Climate Change Hits The American West

New West
By Todd Wilkinson, 6-10-06

In the summer of 1976, a family of four piled into a Ford Gran Torino station wagon, filled up the tank with regular gasoline paying less than $6, and pointed the steering wheel west. On the morning after the country staged mass fireworks displays to commemorate this nation's 200th birthday, the Minnesota tourists set out on a great American pilgrimage, joining a traffic flow of others in route.

Our destination was Glacier National Park in northern Montana. I will never forget the gleaming white, almost metallic, reflection of the snow-crested Rockies visible hundreds of miles away through the windshield as we crossed the Hi-Line and arrived for the night in Browning.

My brother and I scrambled across the Sperry and Grinnell glaciers where we found grizzly bear tracks. Back in Lake Wobegon, I coveted my "Go Hike A Glacier" t-shirt, a treasure brought home from my first personal encounter with primordial post-Pleistocene ice.

Our vacation 30 years ago cemented a lifelong love affair with our national parks but it also imprinted in my mind glaciers as symbolic natural landmarks. Back then, few people could fathom that the essential emblems of Glacier could possibly be gone in 100 years. It turns out, in a rapidly accelerating age of climate change punctuated by rising global temperatures, that these massive sheets of frozen, compressed ancient water could disappear long before that.

In 2000, Al Gore the presidential candidate who did not fair well at the polls in Montana, stood in front of the rapidly disappearing Grinnell in the same spot where I had trekked as a teen. He used the thawing backdrop to talk about the effects of humans pumping greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through our burning of fossil fuels.

Gore did not win the White House, though his supporters said he would have been the best environmental president ever. The victors, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, promptly dismissed climate change as a serious concern. Their administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol and resisted for much of its first term acknowledgment that humans were any more of a catalyst for global warming than normal fluctuations in nature. Melting ice, they said, happens.

Even if Homo sapiens were the primary cause, they argued, it would cost too much for America if government mandated a shift quickly away from an economy built on fossil fuels.

In Montana, we have heard from commentators at two Bozeman-based free-market think tanks, whose views are respected in the White House, that the best course of action is simply to learn to live with any climatic change and adapt down the road if we need to.

Ordering automakers to produce smaller, hybrid cars with better mileage for consumers, rather than continuing to churn out gas guzzling SUVs, is a strike against personal liberty, profits, and freedom, they say. Subsidizing ethanol production is a waste of tax dollars. "Climate change is global in scale and we're already committed to future warming, for carbon dioxide is a long-lived atmospheric resident," writes Pete Geddes of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE). "It's clear: whether anthropogenic or natural, climate change is inevitable. Our challenge is to deal with it responsibly".

Some argue that Montana and the rest of the West with rich deposits of oil, natural gas, and coal beneath them should be entitled to exploit those fuels as a way of stimulating economic growth and helping to wean America off its dependence on Middle Eastern crude.

Most experts, however, say America will never become less dependent on foreign oil especially when we in this country, who account for five percent of the global population, consume 25 percent of the black liquid gold coming out of the ground.

Receiving funding from organizations linked to the energy industry, the climate change downplayers and the free-market thinktankers have positioned themselves at the forefront of a small crowd of skeptics who, in the face of irrefutable scientific evidence, deny that we should worry much about climate change.

With deep stacks of scientific research papers and studies surrounding me at the moment I write these words, I hope they are right, but are they?

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Time Magazine put the following headline on its April 3, 2006 cover issue: "Be Worried. Be VERY Worried. Climate change isn't some vague future problem -- it's already damaging the planet at an alarming pace."

Climate experts say the glaciers of Montana are not merely touchstones. They are crystal balls foretelling our future. Between 1850 and today, the vast majority of glaciers in the Rockies, from Colorado to Canada, have lost at least 70 percent of their icy mass. "The best estimate, though it's not a Biblical truth, is that most of those ice fields will be completely gone by 2030 or shortly thereafter," says Greg Pederson, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey.

A large percentage of Earth's 160,000 glaciers are also winnowing away. Last February, a dozen conservation groups from the U.S. and Canada asked the World Heritage Committee to place Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park on the list of endangered protected areas because of the impacts caused by climate change. Of the 150 glaciers that covered Glacier in modern times, only 27 still remain.

"The effects of climate change are well-documented and clearly visible in Glacier National Park," asserted Erica Thorson, a professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School, "and yet the U.S. has not taken action to protect the world heritage of the park by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions pursuant to its obligations under the World Heritage Convention."

