Report Details Effects of Climate Change Across U.S.

A U.S. report notes that emissions from burning fossil fuels have already translated into more frequent forest fires, especially in the West, where a tanker helicopter over Torrance County, N.M., dropped water earlier this month. (Photo: Roberto E. Rosales/AP)

"The report issued today provides practical information that will help landowners and resource managers make better decisions to address the risks of climate change," said Agriculture Department chief economist Joseph Glauber.

Agriculture Department spokesman William Hohenstein said the department is already incorporating climate change into all of its national forest management plans, and it is drafting a strategic research plan aimed at coping with global warming. "We will use this as a springboard in terms of identifying the questions we're going to focus on" for the strategic plan, he said of the report.

Peter Backlund, another of the report's lead authors and director of research relations at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an interview that the Departments of Agriculture and Interior and other federal agencies will be tested by changing climate conditions on both public and private land.

"This is going to be a big challenge for agencies that haven't traditionally been big players in climate," Backlund said, adding the government's monitoring systems can chart major changes but are insufficient to serve as a climate warning system. "We lack the ability to identify the more subtle changes that are happening that could be much larger in the future. . . . We're pulling this information from systems that weren't designed to look at that."

The report predicts that some of the nation's most valued landscapes may change radically in the near future as precipitation and weather patterns continue to shift.

"Management of Western reservoir systems is very likely to become more challenging as runoff patterns continue to change," it states. "Arid areas are very likely to experience increased erosion and fire risk. In arid ecosystems that have not co-evolved with a fire cycle, the probability of loss of iconic, charismatic megaflora such as Saguaro cacti and Joshua trees will greatly increase."

One of the greatest challenges land managers will face over the next few decades, Janetos said, is uncertainty.

"You can't really assume anymore the climate is going to be familiar or similar to what we've seen over the 20th century," he said. "We're moving into new territory."