BOB MCCRACKEN Nye County History Advertisement

We hear a great deal about climate change these days.

You know the scenario -- the earth's climate is warming up, the polar ice caps are melting, mountain glaciers around the world will be gone in 50 years; sea level is rising and untold numbers of species are threatened with extinction.

And human activity is thought to be the major cause, mostly through the burning of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas.

Perhaps it would be interesting to see what changes, if any, long-time Nye County residents have noted over the past 50 to 100 years.

I spoke with Pahrump resident Harry Ford. He has lived in Pahrump longer than anyone who is not a Native American.

Harry was 7 when he moved to Pahrump with his family in 1944, and he has been there ever since. He spent 38 years with the Nye County Road Department and was involved in a great deal of weather-related plowing and road repair.

He is also a historian, the sparkplug behind the founding and operation of the Pahrump Museum, and tends to see change in the county through the eyes of a historian.

Harry told me, "When we first came to Pahrump in 1944, we had a lot more rain in the wintertime ... And more snow. When I was a boy, you could look up on Charleston Mountain, elevation 11,918, and still see snow in July and August."

Back then, he said, "You could count on waking up on a morning around the first of the year to an inch or more of snow on the ground." That hasn't happened in quite a long time, he added.

Harry said when he and his family first came to the valley, old-timers spoke of the time when they could ride horseback toward the dry lake in the spring and the grass would be up to a horse's knees and sometimes there would be a little water standing on the dry lake bed. And that water was not coming from the Pahrump or Manse springs, he said; the sloughs from those springs didn't flow that far west.

"There was just more rain and snow in the winter," the old-timers remembered. That higher precipitation resulted in more mud in the winter and spring.

As a boy, Harry said, he had to walk three-quarters of a mile to school. He carried his good shoes in a sack, trudging through the mud to and from school in an old pair, his "mud shoes."

In Ash Meadows, when he worked for the road department, Harry said, "You never dared get off the roads. If you did, you were stuck in the mud and somebody had to come and pull you out. And today, it just 'ain't that way anymore.'"

Ford told me there used to be snow stakes on the Highway 95 grades south of Goldfield and Tonopah. At times the snow was heavy enough that it was difficult to clear the road without the guides. There hasn't been a need for snow stakes for a long time.

In Tonopah, they used to blade the snow on Main Street on the left and right sides, creating a pile of snow in the middle of the road. Tonopah doesn't get snow like that anymore, Harry pointed out.

When my family first came to the Tonopah area in the early 1950s, old-timers told us that at the south end of Ralston Valley, southeast of the Tonopah Airport, grass once grew up to the belly of a horse.

And Isadore Sara, in Eureka, told me his father, who raised sheep and operated a butcher shop in Tonopah in its early days, grazed his stock in the Eureka area and northern Smoky Valley in the summer and wintered them at the south end of Ralston Valley prior to the founding of Tonopah.

Today, that area is too dry to support such grazing.

The late lifetime Tonopah resident, Catherine "Kayo" Banovich Lydon, told me her mother, Miruna Banovich, raised goats in Tonopah in the 1920s after her husband, Mike, died at an early age from silicosis acquired from working in the deadly dust in the Tonopah mines.

Miruna sold goat milk, cheese, and sour cream and made sausage from the goats she butchered. Young Kayo and her siblings herded the goats in the hills around Tonopah. I doubt goats could thrive on the vegetation in those hills today.

In 1895, George Sharp purchased what became the Blue Eagle Ranch in Railroad Valley, 110 miles east of Tonopah in northeastern Nye County. The ranch's ownership remains in the family, and Jeanne Sharp Howerton, George's granddaughter, who grew up on the ranch and still has close ties to it, wonders if her grandfather would choose to start a ranch in Railroad Valley today. (Jeanne and I co-authored two books on the history of Railroad Valley.)

Jeanne said, "I have a newspaper report from 1868 that talks about Railroad Valley being a wonderful region for raising stock, with big fields of grass and white sage (cattle and sheep thrive on white sage) for the winter. Apparently, there was more feed."

She added, "The area seems to be dying out. You can see it in the vegetation. Things just don't grow as well because there isn't the precipitation."

Jeanne said the ranch's irrigated pastureland continues to produce high-quality feed, as it always has. "But outside range is definitely diminished in comparison to when Grandpa came to the area, or even from the 1950s and 1960s."

Today, ranchers in the region have on occasion had to pull their cattle off the range for lack of feed, she said. "It seems like every year there is less feed."

Moreover, in the Grant Range (its highest point is Troy Peak at 11,298 feet) that forms the eastern margin of Railroad Valley, some springs that have flowed within the past 50 years have dried up in recent decades.

