Rocky Mountain peaks capture effects of climate change
Aspen Times Weekly; 10/01/2004

Colorado ski resort owners go public on warming concerns
Aspen Times Weekly; 10/01/2004

Colorado shows effects of global warming
Aspen Times Weekly; 09/30/2004

Study predicts warmer West, more and bigger fires
High Country News; 09/29/2004

Presidential candidates split on energy, global warming
Christian Science Monitor; 09/28/2004

Cascade glaciers melting away
Seattle Times (AP); 09/13/2004

Bush administration report ties emissions to global warming
New York Times; 08/26/2004

Melting glaciers rev up seismic activity
Christian Science Monitor; 08/24/2004

Expert shares global-warming research with Montanans
Missoulian; 08/19/2004

Western drought confirms scientist's warnings of water crisis
Toronto National Post; 05/31/2004

The end of Glacier's glaciers imminent and ominous, researcher says
Missoula Independent; 02/10/2004

National Global Warming Coalition

Environmental Protection Agency's Global Warming Web site by State:

• Arizona
  
• Colorado
  
• Idaho
  
• Montana
  
• Nevada
  
• New Mexico
  
• Utah
  
• Wyoming

National Consumers Coalition's Cooler Heads Coalition

National Academies: Closer Look at Global Warming

Impact of Global Warming on North America

Natural Resources Defense Council's Global Warming Web site

Environmental Entrepreneurs: Effect of Global Warming on Montana

The Climate Stewardship Act

Crisis by degrees

A few years ago, Professor Steven Running, a highly credentialed and influential climate scientist at the University of Montana warned in a public meeting that global warming could turn the entire state of Montana into a desert.

No newspaper ran a headline reporting this startling pronouncement, no follow-up interviews were held, no press release emerged from the governor's office commenting on the distressing news. A local television station covered the conference but failed to carry the bombshell.

His warning was relegated to the rapidly mounting heap of alarming reports from around the globe that have failed to stir the U.S. government to recognize the ominous nature of the global warming threat as virtually the entire rest of the planet has recognized it to be.

Professor Running is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, formed in 1988 under UN auspices. Composed of 2,000 of the world's top scientists from over 100 countries, the IPCC is the most authoritative and influential scientific body addressing the science and impacts of global warming. It's reports land on official desks in every national capital in the world.

For 14 years this group has worked from a remarkably strong scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and that global greenhouse gas emissions, predominately from the burning of fossil fuels, should be cut by at least 60 percent below 1990 levels.

Nothing of the sort has occurred and impacts are intensifying, multiplying, and becoming synergistic worldwide.

Weather extremes are on the increase, glaciers and polar ice packs are retreating, coral reefs are being decimated by warm seas, rising sea levels threaten island nations with devastation or even extinction, disease-carrying insects are dramatically expanding their ranges, agricultural yields are falling, and many other grave problems related to rising temperatures are increasing in frequency and intensity.

Furthermore, voices in the insurance industry are warning of global financial catastrophe due to natural disasters aggravated by global warming, if humanity doesn't sharply reduce it's use of fossil fuels.

The Rocky Mountain West is not being spared.

A federal drought map for Oct. 5, 2004, shows almost the entire Rocky Mountain West in a drought, including large areas with "extreme" drought and significant areas earning the most dire "exceptional" designation. Consider the following litany from Montana:

• 1,100 Montana grain farmers have gone out of business in the past few years mostly due to drought. Sales of Montana wheat have dropped 43 percent since 1996, the last year before the drought.

• Over the past several years the projected date for the disappearance of all of the glaciers in Glacier National Park has gone from 2100, to 2050, to 2030, to 2020.

• Unprecedented critical water shortages have threatened to shut down municipal water systems in the eastern part of the state.

• Major dust storms have reappeared in Montana, as reported by the New York Times in 2002.

• In 2003, all-time drought records were broken by more than a week (days without a trace of precipitation) and records were broken for most days over 100 degrees and highest overnight temperatures.

• Evidence collected over the past 50 years suggests that rising temperatures have fostered a decline in springtime snow pack of 15 to 30 percent in Montana and that springtime peak river flows now come an average of two weeks earlier.

• In 2003, Flathead Lake registered some of its warmest temperatures since record-keeping began.

• For south-central Montana, 2004 produce the fourth-warmest March since 1895. It was also among the driest.

Generally speaking, it is unscientific to point to a weather or climate anomaly and claim with certainty that it is a direct result of global warming. "There have been equally disastrous droughts in the past" is the refrain of some in the West.

