First, I’d like to repeat something I’ve typed a lot over the years: generally speaking, taking transit instead of driving alone is a good way to help reduce the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Second, it’s probably fair to say that climate change hasn’t exactly been overwhelming the headlines lately. Even with Election Day looming, the guy talking the most about climate change these days is the same guy last seen rolling around the woods and hugging a grizzly bear and/or Tom Hardy (good movie, btw).

Before we dive back into the transit-and-climate-change-thing, let’s do a quick review of the challenges ahead — especially for California and the West. I’ll try to keep the words to a minimum and let the graphics/pics do the talking…

As these chart from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show, the predictions are that we’re in for a bakeoff and we’re the ones in the oven…

Drilling down a little deeper…

As this chart shows, it has already been getting warmer, especially this century…

Question: do you really want those hot summer days to be two to six degrees hotter?

So that’s the getting warmer part. What’s that mean for us? Well….there’s the reduced snowpack, which probably means less water.

Oh yeah, and there’s pretty good evidence that glaciers in the Sierra Nevada have already shrunk between 31 and 78 percent since the early 1900s….

The Dana Glacier in Yosemite National Park. Click the pic to check out a page on glaciers in California by Hassan Basagic of Portland State University.

And, of course, reduced snowpack means less water in our reservoirs. The big view for the Western U.S., via the U.S. EPA:

The narrower view…here’s what Castaic Lake north of Santa Clarita looked like in summer 2015:

Photo by Steve Hymon.

Coastal erosion and flooding isn’t expected to be as pronounced in California as other low-lying parts of the world, but it could mess with the San Francisco Bay Delta, the source of much of our region’s water and the source of the water in Castaic Lake…

The California Aqueduct carries water to So Cal from the San Francisco Bay Delta. Photo by Steve Hymon.

Some reports have even cited the threat to the country’s largest ports, including our port…

By most accounts, there will be impacts on wildlife…and there’s evidence that birds have already shifted to northern environs…

A UC Davis study found that of 121 native fish species in California, “82 percent are likely to be driven to extinction or very low numbers as climate change speeds the decline of already depleted populations.” That includes the southern steelhead trout, which is native to SoCal but has been threatened for years by a number of factors:

Scientists fear the American pika will be, so to speak, pushed off the top of the mountains in places due to higher temps and reduced snow cover.

An American Pika in the Sierra Nevada. Photo by Marshal Hedin, via Flickr creative commons.

Climate change has also been blamed for helping bark beetles spread further and kill more trees in drought-stressed western forests, such as the San Bernardino National Forest…

Photo: U.S. Forest Service.

Climate change could lead to a longer wildfire season with more intense wildfires that cause more property damage and destroy more vital habitat.

Wildfires in Duarte and Azusa burn last summer as seen from my office in the Metro building. Photo by Steve Hymon.

So that’s a quick, depressing overview — and I didn’t even bother to mention the loss of towns and cities, threats to world agriculture, the spread of horrible diseases and the loss of ecosystems that support so many cherished species, not to mention those we barely know about or understand.

Look…I get it. Predicting the future is hard. Maybe it’s impossible. Climate change can turn out worse than expected — or maybe something that we can adapt to without too many problems. That’s the thing. We just don’t know, although we can take some pretty educated guesses what may happen next.

I know this isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. When I’ve written about global warming in the past, it’s fair to say that reader interest is usually on the small side. But here’s the thing. Metro is in the transportation business. The transportation business is a big culprit in global warming. And within that realm, Metro offers products that can help you reduce your reliance on fossil fuels, which are the big culprit when it comes to climate change….

Oil tankers off the So Cal coast during the Santa Ana winds. Photo by Steve Hymon.

And how to reduce your carbon footprint and greenhouse gases emissions….hint hint, it’s the big long shiny thing at right….more about that in part two of this post.

Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.