Here at the Northern California Hiking Trails blog, we care about climate change. From the increased intensity of wildfires to the longer hiking season, climate change matters to hikers. I’ve written recently about how climate change is affecting critters in the high Sierra Nevada and how it is actually leading to larger glaciers on Mount Shasta. Heck, warming temperatures could contribute to increased rock slides, rock falls, and avalanches discussed last month.
From Tom Knudson’s excellent Sierra Summit blog, I found out about a website from KQED focused on California climate change. (KQED is a Bay Area public television station and public radio station.)
The site has a lot of great material, including audio clips. Recent posts discuss this year’s horrendous fire season, California’s energy plans and how they will affect the climate, and how some plant species are affected by global warming. So put the site on your RSS feed.
How have all the various ramifications of climate change affected your recreation, including hiking? How will climate change impact your life?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
John, What alarms me about global warming and regional drying is that for the past several years we have been in a period of quiet solar activity, allowing a high level of cosmic rays to reach the Earth’s atmosphere. In times past this situation has caused global cooling and an increase in temporate zone storms. From the mid-1500′s to the mid-1800′s, such a condition led to the “Little Ice Age”, when people had ‘ice parties’ on the Thames, and small canon could be dragged across the Hudson near where the Verrazano Narrows Bridge is now. But this time seems to be different. The cosmic state that should be causing global cooling seems to have no effect. Only conclusion that I can reach is that human activies are so strong that they are overwhelming what nature is doing. To test this hypothesis we have to wait until the sun becomes active again with sunspots and flares, and the cosmic rays are banished from the inner solar system. If global warming goes straight off the charts in a reverse of how the stock market averages have dropped off the charts, then we will know for sure that global warming is primarily man-made, and we are in big trouble. As a footnote to this, the oceans will be dying from lack of oxygen and acidfication caused by being overwhelmed by too much CO2 being pumped into them. We do live in interesting times.
Hello Ron,
Most climatologists agree that most, if not all, the climate change we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear in the nineteenth century is due to human activity.
How bad the warming climate will be, and how much it will affect us, depends on what people do now – individually, in groups, and through government.
Lately I’ve been working on reducing my carbon footprint, primarily through driving less and using less energy around the house.
{ 2 trackbacks }