In a small office on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman, Lisa Graumlich, a globally- renowned climate ecologist, sits beneath a set of shellacked tree rings on the wall. Cut from the trunks of centuries-old whitebark pine trees, they, like ice cores harvested from the glaciers of Alaska, Antarctica and Greenland, reveal a story and confirm that change is human-caused.

As executive director of the Big Sky Institute, Graumlich is in constant communication with other climate gurus around the world. Her quarters at MSU serve as a local clearinghouse for research that has been accumulating since the 1970s and she works with colleagues to extrapolate the implications for Montana. I ask Graumlich and Pederson to fast forward half a century.

What will Montana and other Western states be like in the year 2056?

"By then, we may be well on our way to experiencing dramatic changes in the landscape and we will likely lose the kind of stability we have known in Montana throughout the 20th century," Graumlich says. "Because of climate, it will be a lot different around here."

The operative word is "stability" which has given civilization in the West its foundation for predicting weather, building economies, assessing nature, and deciding how we spend our leisure time.

Graumlich and Pederson say that Americans, no matter where they live, need to differentiate between what qualifies as "weather" and the long-term trend line of "climate". A deep legendary snow year at the Big Sky Resort in 2005-2006 is WEATHER; decades of documented diminishing snowpack is CLIMATE. A single scorching summer is weather; seven years of drought in farm and ranch country, set among decadal records showing higher average summer temperatures, is climate.

"Hypothetically, imagine the Dust Bowl years," Graumlich says, "but with the strong possibility that the so-called regular normal climate didn't come back." To some, such description is fear mongering but experts say Montanans need to ponder the trajectory.

There's an old saw in the Rockies (repeated in every region of the country): "The only thing we can count on besides death and taxes is dramatically changing weather." So why, then, does there appear to be so much resistance to accepting the preponderant evidence that imminent change in climate, borne out of changes occurring high in the sky, is actually happening?

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Let's put some things in perspective. A few days before I met with Graumlich, I was 1,500 miles away from Montana, sitting inside an auditorium at Georgia State University waiting to watch the premiere of "Too Hot Not To Handle," an HBO television documentary now airing about climate change. It's a hard-hitting piece assembled by executive producer Laurie David, who is a mother of two daughters, activist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, former talent coordinator for the Late Night With David Letterman Show, and wife of comedian Larry David, best-known for creating the TV sitcom, Seinfeld.

This was no pow-wow of radical greenies and there's nothing funny going on. David, who is architect of a national dialogue called the "Virtual March On Washington", says that many scientists are convinced we are approaching a tipping point with climate. The upshot is that the American public thanks to Hurricane Katrina, David suggests, is also at a critical tipping point of awareness that could result in political action.

Assembled together for a panel discussion along with David were Mike Finley, former superintendent of Yellowstone and presently president of the Atlanta-based Turner Foundation; Dr. Michael McGeehin, director of the division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects for the much-respected federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention; and Dr. Peter Webster, a professor at George Tech who, like MSU's Graumlich, is a veteran of climate change research.

Webster says that despite what the denialists suggest, there is no longer any debate about the cause of climate change. 2005 went down in the books tied with 1998 as the hottest on record. The next three hottest years in U.S. history were 2002, 2003, and 2004. The rest of the top 10 have been notched since 1995.

Webster says the intensity of hurricanes has increased by 50 percent over the last few decades. The $100 billion in damage to the U.S. caused during last year's Atlantic hurricane season might seem an anomaly today, but big powerful events like Katrina and Rita will be common in the years ahead. At the same time those storms were pounding the Gulf Coast, six Midwestern states were reeling from a drought that cost more than $1 billion in failed corn and soybean crops.

Extreme weather events, Webster says, are an expression of what's happening in the atmosphere and in the West's future he sees clouds of smoke. One of the experts featured in Too Hot Not To Handle is Michael Oppenheimer, a professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, prominent thinker on climate, and advisor to the group Environmental Defense. He and several prominent scientists assembled a paper titled "Setting the Record Straight on Climate Change."

Professor Oppenheimer has a special fondness for the Northern Rockies. In the western U.S., 75 percent of the water we use comes from melting snowpack. "Our civilization is dependent upon having water when we want it, how we want it and when we need it," Oppenheimer says. "But everything we set our clocks by is changing."

