Glacier Park: The next century - Disappearing namesake ... symbol of climate change

[Newsjock]

Source: Missoulian

WEST GLACIER - The tourists huddled in a shivering pack amid what should have been the heat of July, crowding around Laura Kloeck while she explained a bit about climate change.

“There is definitely a frightening side to global warming,” Kloeck told them, “but there is hope, too.”

... The trend lines, Kloeck told her chilly crowd, are clear. The world is warming.

Here in Glacier National Park, that means the glaciers will be gone in just a couple of decades. In Joshua Tree National Park in California, it means no more Joshua trees. In Florida's Everglades, it likely means no more glades.

... Scientists from dozens of different disciplines have come to measure the ice, and the moisture, and the tree rings and soil and water, and the plants and animals and skies themselves. They look back millennia, far into the atmospheric past, and there they read stories from deep time.

And here's the thing - all those scientists, from all those fields, with all those different approaches, they all now find their results converging into one uniform narrative.

Summertime temperatures are up several degrees. The ice is nearly gone, and going faster than expected. The hottest years are the most recent years.

It is a consistent story of a changing climate driven to extremes, and at extreme speeds, pushed in part by the choices people have made and continue to make.

Read more: http://missoulian.com/articles/2008/08/18/news/top/news01.txt

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Glacier National Park marks its 100th year in 2010, in the midst of some of the most rapid change the park has experienced. This week, the Missoulian examines those changes.

Sunday: Stability defined Glacier's first century. Its second looks to be anything but. In Territory, accompany an Iowa family on its first, heart-stopping trip up Going-to-the-Sun Road.

Today: New park programs highlight the fact that Glacier has become the poster child for climate change.

Tuesday: As the number of visitors soars, and the park's needs increase apace, funding flattens.

Wednesday: Glacier enters its second century pressured as never before by its surroundings - a moat of mining, energy development and sprawl.