Michigan Buckeyes, Texas Buckeyes: Coalition Says Climate Change Impacts All Habitats

While providing no time frame, a coalition of environmental and sporting groups gathered at the Statehouse Friday to say the Buckeye State could lose its mascot to the "Team Up North" if the northward shift of habitat from global warming is not stopped.

"No Buckeye in the Buckeye State? The Michigan Buckeyes? What in the Woody Hayes is going on?" asked Tom Bullock of the Pew Environment Group, one of eight organizations supporting the "Save the Buckeye" campaign.

The effort includes National Wildlife Federation, League of Ohio Sportsmen, Ohio Environmental Council, American Lung Association of Ohio, Ohio Farmers Union, Audubon Ohio and The Izaac Walton League, and drew support from Rep. Dan Stewart (D-Columbus) Friday. The coalition says unchecked global warming could threaten Ohio's forests, wildlife and waterways, and has called on the next president and Congress to pass legislation in 2009 that would cut greenhouses linked to global warming 80 percent by 2050.

The group has taken its cause to the streets by launching an advertising campaign centered around the following billboard: "Michigan Buckeyes? Global Warming is Sending Ohio's Symbol North." One of the billboards is already posted near Columbus' Buckeye Hall of Fame Café, where OSU football Coach Jim Tressel holds his weekly season press conferences.

The native symbol of the Buckeye State is actually not among the top 10 or even top 15 tree species most threatened by global warming in Ohio and other parts of the eastern United States, according to the League of Ohio Sportsmen, the state affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation. Those trees include the sugar maple, black cherry, white ash, American elm, red maple, white Oak, American beech, yellow poplar, slippery elm and black walnut.

State Forester Dr. David Lytle, chief of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Division of Forestry and former ecologist with the U.S. Center for Research on Ecosystem Change, attended the press conference and said the real debate is not about the relative impact of global warming on any one tree, but rather Ohio's larger habitat.

"Each and every tree species and each and every forest is going to be affected by climate change," he said, acknowledging at the same time that the Ohio Buckeye itself already grows as far north as Michigan and as far south and west as Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma and central Texas, and accommodates temperatures ranging from -20 degrees to 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bullock said there can be no confusion, however, about the effect of fossil fuels on global warming, pointing to a 2007 report by the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," an international group of scientists that concluded with 90 percent certainty that "human-generated greenhouse gases" account for most of the global warming in the past 50 years.

Jim Wentz of the League of Ohio Sportsmen offered a view from the ground:

"Ohio sportsmen know Ohio's climate because we've spent decades in duck blinds, tree stands and fishing boats. We see today that climate change is already disrupting Ohio's forests, fish and wildlife," he said. "We're concerned about the buckeye and also about Lake Erie fish, birds, game animals and commercial trees like the sugar maple. And we're concerned about the livelihoods of people who work in hunting, fishing and forestry."

Bullock acknowledged there are some researchers who continue to question the human link to climate change.

"I think you can still find scientists who debate whether cigarettes cause cancer," he observed.

The coalition said continued global warming will lead to the following:

Greater drought and increasingly severe storms and floods.
Altered growing ranges for agriculture.
Falling water levels in Lake Erie and rising temperatures in all waterways, affecting fish populations.
Expanding, shifting insect populations, affecting plants and wildlife.

Director of Advocacy Shelly Kiser of the American Lung Association of Ohio expanded that list, describing a reciprocal relationship between fossil fuels and global warming. She said carbon gases produce climate change as well as air pollution, while rising temperatures aggravate the build-up of ozone and soot in the atmosphere – all dangerous to humans and habitats.