Yes, he says, warmer climate will mean a longer growing season for carrots and pumpkins in the backyard garden. It will mean an expanded hiking season. It means fewer frozen pipes. It may mean lower winter heating costs, at least in the short term, until we need to more often switch the air conditioner on.

Some places, he says, might be statistically wetter at certain times of the year with climate change than they are now but in regions like the West the precipitation deposited during winter and spring will dry out and evaporate earlier due to withering summer heat. There's a very real chance that much of mountainous Montana will lose not only its glaciers but its regular snowpack, which fuels the ski industry and serves as a natural reservoir for dryland farming worth more than $1 billion to the state, will be fundamentally challenged.

Montana is connected to climatic change that is being registered around the world. In Holland, the once-normal and predictable staging of long-distance skating competitions along that nation's canal system has become rare as the waterways seldom freeze over long enough in winter.

Across the high plains, if you ask farmers, they can tell you that their kids aren't able to skate on ponds in the Back 40 nearly as often as they did when they grew up in the 1950s. This latter observation, Graumlich notes, is where changes in the weather adds up more than anecdotally to the presently almost imperceptible changes in climate. What is actually being observed by us just scratches the surface of what's likely to be in store.

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Every year, Colorado College produces a report called State of the Rockies that focuses on issues central to the eight Rocky Mountain states. Climate was highlighted in 2006.

The State of the Rockies 2006 Report Card made headlines because its modeling strongly shows that with more greenhouse gases, linked to the burning of fossil fuels, pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, precipitation patterns and temperatures will dramatically change. The Northern Plains of Montana is expected to experience the most extreme rise in average annual temperature between 1976 and the year 2085, climbing about 6.5 degrees CELSIUS. Only the shortgrass prairie ecoregion of eastern Colorado and the Great Basin will warm an equal or greater amount.

"From the middle of this century and beyond, parts of lower elevation Montana during the summer could feel more like the present weather around Las Vegas," she says. "That's pretty hot." Pederson adds something that should make every farmer perk up: For every rise in degree Celsius, experts say agriculture will need a 25 percent increase in snowpack or rainfall to make up for drying.

"Certainly the viability of dryland farming will be greatly challenged by the fact that we're seeing warmer temperatures increasing the water stress in soil and plants. Even if snowpack remains the same, the timing of the meltoff is progresively moving earlier, earlier, earlier," adds Graumlich. "The result is a longer period of evapotranspiration and drying out of the soils. On top of that, there will be less water available for irrigation. As a Montanan, I see huge problems for agriculture in a state which is normal dry times is already marginal in giving people an ability to make a living."

Graumlich notes that the number of 90 degree days in Montana already has increased from a handful every summer a couple of generations ago to nearly 30--or equal to a full months' worth--today. At the same time, meteorologists have witnessed a reduction in the number of days where the temperature falls below 0 degrees F.

The number of severe heat waves across the U.S. lasting four days or longer has tripled in the last 50 years, experts say. At the climate discussion in Atlanta, Dr. McGeehin of CDC says heat is a subtle killer. Hundreds died in Chicago in a recent heat event; tens of thousands perished in Europe. McGeehin says human health effects caused by global warming have been treated as secondary issues but he believes they will be brought to the forefront.

Mountainous areas will warm up with effects more profound, equal to those in the Arctic north, the State of the Rockies Report notes. Most high elevation areas that had snowpack on April 1, 1976 are forecast to lose snow by 2085. Snowpack still is expected to dwindle if steps are taken to slow CO2 emissions into the atmosphere but the effects would be only half as extreme.

If it seems like the lilacs and crocus are blooming earlier every spring, they are. Tepid temperatures have thrown nature into flux. It is affecting hibernating animals, including yellow-bellied marmots emerging from their dens 23 days earlier than they did 30 years ago. Because ecosystem components are inter-dependent upon one another, the rapid shift of one species, with the corresponding shift of species it depends on, can lead to a breakdown of ecosystem function," the State of the Rockies Report explains, citing the ripple effect of plants flowering ahead of schedule.

"While a small change in bloom timing may not be disastrous for ecosystems, shifts of several days or week scan impair ecoregional health. If flowers begin blooming earlier and pollinators do not adjust to climate change in a similar manner, then both species become imperiled. Furthermore, changes in bloom and pollination timing can be detrimental not only to the survival of plants and insects, but also up the food-ladder to birds and mammals."

