My daughters and I just returned from an 11 day camping trip which included a four day stay on the shore of McDonald Lake in Glacier National Park. We saw many wonders of nature, beautiful rivers and lakes, forests and meadows, black bear (no grizzlies), moose and deer, the spectacular Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide at Logan Pass. What we didn't see however, were glaciers.
There are several reasons for this, the most significant of course being there are only about 25 glaciers left, down from 150 a century ago. Those that remain are located in remote, mountainous terrain, and getting to one in a reasonable amount of time was going to be very difficult for us. For example to get to Grinnell Glacier from our campsite, with the Going to the Sun Road closed at Logan Pass due to the wildfire on the east side, we would have had to drive 2.5 hours south around the park on Highway 2, make a three hour hike each way and then drive back to our campsite at Fish Creek, for a total of 11 hours, providing we didn't stop to rest and enjoy the view.
So what does this have to do with the Glacier National Park funding its own demise? Follow below the orange squiggle for more.
As many of us know, for ten thousand years the topography of what is now Glacier National Park, in northern Montana, has remained about the same. But the warming climate is melting the park's glaciers, threatening to change the tourist mecca into a Glacier Free National Park.
A century ago, this sweep of mountains on the Canadian border boasted some 150 ice sheets, many of them scores of feet thick, plastered across summits and tucked into rocky fissures high above parabolic valleys. Today, perhaps 25 survive.
http://www.nytimes.com/....
Over thousands of years these glaciers have not retreated but have remained in a melt and freeze cycle, scouring "U" shaped valleys and creating horned mountain tops similar to those in the Swiss "Alps."
http://www.nps.gov/....
According to the USGS, which has documented the glacial retreat with their Repeat Photography Project, the park's glaciers will be gone in 15 years.
There is no doubt. It is settled science. The Earth is getting warmer, and the rapidly retreating and disappearing glaciers are canaries in the mine.
But still Republican climate change deniers gleefully point to the harsh winter storms that have hit the Midwest and Eastern U.S. as proof of "Global Cooling". Senator James Inhofe's snowball in the Senate stunt was particularly discouraging.
Inhofe is not some backbench member of the upper chamber, but is in fact the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, with jurisdiction over the allegedly non-existent climate problem. And so it may have been deeply disturbing for a man with so much power over the fate of the planet to display such stunning ignorance. Source: Huffington Post
Republicans it would seem are more convinced by short term, localized weather events than in long term regional and global trends. And even if they begrudgingly admit that Climate Change is real and possibly partially anthropogenic, the solutions are just too radical for them to support because they cut into profit margins of billionaire industrialists like the Koch brothers and a main source of funding for GOP candidates.
That brings me to the Koch Brothers, darlings of the "free" market, purveyors of petroleum poisoning, devotees of deforestation, propagators of pollution from pulp mills producing paper products for Georgia Pacific and funders of fake science and climate change denying politicians, whose petroleum business has been convicted of polluting our lakes, rivers and streams. And on top of all that the Kochs are working together with ExxonMobile in an effort to close the National Parks and privatize government lands by funding their so called Property and Environment Research Center.
The group pushing to sell off (privatize) the national park system to the fossil fuel industry, and indeed, sell off all public land to the highest corporate bidder, is the Koch and ExxonMobil-funded Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). PERC, Exxon-Mobil, the Koch brothers, and Republicans across the nation contend that no state, federal, or local government has any right to own any land within America’s borders; Source: Politicususa
Ostensibly, besides taking our annual camping vacation to have father/daughter bonding and deepen our connection with the natural beauty of our country, we were going to Glacier Park in hopes of seeing a glacier before they all disappeared. Imagine my dismay when I found that the park restrooms were stocked with Georgia Pacific toilet paper and dispensers, made by the very same jerks who were the face of climate change denial. Every time we wiped our asses it was with Koch tissue and with every wipe we were putting money in their bank accounts, making us unwittingly complicit in their nefarious anti-government, anti-science, anti-National Park activities. I had to swallow hard. Glacier National Park was funding its own demise. The glaciers may be gone in 15 years, which would be equivalent to Redwood National Park having no redwoods or Crater Lake having no lake.
This is why I started a petition to Sally Jewell, the Secretary of the Interior, urging the National Parks to stop purchasing Georgia Pacific products. Here is the link. Please read it, sign it and share. Thanks for taking the time to read my diary and my petition. Your friend, Mike (Dr Jazz).
https://community.sumofus.org/...