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Global warming brings sweeping change to U.S., Michigan

Seth Borenstein and Nicky Forster, Associated Press, and Leonard N. Fleming and Christine MacDonald
The Detroit News
In this June 23, 2008 file photo, James Hansen, a leading researcher on global warming, gives a briefing on global warming on Capitol Hill in Washington. NASA’s top climate scientist in 1988, Hansen warned the world on a record hot June day that global warming was here and worsening. In a scientific study that came out a couple months later, he even forecast how warm it would get, depending on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

 

Salida, Colo. — On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn't approaching — it had already arrived.

The testimony of NASA's top climate scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was "the opening salvo of the age of climate change."

Thirty years later, it's clear that Hansen was right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of the effects — some obvious, others less conspicuous.

Earth is hotter. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water.

Over 30 years — the period climate scientists often use in studies to minimize natural weather variations — the world's annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

MOBILE USERS: View the AP interactive "Climate Change in the U.S." here.

The temperature in the United States is up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees. And in Michigan, it has gone up 1.78 degrees, the 16th highest increase among the lower 48 states.

"The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we're no longer thinking just about the future," said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "Climate change is here, it's now and it's hitting us hard from all sides."

Every one of the 344 climate divisions in the lower 48 states  — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined, according to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean biological and other data.

In this Oct. 18, 2015 file photo, a young girl wades in the water outside of Fatou Faye's home in Diamniadio Island, Saloum Delta in Senegal. The place where Faye's kitchen once stood is now outlined with short branches of mangroves that she hopes will slow the nearby sea from destroying the rest of her house. The rising sea levels pushing into the waters of Senegal's Saloum Delta already threaten to carve the rest of her gray cement home from its foundation, leaving her and 30 other relatives homeless on the low-lying island.

In Michigan, no region has been more affected than northwest Lower Peninsula, which since 1988 has experienced a 2.16-degree Fahrenheit temperature increase. The area including Grand Traverse, Leelanau and Charlevoix counties is home to some of northern Michigan's most popular tourist destinations.

Warming has forced shorter seasons at Crystal Mountain Resort, said Jim MacInnes, chief executive of the Thompsonville resort that traditionally focuses on the winter ski season.

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“The ski season starts a few weeks later now than it used to,” MacInnes said. “It’s more difficult to make snow. We have less time to make snow before the busy holidays and, of course, the busy holidays are extremely important, period, for the ski industry. We’ve also had some cases where we started late and ended early.”

The Traverse City region's three-decade annual temperature increase was the 18th biggest nationally among the 344 climate divisions in the lower 48 states. Crystal Mountain has felt it in the checking account.

Making snow in mid- to late November instead of relying on Mother Nature has increased costs, MacInnes said.

“You have to tie up more capital to make more snow and real quick,” he said.
Crystal has adjusted by expanding its summer season offerings and marketing itself as well as a destination for golf, bike riding and an outdoor water park and slide, MacInnes said.

The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988.

The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees — more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South.

Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken.
People feel the impact of climate change during “extreme” heat days, which lead to bad air for residents to breathe, especially those with respiratory problems, said James Clift, policy director for the Lansing-based Michigan Environmental Council.

The warming is putting Michigan on the verge of violating compliance with the Clean Air Act because of excessive ozone action days, Clift said. During those times, residents are warned against refueling their vehicles, barbecuing or using their gas-powered lawn mowers for fear of creating more smog.

Humanity has faced other changes in temperature and climate throughout history and made adjustments, said Jason Hayes, director of environmental policy for the Midland-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank.

"It is worthwhile to remember that climate is an ever-changing, dynamic and highly complex system that cannot simply be reduced to the simplified concept that carbon dioxide is the master control knob," said Hayes, a former ranger and forester in Canada's British Columbia.

The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming.

Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North American local — though not most — natural weather variability could account for as much as half of warming.

But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun.

Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earth's warming.

"It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace," said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

More: Storms wash out roads in Upper Peninsula

Others cautioned that what might seem to be small increases in temperature should not be taken lightly.

"One or two degrees may not sound like much, but raising your thermostat by just that amount will make a noticeable effect on your comfort," said Deke Arndt, NOAA's climate monitoring chief in Asheville, North Carolina, which has warmed nearly 1.8 degrees in 30 years.

Arndt said average temperatures don't tell the entire story: "It's the extremes that these changes bring."

The nation's extreme weather — flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow — has doubled in 30 years, according to a federal index.

The Northeast's extreme rainfall has more than doubled. Brockton, Massachusetts, had only one day with at least four inches of rain from 1957 to 1988, but a dozen of them in the 30 years since, according to NOAA records. Ellicott City, Maryland, just had its second thousand-year flood in little less than two years.

And the summer's named Atlantic storms? On average, the first one now forms nearly a month earlier than it did in 1988, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

The 14 costliest hurricanes in American history, adjusted for inflation, have hit since 1988, reflecting both growing coastal development and a span that included the most intense Atlantic storms on record.

"The collective damage done by Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 was well more than half of the entire budget of our Department of Defense," said MIT's Kerry Emanuel.

Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Alaska has warmed 2.4 degrees since 1988 and 5.4 degrees in the winter. Since 1988, Utqiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, has warmed more than 6 degrees yearly and more than 9 degrees in winter.

"The temperature change is noticeable. Our ground is thawing," said Mike Aamodt, 73, the city's former acting mayor. He had to move his own cabins at least four times because of coastal erosion and thawing ground due to global warming. "We live the climate change."

The amount of Arctic sea ice in September, when it shrinks the most, fell by nearly one third since 1988. It is disappearing 50 years faster than scientists predicted, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

"There is a new Arctic now because the Arctic ocean is now navigable" at times in the summer, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The vast majority of glaciers around the world have shrunk. A NASA satellite that measures shifts in gravity calculated that Earth's glaciers lost 279 billion tons of ice — nearly 67 trillion gallons of water — from 2002 to 2017. In 1986, the Begich Boggs visitor center at Alaska's Chugach National Forest opened to highlight the Portage glacier. But the glacier keeps shrinking.

"You absolutely cannot see it from the visitor center and you haven't in the last 15 or so years," said climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica have also have shriveled, melting about 455 billion tons of ice into water, according to the NASA satellite. That's enough water to cover the state of Georgia in water nearly 9 feet deep.

And it is enough — coupled with all the other melting ice — to raise the level of the seas. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise (75 millimeters) in just the past 25 years.
With more than 70 percent of the Earth is covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles (27,150 cubic km) of extra water. That's enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep.

It's a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: We're in deep, and getting deeper.
"Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance," NOAA's Arndt said. "The train is in our living room now."

cmacdonald@detroitnews.com

lfleming@detroitnews.com