The survival of some species is plant specific and some plants may not be able to survive rising temperatures. Others, such as weeds, are going to proliferate. "As the natural world goes into a state of flux, other things will be getting synchronized which are destructive to the things we value," Graumlich says. Exotic plants are outcompeting native species and crops grown to benefit people, wildlife and livestock; exotic flowers that bloom send adrift pollen that is threatening the health of asthmatics; beetles that kill our native forests set the stage for massive wildfires; outbreaks of West Nile virus, carried by mosquitoes, could intensify.

Ecologists say that one-fourth of all plant and animal species could face extinction in the coming century. Not to mention, warming can throw a monkeywrench into the economy. Never mind the big "charismatic" species that people swarm to wildlands and zoos to see. How important are just a few species of insects?

Bees pollinate alfalfa, fruit trees and gardens. California alone depends upon bees to pollinate billions of dollars worth of crops. If their timing is off just a little bit in reaching plants, they won't produce fruit and reproduce.

As pollinators of commerce, tourists, too, have come to rely on elements of timing. Within decades, ski areas could be reduced to a narrow window of snow on the mountains. "As industries go, the ski industry in the West has been among the most forward thinking," the USGS's Pederson says. "It has embraced the science and tried to incorporate the information into their business plans to maintain profitability in the future. "

Places like the Moonlight Basin Resort in the Madison mountains of Montana no longer adhere to the classic model of starting the lifts when the snow flies and stopping them when it begins melting. Moonlight is looking at the big picture, making investments in conservation easements and real estate and cultural resources. Rather than one day being left high and dry with the old ski industry paradigm, it is transitioning into a more viable recreation model where a potentially changing landscape remains an asset that will be in demand with society down the road.

In Wyoming, the state just spent $250,000 on a hydrology analysis looking at the impacts on downstream water users when the legendary glaciers in the Wind River Mountains eventually disappear. The Wind Rivers hold 36 square kilometers of glacial ice that could be gone.

Desert states that are part of the Colorado River Compact Agreement are fearful with tens of millions of people downstream dependent upon the amount white stuff that is deposited in the mountains hundreds of miles away. McGeehin of CDC said he anticipates that armed conflicts will be spurred in the future by lack of access to freshwater in a climate-changed world.

In Montana, seventy percent of the water used goes to crops and lawns. On the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, tribal officials already are examining the landscape, planning ahead for ways to catch and retain more rainwater in the absence of snow.

Anglers, as an anchor to Montana's nature-based tourism industry, need to ponder the prospect of drastically reduced fishing seasons. Nationwide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a study that predicted a 4.5 degree spike in temperature—computer models actually anticipate a higher rise—would negatively harm as much as a third of the fishes' habitat in the U.S.

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Only a decade ago when climatologists began preparing computer models designed to help forecast the future, differing scenarios were presented ranging from minor effects to severe ones. Skeptics loved to paint the severe models as examples of Chicken Littles attempting to scare people. Implying that climate change is akin to the much ado about nothing made by the Y2K computer scare.

Even novelist Michael Crichton bought into this theory and created a fictional plot based on the premise. To show how bizarre the politics of climate change during the present Congress are, U.S. Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma (where the economy is driven by energy production), called Crichton the to testify as "an expert witness" before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that rejected calls to address climate change. Famously, Inhofe declared on the Senate floor: "With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is THE greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

In a grandstanding 2003 speech, Inhofe said that any federal policy foremost should "rely on the most objective science." Were Inhofe to follow the objective conclusion reached by the vast majority of credible scientists who have subjected their findings to rigorous peer review, he would know that the computer models forecasting severe consequences from climate change have been embraced as likely possibilities.

"We would fall into the category of being somewhat skeptical because the dangers seem to be exaggerated and they lead to regulatory controls that may not be appropriate," says Jane Shaw, a public policy specialist with PERC—The Center For Free Market Environmentalism, a think tank, in Bozeman. "It's not a matter of whether the science is irrefutable. It's the degree to which climate change is actually a problem. There are a lot of problems worse than global warming and we should be looking at those. Frankly, these disaster scenarios seem really questionable. It isn't just enough to say the temperature in 100 years will be four, five or six degrees higher. We suddenly have all of these predictions of sea levels rising. We are skeptical and we do understand how incentives work. Scientists have an incentive to drum up fear."

The dig against PERC and FREE is that their free-market, anti-regulation posture reflects the self-interested industries that fund the foundations supporting them and have spent large sums of money attempting to discredit climate change scientists.