Other springs have less flow than in the past and in some cases need to be dug out and cleaned on a regular basis to keep water coming.

There used to be more snow and rain in the Grant Range, Jeanne said, and piñon and juniper are replacing white pine and ponderosa stands that were cut a century ago -- further evidence of the area's drying out.

Jeanne pointed out that there used to be a big, impressive, grass-covered area 10 miles north of Warm Springs at the junction of Highway 6 and the road to Tybo, 60 miles east of Tonopah. It was quite a sight on the desert. No more -- now it's dry and dead.

What do we do now?

I suggest these long-term Nye County weather changes described by present and past county residents are likely another symptom of global climate change.

In January a group of distinguished climate scientists held a meeting at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) near Knoxville, Tenn.

A friend who lives near there, Jim Hawkworth, who is interested in constructing a solar energy plant in Nye County, sent me a Jan. 16 report on the meeting from Knoxville's local paper, the News Sentinel.

I read it and called Jim to ask, "What are you trying to do, scare the hell out of me?"

The bottom line from the meeting is this: Climate changes due to human activity are happening faster than expected and may be worse than first predicted.

Briefly, this is the way it works. Energy from the sun strikes the earth. Some of that energy warms the earth and its atmosphere, but much of it is radiated back into space.

Certain gases in the earth's atmosphere -- carbon dioxide is the most important but methane and others play a role -- help trap the heat and keep it from being radiated back into space. The more heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the warmer the climate.

The planet Venus, with a temperature that will melt lead, is an example of a runaway greenhouse effect; Mars, in contrast, has a thin atmosphere and is much colder than Earth.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in about 1800, the level of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere was about 270 parts per million (ppm). Today, CO2 stands at approximately 370 ppm.

This 37 percent increase in about 200 years is due almost entirely to the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and to human-related deforestation.

In the late 1700s, humans worldwide were emitting about 100 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year; today, it is around 6.3 billion tons. We're on track to hit 12 billion tons per year by 2030.

Tom Wilbanks, a distinguished climate scientist at ORNL who worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the recent Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, was a participant at the ORNL meeting.

He estimates that, in the most benign scenario, we are on track for CO2 levels to reach 430 parts per million by 2030, and, realistically, it is probably too late to hold it there. Mid-range projections suggest CO2 levels will reach 650 to 850 ppm later in this century if serious efforts are not made to reduce carbon emissions.

Wilbanks believes that 450 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere will produce a 2 to 3 degree centigrade increase in warming (that's 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit); 650 to 860 ppm CO2 will produce a 5 to 8 degree centigrade warming (9 to 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Extreme projections show estimated levels of atmospheric CO2 at 1,300 ppm which, Wilbanks says, would be catastrophic.

I spoke to Wilbanks' secretary and said, "I'm worried about my grandchildren's future."

She replied, "We're all worried about our grandchildren's future."

And there may -- I emphasize "may" -- be a big underestimation in these projections. Currently, the earth's oceans and land areas naturally absorb rather quickly about 40 percent of the CO2 we humans dump into the atmosphere.

A recent report from France, in Nature magazine, suggests that the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the less the oceans and land areas will be able to absorb. The article suggests that cumulative emissions of CO2 in the 21st century will thus have to be cut by an additional 30 percent to hold at current estimates.

These French scientists say that human-caused emissions of CO2 will eventually need to be reduced to zero -- not an easy prospect.

If we are going to keep our planet habitable for even modest numbers of us, not to mention untold thousands of other species, the evidence suggests we are going to have to smarten up fast. Either we can make the necessary changes in how we obtain and use energy or nature will do it for us.

If nature does it, it won't be pretty. It is highly probable that the weather changes old-timers have witnessed in Nye County over the past 100 years are only the first early signs of what is well on its way.

You may remember the movie "On the Beach" with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner -- it's a classic.

In the film, humans have managed to make the world uninhabitable through nuclear war. A few survivors take refuge in Australia but their end is near. On the last day, some hold a religious rally where a big banner reading "There's Still Time Brother" hangs. The final chilling shot of the film shows the banner and no people; they are all dead.

When it comes to global warming, I would say, "There is still time, brother." How much? Perhaps not a lot.

Nuclear power, of course, can play a vital role in our way out of this unfolding reversal of fortune. That is one of the reasons I am for it.

And one more thing -- suppose all the world-class scientists are wrong about human-caused global warming and there is little threat of serious climate change and that rising levels of CO2 are unrelated to the climate changes we are now seeing.

I ask you, why would anybody want to take a chance?

Who would get on an airliner that most scientists said was unsafe?

Who would shoot craps with their grandchildren's future?