit: Winters have warmed 6.3 degrees.One result is the largest outbreak of tree-killing spruce beetles in the world. In the report's words, rising temperatures "allowed the beetle to survive the winter and to complete its life cycle in half the usual time."
The same has happened with the pine bark beetle in Canada. It has killed forests over a Sweden-sized area of British Columbia, has crossed the Continental Divide and threatens to munch its way across the Great White North.
In our inland West, more than 50 percent of whitebark pine forests in the Northern Rockies has been lost since 1970 -- largely due to beetle infestations. The whitebark pine anchors the soil at high elevations. Its fatty cones are a key pre-hibernation food for grizzly bears.
Hiking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming last summer, retired Forest Service scientist Dr. Jesse Logan showed us tiny holes bored by beetles.
"These trees are dead," he said. "They don't know it yet, though. I guess they are zombie trees."
A few hours earlier, down in a park at Dubois, oil industry workers told us that global warming was a "hoax." But the hoax is killing the forests above them and melting glaciers that sustain flow of the Wind River.
The global-warming report, and its White House release, is welcome on one front: As science struggles to keep up with impacts of global warming, politics is at last trying to keep up with science.
"Finally, the U.S. government is leveling with the American people about the threat we all face," said Dr. Jeffrey Short, a former government scientist who now works for Oceana.
The U.S. House of Representatives will soon vote on what's known as the Waxman-Markey Bill. It makes concessions to polluters. It sets what Denis Hayes of The Bullitt Foundation calls "a wimpy 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions" as a goal for 2020.
Yet, Hayes is urging lawmakers to hold their noses and vote for the bill -- to give the Obama administration credibility and needed momentum in the global effort to curb global warming.
"Climate legislation has to pass a Senate in which the oil, coal and electric utility industries wield fearsome power," Hayes said.
Some will deny this. Such is their right. It's dangerous, however, to stick your head in the sand when sea levels are rising.