FILE - In this Sept 18, 2012, file photo, New Hampshire Republican Congressman Charles Bass speaks during a debate in Manchester, N.H. The scene playing out on Capitol Hill is a familiar one as lawmakers with competing ideologies wage an 11th-hour battle to avert a predictable crisis. Rep. Charlie Bass, a New Hampshire Republican who lost his re-election bid last month, says it’s unclear whether his GOP colleagues will “face the reality that the president, at least at this point, is not going to accept anything other than a tax rate increase.” (AP Photo/The Union Leader, David Lane, Pool, File)

HOOKSET, N.H. (AP) — Fear and frustration course through the lunch crowd at Robie's Country Store and Deli, a popular outpost 500 miles from where Washington is again locked in tense negotiations over taxes and spending as a critical deadline looms.

"I'm worried," Lorraine Cadren of nearby Manchester says between bites of her chicken sandwich. Her doubt in the nation's elected leaders is palpable: "I'm not sure what's going to come out of Washington next." Not that she has the time to pay much attention; the 64-year-old is unemployed and preoccupied with finding a new job as Christmas approaches.

A few tables away, John Pfeifle shares Cadren's angst while trying to enjoy his $6.99 chicken parmesan special.

"Somebody's gotta have some smarts," says the 63-year-old business owner, complaining that both President Barack Obama and House Republicans seem willing to allow the nation to go over the "fiscal cliff," triggering broad tax increases and massive spending cuts that economists warn could lead to another recession.

"I have no faith at all they'll do the right thing," Pfeifle said of Congress.

And why would these voters have confidence in Washington?

The scene playing out on Capitol Hill is a familiar one as lawmakers with competing ideologies wage an 11th-hour battle to avert a predictable crisis. This one comes just a year after an equally divided Washington nearly let the country default on its loan obligations — a debt-ceiling debate that contributed to the electorate's deep lack of faith in their elected leaders and a drop in the nation's credit rating.

Evidence of Congress' plummeting popularity is everywhere.

From New Hampshire diners to Colorado coffee shops, weary residents report widespread concern. They relate the debate in Washington over their tax dollars with their own lives: average Americans who are struggling every day to make ends meet. And already distracted by the holidays and tired of politics after a bitter presidential campaign, they are calling on Washington to get its act together.

"It's pathetic. Nobody's doing their job," said Laura Hager, a retiree from Lancaster, Pa. "The rest of the country is being held hostage to this entire situation."

She said the uncertainty makes it difficult to shape a personal financial plan; she can't imagine what business leaders must be going through. "Nobody can plan. Nobody knows what they'll do," she said.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., warned that the public's disgust with Congress would reach new heights if lawmakers and the White House fail to reach an accord before the year-end deadline.

"Ninety percent disapproval rating is going to go up to 99 percent disapproval," the senator said at a panel discussion last week in Washington on the fiscal cliff's impact on businesses.

Warner overstated Congress' unpopularity, although not by much.

A recent Associated Press-GfK poll found that 74 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job; just 23 percent approve. The figures are virtually unchanged from June and slightly above Congress' recent low point of 12 percent approval during the debt ceiling debate in August 2011.

Some voters are trying to ignore the debate altogether, although near-constant news coverage is making that difficult, especially as Obama and his Republican opponents work to rally their supporters.

In a campaign-style event Monday in Michigan, the heart of industrial America, Obama warned that he "won't compromise" on his demand that the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes. Polls find that most voters agree with the president's deficit-cutting plan to raise tax rates on income over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples, although House Republicans are reluctant to agree.

The conservative group Crossroads GPS is running television ads across the country describing Obama's solution as "a huge tax increase" with "no real spending reforms." ''Call President Obama and tell him it's time to show us a balanced plan," the ad says.

Most voters interviewed in recent days are calling for an immediate compromise and seem willing to raise taxes on the wealthy so long as the middle class is protected.

There is a vague sense that the "fiscal cliff" is more serious than other recent Capitol Hill clashes. But barely a month after the presidential contest ended, most people say they're not following the daily developments that consume Washington.

In a Denver coffee shop, interior designer Roxann Lloyd, 42, is mystified by the sound and fury out of Washington over the cliff.

"I don't think they have any idea what a big deal is to an average person," she said. "I'm just ignoring it."

Lloyd said she isn't surprised by the partisan bickering over the issue. "I don't feel like they are really looking out for us," she said of Congress.

John Baker, 65, a Denver psychologist, said he had little faith in Congress' ability to fix the problem: "I don't think Congress can fix a flat tire."

"It's a typical Washington, 'Let's hit the panic button and keep people scared so they will let us do what we want to do,'" Baker said in a downtown Denver Starbucks. "Ultimately, it will be fixed but not until a lot of pockets are lined."

