Glacier-sized pawn in their game

Glacier National Park has become a convenient and effective tool for the great climate change campaign. The park's glaciers are indeed shrinking, a well-documented fact with consequential landscape changes.

But climate change alarmists shouldn't be playing games with these facts the way the National Environmental Trust is. The Missoula-based organization announced this week a contest to rename Glacier National Park, because scientists predict the park will lose all of its glaciers by 2030 if climate trends continue.

"This contest will let the Montana congressional delegation know that it is time they supported mandatory global warming pollution reduction policies," said a press release from the trust.

The contest may be well-intended, but it is also a disingenuous and misleading exercise.

That's because Glacier's glaciers have been melting for thousands of years, and because the park wasn't even named for the tiny alpine glaciers of today, but for the landscape carved out by continental glaciers over a period of hundreds of thousands of years.

"Crown of the Continent: Profile of a Treasured Landscape" describes in detail how the park and most of the Northern Continental Divide was almost entirely buried in ice going back some 2 million years to the Pleistocene Period.

"The classic features of the Crown of the Continent are chiefly the result of glacial erosion. As the ice retreated, it left behind a dramatic landscape formed by glacial sculpting of the underlying rock. The ice left behind such features as U-shaped valleys, knifelike ridges, hanging valleys, waterfalls, cirques and steep cliffs."

Those are classic features of Glacier National Park, more so than the remaining alpine glaciers clinging to the sides of a few mountains.

Maybe the contest allows the National Environmental Trust to project a certain moral superiority, but it does little else.

The question one must ask is whether "mandatory global warming pollution reduction policies" will halt or reverse the melting of Grinnell Glacier, or Jackson Glacier, or any other glacier in Glacier National Park within the next 30 years. We doubt it.

It is misleading to suggest that such policy changes, no matter how draconian, will "save" Glacier's glaciers. And it is irresponsible to appeal for a popular emotive response over the loss of glaciers while completely ignoring the economic impacts that will surely result from draconian policy changes.