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It begs the question of how often families must be smoked out, scorched out, or flooded out of parks for these treasures become a more prominent rallying cry to fight global warming. National parks are unique for their locations at high and low elevations and delicate layers of ecosystems. It makes them ripe for disproportional impacts from climate change, relative to the nation in general. According to studies in 2018 and 2020 led by Patrick Gonzalez, who was the principal climate scientist for the National Park Service, a White House climate advisor, and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the mean annual temperature of the parks has increased at double the US rate since 1895. Without major reductions in the carbon emissions fueling global warming, the impacts on the parks would be endless. Even under a scenario of drastic emissions reductions, Gonzalez’s 2018 study found that more than half of national park area would exceed the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit limits set by the Paris Agreement to avoid catastrophic climate impacts—more than double the 22 percent of the US as a whole that would exceed that temperature. The 2020 study offered an exclamation point: “Without emissions reductions, climate change could increase temperatures across the national parks, up to 9ºC (16ºF) by 2100 in parks in Alaska. This could melt all glaciers from Glacier National Park, raise sea level enough to inundate half of Everglades National Park, dissolve coral reefs in Virgin Islands National Park through ocean acidification, and damage many other natural and cultural resources.” Since wildfires and their smoke are currently so prominent in the news, it is of note that Gonzalez’s 2020 study predicts that the frequency of wildfire could increase by up to 300 percent in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, and up to 1,000 percent in Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. In 2019, Gonzalez, despite being pressured by superiors during the Trump administration to not talk about “anthropogenic,” or human-caused climate change, testified to Congress that, “Cutting carbon pollution would reduce human-caused climate change and help save our national parks for future generations.”
Crowds grow even as temperatures rise
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