It's unclear whether members of Congress are hearing the message.

Rep. Charlie Bass, a New Hampshire Republican who lost his re-election bid last month, says it's unclear whether his GOP colleagues will "face the reality that the president, at least at this point, is not going to accept anything other than a tax rate increase."

A stalemate would result in "painful uncertainty," Bass said, offering his caucus a bit of advice: "We best get on with it — get it done."

Back at Robie's, store owner Debbie Chouinard says she's burned out from election season and "tired of all the bull."

"I honestly haven't been paying attention," she said while feeding her 2-year-old granddaughter lunch during a brief lull. "People should be working together to get this country going."

___

Associated Press writers Nicholas Riccardi in Denver and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO — Smoke from Arctic wildfires may have contributed to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet during the 2012 melt season, according to new research to be presented at a scientific conference in San Francisco on Friday. The research, led by Jason Box of Ohio State University, provides the first satellite-based evidence that smoke from Arctic wildfires is reaching the Greenland ice sheet, where it acts as an amplifier of the warming already occurring from manmade emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.

Aerial photo of the Greenland ice sheet surface from mid-August, 2005. The dark areas are concentrations of light absorbing impurities. This example the impurities are some combination of dust, soot, and microbial activity.
Click to enlarge the image.
Credit: Jason Box.

Wildfire smoke contains dark-colored soot and other particles which, when deposited onto the Greenland ice sheet, cause the ice and snow surfaces to darken and absorb more incoming solar radiation, and therefore melt more readily. Box said that wildfire smoke may be responsible for a dramatic expansion in the portion of Greenland that experiences melting during the summer season.

During July of this year, melting was observed even at the highest elevations in Greenland, with the melt extent reaching a record 97 percent of the ice sheet on a single day. This is nearly four times greater than the typical 25 percent average melt extent observed during the 1981 to 2010 period, according to a separate Arctic report released on Wednesday.

As was first reported by Climate Central in June, Box observed a record low in the reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet during the 2012 melt season, which he attributed partially to the influence of dark-colored particles on the bright, highly reflective snow and ice cover. He and his colleagues have found that the reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet has declined by 6 percent in the last decade, which is helping to cause melting even in the coldest areas of the island. However, exactly how much of that decline is attributable to soot from wildfires is not yet clear.

Profile of the atmosphere above Greenland's ice sheet, showing areas of what researchers say is wildfire smoke.
Click to enlarge the image.
Credit: Ohio State/NASA CALIPSO satellite.

"Soot is an extremely powerful light absorber," Box said in a press release. "It settles over the ice and captures the sun's heat. That's why increasing tundra wildfires have the potential to accelerate the melting in Greenland."

A comprehensive annual report on the state of the Arctic, which was released on Wednesday, found that global warming is causing an increase in Arctic wildfires, as vegetation cover increases and thunderstorms, which are a key ignition source for wildfires, become more numerous during the Arctic summer. The report found that conditions have been particularly favorable for Alaskan wildfires during the past several years.

The high reflectivity of snow is one factor that has kept Greenland so cold by bouncing incoming heat from the sun back out toward space. But with several factors combining to increase temperatures in Greenland and reduce the reflectivity of the snow and ice cover, the ice sheet is becoming less efficient at reflecting that heat energy, and as a consequence melt seasons are becoming more severe.

Freshly fallen snow reflects up to 84 percent of incoming sunlight, but during the warm season the reflectivity declines as the ice grains within the snowpack change shape and size. In addition, once snow cover melts completely it often reveals underlying ice that has been darkened by dust and other particles, whose surface absorbs more solar energy, promoting heating.

Greenland ice melt extent trends, showing the extensive melt in 2012.
Credit: 2012 Arctic Report Card.

Greenland is the world's largest island, and it holds 680,000 cubic miles of ice. If all of this ice were to melt — which, luckily won't happen anytime soon — the oceans would rise by more than 20 feet.

Drew Shindell, a NASA climate researcher who was not involved in this research, said there are still many open questions about how wildfires are contributing to Greenland melt. "The link between fires, black carbon [soot] and melting seems quite reasonable, but I too would want to see some more measurements to know if the contribution from this was important or not," Shindell said in an email message. "It'd be good to see how variations in fires from year-to-year correspond with variations in melting to reinforce their claim."

To find evidence of soot deposition from these fires, Box and his colleagues, including Thomas Painter of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and graduate student McKenzie Skiles of the University of California, Los Angeles, first used thermal images from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to spot large Arctic wildfires. They then calculated possible smoke particle trajectories, which showed that smoke could be reaching Greenland, particularly from fires in Alaska and parts of Canada. They then used those trajectories to scrutinize thermal imagery from another NASA satellite to pinpoint sooty aerosols over Greenland.

