Posted on 09/25/2006 7:02:17 PM PDT by Daralundy
The bitterly cold winters of Gordon Chipman's childhood are fading into memory, and the pine forests that now blanket British Columbia's sprawling Interior landscape may soon follow.
Chipman grew up in Williams Lake, a hub town in the Interior forest industry where logging contractors traditionally relied on minus-40 Celsius winter temperatures to sustain an annual peak in logging activity.
The deep freeze made a hard surface, supporting fast, efficient movement of heavy logging equipment that would, at other times of the year, become mired in soft ground.
In Chipman's mind, nothing, not even the rapid spread of the mountain pine beetle, can match the absence of cold winters as a fundamental change in the way trees are harvested in B.C.'s interior forests.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body of scientists, estimates the world's average temperature has risen 0.6 degrees Celsius since the beginning of the last century -- and projects it will rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees in this century.
Even a change of 3.5 degrees would have enormous significance for B.C.'s climate -- that's the average temperature difference between Prince George and the Southern Okanagan over the last century.
The international panel has identified fossil fuel combustion -- including coal-fired electricity generation and the burning of oil and natural gas for transportation and home heating -- as the probable trigger for a global warming trend that is perceived as too abrupt to be explained by natural climatic phenomena.
This trend, acknowledged in a recent report from the B.C. Forest Service, is a two-edged sword for the province -- which still depends on forestry as its main industry, but also benefits from about $4.5 billion in annual investment and royalty income from the natural gas sector.
"Our service season in Williams Lake is 10 months long -- but I would say we do 60 per cent of our harvesting in wintertime," says Chipman, a registered professional forester and log buyer who has been based in his home town for the past 13 years.
"We rely on the freeze-up to come in mid-November, and at that point we start doubling our production. That carries on through to about mid-March."
At least, that's what reliably happened until the mid-1990s, when winter temperatures stopped falling into the 40-below range that supports pine-laden logging trucks on rough, temporary dirt roads -- and keeps the cold-averse mountain pine beetle at bay.
"In the last few years it's been really tough to do that, to ramp up our production in the winter months, just because we are not getting the freeze-up."
Warmer winters aren't just a local phenomenon for Williams Lake. They are part of what most of the world's climatologists perceive as a global warming trend, including an ongoing transformation of the northern hemisphere that forces cold- and moisture-loving evergreens to retreat to ever-higher latitudes.
A recent report from the B.C. Forest Service suggests that, before the end of the century, southern forests will disappear, and be replaced by grasslands.
The report, titled Preparing for Climate Change, anticipates extreme weather events such as ice storms, floods, droughts and fires, plus even greater threats from the spread of disease, pests, and invasive plant species.
Even the devastation that mountain pine beetles are causing in B.C.'s Interior pine forests -- swaths of dead trees so vast you can see them from outer space -- cannot measure up to the impact that warmer weather is having on the province's logging industry, Chipman reckons.
"The biggest change we've seen in the forest over the last 10 years is the temperature in winter.
"It costs more to maintain that production. We have to hire more people, and it's more of a struggle than in the past to find enough people, especially with the huge demand for labour in the oil patch around Fort St. John. There is a huge demand for labour up there -- a lot of equipment operators from this area have gone north."
Richard Hebda, curator of botany and earth history at the Royal British Columbia Museum, says the trend is "not business as usual" for the province's logging industry -- or its forestry-dependent economy in general.
"Over the next few decades the British Columbia landscape will be transformed. And presumably, because of how strongly dependent we are upon the landscape, so will our economies and our communities be transformed in the next few decades."
Hebda's ongoing study of B.C. fossil records shows "there was a time only eight or nine thousand years ago when, in fact, it was warmer and largely drier than it is today."
"There was less water and higher temperatures. Trees could not grow where they do today."
For example, the Southern Interior, reaching as far north as Quesnel, was mainly grassland.
The eastern side of Vancouver Island was open grassland, and the western red cedars that towered over the coastal landscape as recently as a century ago were "not nearly as widespread because we didn't have the same kind of coastal temperate rainforest as we do today."
Hebda's research also reveals that, while climate changes typically work their way through the landscape over centuries or even millennia, major shifts in temperature and rainfall can occur with stunning rapidity.
For example, fossil records from Douglas fir, that stood near Victoria in 1844 BC, show a 90-per-cent decline in annual rate of growth -- "in less than a decade."
"Our whole point is to say that climate does change pretty quickly and, when it does, it has pretty profound consequences."
The present situation, Hebda adds, is one of rapid change.
The B.C. Forest Service report anticipates that communities depending on the industry will be hit hard, as local forests fall victim to fire, disease, and a fundamental inability to adapt to new climate systems.
The changes are expected to come so fast that B.C.'s natural and planted forests will find themselves "significantly maladapted within their lifespan."
The report was derived from the findings of 104 published scientific studies on climate change, and proposes a 13-part action plan to prepare B.C. for an unprecedented economic and ecological transformation.
