Md., Va. Set Action Plans for Changes in Climate

To head this off, the state must eliminate most of the greenhouse gases coming from tailpipes and smokestacks, the Maryland Commission on Climate Change said in a report. That will be a tall order because Maryland's emissions are on the rise.

In Richmond yesterday, environmentalists were pressing a Virginia climate-change panel to recommend emissions cutbacks.

The states are in similar positions: Both are starting to gauge the threat from rising temperatures and making response plans.

Maryland and Virginia are struggling with a problem whose worst effects will be in the future and with solutions that seem to require enormous changes implemented over decades.

"It's sort of the transformation from, 'We've got a problem,' " said Shari T. Wilson, Maryland secretary of the environment. "We're shifting to, 'Here's the good news,' " she said, which is that solutions are available.

Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) established the Maryland commission, which includes legislators and state agency directors, in April 2007. Its "Climate Action Plan," released yesterday, showed temperatures slowly changing a state that, ecologically and politically, has long sat on the border of North and South.

Annual average temperatures in the state could rise by three degrees by mid-century, the report said. After that, the warming could be more drastic, producing dangerous summertime heat waves and more than 24 days a year with temperatures topping 100 degrees.

"Like Phoenix, but with humidity," said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

The report also found that, with more than 3,000 miles of winding coastline, Maryland "is poised in a very precarious position" as sea levels rise. The problem of rising seas is compounded by geological processes that are causing the land around the Chesapeake Bay to sink.

The commission said waters might rise three feet by 2100, which would flood 200 square miles of land. On the Eastern Shore, part of low-lying Dorchester County might be lost, including waterside towns and some of the East Coast's best migrating bird habitats, the report said.

"In terms of the waterfowl, it would have a catastrophic impact," said Court Stevenson, a professor at the environmental science center. "They couldn't exist," he said, if the area's marshes became open water.

The report found that increasing temperatures could also cause a shift in the plants and animals that dominate Maryland's forests and the Chesapeake. Maple, beech and birch trees could be supplanted by pines. And the iconic Baltimore Oriole could depart, replaced by southern birds.

To stave off the most disastrous effects of climate change, the panel recommended that Maryland begin reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. The pollutants, which come from cars, boats, planes and power plants, have been increasing steadily in the state over the past decade.

By 2012, the commission said, emissions should be cut by 10 percent, compared with their 2006 levels. State officials said they think they are on track toward this goal.

But both they and environmental activists said they weren't sure how to reach the commission's most ambitious goal: a 90 percent reduction in emissions by 2050.

"I think it's going to require a significant transformation in the way we live," said Frank O'Donnell of the District-based Clean Air Watch. "We're going to have to completely change the ways we create and use energy," he said, to rely on fuel sources that do not produce emissions.

In Virginia, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) has pledged to reduce emissions to 2000 levels by 2025. At a meeting yesterday of the state's climate change commission, activists said his goal does not go far enough.

The goal "falls way short of what is necessary to avoid the worst impacts from global warming," Glen Besa, director of the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, said in a statement yesterday. "The commission needs [to] establish science-based targets for emission reductions and not accept targets that may be merely politically acceptable."

Besa's group, along with a coalition of other environmental organizations, also called for a moratorium on coal-fired power plants in the state. These groups fervently oppose a $1.8 billion plant being built in southwest Virginia by Dominion, which Kaine has endorsed.

The Virginia commission is expected to make its final report in December. State officials have said that they, too, are worried about rising waters.

In a preliminary report this week, the commissioners concluded that Alexandria and Hampton Roads are at risk of increased flood damage because of sea level increases.

"Virginia is a very low-lying state," L. Preston Bryant Jr., Virginia's secretary of natural resources and chairman of the climate commission, said in a telephone interview. "We have 3,500 miles of coastline and tidal shoreline [where] we have literally hundreds of billions of dollars of military, commercial and industrial infrastructure. We need to be concerned about that."