Climate Change

East Hampton Town’s forests are under assault from multiple species, the town board was told on Tuesday, and while invasive insects are a major component of the ongoing threat to them, “more aggressive deer management” was the recommendation to alleviate forest degradation.

The bright blue slashes of paint stand out like neon under a black light, marking the trunks in a stand of healthy pine trees along both sides of Cranberry Hole Road on Napeague that will be sacrificed to protect the overall health of the region’s forests as the southern pine beetle continues its destructive eastward march.

The abnormally low water table coupled with the spread of invasive species are combining to threaten the long-term health of the East End’s coastal plain ponds.

Bird populations have declined steeply over the last 50 years, but the North American Bird Conservation Initiative's "State of the Birds 2022" report, published in early October, balanced the gloom with some success stories and offered strategies for future action which would "bring birds back."

Some 3,200 pitch pines on Napeague were being felled this week, victims of the southern pine beetle infestation that has killed thousands of trees in East Hampton Town since 2017.

A microscopic wormlike creature is rapidly killing American and European beech trees on the East End, and there is not much to be done about it. Beech leaf disease appears to have started in the United States in Ohio sometime before 2012. By 2019, it was on Long Island.

If the forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center are right, the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season will be the seventh consecutive year of above-average hurricane activity, with 14 to 21 named storms, three to six of which could become major hurricanes.

The currently projected range of sea level rise “will transform East Hampton into a series of islands with permanent submergence of low-lying areas as early as 2070.” That is the ominous conclusion that leads a draft of the town’s Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Plan, issued last week.

The southern pine beetle infestation that has killed thousands of pitch pines in East Hampton Town since 2017 is continuing its destructive march, with thousands more dead and dying trees identified this year.

The threat of sea level rise is greater than that presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's own dire reports on climate change, a renowned and controversial scientist told a small group in Sagaponack last week, but similarly divisive proposals to combat anthropogenic climate change would be both safe and effective, he said.

Summer water temperatures are rising in East Hampton, stressing organisms including bivalves and seagrasses. Meanwhile, the water quality in Wainscott Pond is rapidly worsening, with 2020 measurements of a toxin "unlike anything we'd ever seen," the town trustees were told on Monday.

The momentum building for meaningful action on climate change on the national level was reflected in East Hampton on Tuesday, when the town board heard, and responded enthusiastically to, a recommendation from its energy sustainability committee to declare a climate emergency, something 1,874 jurisdictions in 33 countries have already done.