Nationally renowned climate change activist Bill McKibben issued a stark warning to a Bozeman audience earlier this month: "The things that scientists were warning us about [in 1989] are now coming true, and they're becoming true in dramatic ...
fashion." Montanans have been witnessing that drama all summer. July's oppressive heat led to restrictions on 17 popular fishing sites.
A freak storm in Missoula knocked down enough trees and branches to fill Washington-Grizzly Stadium to the brim. As school started, smoke-strangled skies left playgrounds across Montana empty during recess while kids stayed safe indoors. Now, a few rainy days behind us and a glorious autumn ahead, we're settling back into oblivion.
Obliviousness can be manufactured, and obliviousness to climate change clearly has been. In 1990, leaders from both political parties took the then-coalescing opinion of most scientists on the issue seriously. Reminding us of the "sacred trust" our tenancy on this planet imposes, then-President George H.
W. Bush enacted the National Climate Assessment and called for an international treaty limiting carbon emissions. Limit carbon emissions? Not if the Koch Brothers had anything to say about it.
With their billions accruing from fossil fuel consumption, they got busy. The Cato Institute, a Koch creation and suckling, convened "perhaps the earliest known organized conference of climate change deniers," as journalist Jane Mayer described it. "They stopped anything from happening.
