Reflections on Global Warming

According to the United Nations, the average terrestrial glacier has lost 38 feet of its thickness. Similarly, according to National Geographic, every glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park will have either fully melted or fully receded into Canada by 2020. These facts irrefutably confirm that global warming is alive and well. While many Americans might not care about the disappearance of slow moving ice, it saddens me. Having just spent the past week in Colorado, I am reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s thoughts about the American West: it is in the West that young Americans learn what it means to live the strenuous life. It is there that they can view the last vestiges of American’s wilderness and draw from them the correlative strength that only comes from living in untamed, challenged environs. Glaciers used to be a large part of the West. Every year like clockwork they would run through the Rockies bringing the West water and life. Now, it seems that our consumer-based craze for all things fossil fuel has beaten them back forever. We have become so concerned with production that we have irrevocable altered our environment. Who knows what the results may be? I can tell you this though: the effects of global warming will not stop with the loss of our country’s beautiful and unique glaciers. Consider these other, very real, and very quickly approaching possibilities.

1. El Niño will visit the West Coast every year bringing with it massive amounts of rainfall that will completely destroy California’s ecological balance, increase mudslides, and potentially trigger vast new rounds of earthquakes.
2. America’s favorite trees (e.g. Ash, Maple, Pine, etc.) will slowly die off as the low temperatures necessary to kill off the pests who prey on them disappear.
3. Grizzly bears, wolves, and other animals who rely on the change of seasons will no longer visit our northern lands because it is too warm. And let's not forget the plight of the polar bears too.
4. As global temperatures rise and the ice caps melt, Nevada and Pennsylvania will suddenly become beach states.
5. Finally, things will become so hot in the American southwest that firefighters will no longer be able to maintain its unnatural non-burning. Given that humans were not intended to live there in the first place (not enough water, too much natural tinder, etc.), when temperatures become so high that vegetation dries at a faster rate than normal, fires will proliferate at uncontrollable rates. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the Southwest appears to be emerging from its 20 year abnormally-abundant rainy season which geologists call a climatological outlier.