Climate Change

CAMPO, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization that coordinates regional transportation planning for Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis, and Williamson Counties, has committed our region to a transportation development plan that, for the second time in ten years, assumes excessively aggressive traffic growth.

How do we know that CAMPO was overly optimistic with its projections for the 2030 and 2035 plans? The 2035 Plan projects future growth in traffic almost identically to the 2030 Plan. But actual traffic counts and total miles traveled, on average, are flat or actually falling. (See accompanying chart, “TxDOT Traffic Counts.”)

Data from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), indicates that traffic volume has not increased since the turn of the 21st century. This has occurred even in the face of significant

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates federal research on environmental changes and their implications for society. The program began as a presidential initiative in 1989 during the Reagan–Bush era and called for “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program that will assist the nation and the world in the understanding, assessment, prediction and response to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”

The implications of this report are beyond extreme. Austin (Central Texas) normally has 12 days of 100-degree-plus heat per summer based on temperature records that go back to 1854. In the next 80 to 90 years, Austin is projected to average between 90 and 120 days of 100-degree plus heat every year. (See accompanying chart, Number of Days Over 1000F.) The Sonoran Desert Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, only averages 87 days over 100 degrees.

The Sonoran Desert is a traditional thorn and gravel desert with little to no water, blistering temperatures and, except for the natural inhabitants of the desert, is totally inhospitable to life. Austin's summers will be a third more extreme than those of the Sonoran Desert and about ten times more extreme than the normal Texas Hill Country summers.

Most life, as we know it in the Hill Country, will be dead by mid century. The transition to a thorn and gravel desert will be well underway. Today the changes have already begun.

Two things complicate the issue. There is a simple scientific concept that says scientists are conservative in their work. This is the “publish or perish” concept. Simply put, a scientist must be absolutely certain about the results of his or her discoveries or they will not be able to publish their papers in the academic journals. If a scientist is found to be wrong after their results are published, the journals will be much more cautious about publishing that scientist’s work in the future. A scientist’s work is therefore conservative to minimize the risk of being wrong.

The second complicating factor is that the rate of change has increased. Not long after the turn of the century, impacts of warming started increasing faster. A quote from the USGCRP Report states the obvious “Some of the changes have been faster than previous assessments have projected.”

The next graphic shows the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide (as carbon) in gigatons, from the USGCRP Report. The colored lines are the computer model’s projections. The black line with the circles shows actual