Climate Scientist says Water, Wildfire Greatest Concerns in GYE

EDITOR’S NOTE: Big Sky SNO (Sustainability Network Organization) launched its Big Sky Community Climate Action Plan in 2023, featuring a panel discussion with four leading experts in their respective fields moderated by Mountain Journal Managing Editor Joseph T. O’Connor.

Ahead of the launch, MoJo ran a short preview interview with the panelists. Here’s the second installment, this with Cathy Whitlock. – Mountain Journal

Dr. Cathy Whitlock is an Earth scientist, Regents Professor at Montana State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, noted for her work in environmental change, paleoecology and paleoclimatology. She’s a lead author of the comprehensive Montana Climate Assessment and also the Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment, on which SNO based its Big Sky Climate Action Plan.

Originally from Syracuse, New York, Whitlock has focused much of her work on wildfires and their relationship with the shifting climate and humans around the globe. At the panel discussion on Feb. 16, she'll speak to climate education, carbon mitigation and setting priorities in the face of a warming climate. Whitlock says the time for action is now. "We need to reduce greenhouse gases as a first order of business," she told MoJo. "But the climate is going to continue to warm till at least the middle of the century and so we're going to have to adapt to all these things like wildfire and drought."

Mountain Journal: What should Big Sky be considering in conversations about a changing climate and what are your major concerns?

Cathy Whitlock: The thing that places like Big Sky need to think about, and I'm sure they are thinking about it, is the consequences of warmer temperatures because we've already seen it warm about two-and-a-half degrees Fahrenheit since 1950. And in the next eight years, we'll likely see warming by four to six degrees and maybe even more. So warming is happening and in a mountain setting that's probably not such a big deal, but it has a huge impact on the precipitation that we get. The assessment discusses that we're going to have earlier snow melts, it'll come off faster and we’ll likely go into summer with less moisture than we've seen in the past. That’s going to lead to more wildfires, warmer streams, probably more fish closures, and opportunities for these mountain rivers to get easily polluted.

It affects the winter recreational industries in terms of how long they are going to last and how reliable the snowpack is. And it affects the summer recreational sectors because summers are going to be longer but they're going to have a bigger impact on recreation that focuses on fishing and the wildfires themselves will be a big issue.

MOJO: We’ve talked about how hard it is for folks to know where to begin in terms of action related to climate change. What do you think individuals or companies can physically do?

C.W.: In the Greater Yellowstone, a lot of the thinking has to go around water. How do we conserve water? How do we protect water quality? How do we make sure we have enough water going into the summer, so water conservation is really a key issue for places like Big Sky. Big Sky and the high elevations are really the headwaters for everything that happens downstream. If Big Sky is losing its water, just think about what's happening downstream.

Big Sky also needs to think really carefully about wildfire because I think it's inevitable that there are going to be more wildfires and people are living in fire-prone areas. They really need to pay attention to some of the fire smart recommendations around their houses and the way buildings are built. They need to think about what the exit routes are off the mountain with a big fire. That's going to be a real issue. In some ways to me, Big Sky is a little bit like Paradise in California. It doesn't have a lot of ways off the mountain and it's not unimaginable to think of a fire starting at lower elevations and just roaring up the hill slopes around Big Sky.

C.W.: I don't think we're going to go extinct. I think young people have that fear that all humanity is going to be lost and that's not true. But it's going to be such a different world. What's the place going to look like after several fires such as have occurred in California. What trees are going to come back? Are they going to be the same trees that got burned? I don't think so. What's going to happen to the animals that are moving around on the landscape looking for food and our confrontations with them? We're going to have very different relationships with wildlife, because they're responding to climate change.

The relationship between our wildflowers and our pollinators is going to change because they’re getting out of sync, especially when you're looking at migratory species pollinating our plants. Toads and frogs are going to really be struggling in wetlands. It'll be a different world. The thing I think about a lot is that the amount of CO2 that's in the atmosphere now, climate scientists don't think we've seen that level for 3.3 million years. We haven't had 415 parts per million since the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago). So the world is really out of equilibrium right now. Because we don't look like the Pliocene.

I think about my lifetime. I'm going to live my whole life in a warming climate. No matter who I convince, it's not going to affect my life, but it is going to affect my granddaughter.