From New Mexico In Depth (Laura Paskus):
“The agreement is a clear articulation of the fact that almost all countries of the world now agree that climate change is a serious problem—and more serious than they agreed to in the past,” says Jonathan Overpeck, co-director for the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment and professor in the university’s Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences departments.
By recognizing the magnitude and importance of climate change, he says that delegates in Paris did achieve a “major milestone in human history.”
But, he adds: “the devil is in the implementation.”
[…]
Last week, delegates recognized that trying to restrict warming to two degrees will not protect many countries, especially island and coastal nations that are being inundated by sea level rises.
Instead, it now seems imperative to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial levels…
For New Mexicans, the conversation isn’t an abstract one.
“The impacts of climate change are really clear in the Southwest right now,” says Overpeck. “There is very noticeable warming, and it is greater than the global average warming.”
While the focus lately has been on California, Overpeck points out that the larger Southwest has been in drought for more than a decade.
“This drought has been moving around the Southwest since 1999,” he says. “And this drought is unique: it’s the worst drought we’ve seen in the rain gauge record, and it’s made worse because it’s a ‘hot drought.’” That is, the drought is driven as much by anomalously hot temperatures as by precipitation.
“The effects on forests and water supply are already happening,” he says, citing forest mortality and larger, more severe forest fires. “They were predicted to happen, and they’re already happening. They aren’t hypothetical.”
Warmer temperatures will also affect people’s health, thanks to things like longer heat waves in the summer and an increase in dust storms.
“One of the other health effects, that scientists worry about most, is an increase in infectious disease in our region, as more disease is able to spread out of the tropics into the US, into the Southwest,” he says. “Dengue and other mosquito-borne illnesses will probably be favored more and more in the Southwest as the climate warms.”
And while science is his specialty, Overpeck allows himself to step into the political realm.
Although the number of Americans denying or ignoring climate change has become increasingly small, they still have a great deal of influence on policy, which affects people across the globe, he says.
East Fork Jemez River Valles Caldera New Mexico via the Associated Press
A forested lava dome in the midst of the Valle Grande, the largest meadow in the Valles Caldera National Preserve