Researchers Call for 'No-Regrets' Approach to Climate Warming

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http://uanews.org/node/32480

Researchers Call for 'No-Regrets' Approach to Climate Warming

The strategy, detailed in the journal Science, prepares people for a hotter and drier Southwestern U.S. through water conservation and the continued development of ways to harness energy from the sun, wind and Earth.

By Stephanie Doster, Institute of the Environment, June 24, 2010

Two prominent climate experts, including one from the University of Arizona, are calling for a "no-regrets" strategy for planning for a hotter and drier western North America. Their advice: use water conservatively and continue developing ways to harness energy from the sun, wind and Earth.

Jonathan Overpeck, principal investigator with the Climate Assessment for the Southwest at the UA, and Bradley Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, write in the June 25 issue of the journal Science that such an approach is necessary for coping with a wide range of projected future climate changes in the West and Southwest.

In their overview of shifting climate in the region, Overpeck and Udall cite published findings of prevalent signs of change: rising temperatures, earlier snowmelt, northward-shifting winter storms, increasing precipitation intensity and flooding, record-setting drought, plummeting Colorado River reservoir storage, widespread vegetation mortality and more large wildfires.

"The West, and especially the Southwest, is leading the nation in climate change – warming, drying, less late-winter snowpack and drought – as well as the impacts of this change," said Overpeck, a UA professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences and co-director of the http://www.environment.arizona.edu/">Institute of the Environment.

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"One thing is for sure," Overpeck said. "The best strategy now – the no-regrets strategy – is to prepare for a hotter and drier West, Southwest and Arizona, and to make sure we don't commit water to things now in ways that could make water shortages in the future more difficult to deal with."

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