A spruce budworm outbreak here has me worried about the long-term health of our forest, given that climate change is likely to substantially alter conditions here in Montana. The nightmare scenario is for temperatures to warm up without soil moisture keeping up, so that drought-weakened trees are easily ravaged by budworm and other pests, unchecked by the good hard cold you can usually count on here at some point in January, with dead stands ultimately burning before a graceful succession of species can take place. The big questions, then, are what’s the risk, how to see it coming, and how to adapt.
To get a look at the risk, I downloaded some GCM results from the CMIP3 archive. These are huge files, and unfortunately not very informative about local conditions because the global grids simply aren’t fine enough to resolve local features. I’ve been watching for some time for a study to cover my region, and at last there are some preliminary results from Eric Salathé at University of Washington. Regional climate modeling is still an uncertain business, but the results are probably as close as one can come to a peek at the future.
The future is generally warmer. Here’s the regional temperature trend for my grid point, using the ECHAM5 model (downscaled) for the 20th century (blue) and IPCC A2 forcings (red), reported as middle-of-the-road warming:
