Climate Change Projections for the Highlands Advancement of Science

[FREE] Serving Philipstown and Beacon 2018 Golf Guide Page 24 MAY 4, 2018 161 MAIN ST., COLD SPRING, N.Y. | highlandscurrent.com What’s Up with Breakneck? Planned closure delayed be part of the Fjord Trail linking Cold Spring and Beacon, says the delay is due until at least the fall to a lack of bids on the project. It received only one, which exceeded the budget, said By Ian Halim Senior Planner Amy Kacala. A new bid- ding process will begin in the fall. In the lthough plans had called for clos- meantime, she said, the nonprofit plans to ing access to Breakneck Ridge hire a landscape firm to propose modifica- from Route 9D on Jan. 1 to allow A tions to the design. construction on the Hudson Highlands Breakneck has become an increasingly Fjord Trail to proceed, it will remain open popular destination for hikers, drawing through the summer and into the fall, ac- more than 1,000 visitors on most summer cording to trail officials. weekends and an estimated 100,000 in Scenic Hudson, which is spearheading are able to grow. We will suffer extended 2017. Trails.com ranks it as the most pop- the Breakneck Connector project that will (Continued on Page 6) Part 1: heat waves, with between 10 (Albany) and 28 (New York City) “danger days” on which the heat index hits 105 degrees or higher. At the same time, the Highlands will look like a resort to the residents of Raleigh (70 danger days) and Phoenix (147). Runaway Train If unchecked, sea-level rise will push the Hudson River to the Metro-North By Chip Rowe tracks on Cold Spring’s waterfront by 2100, putting the Hudson line north and he climate has always been chang- south under water. The Beacon train ing. If you are in the Highlands, station will be overrun and Dia:Beacon Tyou are sitting at this moment on a will become an island. Average tempera- spot once covered with several thousand tures, at their worst, could be 10 degrees feet of ice. But that was 21,000 years ago. higher by the turn of the century and Now imagine the Highlands just 30 the growing season a month longer, al- years from now, when our climate will lowing for more pollen and more ticks. be closer to what you find today in Ra- Poison ivy and algae blooms will thrive. leigh, North Carolina. “The rate of change is scary,” says That may sound appealing, but along Radley Horton, a climate scientist at with the temperate mercury we will Columbia University who lives in Cold see far less snow and far more heavy Spring. “The red flags are here.” downpours, “100-year storms” that will While the climate has always been occur every 5 or 10 years and cause bil- changing, it has never changed as fast as lions of dollars in damage, and summer it has since 1830, the year the first coal- droughts that will change what farmers powered steam engine, (To Page 12) A crowd of hikers on Breakneck Ridge in May 2017 Photo by Luis Maldonado/NYNJTC Beacon Police Release Body-Cam Policy Allows officers to view says he hasn’t heard any feedback, posi- tive or negative, from the community. footage before reports “The department continues to find the body cameras useful,” he wrote on May 3 By Jeff Simms in an email. The Beacon police used a nearly $10,000 he Beacon Police Department’s poli- federal grant to purchase the cameras, a cy on how officers use body cameras technology also employed by officers in receives mixed grades when com- T neighboring Newburgh and Wappingers pared to guidelines suggested by civil- Falls. In Putnam County, Sheriff Robert rights groups but largely conforms with Langley Jr. says he plans to have his depu- those of police executives. ties use them, as well. The agency released its policy follow- Watchdog organizations such as the ing a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) American Civil Liberties Union and The request by The Current. Patrol officers in Leadership Conference/Upturn have been TECH TITANS — Bryce Lake and Eamon Wall work on projects on April 30 in the newly Beacon began wearing the cameras about critical of the technology, saying the cam- opened Innovation & Learning Center at the Desmond-Fish Library in Garrison. For six weeks ago, and Chief Kevin Junjulas more photos, see highlandscurrent.com. Photo by Ross Corsair eras have not (Continued on Page 10) 12 MAY 4, 2018 The Highlands Current highlandscurrent.com (Continued from Page 1) the Tom Thumb, was constructed in Baltimore. The Discovery of the Powered by fossil fuels, a trip that took two weeks in 1830 took only two days by Greenhouse Gas Effect 1857, and takes two hours today by plane. lthough credit for identifying the As America grew, it became smaller. Agreenhouse gas effect typically