Pat Stuart

The climate change lottery is already showing us a lot about who will be winners and who will end up as losers and, so far, we’re a winner. Our spring and summer weather experience feels beyond sweet, doesn’t it? A May and June of rain turned our desert green and brought out wildflowers seldom seen. The normally brown McCulloughs sprouted lush hillsides.  Heart Mountain and its friends around the Basin sprouted knee-high grass. Flying over them revealed meadows where herbivores could graze until they could eat no more.  

Then, July.  

Summer came just in time for the Fourth. Sort of. The big Cowboy Payday rodeo saw monsoonal rains that turned the arena into a mudhole, but the Fourth of July parade experienced weather so perfect that it motivated people to turn out dressed in finery more appropriate for an Easter Parade. People strutted along the sidewalks in their new summer best or tipped their hats rakishly against the sun.

Elsewhere, it was not so. Most of the world, we are told, was sweltering or burning. Record keepers announced new records made and then broken on a daily basis. They say 2023 is sure to become the hottest year ever. And 2024 may be worse.  

Incredible to think of places in this country (outside Death Valley, of course) with day-on-day temps blasting out the tops of thermometers. So different from our local experience. Right now, I’m writing this on an August afternoon with partly cloudy skies overhead, a cooling breeze, a high temperature of 73 degrees and showers in the forecast and no need for air conditioning. More, I’m wearing a long-sleeve shirt.    

Who could ask for better ... unless you’re a heat lover, of course? It’s like we live in another world, almost on another planet.  

In fact, we do. Our Big Horn Basin — an area about the size of New Jersey — is known for a unique microclimate, one created by our mountains. They give us weather patterns which often deviate from those of the surrounding regions.  

That’s not something you didn’t know. What’s maybe news to you is that we are a geographic laboratory for scientists attempting to understand climate change.  

Not the current one. Their interest is focused on events that happened during and after the Laramide Orogeny when colliding plates slowly pushed up the Beartooth, Bighorn, Bridger, Pryor, Absaroka and Owl Creek ranges and the temperatures within their boundaries rose in an early example of climate change. 

Unlike our man-made situation now, that process took place over 10,000 years, giving many species time to change and adapt.

Our experience is unlikely to mirror the ancient one. Still, we have our surrounding mountains. Still, they give us a microclimate, meaning we can expect to have our own unique weather as the world boils around us.

So, OK. That sounds grim. What’s going to happen? I wish my crystal ball would say. Instead, it produces guesses only.  

One thing it does show concerns population migrations. Whether you “believe” in our current period of climate change as manmade or natural is unimportant. Whatever the cause, it’s with us, and it will change much about the way the world works and how and where people live.

Sea level rise and regions blighted by heat or extreme weather conditions will force people in the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, to relocate over the next 50-100 years. In the normal course of events, presuming we continue to have a moderate climate, they’ll be migrating to places like ... here.  

We’ll have everything they want except for one essential thing: jobs. For once, not being able to provide enough jobs for everyone may be a big asset; could help us escape the worst of overpopulation. We’ll grow, of course. We’ll grow with or without climate change, but with luck and good planning we can handle whatever the future throws at us.

In the lottery of life (and what is more essential to life than climate), it seems to me, we’re coming up a winner.