In order to get an accurate measure of the extent of the soot particle contribution to the Greenland melt, it's also neccesary to obtain ground-based evidence. To accomplish this task, Box is planning an expedition to the ice sheet in 2013, called the Dark Snow Project. He said it would be a funded through crowdsourcing, making it the first such scientific ice expedition of its kind.

Box has been an outspoken advocate of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, going as far as taking part in protestsagainst the Keystone XL oil pipeline at the White House in 2011.

Related Content:
Warming Driving Arctic Into New, Volatile State
Greenland Ice Sheet Nearing Critical 'Tipping Point'
The Story Behind Record Ice Loss in Greenland

Follow the author on Twitter @afreedma or @ClimateCentral. We're also on Facebook & other social networks.

• Posted in Causes, Greenhouse Gases, Impacts, Water, Snow & Ice, Oceans & Coasts, Sea Level, Landscapes, Global, Arctic & Greenland
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By Autumn Spanne, The Daily Climate

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on climate change impacts to Colombia's cloud forests and high mountain ecosystems.

BOGOTÁ – Half a mile above this city of nearly 8 million is a rugged, fog-shrouded world, silent except for the trickle of water and whispering wind pushing through the treeless tundra.

This is Chingaza, a national park 40 miles from Bogotá, in the eastern range of the Colombian Andes.

Deforestation & climate change high in the Andes can adversely impact Colombia's cities far below.
Credit: Autumn Spanne.

Known as páramos, these ecosystems at more than 11,000 feet above sea level exist only in Central and South America, the majority in Colombia. Páramos resemble a sort of alpine archipelago, each a link in the chain of distinct island ecosystems that have evolved in isolation to produce plants found nowhere else on the planet. They play a crucial role in maintaining a reliable water supply for millions of people in major cities like Bogotá and Medellín. And along with the forests below, they protect those cities and the surrounding countryside from massive flooding.

One of the wettest countries on earth, Colombia has two rainy seasons. The second of the year officially began in September. For the past two years, however, some parts of the country have had little respite from a destructive deluge during what are traditionally drier times of year.

The Culprit

La Niña — the pattern of climate variability characterized by cold ocean surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific — has been blamed as the immediate culprit. But scientists believe climate change is also a factor in the flooding that has affected three quarters of Colombia in the past two years, cost billions of dollars, and left hundreds dead.

Photo of Bogotá flood response.
Credit: Santiago La Rotta/flickr.

As climate change converges with human encroachment in these mountains, the degradation of high Andean ecosystems is accelerating. And there are growing concerns that these costly floods will become a chronic problem even if climate change leads to sustained drought in the region.

Páramos and cloud forests work as a finely tuned piece of ecological engineering that manages the flow of water from the high mountains to the lakes and rivers below. The páramos act as a sponge, absorbing and then conducting enormous quantities down the mountainside to the cloud forests. From there the water is further filtered and directed into rivers and reservoirs that quench the thirst of major urban areas without eroding the soil — crucial in protecting against flooding.

The annual precipitation in Chingaza, which provides about 80 percent of Bogotá's water, approaches four meters, or more than 13 feet, in some areas. Not all páramos are as wet as Chingaza, but they all have a vital role in both storing water and managing its flow.

Protecting Lowlands

"Well-preserved high-altitude lakes and peatlands help to protect lowlands from flooding by slowing down streamflows. After water purification, one of the most important regulating services of páramo... environments is flood control," said Daniel Ruiz, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Antioquia School of Engineering and researcher at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

One of the most prominent features of páramos are large, silvery-green plants called espletia, more commonly known as frailejón. The plant is ubiquitous, dotting the chilly landscape in some places as far as the eye can see. Its spiky clusters of leaves, reminiscent of some cacti, are covered in soft little hairs that catch moisture from the fog and funnel it into moss-covered soils that can hold several times their weight in water.

There are a variety of theories about how rising air temperature and altered precipitation patterns might affect these ecosystems in the future. But change has already arrived.

A scene from the Páramos.
Credit: Autumn Spanne.

In 2011, the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment released a joint report assessing climate change and biodiversity in the Andes. The report notes that the region is not just facing threats from future climate change, but already undergoing "significant shifts in temperatures, rainfall regimes and seasonal weather patterns."

The extreme, prolonged rainy seasons in 2010 and 2011 offer a preview of the damage such shifts may bring to urban areas in the future. In Medellín, heavy rains created rivers in the city center and led to devastating landslides. In one case, more than 100 people were killed or missing after an avalanche of mud buried dozens of homes on a hillside above the city.

