Kit Batten Climate Change Podcast
October 22, 2009
This is a Podcast from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Last month Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar launched the first ever coordinated strategy to address current and future impacts of climate change on America’s land, water, fish, wildlife and cultural resources. The Climate Change Response Council chaired by the Secretary will unify science and data across the bureaus of the Interior Department. Dr. Kit Batten is the Science Advisor in the Office of the Deputy Secretary.
Each of the bureaus in the past has been doing tremendous work on climate change, but it hasn’t been unified in this way, so not necessarily communicating with one another about the successes. So now we’re moving forward in a way that will ensure that we’re working together.
This effort will also share data with Universities, Non-governmental organizations, states, other federal agencies and the public. Dr. Batten says climate change is here, and that studies show even mother-nature is releasing carbon with the melting of permafrost.
Permafrost is a type of material that is full of carbon, and so when it melts the bacteria that are present in that permafrost start their metabolism and start releasing a lot methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And so that means that as warming is happening more and more carbon is being released from these systems that are already melting, leading to more warming, melting them faster. This is a huge issue. This type of self-re-enforcing greenhouse gas emission cycle is very scary and is leading to the rapid warming that we’re seeing.
That warming is melting glaciers and sea ice which is leading to a rise in sea-level.
When we’re talking about sea-level rise, scientists now predict that we may see a one-meter sea-level rise by the end of this century, and what that means is, one-meter sea-level rise would lead to severe inundation of the Everglades, of New Orleans and its surrounding habitats, many impacts along our coastlines. So this is significant if we’re thinking about either cost of protecting our shores or relocation populations inland as the sea level rises.
Even more immediate however is the problem of water shortages both in the western United States and in the southeast.
Water is becoming more limited as the result of rising temperatures, and as a result of changing weather patterns; actually less precipitation is falling as snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California than as it used to. So that means the snow pack, which is a way of naturally retaining water for longer into the season, each year is diminishing. So there’s less water available because it’s running off earlier in the year, causing erosion and other problems as well as water shortages. So what do we do, we have to make choices about how to best manage that water. So we have to be smart about water efficiency and about designing strategies to deal with these coming water shortages.
The Department of the Interior is committed to renewable energy as part of its mitigation strategy. It has been speeding up permitting of solar and wind development, taking a look at how energy will be transferred from where it is produced to where it is needed, overseeing a carbon storage project and setting goals to reduce the departments’ own carbon footprint.
Mitigation is doable. We need to use every tool in our toolbox in order to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible. So that means investing in renewable energy generation, that means new transmission lines to get that renewable energy to the people who need it. That means trying to move as rapidly as possible towards capturing the carbon dioxide from our coal plants and storing it underground in geologic formations. That means investing in sequestering carbon naturally in our eco-systems in plants and soils, which actually hold quite a lot of carbon in them if you manage them properly. That also means reducing as a department our emissions through our buildings and operations, by becoming more efficient. It means making more fuel- efficient vehicle fleet choices, and it means reaching out to our visitors in our parks to try and educate them about how best to be reducing their own emissions.
The Department of the Interior taking a lead role in addressing the impacts of climate change because it manages one-fifth of the nation’s landmass and provides drinking water for more than 31 million people and irrigation for 140,000 farmers.
This has been a podcast from the U.S. Department of the Interior; I’m Ron Tull, Washington.