This red state is sounding a warning we all need to heed

“Winter? What winter?” asked the email from an old friend and life-long Montanan.

Indeed, right now it’s still in the 50s here in Helena, in mid-January. At night, the temperatures are not even making it down to freezing, often remaining in the 40s. New high temperature records are being set across the state every week.

“Winter? What winter?” is a dang good question.

Now maybe those who are new in-migrants to Montana — and there are many — this may seem like “really nice weather.” And it is — for spring, not winter in Montana.

But for those of us who have lived here for all or most of our lives, seeing new high temperature records being set every week as the mountain ranges remain brown except for their summits, something like seasonal dislocation is occurring. And it is not comforting because we know what’s coming — and it isn’t going to be pretty.

The meteorologists say the Sno-Tel sites measuring snow depth at elevation are showing wide variation in accumulation — some say it’s good, some say they’re way low. As an email from another old friend this week reported: “Snowmobilers say there’s good snow at 9,000 feet in the Tobacco Root Mountains.” 9,000 feet?! That particular range tops out at 10,000 feet, so we basically have 1,000 feet of actual snowpack and then, well, it’s back to brown all the way down to the valleys below.

Bob Dylan famously sang “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — and indeed, you don’t need a meteorologist to know there’s no snow in our mountains, you can trust your own eyes on that by just looking around.

What this proves — undeniably and more evident every day — is that the environmentalists were right. The predictions of the consequences of overloading the atmosphere with human-caused pollutants are now coming home to roost. Those predictions have been on-going for many decades, and for many decades they have been largely ignored, distorted, and contested by, of course, those with a profit motive in continuing “business as usual” in the fossil fuel industries.

Now, that position has been wholeheartedly adopted by a science-deficient president and the kow-towing toadies larding his administration. Despite his proclamations that climate change is a “hoax,” the reality is staring us in the face here in Montana — and no amount of propaganda is going to bring down the temperature or produce the snowpack necessary to sustain Montanans through the ever hotter and drier summers.

Tragically, not only has the fossil fuel industry been unleashed by removing what few regulatory sidebars once existed, the administration has adopted an absolutely insane policy of massive deforestation of what remains of our national forests.

While billions are being spent on quixotic quests to engineer huge machines to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, those forests and their green trees achieve that job by not only removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but safely sequestering it in the soil. And they do it for free — if we simply let them live.

Unfortunately, Montana’s governor is equally misdirected by trying to log as much of our state forests as possible, even kicking up the supposed “sustainable yield” by millions of board feet every year when there’s no guarantee that they will regrow in the changing climatic conditions.

The environmentalists were right and remain right, and many continue the struggle to try to save something for generations yet to come. The weather? Nice for April, not January, in Montana — where the old hands, who know better, are asking, “Winter? What Winter?”

• George Ochenski is Montana's longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana's natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.