Nearly two centuries of burning the goes to John Tyndall, who published fuels required to run our trains and a series of papers in 1859, the first cars and planes, and heat our interiors scientific research that identified it and power our gadgets, have come with was presented three years earlier, in Albany, at the annual meeting of a heavy price. The carbon dioxide (CO2) released by generations of innovation the American Association for the has saturated the atmosphere, dramati- Climate Change Projections for the Highlands Advancement of Science. cally increasing the amount of solar heat The author was a relative unknown, it traps, a process first conceptualized in Baseline 2020s 2050s 2080s a 37-year-old woman named Eunice 1856 by scientist Eunice Foote in a paper Foote who had come to the conference presented in Albany (see story at right). Increase air temp 50˚ 2.3˚ – 3.2˚ 4.5˚ – 6.2˚ 5.6˚ – 9.7˚ with her husband. Little is known This relationship later became known about her background, but her % ↑ precipitation 51” 2 – 7% 4 – 12% 5 – 15% as “the greenhouse effect,” because the two-page report, “Circumstances atmosphere traps heat in the same way a Heat waves 1 3 – 4 5 – 7 6 – 9 affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” explained experiments she had greenhouse does. And we need that heat; Days over 90˚ 10 26 – 31 39 – 52 44 – 76 done to measure the variation in the for starters, it keeps the oceans from absorption of radiant energy by gases freezing solid. But the more carbon we re- Sea-level rise Current 1 – 9 ” 5 – 27 ” 10 – 54 ” in the atmosphere. It also included her lease into the atmosphere, the more heat speculation that increasing the amount the atmosphere traps, and the hotter the 100-year flood 0% probability ↑ 20 – 50% ↑ 70 – 90% ↑140 – 610% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere earth becomes. Source: Responding to Climate Change in New York State ClimAID Report (2011, 2014) for Region 5, would lead to global warming. The change isn’t dramatic in the mo- which includes Dutchess and Putnam counties Graphic by Lynn Carano Scientific American praised Foote for ment. But when scientists pull up ice Although global warming affects every the wetlands and trees, the poison ivy, her experiments, which involved an cores in the Antarctic to measure carbon air pump, thermometers and glass person on earth — at last count, there are the ticks, the dirt roads. We will speak to in trapped air from as long ago as 11,000 cylinders, and noted it was “happy to years and study tree rings for growth more than 7.8 billion of us — we wanted to the innovators who are addressing how say” they had been “done by a lady.” rates, a troubling pattern becomes appar- focus on the Highlands, as best we could. we must adapt, and the activists who are ent: a slow and steady rise until the in- Fortunately, there are many people who hoping to change the conversation here, dustrial revolution, when the lines on the live here — scientists, journalists, farmers, in Washington and across the country. vid Gelber, who left a two-decade career charts that track everything bad look less naturalists, legislators, activists — who But first, to get a broader perspective, at 60 Minutes to pursue what he sees as like the gentle westerly slope up Anthony’s are able to help us better understand what I visited with three Highlands residents the story of our time, and whose reporting Nose and more like its sheer face. is happening, and will happen. who think about climate change every day: spurred him to action; and Andy Revkin, No one alive today will be around to see Over the next few weeks, we will exam- Alison Spodek, an assistant professor of who has reported on climate change for a happy ending, if there is one. If global ine the impact of climate change close to chemistry and environmental studies at 30 years for The New York Times, warming is to be stopped, it will take gen- home — including on our river, weather, Vassar College, whose battle with leuke- ProPublica and, most recently, National erations. Based on documented changes, farming and food, the wildlife we see, mia changed, and informed, her view; Da- Geographic. (continued on next page) climatologists years ago concluded the situation is a runaway train — more pre- cisely, a runaway oil train. We can only slow it down, buy some time. It’s a legacy issue, which is always a hard sell. Many of us never write a will, let alone plan for a century or more down the road. “In 2040 we will know the future of the earth, whether it’s going to warm 4 degrees or 9 or 10,” says Eban Goodstein, director of the Bard Center for Environ- mental Policy.

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