Climate change is a global problem, but journalist Steven Nash, who teaches at the University of Richmond, wanted to know what might happen here. He’s written a book called Virginia Climate Fever, detailing what the Commonwealth can expect in the years to come. He says the coasts will, of course, see more flooding, inland areas are also in for trouble.
Steven Nash has been writing about science and environmental issues for nearly 30 years – waiting for specific data that would allow him to report what may happen to Virginia during this century. Now he has it, and the news is not good. Unless we change the way to produce electricity, power our cars and factories, the number of days with temperatures over 90 degrees will go from about 22 to about 53, giving us weather like what we now see in northern Florida:
“Northern Florida is bi-coastal. We’re going to be more like Alabama of Mississippi or Louisiana – landlocked and sweltering. Again, we can adapt to that, but the forests can’t adapt to that, and the wildlife can adapt to that, and our energy system can’t easily handle the additional loads that are going to be put on it.”
Scientists already have a name for what may be coming. They call it the big die-off. “Huge expanses of forest will die off so quickly that nothing will replace them any time soon.”
It’s not clear when that might happen. Nash says much depends on how humans behave in the face of climate change. Already, he says, our forests are battling invasive plants that thrive in warmer weather.
“We have dozens of very vigorous and aggressive invasive plants in the national forest and on private lands. We have lots of insects like stink bugs, and diseases and insects that attack trees, so that we’ve lost many species of trees already.”
The loss of forests will also lead to less clean, fresh water and as trees die, there will be even more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Faced with such dire predictions, Nash hopes Virginia will take action. He thinks humanity has been slow to make changes, because it’s never faced this kind of thing before – but another expert on climate change thinks Americans need therapy to confront a threat that could ultimately destroy us. We’ll explore that idea in our next report.