More Flooding

The Bogotá River, choked with sediment and trash, overflowed its banks and flooded low-lying neighborhoods in and around the nation's capital. All told, more than three million Colombians — about seven percent of the total population — were displaced or suffered significant damage to their homes in 2011 alone as a result of flooding, according the World Bank.

Models predict that warming in the Andes is likely to contribute both to more flooding and more drought in the region as mountain environments change. According to the Inter-American Institute report, the average temperature of the Andes has increased by 0.7°C over the past 60 years. That's similar to the global average, but high altitude ecosystems like páramos and cloud forests in the tropical Andes are particularly sensitive to warming — much like coral reefs, glaciers and polar regions.

Ruiz, who contributed to the report, noted that an analysis of weather records at one páramo research station showed increases in minimum temperatures were almost twice that of lower elevations, while increases in maximum temperatures jumped to nearly three times the average at lower elevations.

Climate change research here is in its early stages, and scientists are still teasing out which changes in the high mountains are the result of climate change and which are more likely the result of other human-caused changes, namely, agriculture, ranching and mining. Research suggests a combination of both is to blame for increasing temperatures and declines in key species, including some frailejónes.

A scene from the Páramos.
Credit: Autumn Spanne.

Conrado Tobón, a hydrologist at the National University of Colombia in Medellín, studies how climate change is altering the water cycle of high Andean ecosystems. In 2005, his team began studying the eco-hydrology of páramos and high Andean forests that are crucial to the water supply of Bogotá, Medellín and Quito, Ecuador.

Confirming Results

The team took minute-by-minute measurements of conditions like precipitation, temperature, wind, evaporation rate and water content of the soil. The goal is to do a complete accounting of the movement of water from the time it hit the surface of a plant and passed through moss and soil, until it flowed out of the basin and into the network of high forest streams on its way to the lowlands.

They also used data on precipitation in Colombia from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to model changes under different temperature and precipitation scenarios. The researchers modeled for páramos degraded by agriculture and mining as well as protected ones like Chingaza. Tobón's results confirm what other models are showing: Precipitation will likely decrease in the páramos and high Andean forests, perhaps even leading to a sustained drought.

But overall drier conditions don't necessarily mean less risk of flooding — quite the opposite, in fact. At his own research stations in the northern Andes, Ruiz noticed increasing incidences of extreme rains, which are likely to cause more runoff and soil erosion. It's a perfect recipe for flooding.

"Dry periods are getting longer and wet seasons are getting more intense," he said. "Páramos are thus getting washed by intense, short-lived thunderstorms and downpours that cannot be handled by vegetation adapted to drizzles."

Lifting the Cloud Veil

Local climate changes are partly to blame. The conversion of mountain forest to pasture and croplands has raised temperatures in the region, prompting a lifting of the cloud level — enough to leave some cloud forests and páramos below the fog, and increasing solar radiation. This decrease in cloud cover is one of the biggest contributors to climatic stress in the páramos, according to Ruiz.

The convergence of local and global changes compounds the impacts on fragile but important high mountain ecosystems. Increased radiation and warmer temperatures cause plants normally found at lower elevations to move upslope. Invasive plant, animal and insect species also migrate, disrupting the delicate biological machinery that makes páramos and high forests function as a fine-tuned water storage and distribution system.

Instead of precipitation in the form of fog, páramos and forests receive more precipitation as rain. This affects the plants adapted to collecting moisture from fog and the soil, because they are unaccustomed to heavier rain droplets. Those heavier raindrops also compact the soil, causing it to absorb less water and increasing runoff and sediment, which clog rivers and contribute significantly to lowland flooding.

Awareness Grows

As awareness of climate change and other kinds of environmental degradation grows, the Colombian government is starting to respond. One example is a collaboration between the national government, the city of Bogotá and the environmental organization Conservation International on a páramo restoration project.

The plan calls for limiting local environmental degradation in protected areas, like Chingaza, through the creation of a 1.5 million-acre conservation corridor connecting the park with the nearby páramos of Guerrero and Sumapaz, the largest páramo in the world. It also seeks better protection of privately-owned lands in the vicinity that are being cleared for cattle ranching and potato farming.

Part of that scheme includes training for local farmers and ranchers in using more sustainable practices. Conservation International is developing a forest carbon project, using the sale of carbon credits to compensate landowners for setting aside portions of their land for conservation and forest restoration.

"We understand that these ecosystems are offering important services — not only the supply of water, but the regulation of water," said Patricia Bejarano-Mora, land-use planning coordinator for Conservation International's Colombia office.

"At this point maybe the solution is not works of engineering, like building dykes, but conservation of forests and eco-hydrology," she added. "Policies are beginning to recognize that."

The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news service covering climate change, and a Climate Central content partner.

• Posted in Impacts, Climate, Extremes, Flooding, Water, Flora & Fauna, Landscapes, International
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