But set against the context of similar events from around the globe and scientific confidence that human activity is currently a much larger influence than natural variability, we have long since passed the point where we should be reducing as much as possible those human influences.

Scientists strive for certainty, as they should. Policy-makers and the citizens they answer to operate by a different standard: prudence. Very few policy decisions are made on the basis of certainty. The response of policy-makers in the Rocky Mountain West and Washington, D.C., to global warming has been imprudent in the extreme.

In contrast to uniformly timid responses on the policy table in Washington, D.C., we should pushing for a sweeping transformation of our energy infrastructure before our current addiction to fossil fuels takes us off an ecological cliff.

But first we need to dispense with some persistent distractions:

• Policy-makers and the citizens they answer to should not be frittering away valuable time wondering if global warming is occurring. The top climate scientists in the world made that call 14 years ago.

• Furthermore, there is a remarkably strong consensus among those same scientists that the rise in global average temperatures is largely the result of human activity, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels. As Jerry Mahlman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research pointed out in a December 2003 New York Times interview: "Oh sure, there are people insisting that warming is just a part of natural weather cycles, but their claims are not close to being scientifically credible."

As an example of the dramatic changes that are warranted, consider the policy proposal of The National Global Warming Coalition, of which I am the founder and executive director.

NGWC is a network of organizations and individuals from around the United States that are impatient with the slow pace of response to the alarming threat of global warming. Since our founding in November 2003, we have been a firm American voice calling for specific, very large reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions by a clear deadline. Our answer to what is probably the greatest threat humanity has ever faced is "The Three R's of a Global Warming Solution":

1) Ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Beyond the sheer magnitude of the global warming threat, the greatest obstacle to adequately addressing it is the policy of the United States. The U.S. produces 22 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other nation, yet has refused to commit to the miniscule 7 percent reductions called for in the Kyoto Treaty and has even withdrawn from the treaty process.

The nations of the world, including the United States until recently, have put a tremendous amount of time, money and effort into developing the Kyoto Protocol. One hundred and twenty-five nations have either ratified or approved the treaty. Once Russia ratifies the treaty, as now appears certain, the treaty will go into force.

However, the proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.S. is so large that even if the rest of the world dramatically cut its own emissions, and we did not, the climate would continue to be destabilized. The U.S. must participate fully in this treaty at the earliest possible date.

2) Redirect multibillion dollar subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable energy.

Activities that are subsidized tend to be encouraged. The burning of coal, oil and natural gas is the main cause of global warming. Why are we using public funds to encourage dirty fuel production from fossil fuels and nuclear power when the world needs a dramatic shift to renewable energy?

We should take this money and put it into clean, renewable energy that does not further destabilize the climate. This would speed the development of renewable energy and lead to reduced costs of production.

Furthermore, a report released in April 2004 by researchers at University of California at Berkeley concluded that investing in renewable energy would create more American jobs than comparable investments in fossil fuels.

3) Reduce global greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Fourteen years have passed since the world's top climate scientists called for prompt reductions of 60 percent in global greenhouse gas emissions. Since that time emissions have actually risen, so we are going to have to cut even more. Furthermore, because global warming is accelerating we must get on an 80 percent reduction program immediately.

The reason we need to cut so aggressively is that as the earth warms, the oceans emit more carbon dioxide. As forests dry out, they burn more easily, releasing more carbon dioxide. As permafrost melts it absorbs more heat and releases more greenhouse gases. As polar ice melts it exposes water which absorbs more heat, melting existing ice more rapidly. All of these trends are underway and threaten to spin out of control. We are in a global environmental emergency and must start now to reduce emissions dramatically.

This timetable is certainly ambitious, but clearly it will be cheaper than letting global warming get completely out of control. Every major industry in the United States was retooled in 12 months during World War II, demonstrating that anything is possible where the political will exists.

There may be a silver lining if we act in time.

In southwest Montana and other locations in the Rocky Mountain West, otherwise intelligent beings labor with the sun on their shoulders and the wind in their hair to extract coal-bed methane, a threat to air, water and soil quality. Shouldn't we be developing the sun and wind resources and leaving the methane in the ground?

This could also be the centerpiece of sustainable economic development.

But we must not delay.

A scan of the planet shows the dagger of global warming piercing the skin of its first victims and no country on earth weighs more heavily on the hilt of that knife than our own. We will not escape the bitter fruits of our own denial indefinitely.