In some regions of the province, for example, the need to preserve supplies of water for drinking, agriculture, hydroelectricity and fish habitat will supersede the need to sustain a forestry economy.
B.C. chief forester Jim Snetsinger cautioned there is still a fair amount of uncertainty about the impact greenhouse gases -- including carbon dioxide produced in the combustion of fossil fuels -- will have upon Earth's atmosphere in the future.
"Who knows how governments and the human race will react to this whole issue around emissions?" he asked.
However, he added that, "while there is a lot of uncertainty around climate change, there is a lot of evidence around this warming trend that's happening -- an increasing body of scientific information around it."
The forest service report says the size and scope of the transformation of B.C.'s forests can't be managed through human intervention. It may become necessary to plant alternative species in B.C. parks and wilderness areas on the premise that the government's traditional hands-off approach in parks "may not be an appropriate response."
Forest researchers also anticipate greater numbers of pines will die from a "red band needle blight" known as Dothistroma.
The report says an unprecedented Dothistroma blight is underway in northwest B.C. -- and links it to more frequent rainfalls in summer.
"Dothistroma has gone from relative obscurity in the province to the best known forest pathogen in less than five years."
The fungus causes the needles of pine trees to turn brown and die, working its way up from lower to higher branches.
Pines can usually survive an occasional bout of the blight, but warmer, wetter weather means the disease comes back year after year and the trees then succumb.
University of Northern B.C. forestry professor Kathy Lewis said, in an interview, she is seeing the once-uncommon blight on trees in her neighbourhood, and at her home, in Prince George.
Lewis has been leading her students in research on the blight, based on work pioneered by B.C. Forest Service researcher Alex Woods. Lewis said B.C.'s past forest management practices, including reforestation that quadrupled the natural proportion of pines in Interior and northern forests, have contributed to the current epidemic.
"It had been here for a long time but it never got up and going because reproduction was limited by drier and cooler temperatures. Now, with the change in the climate, we're over a threshold," Lewis said.
Lewis said more than three consecutive wet days when the daily temperature is over 18 degrees is the "perfect" environment for this fungus to reproduce.
"We now have more of those kinds of combinations of weather conditions, leading to the expansion of the fungus."
Lewis said the blight is already widespread in the Pacific Northwest, around Smithers, and in the Prince George area, where it is "down my driveway."
HOTTER CLIMATE WOULD BE DEADLY FOR SALMON
Climate change may be a death sentence for British Columbia's famed runs of Fraser River sockeye salmon.
The average water temperature of the Fraser has been creeping up for more than 50 years, and scientists are now warning that, if the trend continues, a catastrophic die-off of migrating salmon will be the outcome.
According to the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, human activity -- including alteration of land and burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil to create energy -- is "the main cause" of climate change events pushing up the temperature of the Fraser River.
A researcher with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has reported that average summer water temperatures, which can coincide with migration up the Fraser of millions of spawning sockeye, are trending higher with each passing year.
This past summer, the Fraser temperature during sockeye migration peaked at 20.7 degrees -- fortunately for the fish, they were a couple of weeks late in their migration and escaped what would have otherwise been a disaster.
Columbia River researchers have noted that higher water temperatures slow the pace of migration in that stream -- to 80 days, up from 40 in cooler water.
"We're showing temperature going up a little over a tenth of a degree every decade, so it's maybe a half a degree in the time we've been looking. If you've been talking to other climate change people, then you recognize that it sounds small, but it's significant," says department researcher John Morrison.
Simply by projecting the trend into the future, Morrison has been able to calculate plenty of trouble in the decades ahead.
Research has shown that 20 degrees Celsius is a "critical threshold" for migrating Fraser sockeye, and once that threshold is crossed, fish begin to die off before they can spawn.
Only twice in the last 95 years, 1998 and 2004, has the Fraser crept above 21 degrees and, in both those years, the number of spawning fish on some Fraser tributary rivers was only a fraction of what had been expected.
Even small increases are critical. Salmon are cold-blooded creatures acclimated to moderate temperatures and have a tough time functioning outside that range.
Morrison calculates that by 2050, critically high river temperatures will be a frequent event in summer and by 2080, the summer temperature will reach critical highs at least every second year.
"The trend we detected when we look back is pretty much going to move forward at the same rate according to climate change models," Harrison said.
Fisheries researchers have proven that warmer water makes salmon lethargic, and even kills them if they remain exposed for just a few days.
"When we hold fish at warmer temperatures, they die sooner in captivity," department researcher David Patterson says.
"Those same temperatures are similar to the ones they are experiencing during high temperature years in the Fraser River. The warmer it is, the more energy it costs to swim per kilometre.
"I've looked at quite a few Western rivers and they are all doing the same thing. Water is coming out of the systems earlier in the spring. That includes the Saskatchewan River, the Mackenzie, the Skeena, the Nass."
What is the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC was established by the United Nations Environment Programme to assess modeled climate change scenarios for the purpose of coordinating international responses to climate change.
As such it is an organ of the United Nations and answerable only to U.N. agendas.
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