Taking Climate Change Personally

I teach at a junior high school in Missouri and attended a Smithsonian Day event as the Missouri Teacher of the Year in 2008. I subsequently won the Smithsonian’s 2009 Increase Award for innovation in teaching teachers how to use Smithsonian resources. When I think about global warming, my thoughts turn to Glacier National Park in Montana. Our entire family spent about a week in the park in 1986, when I was 15, and the highlight was hiking to Grinnell Glacier. We walked on the glacier, felt the river of icy water melting beneath it, and marveled at the views from the Continental Divide. We still look at the photographs and laugh about how much fun we had on that hike.

Fifteen years later, I returned to Glacier National Park to propose to my wife. We hiked the same trail I had as a teenager. But things had changed. When we reached the top, Grinnell Glacier was much different than I had remembered. It was now 2001 and global warming had started to take its toll. The ancient ice mass had become noticeably smaller, and we learned that it was continuing to melt at an accelerated rate. Grinnell Glacier is vanishing before our eyes.

Scientists had predicted the glaciers will vanish from Glacier National Park by 2030. Two years ago that estimate was revised to 2020. Think about it - Glacier National Park without glaciers. The average daily temperature in the park has increased two degrees each year. Glacier National Park is visibly showing the impact of global warming.

The issue of global warming is so easy to ignore in our daily lives. It's difficult to really comprehend the impact of the world's oceans rising a couple of inches each year or the melting of an ice cap on the opposite side of the earth. But it’s happening. It’s real. In many ways it’s like watching your children grow up. They are growing at a rate that is so slow you don't notice it. Then one day you turn around and they're five feet tall.

Grinnell Glacier is part of my personal history. My wife and I want to take our two girls there. We want to hike to the top of Grinnell with them and share the amazing experience we had years before. But in 10 years we may not be able to realize our dream. The glacier may be gone. And that saddens me. Obviously there are greater ramifications to global warming than its effect on the Langhorst family vacation, but what’s happening to that ancient ice mass really brings the issue home for me.

I suspect many of us have a personal take on global warming. If you do, I hope you’ll take a moment to answer this question: What makes global warming real to you? Is there an event, a statistic, an image that moves global warming from just a scientific theory into your personal life?

Please leave your comment on this blog post. We'd love to hear why you take global warming personally.

Eric Langhorst is an 8th grade American history teacher at South Valley Jr. High School in Liberty, Missouri, and a recipient of Smithsonian’s Increase Award for innovation in teaching.