Excerpt
No matter how far you go on vacation, sometimes you can't get away -- especially if you write about science policy for a living.
I recently escaped the steamy confines of Washington, D.C., for the mountains of Montana for some sorely needed R & R. The last time I set foot in Big Sky Country was 10 years ago, when I attended a grizzly bear conference at a ranch just outside of Yellowstone National Park. And the first and only other time I visited the state was 35 years ago, when I backpacked in Glacier National Park.
From a climate perspective, things there have gotten worse.
The glaciers I marveled at on my backpacking trip have shrunk considerably, and even then they were a pale approximation of what they once were. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there were approximately 150 glaciers in the area in 1850, and most of them were still there in 1910 when the park was established. In 1979, when I was fending off mosquitoes at the Continental Divide, the official National Park Service estimate was down to 75 glaciers, and now, according to the USGS, there are only 25 glaciers larger than 25 acres.
At that 2004 conference, I learned that global warming is making it harder to keep a key item in the grizzly bear pantry in stock. The bears like to feast on high-protein seeds from whitebark pine cones in the fall to fatten up before hibernation time, but the tree is being ravaged by the mountain pine beetle, which develops faster and survives winter more easily thanks to warmer temperatures.
To be sure, the beetles have been around for a long time, and they aren't the whitebark pine's only problem. The trees also have been suffering from white pine blister rust -- a disease accidentally introduced via imported seedlings nearly a century ago -- and fire pattern changes have enabled other tree species to invade their territory. But over the last 10 years, beetle outbreaks have intensified. According to a 2012 U.S. Forest Service study, they "are occurring more rapidly and dramatically than imagined a decade ago." Since my last visit, the Forest Service estimates the beetle has killed more than 4.5 million whitebark pine trees in Montana alone.
This grim state of affairs prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to determine in 2011 that the whitebark pine is in "imminent" risk of extinction due to, among other things, global warming -- the first time the federal government identified climate change as a contributing factor in a tree species' demise. Budgetary constraints and more pressing agency priorities, however, have kept the tree off the endangered species list.
The fate of the Yellowstone region's grizzlies, meanwhile, has teetered back and forth in recent years. In 2007, the FWS concluded that they had recovered sufficiently and took them off the threatened species list, which they had been on since 1975. Two years later, however, a federal district court in Montana put them back on, citing concerns about the whitebark pine. Regardless, the FWS is again considering delisting the roughly 700 bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, contending they are supplementing their diet with more meat.
Montana Scientists Sound the Alarm
If anyone gets climate in Montana, it's scientists. During my recent visit I picked up a copy of the Missoulian, Missoula's daily newspaper, and came across an op-ed titled "Climate change is a scientific reality." Written by University of Montana entomologist Diana Six and five other Montana-based scientists, the July 30 column was essentially a public version of a letter they and 96 other scientists across the state sent to Montana's governor and the state's congressional delegation in late June.
The scientists cited some of the severe impacts global warming is already having on the state -- including longer wildfire seasons and the aforementioned pine beetle -- and warned that the consequences of doing nothing to curb carbon emissions would be dire indeed.
They also chastised Montana politicians for turning a blind eye to empirical evidence.
"Some of Montana's political leaders continue to ignore the most basic scientific findings about climate change," they wrote. "We hear them say: 'I'm not a scientist so I cannot be sure.' We are scientists and let us be clear: The scientific evidence that Earth's climate is warming is overwhelming. We need to move from debate to solutions."
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