This summer, former Vice President and presidential candidate Gore is featured in a documentary entitled "An Inconvenient Truth" that is being shown in cinemas across the country. In a movie review that appeared in The Washington Post, Richard Cohen writes: "You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences are beyond him."

Cohen adds: "But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma."

I have Inhofe's warning about so-called "phony science" and Shaw's skepticism in mind as I meet with Greg Pederson of the U.S. Geological Survey at MSU. I ask Pederson if he has an incentive to make people afraid. He grins and calls the assertion ridiculous.

Since John Wesley Powell helped found the USGS in the 19th century, this legendary federal agency has developed a well-deserved reputation for generating "science in the public interest." During the petroleum age, USGS also has been closely allied as a service provider to the oil and gas industry, helping engineers know where and how much energy resources lie in the ground. On that front, its science and the people working for the agency have been acclaimed.

In recent years, USGS and a sister agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also have lead the way in studying climate change from the perspective of the atmosphere and expressions on the ground. Pederson is among a prestigious team of USGS experts working on glaciers.

Three forces shape our regional climate: the El Nino Southern Oscillation (related to warming seas off the coast of South America); the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (also related to ocean temperature); and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Such oceanic phenomena also shape the conveyor belt that delivers storms through the Jet Stream around cells of high atmospheric pressure.

The combination of warming surface temperatures in the ocean and more fresh water caused by melting ice are likely to disrupt ocean currents and the way weather is manifested in the Rockies. "There's a scenario widely discussed in the scientific community and not far fetched that truly does wake me up in a cold sweat at night," Graumlich says. "Based upon the acceleration of warming and possible feedback loops that speed it up more than we anticipate, there is a very real prospect that we could see a melting out of the Arctic Ice Sheet."

Ice reflects the sun back into space and acts as an air conditioner for the planet. As it melts it gives way to exposed rock and earth that absorbs warming light. Once the process of melting begins, it can accelerate. Ninety-nine percent of the glaciers in Alaska are melting, some at dramatic rates. Were all of them to liquefy, it could raise sea levels by up to a foot. If the ice in Greenland melted it could raise sea levels by several feet, threatening millions of coastal dwellers in the U.S.

"We can imagine that by 2056 we will have climate refugees that are not just inhabitants of low-lying Pacific Islands," Graumlich says. If Montanans and others blanch at the thought of Californians pouring into the state as second homeowners, imagine how society might react with thousands of uprooted refugees fleeing into the Rocky Mountain region like the displacement that occurred in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina?

During the last decade, travelers heading west on Interstate 90 up and over Homestake Pass have noticed a rapid shift in arboreal color as they crest the Pass and drop down into Butte, which is surrounded by national forests. Today, in nearly ever direction that one looks outward from the Mining City, the vast carpet of evergreens has taken on a reddish patina, the result of spruce beetles boring into the trunks and killing the trees, leaving the needles dry and limp.

Fire experts and silviculturists know what is coming. Short of felling all the spruce and pine in what would represent the Mother of All Logging Operations in the Butte and Anaconda areas, little can be done. The dead trees have primed the national forest for huge wildfires. It's not a matter of if, but when.

How and why did this happen? Insect infestations are part of the natural cycle of life. They may be perceived as a loss of revenue opportunity for timber towns, but they serve an ecological function in nature.

Bug outbreaks have been documented well into prehistoric times by core rings in trees. And beetle killed trees were observed back in the twilight of the 20th century. Typically, they've been halted by weather AND climate. Beetles thrive and advance in years of warm dry summers and mild winters. They are beaten back when there are consecutive years of cooler rainy weather in spring, summer, and fall and then weeks of below zero in winter.

Their current advance, experts say, should serve as a wake up call. According to entomologists, what's disturbing is that rising average temperatures have enabled beetle outbreaks not only to persist longer, but since the 1990s the lack of cold winters, like those remembered by the pioneers, has allowed beetles to complete an entire life cycle (adults eating trees, laying eggs that hatch, and turn produce more adults) in a single year that traditionally took two years.

The view from Butte is likely to be repeated across the state and no epic aerial spraying campaign of insecticides, no Bunyanesque logging operation, no federal Healthy Forest Initiative is going to halt it. Only climate can, and the trend line is going in the opposite direction of a solution.

