No more white pines in southern Maine. No maples, red spruce or balsam fir either.

A foot of the state’s coastline will be reclaimed by the sea.

Weather that resembles something just north of Virginia or Georgia – hardly ski country – will become the norm here.

Those are scientific forecasts by the New England Regional Assessment and others for 2100 – less than a lifetime away – if nothing changes, if the Earth continues to warm.

Evidence of the warming is already here.

Records show the average New England temperature is up almost one degree over the last century, thanks to climate change and global warming – considered a significant increase.

An East Dixfield maple syrup producer says he’s tapping one week earlier than his grandfather did 40 years ago. Maine and New England don’t own the syrup market anymore – Canada’s king now, in part, because it’s colder.

Ice on Moosehead Lake breaks up five days earlier on average than it did 100 years ago.

And NERA’s report for the federal U.S. Global Change Research Program shows that nearly 15 percent less snow fell in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire over the last 50 years. Not less precipitation, less snow.

With that as the backdrop, and with the vast majority of the world’s scientists now acknowledging a global warming trend due, at least in part, to human activities, Maine is on the brink of trying to cool things down.

The state has enlisted more than 100 people – university professors, blueberry growers, automakers, legislators – to come up with a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mostly the byproduct from burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and the like are trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere.

The biggest emissions culprit here in Maine, experts say: the all-American auto. People drove 14 billion miles on Maine roads in 2000, nearly double 1980 miles, according to the Department of Transportation.

Each gallon of gas puts almost 20 pounds of (CO2) in the air.

“If you’re getting 15 miles per gallon versus 50, I think you can see you’re part of the problem,” says Barrett Rock, with the University of New Hampshire’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space and an author in the NERA report.

Ideas that the large Maine group will formally make public next month to curb climate change will be big and small, political and not.

Environmentalists’ mantra: “Everybody can do something about it.”

To keep Maine the way life should be, they say, you will have to.

From trees to tailpipes

Back in 2001, then-Gov. Angus King committed the state to reducing greenhouse gases, along with the rest of New England and eastern Canada. First goal: lower emissions to 1990 levels by 2010.

Maine was first state in the country to sign that into law last year. The state has just over five years to reduce emissions by more than 5 million tons, for a rollback to 20 million tons a year.

But every proposal that members of the broad Maine Greenhouse Gas Climate Action Plan advisory group have reached consensus on – every option they’ve quantified – won’t be enough, says Malcolm Burson, associate director at the Department of Environmental Protection.

So on Oct. 15, the DEP will toss every idea into a report for the Legislature.

Energy-efficiency standards for traffic lights. Biodiesel fuel for farm equipment. A $100-a-month tax incentive to commute. New energy-efficient home-building codes.

Among the most radical ideas: coaxing Maine’s forests to take in more carbon, and adopting new, controversial(CO2)r standards out of California.

• Maine is 85 percent forest. Trees breathe in (CO2), release oxygen back into the air and hold onto the carbon, Burson says.

When a tree is cut, or its soil and roots disturbed, carbon stored in the wood’s tissue slowly seeps into the air. For a time in the 1990s, Maine forests were giving off more carbon than they were taking in.

That can be reversed.

The goal isn’t a forest that never gets cut, he says. It’s a forest that grows a bit longer, has poor trees thinned sooner; lighter, more frequent harvests; and more softwood species planted.

The net effect could be huge, experts say: Forestry proposals combine for annual savings of 1.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases.

• Adopting new auto emissions standards out of California is the single, most cost-effective proposal on the list, says Burson.

But it’s a major wait-and-see.

Auto dealers didn’t embrace the change when Maine adopted California standards the first time around in 1997, says Lynne Cayting, the Mobile Forces Section chief at DEP. Seven states have followed California’s lead, three of them – Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey – just this year.

California’s newest changes, aimed at (CO2) in the tailpipe, could reduce vehicle emissions by 30 percent by 2020. Only, that state’s regulations won’t come out until January 2005, and the auto industry is expected to sue.

Maine couldn’t adopt the standards until the end of a court challenge – and can expect a tussle of its own when the time comes.

The forecast under stricter standards: eventual savings of 933,600 metric tons of greenhouse gases each year.

The California Air Resources Board projects the change could add about $1,600 to the price of a new car by 2020, a cost that may be made up for with better fuel efficiency.

Raising carbon-friendly forests would cost money too, cautions Alec Giffen, director of the State Forest Service. But companies looking to improve their emissions might pay a premium for that wood. The forest service has gotten a grant to study the carbon market.

The core challenge: how to mobilize the public to ask for cleaner cars, to commute more or drive less, and to be willing to pay more?

“If you visualize a world where we have more ice storms like 1998, if you visualize a world where there’s more rain than snow … if we start seeing 500-year floods every few years, it’s not really hard to get people’s attention,” says Beth Nagusky, director of the state’s year-old Office of Energy Independence and Security.

And yet it has been.

How Maine’s not turning green

Less than 1 percent of Maine households have signed up for green electricity.

