New report on climate change in Greater Yellowstone
In September, the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition released the report: Greater Yellowstone in Peril: The Threats of Climate Disruption.
From RMCO's webpage on the report:
Already, Greater Yellowstone is experiencing changes. The region has gotten hotter at a faster rate than the global average. Summers have especially gotten hotter. If emissions of heat-trapping pollutants go up at a medium-high rate, average summer temperatures in Yellowstone National Park could get as hot as recent summers in Culver City in the Los Angeles area by the end of the century.
Higher temperatures, along with other climate changes discussed in the report, threaten Greater Yellowstone's unaparalleled natural wonders—as well as the local economies built around them. Visitors to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks alone spent an estimated $700 million in 2009, and with a rise in visitation numbers in 2010, that figure presumably increased as well.
Already, whitebark pines, the dominant, ecologically important trees of the region’s highest forests, are suffering widespread mortality from tree-killing mountain pine beetles, now able to spread in epidemic numbers into mountaintops that used to be too cold for them. As a result, grizzly bears, which depend on whitebark pine seeds as a key pre-hibernation food, now face a new threat. Wildfires are now more widespread and extreme. Fishing restrictions are more common, to protect trout stressed by hotter river temperatures....
See also GYC's webpage on the report, and a story from the Idaho Statesman.
Posted by Charles Chester on Friday, October 7, 20112:31PM
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