Outbreaks of beetles killing forests are only the first scene in the story of landscape alteration. After native forests die and are burned by fire, the successional regime of trees replacing them will be different. Arboreal varieties that have typically replaced them—lodgepole pine, spruce, and fir—thrived in cooler, moister times. Instead of forests rising up, the best guess of silvilcurists is that the slopes will be covered by brushy species that climb to the tops of ridgelines and through the river drainages currently populated in places by trees with big ancient trunks. "Old growth trees in Montana are going to become increasingly rare," Graumlich says. "The kind of 'forests' that our grandparents grew and that we've shared with them will be remembered in history books by our grandkids and great grandkids, but the massive kinds of trees we've known and associated with our experiences in the backcountry will be few and far between."

Which brings us to another point, Graumlich notes. Where does conservation fit into the equation? The entire preservation movement has been based on an aesthetic and biological premise that KINDS of landscapes can be spared if they are put off limits to development. But by and large, climate change transcends the artificial boundary lines of national parks, protected business lands and personal property.

Graumlich says the aesthetic foundation that our generation holds in its mind, as an idea handed down from John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, of glaciers, and grizzly bears prowling the dark moist shadows of forest canopies, and the image of anglers casting artificial flies on trout waters in July, will be altered.

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Climate change has the net effect of making places in higher latitudes feel like places now in lower latitudes. "Montanans know how it feels," John D. Varley says. "For those of us who remember the 1970s and the heavy snows and frigid temperatures, who the hell would have ever wanted to move here? The answer is that not many people did. We're the equivalent today of a more southern place and that's one the reasons why we're more attractive."

Varley retired to Bozeman in 2006 after spending 43 years in government service as a biologist. Thirty-three of those years were in Yellowstone and much of them as the chief park scientist overseeing research. Varley is internationally regarded as one of the modern pioneers of applied "ecosystem management". During his tenure in the park, the forest fires of 1988 occurred, grizzly bears rebounded, wolves were reintroduced, his office unleashed the largest ongoing effort of field research of any public land in the U.S., and microbes in the park's geothermal waters were identified and used in groundbreaking biotechnology projects.

During those years, Varley says, he and his colleagues witnessed a steady and dramatic yet subtle change in the physical environment that largely escaped the watchful eye of millions of visitors.

"I try to puzzle through what climate change means for a place like Yellowstone and it's really complicated. Will it be warmer and drier or warmer and wetter?" he asks. "I think those are the most commonly held views."

Is there overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that big changes will occur in Yellowstone? "Big changes have ALREADY happened," he notes.

Consider: A warmer and drier climate means a continuation of trends that started in the 1970s. "Everybody can identify with the loss of glaciers but in Yellowstone the decrease in lakes and ponds and wetlands has been astounding," Varley says. "What were considered permanent bodies of water, meaning reference was given to them in the 1850s, '60s and '70s, and bestowed with a name as a lake, are now gone. Some wetlands that were considered permanent ponds are no longer there. Some lakes have become ephemeral."

Warmer and drier translates into a loss of biological diversity in the park. It also signals the elimination of whitebark pine trees which produce seeds that are a major source of sustenance for grizzly bears.

A benefit of a warmer and wetter scenario is that a richer array of succulent plants will be available for bears and game animals to eat, and that the number of wetlands COULD actually increase, meaning more biodiversity. For example, warmer and wetter might bring an expansion of Yellowstone's Northern Range, today often compared to Africa's Serengeti Plain for the variety and number of large mammals that range across it.

But the sobering reality is that warmer, whether accompanied by increased moisture or dryness, also means the arrival of diseases and organisms that were repelled from finding a home in the northern Rockies by colder temperatures. He points to hookworm parasites that are fatal to canids -- wolves, coyotes, foxes, and yes, domestic dogs. During the past few decades, the presence of hookworms had steadily been moving up in elevation out of lower valleys. To land in the wolf population could have devastating consequences.

"The greatest challenges will not be created by the presence or absence of things we already know about," Varley explains. "They will probably come from things more insidious and harder to predict. It could mean warmer waterways creating hospitable conditions for a mudsnail that turns a trajectory of what is known to an outcome that is not known. It will affect that proportion of animals present in a place that will be different than what we now experience."

Pausing, Varley says the notion of predictability, upon which civilization has been built (and, by extension, tourist economies, farm towns, recreational pursuits, ways of life) will need to be restructured.

"Preservation as we have known it for over 100 years has been associated with protection of a given piece of land. The way you provide protection is you use your police powers and that got the job done. I think for present-day managers, that approach is still needed against evildoers, but with climate change there's going to be an increasing level of helplessness when the problems they face are not caused by poachers but by auto or factory emissions originating in the Peoples' Republic of China. You can't protect the boundaries of special places any more. It's out of your hands."

