Posted: April 29th, 2015

Climate change and water resources

Climate change and water resources

The climate change that is expected to occur over the next decades, and which mounting evidence shows is already occurring, can have dramatic impacts on water resources. Since the scientific consensus is that a substantial fraction of the increases in surface air temperature and changes in precipitation dynamics is due to human influences, there is a strong social impact component both to the causes and effects. In other words, we (and our ancestors to a lesser extent) bear responsibility for many of the changes that our descendents will experience. Our generation bears a particularly important responsibility as the first to clearly sit on both the cause and effect side of this equation.

Assignment
As a background, look at Climate Change Impacts on the United States The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, By the National Assessment Synthesis Team, US Global Change Research Program (2000). This report is on-line at http://gcrio.org/NationalAssessment/overpdf/16WA.pdf . Read the short chapter on Sectors: Water, which gives a comprehensive overview of the many ways in which water resources will be affected by a changing climate.
Select one geographic area in which water resources will be affected, and prepare a short essay (see guidelines below) that explores it. Some issues/questions that you should consider addressing are:
1) What is the water sector effect you are concentrating on? Why would changes be of interest to society?
2) How great an impact is expected? Is there agreement or controversy over the magnitude of the impact?
3) What are the prospects for mitigating the effects? How can planning for climate change address some of the impacts? Will different countries/states be able to adapt or adjust with little cost, or will huge amounts of new infrastructure be needed?
4) How much of the projected effect could possibly be eliminated by reducing current anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases? (This may be more difficult to find.)
Writing and Research Guidelines:
Limit your effort to 4-5 hours. Spend 1.5 hour for the initial investigation and discovery. Spend another 1.5 hours to find an additional source of information on the same issue or a contrasting opinion to the first paper. Then spend 1-2 hours to write a summary of your findings (about four paragraphs). Spell-check your paper, and read it carefully for grammar – this will be graded. Submit a .pdf or Word document if you send it to me electronically.
If one of your sources of information is the internet, then the second source cannot be the internet. It must be a technical journal paper, professional report, newspaper article, personal interview, etc. Complete your paper with complete references to your sources (do not attach copies of the source documents). If you have not yet used the library’s web-based technical article search, it is very helpful in finding articles on any topic. If the library does not have a subscription to the journal your article(s) appear in, you can request them via interlibrary loan, and they generally arrive quickly.
Useful links:
The Climate Impacts Group (CIG) is an interdisciplinary research group studying the impacts of natural climate variability and global climate change (“global warming”) on the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW). They have lots of info on planning for climate change in the PNW.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (new report, AR4, out now!!)
EPA’s Global Warming resource (http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/index.html)