By Patrick Reilly
Miller Creek
This winter has been a mild one (click here) — especially by Denny Anderson’s standards.
“I’ve seen it 43 degrees below zero” he recalled, walking the 220-acre ranch above Missoula where he’s lived for 54 years. When he moved here, he remembered on a sunny morning last week, winters would bring at least three solid weeks at 20 degrees below.
Those fierce cold spells are gone. So are the snowdrifts that would cover Miller Creek each year, and his ability to predict, reliably, when the soil would be just right for planting hay, grass, oats, and alfalfa in the spring. “It’s patchy” now, he said. “Some years it’s real moist, some years it’s bone dry. I really believe that’s due to climate change. Nothing is standard anymore.”
As Anderson reflects on these changes, Missoula is bracing for a warmer climate in decades to come. The Climate Ready Missoula plan currently being drafted by the city, county and Climate Smart Missoula lists 29 climate change-adaptation goals for the area, and 67 strategies to reach them — all to get Missoula County ready for a temperature increase of 5 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
But climate change isn’t just a future trend; it's a current reality. Earlier this month, NASA scientists announced the past decade was the warmest on record. And according to the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment, Northwest Montana’s average annual temperatures increased by .39 degrees Fahrenheit every decade between 1950 and 2015 — from just under 40 degrees in 1950 to just under 42 in 2015....
