climate change

President Biden announced his conservation goal to address climate change shortly after taking office. Earlier this year, he rolled out several executive orders related to it, including a pause on new oil and gas leases on public land.

The megadrought bedeviling the American West got even drier last year and is becoming the deepest dry spell in more than 1,200 years. Monday's study says the megadrought is now the worst-case scenario officials and scientists worried about in the 1900s. The drought deepened so much in 2021 that it is 5% worse than the old record in the late 1500s. They calculate that 42% of this drought is due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels.

Sixteen youth plaintiffs are suing the state of Montana for their right to access a clean and healthful environment in a case scheduled to go to trial next year.

The ruling revokes leases sold in the Gulf of Mexico in the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. It says the Interior Department failed to consider the greenhouse gases it would produce.

As climate change heats up and dries out the West, administration officials said they have crafted a $50 billion plan to more than double the use of controlled fires and logging to reduce trees and other vegetation that serves as tinder in the most at-risk areas.

The meltwater lednian and western glacier stoneflies require cold flowing water from glaciers or snowfields to survive. Scientists predict those cold-water sources could be gone by 2030 due to climate change.

Climate change may produce new pacific salmon habitat in the western US. That’s the finding of a study led by Simon Fraser University involving University of Montana researchers published in Nature Communications.

High winds, months of drought and record temperatures fueled wildfires in central Montana this week that burned thousands of acres. Dozens of homes, grain elevators and bridges have been lost. MTPR’s Shaylee Ragar talked to some of those impacted by the fires.

The meeting of world leaders at the COP26 international climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, thousands of miles away from Montana, may have big implications for Montana.

Because trees can capture and store carbon, forests play a big role in tackling climate change. Recently, however, a study found that insects and diseases are threatening forests' carbon storage potential.