Montana Climate Change

Steve Running | Regents Professor of Ecology, University of Montana

Hello. I’m Steve Running, Regents Professor at the University of Montana. I’ve been in Montana since 1979. I can’t quite claim I’m a native, I was born in Spokane. I guess that means I won’t ever get to be governor. I’m at least half native at this point though.

As I contemplate why I’m here, why I’ve stayed here my whole career, I suspect it isn’t that much different than an awful lot of the rest of Montanans. Probably every single one of us could make more money by moving somewhere else. And yet here we are.

We stay here.

I suspect we’re all here for pretty similar reasons. We want a place where we don’t feel crowded. We want a place where we can go out the back door and do any number of things, literally right out the back door. I can go out my back door and if I turn one direction I go up the street into a wilderness area, and if I turn the other way I can head to campus. I think I would never have made it in a lifestyle where I had to get in a car and commute for an hour every day down a freeway.

What I find in my work is that Montana is changing, and it has changed in the 32 years since I’ve been here. A lot of my research in the last two decades has been to understand where Montana is going in its physical environment and of course where the world is going.

What I do see are the initial signs of trends that are going to change some of the things we all like to do.

One curious aspect of the Montana climate that probably no one is sad to see gone are the extreme winter temperatures. A lot of you may know that up on Rogers Pass they set the record low temperature for the lower 48 states, 70 degrees below zero in the 1930s. When you read historical accounts and when you look at weather records of the past, winters where you have a few nights at 40 and 50 below zero were not uncommon. Almost every few years you would have temperatures, down in the cities, not up in some high mining camp, but down in the cities there would be recorded temperatures that cold and lower.

You think now, in the last 20 or 30 years, maybe we’ve had a temperature of 25 or 28 below zero in our cities. That’s about the lowest we ever hear of.

We all know they weren’t enjoyable. I’m sure no one probably misses 40 below zero. But it turns out it has some important roles in an ecosystem, ecosystem cleansers as I like to call it. Forty below zero cleans a lot of things out of an ecosystem that cannot take it. Both people that move back to southern states, I won’t say anything more about that, but also a lot of animals and insects; termites, for example, don’t make it in weather that cold.

What I see for our future climate most clearly, though, is that it’s just going to continue to become drier. It’s not because of less snow or rain, it’s because higher temperatures simply evaporate more water. It dries the landscape more. The beginnings of this are already being felt. We know now we are a couple of degrees warmer than 50 years ago on average. The weather statistics bear this out. And we will progressively see our landscapes bearing this out.

Probably the most striking example we see periodically are much more dynamic wildfires.

On our bad fire years, we’ll get fires that will take off at a rate that we really haven’t seen in the past. They’ve become much bigger than what we can stop. And they literally become a point of public danger that we have to be cognizant of. This is a part of our ecosystem transitioning into the balance of this new climate. And of course, this climate is continuing to change.

We will see changes in our forests, partly by these wildfires, or simply due to species of trees such as white bark pine, which are not as successful in these new climates. I don’t expect Montana to be a bad place in the next century by any means. But I think we need to recognize that as a part of these global trends, this is what we’re going to see in the state.

Our rivers not having as much water in them is another example of this ecosystem impact. We’re seeing that already on dry years when the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks has to close fishing, sometimes for weeks at a time on certain rivers that have gotten to minimum flow. Those are things that will happen more regularly in the future. We have to recognize that this is just part of where the future climate is going to take us.

I think we’re still going to have plenty of skiing in the winter. We have high-mountain, good cold snow. A few degrees of warming is not going to take the snow out from under us; that may happen more toward the West Coast. It may change how animals hibernate though. And it certainly will mean that our ski seasons will be a bit shorter in the spring, little by little. And we’ll have the same type of variability that we have in a year like this; you remember three or four years ago that we had almost no snow pack. It was melted by late March on most of the mountains, most were snow free. That type of variability will continue.

The final thing I would want us to recognize is that Montana has to be part of the global community in the whole topic of climate change. I think this bumper sticker has been around before this issue, but it’s so perfect: “Think Globally and Act Locally.” We’re all going to have to think about a global transition of the energy systems of the planet. We’ll have to make lifestyle changes that minimize energy use, particularly of carbon-based energy sources. We have to make this transition in the next half century.

And we have to do this in a way that is cooperative with the rest of the world.

I sometimes joke that this is the ultimate test of the human IQ: whether we are smart enough when presented with evidence of impending doom to make any effort to avoid that consequence. We do have plenty of time and opportunity to avoid really ruining the planet. But we will ruin the planet within no more than 200 years, which is the lifetime of this country, if we don’t have a significantly different energy future.

I think this is probably good news for all of you under 30. Because I think all of us, when we were in college, were hell bent on changing the world. In a lot of cases we weren’t very successful in changing the things that we thought needed fixing.

In this case though, you have to succeed. You really do have to change the world in a very fundamental way, like the beginning of the original industrial revolution. You have a lot of challenges but an incredible amount of opportunity to forge a new path for humanity that I hope I live long enough to get an initial sense of where everything is going to go. Because I think it is just going to be just spectacular.

This transition, though, has to be about energy.

I wish you all the best.