How tragic, when renewable energy is already starting to clear a windy, sunlit path for humanity's footfalls.

Readers respond:

Not all the credit
The biggest issue we have to accept is that global warming is something that has been going on for thousands of years.

Along with this there have been many periods of global cooling, all of which happened before man came upon the scene.

Where I live now, the ice was a mile thick 10,000 years ago - not sure what caused it to melt but it did. And at some earlier point in time it had cooled off enough to allow the ice sheet to form.

No doubt that man's actions have an effect on the issue but sometimes we give ourselves more credit than is due.

Global warming. Climate change. The cyclical nature of the environment. Scientists, politicians, activists and consumers worldwide can argue about what to call it and whether or not human activity in the world is having an impact.

But in the Rocky Mountain West, after years of drought have dried up reservoirs and decimated forests, after shortened ski seasons and lengthened summers, something is happening to the environment here that can't be dismissed through semantics.

At the very top of the Rocky Mountains, the landscape is changing. Glaciers are melting, and now at a pace faster than occurred in all the 50 years between 1950 and the turn of the century.

Plants and vegetation, such as the whitebark pine, found previously only at lower elevations are marching ever higher up the mountains' reaches.

Yet it's the changes that have occurred in the valleys and foothills and deserts of the Rocky Mountain states that are raising the volume of concern about the wear-and-tear our natural environment is starting to show.

Years of unparalleled growth along the Colorado's Front Range, across the desert near Phoenix and through Utah's Wasatch Front have brought millions of new residents, tens of thousands of additional vehicles and miles and miles of new interstates and highways.

With the traffic has come air pollution, with urban areas around Utah's Wasatch and Colorado's Front Range often exceeding federal guidelines for air pollution.

In April of this year, the EPA announced the largest air pollution region ever for Colorado, incorporating all of Denver's metro area and sweeping upslope to the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park.

In the Four Corners area of the West, where Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado come together, particulate from coal-fired generation plants blends with car emissions from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and other urban areas to cloud the horizons in Grand Canyon, Zion and Mesa Verde national parks.

Whether or not you care to link the surge in fossil-fuel emissions to environmental changes, the issue has certainly gained greater visibility at the national level.

Arizona's Sen. John McCain teamed up with Connecticut's Sen. Joe Lieberman to draft the Climate Stewardship Act in 2003.

That measured failed on its first hearing in October 2003, but did win the support of 43 of the senators, showing definite gains in support for a genuine climate change policy.

The Bush administration has shown no such interest in the issue of climate change and has been steadfast in ignoring fossil-fuel emissions and their effects on the environment, saying it would sign any treaty or compact that jeopardized one single American job.

Since there seems to be no desire at the national level to seek a resolution, or to even acknowledge there may be a problem, governors and state agencies are taking matters into their own hands.

Earlier this year, the Western Governors Association developed and passed its own clean-energy initiative that mandates generation of 30,000 megawatts of clean energy by 2015 and a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2020.

New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona have adopted regulations requiring utilities to provide a percentage of their energy from renewable energy sources. An initiative on Colorado's Nov. 2 ballot would require utility companies obtain 3 percent of their electricity from renewable resources 2007, increasing to 10 percent by 2015.

Private enterprise is jumping on the train, too. Ski resorts across Colorado are taking steps to use more renewable energy and incorporating conservation measures into their operations.

But it's the Westerners' love affair with their vehicles that remains the biggest obstacle to lowering energy demands and cleaning up the air. A 2002 Census Bureau survey placed Phoenix seventh in the nation in commuting time, beating out San Diego, San Antonia and Dallas for time spent traveling to and from work.

Only one Western state has decided to go right to the source of the problem and regulate vehicle emissions. Earlier this year, California passed landmark standards for vehicle emissions for new vehicles, beginning in 2009.

Other Western states are turning to mass transit plans to alleviate congestion, both on their overcrowded highways and interstates, and in their skies, fouled by millions of commuters' cars. Utah's mass transit has grown considerably over the past five years, with 5 million riders in less than one year on its light rail lines along the Wasatch Front.

Huge transportation initiatives are on ballots in Colorado and Arizona, where voters will decide whether or not they will spend billions on transportation and mass transit systems.

Renewable energy, conservation measures and mass transit systems will not solve the problems created by greenhouse gases, but each step, by each individual, city, state and nation is at least a step in the right direction into slowing down the effects of humans on the environment.