Glaciers are Outliving the Environmentalist Who Predicted Their Doom

 Daniel Greenfield

"This August I visited Glacier National Park in Montana," Gianna Kelly, the founder of Climb for Conservation, wrote in the Huffington Post. "I am still stunned to have learned the following fact:  by 2020, no glaciers will exist in Glacier National Park." Kelly, who had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, wrote that back in the first year of the Obama administration. It might stun her more to learn that Obama is out of the White House and that the glaciers of Glacier National Park are still there and waiting to be visited. Throughout the Obama era, visitors to Glacier National Park were frequently harangued with false claims that the glaciers would all be gone in a decade. These warnings decorated dioramas and trash cans even as the hysterical propaganda become more ridiculous with every passing year. In time for the 2019 summer season at Glacier National Park, the embarrassing signs claiming that the glaciers won’t be there next year have begun coming down. But the doomsday predictions won’t leave. The melting glaciers of Glacier have been the subject of countless media stories and at least one book, The Melting World: A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers, from St. Martin’s Press, which excitingly promised to chronicle the “the first extinction of a mountain ecosystem in what is expected to be a series of such global calamities as humanity faces the prospect of a world without alpine ice.” Melting World followed Daniel Fagre, who heads the Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project for the United States Geological Survey, and is the figure most associated with the 2020 number. Fagre had told the book’s author back in 2008 that all the glaciers would be gone in 10 to 12 years. The USGS global warming expert has been quoted in media outlets every year predicting the death of the glaciers... The glaciers of Glacier seem likely to outlive the environmentalist who had spent the bulk of his career predicting their doom. And, if the Department of the Interior cleans house, they will outlive his career...MORE