Western States Epicenter Of Warming In United States - Denver Post

[hatrack]

Durango - The globe is warming, but the American West is really cooking - hotter and faster on average than the rest of the U.S. and the world, a leading climate researcher said at a conference here Thursday. "The West is warming dramatically," said Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. "Things are just going to get hotter. You can bet the farm on it." It's not just the farm and shorter irrigation seasons at stake. It probably means shorter skiing and rafting seasons but longer droughts, worse floods, sweatier summers and more dead trees.

The West is already 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than its average annual temperature, calculated using more than 100 years of records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Most scientific studies peg the rise in the Earth's average temperature since 1880 at 1 degree Fahrenheit, making it the warmest it has been in the past 400 years.

Overpack said that distilling data from about 30 computer-modeling studies shows "by robust consensus" that, by midcentury, annual average temperatures in the West will be up 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit. By the end of the century, the West could be 7 to 8 degrees warmer, he said. While there are skeptics, especially regarding modeling, a broad scientific consensus has emerged that temperatures are rising, ice sheets and glaciers are shrinking, and humans, especially by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, are forcing climate changes.

"It's beyond even what scientists expected," Overpeck said of the West's warming trends during this week's Conference To Look at Climate Change in the San Juan Mountains.

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http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4484760