Warning that the water is rising in the Chesapeake Bay, scientists and activists urged Tuesday that Congress act to reduce climate-warming pollution that threatens to flood bayfront communities and worsen the fish-suffocating "dead zones" that plague North America's largest estuary.
With a House vote possible Friday on a bill that would seek to curtail greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, two natural resources subcommittees held a field hearing Tuesday at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater to learn more about what global warming might mean for coastal regions like the Chesapeake.
The bay's water level has risen about a foot in the past century, scientists said, and the average temperature has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past four decades.
"Here today, we've seen major changes already," said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
Anson "Tuck" Hines, director of the Smithsonian research center, said warming waters might be behind the dieback in recent years of eelgrass beds in the lower bay that are nurseries for the Chesapeake's blue crabs.
Another foot or two increase in sea level by the end of this century - on the low end of climate-change predictions - would submerge wildlife-rich marshlands and flood low-lying cities such as Annapolis and Baltimore, witnesses predicted. Unless action is taken to curb greenhouse gases substantially over the next 40 years, Boesch warned, "it's too late" to stop many of the predicted changes.
The traditional fishing communities that are clinging to Smith and Tangier islands could be forced to move to the mainland even sooner as rising waters engulf their homes. If that happens, warned Stuart Parnes, head of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, the last living remnants of the region's heritage and culture could be lost.
Rising sea levels already are a threat to North Beach, the bayfront town in Calvert County. Mayor Michael Bojokles said the 2,000-resident community continues to lose its namesake beach at the rate of more than 5 feet a year. Climate change also threatens to make it harder to clean up the nutrient pollution fouling the Chesapeake, said Bernie Fowler, a former state senator from Calvert County who has campaigned for decades to restore the clarity of bay waters to what it was in his youth in the 1930s.
"Don't let global warming dry up your hopes and scare you off," Fowler, 85, urged the lawmakers. "The eyes of the world are watching us."
Arizona Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, chairman of the national parks, forests and public lands subcommittee, said the hearing's focus on the Chesapeake suggested to him that the climate bill might need to be strengthened.