Frontier Energy in South China, the only company in the state selling residential heating oil blended with 10 or 20 percent vegetable oil – bioheat- has 40 customers.

Seventy percent of Mainers haven’t tried energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs, according to a postcard survey by the state.

Each measure reduces greenhouse gas emissions and costs a bit more up front: $90 a year in the case of green power, 15 cents a gallon more for bioheat and 2 to 10 times more for fluorescent bulbs.

The bulbs will eventually save money by lasting longer, says Nagusky. And as for the premium on power and heat, well, she adds, people pay more for premium coffee and ice cream, right?

The state started a green power radio campaign in August.

“There’s a tremendous amount of inertia to overcome – you have to make it easy for people to act,” Nagusky says. The ad’s tag line: “So go ahead, save energy. You’ll save money and help save the planet.”

It’s a message that she hopes resonates, but, she added, “it’s hard, energy prices are not so high that people feel they have to act. Gas prices go to $2, people are interested.”

At Frontier Energy, Vice President Joel Glatz has sold, but not really marketed, bioheat and biodiesel for two years. (The 20 percent mix doesn’t require furnace or engine modifications.) He plans a large advertising push for this heating season or next.

He says obvious customers are the environmentally conscious people who drive the organic food market.

“There’s a certain number of greens out there. The people that aren’t green tend to be red, white and blue,” says Glatz, people who take pride in supporting farmers and reducing dependence on foreign oil.

“It takes multiple hits if you will, multiple messages, before they actually take the action,” says Christine James, congregation outreach coordinator at Maine Interfaith Power and Light, which sells electricity made from wind, biomass and other renewables. “We don’t think about how electricity gets to our homes. … We don’t think about what’s behind it and (that) we have any influence on what’s behind it.”

State government has taken a lead, quietly, warming the Blaine House last winter with bioheat and bringing the total number of state buildings on that fuel to 18 this winter. (There’s only a slight outdoor smell, says Glatz, like french fries if it’s recycled oil, like popcorn if it’s virgin.)

The DOT has been testing biodiesel in its Freeport trucks and heavy equipment. Gov. John Baldacci signed an executive order last spring that encourages state workers to carpool and gives preferential parking spots for hybrid cars.

More sweater weather?

Another step in the goals Baldacci signed into law: getting 50 Maine businesses to agree to reduce emissions by January 2006.

Sue Jones of the Natural Resources Council of Maine says companies can reduce their use of air conditioning, build facilities near public transportation and encourage workers to tele-commute.

It’s the NRCM that put East Dixfield farmer Rodney Hall in a glossy brochure and in radio ads this summer trying to put a face to the effects of global warming.

“We have reached our peak oil production, there’s nothing but downhill after this. We better figure it out,” says Jones, who is also part of the climate action plan group. “We don’t have a great way of showing or telling people what (the future) will be like. Being a natural resources-based economy in Maine, there isn’t one sector that’s not impacted or won’t be impacted.”

Rock has seen the scientific models. In one that factors in more rain, the temperature in New England and New York goes up 6 degrees over the next 100 years. In another with less rain, the temperature rises 10 degrees.

According to average city temperature tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, if either of those models are correct, the average temperature in Boston would bump to that of Richmond, Va., or Atlanta, Ga.

Under either premise, “we would lose our maples,” Rock says at UNH. “Maine would lose its pine tree.”

His take on the popular attitude about global warming: “I’m not too worried about it because scientists don’t agree and it’s 100 years out.”

He hates that and blames the media a little.

“The thing that isn’t portrayed is, there are literally a handful of mainstream naysayers’ (who say climate change is a myth) and 2,500-card-carrying climatologists that are of one accord (that) it is happening and it’s only going to get worse, and humans are the cause,” Rock says.

It hasn’t always been like that. For years the issue sparked heated debate among scientists, and politicians.

But even the Bush administration in a report in August named greenhouse gas emissions the “most plausible explanation” for 30 years of warming. In a press release following the report, U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe said it mirrored public acceptance of the issue.

The first climate change resolution tied to the Kyoto Protocol back in 1997 got no Senate votes, according to Snowe. Last year, a bill she co-sponsored for a U.S.-wide emissions rollback got support from nearly half that body.

“It is now fact, not speculation, that average global temperatures are rising,” she said.

Burson over at the DEP says his agency is fact-based. And there’s no question, to him, that climate change is real.

After the release of the report, DEP will encourage the public to take small steps: plant a tree in the yard – it can grow to offer shade in the summer, and a windbreak in the winter; buy energy-efficient appliances; consider a hybrid vehicle; if making a quick trip from home, take the car instead of the SUV, says environmental specialist Michael Karagiannes.

“If we stopped tomorrow emitting every greenhouse gas, it wouldn’t change what’s up there,” adds Burson. Every unit of (CO2) takes 100 years to degrade. But it could mean the warming trend would eventually taper off, he says.

Otherwise, says Rock, “I think the bottom line is, the New England we know today would change, which is kind of sobering, although the average Maine and New Hampshire person would probably welcome a nice, long fall.”