lightblueline

With water rising at the Golden Gate Bridge and snowpack melting earlier in the year, California faces a double dilemma caused by climate change. The Contra Costa Times, January 22, 2007 describes how climate scientists are predicting a rocky future for California's waters users and coastal residents:

"More than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published on climate change and California's water, studies that range from technical reports meant to improve how scientists can more accurately regionalize climate change projections, to how Californians might adapt to them, to documenting changes already taking place.

'There's an increasingly clear message that we're already here,' said Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, who helped write a summary of those studies for water officials in 2003.

In the mid-1980s, Gleick published the first detailed assessment of how climate change would affect California's water supply. He concluded then that the state would see more rain, less snow and a greater risk of floods and drought -- conclusions that have only strengthened with time.

A respected scientist and environmental advocate, Gleick is firmly in the scientific mainstream when he says that humans are at least partly responsible for global warming.

'I can't tell you if it's 80-20, 70-30, 60-40 or 50-50,' Gleick said. 'But we can't explain the changes that we're seeing without invoking human influences. They cannot be just the results of natural variability.'

The human fingerprint on climate change is becoming clearer, both globally and in California.

You can read the entire report here:

Rising seas, shrinking streams may leave state dying of thirst