The Holy Grail for conservationists has been the vision of pristinity as expressed by native species, native ecosystems, Varley says. "But like ecosystems everywhere, even those without a huge presence of humankind, our ecosystems are now on a new trajectory. It's like somebody pulled the rug out from under us. Baring a volcanic explosion, Yellowstone will always be there in some form that is recognizable. But it won't be the same place that we worked so hard to protect the last 135 years."

Climate change, although created by human hands, challenges the conventional mindset of land managers who were taught to believe they could achieve precise preferred outcomes based upon the application of certain management prescriptions. All of this goes out the window and along with it, possibly, the human hubris of believing that nature can be controlled.

Wishful thinking, vehement denial, kicking and screaming, trying to paint it as a partisan conspiracy, praying for a miracle; these acts may serve a cathartic function but they do not erase the significant and growing body of science that makes the certainty of dramatic climate change in our lifetime irrefutable.

"What allows me to get back to sleep after I wake up in a cold sweat is that there's promise in a re-organized global world," Graumlich says. "There is the potential to harness the business community on the same scale in which IT [information technology) has been harnessed and used as a tool to transform. It can become an engine for prosperity. The pressing need to confront climate change will force a huge unprecedented reaction, even if the outcomes are for the better."

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It's true: Undeniably, there's a lot that scientists still don't know. But that absence of a clear distillation of the future does not mean there is an abscence of consensus that we are in store for dramatic changes which will push humanity beyond the cocoon of a comfort zone it has enjoyed and grown accustomed to. Scientists, after all, are an ilk of bright minded skeptics who devote their lives to the pursuit of disproving and debunking things before they are embraced as fact.

Author Tim Flannery, who wrote the recent critically acclaimed book about climate change, titled The Weather Makers, echoes the belief of many scientists that humans have roughly a decade, give or take a few years, to confront carbon dioxide emissions in a meaningful way. Such action could blunt the worst effects of warming down the road when all of us adults reading these words are no longer living. Along with Flannery, two others have written excellent eminently-readable books on the subject: New Yorker Magazine staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From A Catastrophe; and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change.

Is it still possible for politicians to think and act and create policies that are balanced between the rational self—read economic—interests of constituents living in the here and now and the best interests of citizens who are not yet born?

Just as society can no longer ignore the truth of evidence relating to climate change, so, too, must it recognize that wallowing in despair is equivalent to taking no action.

So here is the good news.

As fate would have it, the Rockies and western plains, where I reside and where the glaciers are vanishing and the temperatures heating up, also sit at one of the ground zeros for a possible American revolution in alternative energy. A key player is businessman, conservationist, and bison rancher Ted Turner who is fast gaining an international profile for his environmental and humanitarian work.

Devoting his autumn years and contributing millions upon millions of dollars to ending nuclear proliferation and addressing climate change, Turner believes the linchpin solution is segueing the fossil fuel economy into alternative energy. He believes vast new fortunes can be made by those who re-tool their business strategies and embrace innovation that is geared to sustainable energy sources. Turner is planning to put wind turbines on some of his ranches in the southern Rockies and he's looking at ways that the companies he runs can serve as an example of doing more with less. Many of the brightest minds have joined Turner and former Yellowstone superintendent Finley (head of the Turner Foundation) at Turner's Flying D Ranch outside of Bozeman to think about how to engage corporate America in solutions.

Together, Turner and Finley have played crucial roles in establishing the Energy Future Coalition that is making huge inroads with the business community, labor leaders and environmentalists to bring about change in U.S. energy policy. Six working groups with prominent politicians and business executives were formed around the topics of transportation, bioenergy, agriculture, the future of coal, end-use energy, and safeguarding the power grid as a national security issue. A pilot project of EFC is 25 X 25, which aims to have agricultural products produce 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the U.S. by the year 2025.

"CEOs in business are starting to get it," Finley says. "From the executives at Wal-Mart to the senior partners at Goldman Sachs, they recognize the huge business opportunities."

If carried out, analysts say investments in biofuels, conservation, and energy efficiency as suggested by 25 X 25 would in a fairly short amount of time reduce U.S. oil consumption by three million barrels A DAY or about 15 percent of current consumption annually. It would create 1 million new jobs by 2015, add another 500,000 jobs in the staggered U.S. auto industry, spawn more than 500,000 jobs in clean-coal technology (where Montana could position itself as a leader), and perhaps most importantly it would help households save money on their monthly power and gas bills and enable the U.S. to reduce emissions of carbon by 180 tons per year or about 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2001. Montana and other western states could be at the head of the pack.

