A recent article posted by Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), titled “Climate change will keep hitting Oregonians hard, but the exact impact will depend on where you live,” claims that Oregon will be impacted severely on multiple fronts by climate change. Areas of concern include increased wildfires, sea level rise, and water shortages, among others. [emphasis, links added]
This is mostly false, as many of the problems listed are not worsening, and those that are have nothing to do with climate change.
OPB writes that different regions of Oregon will face different effects from climate change, which is reasonable; coastal communities will have to worry about sea levels more than those in Eastern Oregon, for example.
But the caveats listed by OPB are interesting. The story doesn’t just discuss geographic and natural climate differences, but also differing effects based on demographics, such as, “how many people live there, and how much money their local governments have on hand.”
Those two variables, and others like population growth and relative incomes, are independent of long-term climate change and even short-term weather events.
Regardless, the article goes on to make several false claims regarding the direct effects of climate change:
“The Oregon Coast faces sea-level rise, algal blooms and shellfish biotoxins. The northern Willamette Valley faces heat waves, higher landslide risks and increased water demands as the population grows. Northeastern Oregon faces longer fire seasons, scorched crops and increasing numbers of destructive pests.”
For the sake of brevity, we will not go into each assertion made in this post, but almost every one of these supposed hazards is overblown at best, and or simply not occurring, at worst.
Beginning with sea level rise, the average absolute sea level rise globally is about 1.7+/-0.3 millimeters per year.
Two out of the five available National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sea level monitoring stations in Oregon are slightly above that rate, at 1.78 +/- 0.58 and 2.52 +/- 0.61 mm/year, or the rest are below the average global rate. These rates equate to a rise of about 0.58 ft and 0.83 ft over 100 years, respectively (See chart below).
Hellbound and Down 