Trego's Mountain Ear

I knew that I had measured the Kootenai’s lowest snowfalls.  I didn’t realize that the 1977 record still stood.  I don’t know if the record will still be standing in June – but right now, that seems to be the way to bet.

Back then, it was global warming – and I was measuring record lows as I did snow surveys.  So I figured I should start reading a bit more about global warming.  As the years went on, the readings got back toward normal, and it looked as if I didn’t have to get too worried . . . it looked like a black swan event, and besides, nobody remembers the guy who ran the stopwatch when Jesse Owens ran at the Olympics in Germany.

The geologists tell me that 12,000 years ago there was a mile or more of ice over the spot I call home.  The Pleistocene is the word for the era we live in, when my home is ice-free for one season, and ice-free for part of the other season.  (The two seasons are August and Winter . . . some confuse the issue by adding a third season called Construction.  It is easy to be skeptical about global warming when your longest season is winter.)

My first calculation about global warming – from a Trego perspective – was that a longer growing season would have some advantages.   Heck, we might get to a point where we could raise some short-season varieties of corn, melons – perhaps even blackberries.  There’s a lot to be said for longer growing seasons.  Perhaps we might get to three seasons – July, August and Winter.  Shorter winters might demand less firewood?  This global warming may have some advantages for folks who live at the 49th parallel.

Foresters introduced me to the concept of “climax species.”  On the place in Trego most of the trees are Douglas Fir – but there are some awesome Ponderosa Pine, that, when we cored the tree, proved to be older.   Even older are the snags and remnants that evidence a burn before settlement.  Climate may change – either because of human activities or because of natural processes.  The one thing that is fairly certain is change.  Causality is, of course, subject to debate.  Unfortunately, we infer causality from the data – we don’t prove it.

As I looked at it, global warming could have advantages in some places and disadvantages in others.  The trick to dealing with any situation is to pick the place where you stand, a place where the advantages show up.  I like the city of Paramaribo – but it’s just a touch north of the equator and just a couple feet above sea level.  With a 365 day growing season, and a typical temperature of 84 degrees Fahrenheit, there just isn’t a whole lot that higher global temperatures can do for P-bo.  On the other hand, a longer growing season, and more growing degree days is going to make the crops grow a little better. 

The geological record suggests that climate, like weather, changes.  I was there to measure the lowest Kootenai snowfalls on record – but my guess is that there were lower snowfalls that occurred earlier when nobody was hired to measure them.  Things change.  If I can find ways that those changes make my life better, it’s good.