Mike Phillips, a candidate for the Montana House from Bozeman and director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, has made as part of his campaign a promise to champion alternative energy when the legislature meets again in Helena in 2007.

In announcing his candidacy, Phillips was the first state candidate in the West to throw his support behind 25 X 25. The initiative has won enthusiasm not only from Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who was the first western governor to endorse the program, but it received heavyweight backing in the form of the American Farm Bureau, one of the most powerful lobbying entities in Congress. Schweitzer also empanelled a special task force on climate change.

Like Turner, the governor supports the notion of the federal government initiating a massive R & D effort with alternative fuels modeled after the Apollo space program that would function as a partnership between the state and federal government and the business community.

In 2005, Montana Senate Majority Leader John Tester, a candidate for U.S. senator, introduced a bill which became law, mandating that by 2015 at least 15 percent of all energy in the state be produced through renewable resources. Tester's opponent, incumbent U.S. Senator Conrad Burns says that he, too, is committed to investing federal dollars in ethanol production.

Next to solar, Montana's most abundant sustainable resource is wind. In part because of the incentives offered in the legislation, wind farms began springing up almost immediately in the state, most noticeably in the Judith Gap. New construction of propellered-windmills catapulted Montana from ranking 50th in the nation of wind energy to 15th.

The chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality recently told a reporter that the Bush Administration is spending $10 billion annually on climate change research. That's one-tenth the amount spent to fund a year's worth of the war in Iraq. Society will spend billions more to rebuild New Orleans and billions more after that to try and keep the city from being inundated again by hurricanes and rising seas.

Are scientists incentivized to fear monger, as PERC's Shaw claims? "As a society we have some really hard questions to face. Status quo won't work any more," government scientist Pederson says. "Scare tactics only turn people off. We prefer to re-frame the Time Magazine cover another way. Instead of 'Be Worried. Be VERY Worried,' people should 'Think Hard. Think VERY Hard about the decisions they are making, where and how they are living, what they are buying, and who they are voting for. The personal actions we take are the investment we make."

I think back to the sense of patriotism that was infused in me as a teenager as I watched the fireworks show on America's 200th birthday and helped my parents pack the family station wagon for our trip the next morning to Glacier Park. In the New York Times, Pulitizer Prize-winning columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that being green is the new red, white and blue.

That might be hard for some westerners who subscribe to the cowboy myth of maverick independence and geographic isolation to swallow. We are separate from the rest of the world. We are where the world wants to come and relax. But potentially we can also position ourselves at the center of the world.

"Sorry, but being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue," Friedman writes. "It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad."

Across America, hundreds of thousands of citizens—Republicans, Democrats independents, business people, grandparents, school teachers, NASCAR and Indy drivers, religious leaders, country- western and rock musicians, and young people have signed on to the Virtual March on Washington, D.C. at www.stopglobalwarming.org. One of the signees is Republican John McCain.

Nearly 250 mayors of large and mid-sized cities also have come together to form a unified front in tackling climate change, part of it prompted by inaction on the federal level from Washington, D.C. The city of Portland, Oregon, for example, is leading the way in trying to get both government and private business to lower CO2 emissions by adopting energy conservation measures and opportunities for carbon sequestration.

"If we have the brainpower in this country to put a man on the moon and remove someone's heart and replace it with a new one, then I believe establishing a new paradigm for how we create our energy is definitely doable," says Phillips. "It's the states and the individual businesses that get out ahead that will be best positioned to enjoy the rewards of the change that has to occur."

Climate change is the greatest challenge to modern civilization, Ted Turner tells me. Addressing it with courage and conviction and an entrepreneurial spirit can yield unprecedented opportunity. "This is the only thing that has left me thinking like an optimist," he adds. "Otherwise, if you care about the future your kid's grandkids are going to inherit, you realize how dire it could be. It is our only chance to literally make a difference in shaping a world worth saving."



EDITOR'S NOTE: Todd Wilkinson, based in Bozeman, is currently writing a book about Ted Turner's work as a global environmentalist and his ownership of two million acres of private land in the U.S. A shorter version of the story appears this summer in the journal Montana Quarterly, currently on news stands. Color photos by Todd Wilkinson