MEDICINE&SCIENCE
Baltimoresun.com/marylandhealth
with actual data. They said they hope this helps people better understand how climate is changing and how their actions contribute to those environmental shifts.
For example, residents might remember heavy rainfalls like the one that devastated downtown Ellicott City last summer. But they don’t know that such extreme weather has translated to a significant change in climate — an increase from about 39 inches of annual rainfall in 1920 to more than 45 inches in 2000.
The researchers have translated the complex and dense graphs of the changes into more simplified displays that show clear upward trends in precipitation levels and so-called “tropical nights” as well as a decline in frost days.
“Organisms and people feel weather; they don’t really feel climate,” Coles said.
Those graphs now appear on a website the researchers want to promote, at www.chesapeakedata.com/changingchesa peake.
And they will be highlighted in a new chapter of the Chesapeake Bay Ecosystem Atlas, an online textbook written by a Virginia consultant and used in middle- and high-school classrooms around the bay region.
The book traces the bay’s history, starting from a meteorite strike 35 million years ago, and details its complex food web, from microscopic plankton to rockfish. The researchers’ work is forming the basis of a fifth and final chapter that will show students the effects of climate change on the bay, said Dave Jasinski, vice president of Chesapeake Environmental Communications in Richmond, Va., and the book’s author.
He said the data can help people realize that global warming isn’t hypothetical or far off.
“People always think of climate change as, ‘That’s something I’ll worry about tomorrow,’ ” Jasinski said. “It’s not an eventual thing. It’s a now thing. It’s an ‘already has happened’ thing.”
The researchers hope to disseminate their findings through the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, a part of NOAA that has a lab in Oxford on the Eastern Shore, and through other NOAA offices, including the estuarine research reserves. In Maryland, the reserves include the Anita C. Leight Estuary Center on Otter Point Creek in Abingdon, the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary on the Patuxent River near Upper Marlboro, and a reserve on Monie Bay near Deal Island in Somerset County.
And the scientists plan to explain and continue studying the ways the climate changes they observed are affecting the bay.
Scientific papers they expect to release soon examine ways the warming trends could allow tick-borne diseases and harmful Vibrio bacteria to thrive, and how they could hurt larval fish. Another paper scrutinizes precipitation changes to understand how much more often downpours are occurring and how extreme they are, perhaps better informing agricultural practices or urban management of stormwater runoff.
James McGarry, Maryland and District of Columbia policy director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, was not surprised by the findings. He said the research provides helpful information as climate policy is being discussed in Washington, where President Donald Trump’s administration is challenging the environmental platform of his predecessor, and in Annapolis, where politicians are more eager to pass greenhouse gas limits or renewable-energy incentives.
“It’s sad that we talk about climate change usually in the context of something bad,” McGarry said. “The good news is that Maryland is, compared to the rest of the country, more informed about climate change.”