This story is produced by Montana Free Press and Mountain Journal in collaboration with Grist as part of the Report for America Local News Initiative.
Bare ground flanked the edges of ski runs. It rained in December. Flower beds never went dormant. Snow plows sat gathering rust. As these conditions took hold across Greater Yellowstone and the West last winter, Marianne Cowherd, a snow scientist at Montana State University, was hit with question after question.
“People around me would ask if the snow was so bad because of climate change, and I would find myself having to answer, ‘Probably?’” Cowherd said. “But I don’t really know for sure. And I said that a lot of times over the course of the winter.”
She wasn’t alone. Researchers in Colorado and Wyoming faced similar queries. So they teamed up to find answers. “By the time March and April rolled around, we decided that really we should try to do the formal steps that you need to take to understand whether or not it was caused or attributable to climate change,” Cowherd said.
They found that, yes, human-caused climate change is to blame for this year’s snow drought. According to their research, recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a lack of snow this severe across the West is more than 4 times more likely to occur because of human-caused warming.
The burning of fossil fuels, like coal or oil, for power releases greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause the Earth to warm. While there are many types of planet-warming emissions, the main contributors to warming are carbon dioxide and methane. Scientists have monitored atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958, and it has increased every year since.
This warming increases drought events, decreasing annual snowfall and prompting spring runoff earlier each year. Higher temperatures and lower precipitation also elongates the wildfire season and a warmer climate drives more intense, large-scale fires on the landscape. In ecosystems like Greater Yellowstone, warming impacts wildlife like wolverines dependent on robust snowpacks to build dens, or the timing of the spring green-up that ungulates such as elk and pronghorn rely on to sustain migration. Climate change also disrupts agriculture and harms human health with extreme heat, and increases natural disasters.
“It’s not something that we would expect to happen in the way that it did if there were no climate change occurring,” Cowherd added.
That likelihood is even higher in areas that were especially hard hit, like the Upper Colorado River Basin, where climate change made this winter’s extreme snow drought 14 times more likely.
The research stemmed from a high-resolution dataset compiled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research supercomputer, housed in Cheyenne that tracks how watersheds change across a landscape, going all the way back to 1850. Cowherd and her co-authors were able to compare this winter to winters before the industrial revolution, when humanity’s large-scale planet-warming emissions hadn’t yet begun.
“We’re not just looking at the average temperature for this year and saying, OK, it was really warm, therefore this is a climate-attributed drought,” Cowherd explained. “We’re actually building a good guess of what the world would have been like if there were no climate change, and that’s how we do the actual attribution.”
The researchers’ models predict that in the current climate, snow drought would occur every 6.8 years, compared to just once every 30 years during preindustrial times. Cowherd says it’s important to understand events like this snow drought, because of how vital snow is for replenishing water resources in the mostly arid Mountain West. She hopes land managers can use findings like these to proactively plan for the warming that has already occurred. But she also sees a thread of hope in the research.
“This is a negative impact of anthropogenic climate change, and that is difficult to hear, difficult to learn, but it also means that it’s within our control to a certain degree,” she said. “If we pursue these lower emission scenarios … we would expect years like this to happen less frequently.”
And, know that greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for a long time; thus, the time to take action was yesterday! But, today will do just fine. We know what we need to do, so why don’t we do it? The government and utility companies can help, and it sure would be nice if fossil fuels were not subsidized. But! The ultimate responsibility is on us as individuals. Be as energy- and water-efficient as you can and use renewables where you can whether directly or indirectly.
If you thought this year’s snow drought and anemic runoff were concerning, the 2027 hydrologic season in the Rocky Mountains will be one for the ages. Not in a good.
The largest, fastest growing El Niño has formed in the eastern Pacific. It’s a harbinger that the mountain snowpack will not be replenished over the coming winter, and rain will be replacing snow more often. Folks may be nisled by a startling increase in rainfall and consequential floods in 2027, but rain eats snow and comes at the worst time in the seasonal cycle. The reservoirs will not likely refill next year… from your ranch stock pond to Lake Mead … without the grace of divine intervention. The science says don’t bet the ranch.
Given the past months of unusually intense longer lasting storm track episodes – everywhere in the world it seems – anyone who still thinks it’s just weather and not Climate Change needs either a remedial 10th grade Earth Science class or a trip to the woodshed. Mankind has disrupted the planetary climate beyond it’s capacity to restore equilibrium. No doubt.
But here’s my overriding question. We’re in the crux of a crucial 2026 midterm election cycle with everything important on the ledger of issues. Almost everything , that is. Politicians and their surrogates are ranting about the economy , crippling fatuous tariffs, the Iran War, transgender deceits , imaginary voter fraud, actual voter disinfranchisement, Articial Intelligence doing battle with Natural Stupidity… it’s a long list of election concerns. Except, have you heard anyone running for any office even mention Climate Change ?
The one thing that every other thing lines up behind is global Climate Change. If we fail to mitigate the adverse effects of climate, nothing else will matter. Here in Wyoming our leadership and politicos are mostly on the wrong side of the equations for resolving climate change. Truth be told, Wyoming is part of the problem , because of its fossil thinking about Fossil Fuels. But have you heard a single utterance in the campaigns for US Senate, Congress, Governor all the way down to town councils and county boards that addresses the future if we don’t deal with climate change?
I sure haven’t . The Dems, the GOP especially the Freedom Caucus , are in abject denial. Which only reinforces my belief that Wyoming above all elsewheres needs to throw the bums out and replace them with a Green Party. May future ballots in the Cowboy State have pragmatic populist candidates with a green aura. Your grandkids will be grateful.
Dewey, when the Glaciers receded from northern Missouri and much of North America, thousands of years ago…
What should the cavemen have done to stop it?
The arrogance (to put it nicely) of humans to think they caused or can reverse “climate change” is astonishing.
We have decades of recorded FAILED chicken little predictions from climate alarmists that have ZERO comprehension that what we see over the course of 150 years of “climate change” is literally the blink of an eye in earths history.
For those that believe humans are causing this, their is only 1 single solution. Reverse/roll back the Industrial revolution.
All the technology, all the industry.
Humans will not “Tech” their way out of this, when tech caused it (assumably).
The practical reality is that Wyoming residents have one of, if not the lowest personal tax rates in the country, that is largely due to taxes paid by the fossil fuels industries. The willful ignorance and outright stupidity on the part of Wyoming voters and leaders regarding the human contribution to the rapid changes we are witnessing in the climate result from fear of losing our cash cows. It is far easier to convince yourself that climate change is a hoax than it is to do the hard work of determining exactly how much our activities are contributing to and hastening the rate of change in the climate, and then risking the potential loss of tax income that may result from transitioning to different forms of energy generation. Why are wind and solar energy so widely hated in Wyoming. Is it because they take up too much land, are unsightly and kill too many birds? Hell no, it’s because they threaten the geese that lay the golden eggs that pay our taxes. Promoting the adoption of non-carbon forms of energy generation in good ol’ Wyoming will get you voted out of office almost as fast as dissing the imbecile currently masquerading as our president.
Uh huh. Back in the 1980s I learned quite a bit about Weather and Climate, Pedology and the Geography of Soils (and the five soil forming factors), Watershed Management, and Federal Land Management and Policy at UW Geography Department. You’ll likely find none of these classes available now, but for sure you won’t find the Geography Department. The “powers that be” (i.e. the state gummint and UW Trustees) deemed that land use planning and understanding the consequences of NOT planning were of no practical use.
Rick Reider must be rolling in his grave.
Not a year event. When lakes are ice-free in late January and early February on a regular basis, the signal is clear to climate deniers. Or is it?
Human caused climate change may be as big of a hoax as “trust the science and mask up and stay 6′ apart”. Earth’s climate has been constantly changing long before fossil fuels. True science will tell you that fossil fuels is a lie perpetrated by the old original oil and coal barons to drive up the price.
It’s crazy Harold, you would think that man must have also caused all the Laurentide Ice Sheet covering half of the North America to disappear 20000 years ago as well.
The Climate has ALWAYS been changing, it is pretty bold to say that man is currently causing 100% of it
It’s 2026. There are are both overwhelming data (evidence) and expert consensus that anthropogenic climate change is real, is accelerating, and unless checked, will be catastrophic for most life on Earth (start here: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/). And here you are, spouting the same old cliched pablum – “Earth’s climate has been constantly changing…”. How much suffering must you endure to become even minimally intellectually curious? Why are you, in your willing ignorance, so eager to condemn future generations to a marginally habitable planet with staggering climate migration and more than a billion climate refugees projected by 2100?
If this is true, the only way to stop/reverse it is for humanity to go back to a pre industrial revolution standard of living\way of life.
Correct?
It is man caused it is advancing technology caused.
Incorrect. Three logical fallacies in one short post: false dilemma, slippery slope, and straw man. Kudos. That’s impressive.