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This story was originally appeared Yale Environment 360 and Climate Table collaboration.
In 1872, when Yellowstone was named the first national park in the United States, Congress ordered “reservation and liquidation, occupation and removal from sale, and … separation as a public park or pleasant ground, for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Today, however, Yellowstone, which covers 3,472 square miles across Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, faces a threat that national park designations cannot protect: a rise in temperature.
Since the 1950s, the iconic park has undergone several changes caused by global warming caused by humans, including a reduction in the snowpack, shorter winters and longer summers, and an increased risk of fires. These changes, as well as the predicted changes as the planet continues to heat up this century, are set out in a newly released climate assessment years passed. The report examines the effects of climate change not only on the park, but also on the Great Yellowstone Ecosystem — an area 10 times the size of the park.
The climate assessment says that park temperatures are as high or as high as at any time in the last 20,000 years and are probably the warmest in the last 800,000 years. Since 1950, Yellowstone has experienced an average temperature rise of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, with the most significant warming occurring at altitudes above 5,000 feet.
Today, the report says, the dissolution of the Yellowstone spring begins a few weeks earlier and the discharge of the annual spot currents is eight days earlier than in 1950. The region’s agricultural growth season is nearly two weeks longer than it was 70 years ago. Since 1950, snowfall in the Great Yellowstone Area has fallen by 53% and 43% in January and March, and in September the snowfall has almost disappeared, falling by 96%. Annual snowfall has dropped by almost 2 meters since the 1950s.
Due to constant warming, the precipitation that now fell as much as snow is like rain. Annual rainfall could increase by 9 to 15 percent by the end of the century, the assessment says. But if the snow package declines, and temperatures and evaporation increase, future conditions are expected to be drier, stressing vegetation and increasing the risk of fires. Extreme weather is more common already, and they are pleasant The 1988 massive Yellowstone fires—He burned 8,000,000 acres — is a growing seasonal concern.
Future projections of the assessment are even darker. If heat-emitting emissions are not reduced, the towns around Greater Yellowstone — including Bozeman Montana and Jackson, Pinedale and Cody in Wyoming — can have temperatures between 40 and 60 days a year in excess of 90 ºF. the current state of greenhouse gas emissions could lead to a 5-10 degree rise in temperatures in the Great Yellowstone area by 2100, creating fluctuations in the ecosystem, including changes in forest composition.
Water is at the root of the problems facing the Great Yellowstone Area, and the report warns that communities around the park — including ranchers, farmers, businesses and homeowners — need to create plans for increasing drought prospects, declining snowpack and seasonal changes in water availability.
“The climate will challenge our economy and the health of all the people who live here,” he said Cathy Whitlock, Paleoclimatologist at Montana State University and author of the report. He hopes that “the population and political leaders will be involved in the local effects and the development of lists of the most endangered habitats and specific human health indicators to be studied”, connection between the growth of fires and respiratory diseases. The alarm is not new, but the authors of the Yellowstone report hope that their approach and the set of evidence presented will convince skeptics of climate change to accept that it is real and exacerbated.
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