Snow Drought Forces Colorado To Confront Reality Of Weather Extremes; Pine Beetles Get Boost
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We have had some very unusual weather so far this season, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz said Friday. For the first time in 30 years, a lack of snow has not allowed us to open the back bowls in Vail as of January 6, 2012, and, for the first time since the late 1800s, it did not snow at all in Tahoe in December.
Vail saw eight inches of new snow on Saturday, but it still wasnt enough to open the vast majority of the mountain. Ski industry woes aside, state water watchers and firefighters are nervously eyeing the miniscule mountain snowpack, which supplies so much of the water used by Front Range cities. As of Dec. 30, snowpack in the Colorado River basin was 44 percent of last years record level and just 63 percent of the annual average.
[The drought] will make the beetle epidemic even more severe, said state Sen. Gail Schwartz, a Snowmass Democrat whos introducing a bill in the legislative session starting Wednesday thats aimed at reducing the fire danger from a mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed millions of acres of Colorado lodgepole pines. What doesnt burn down will blow down.
But just as it lacked scientific validity to point to Vails record 525 inches of snowfall last season as proof that climate change is a hoax (which many conservatives gleefully did), ski industry experts say its wrong to totally blame the current drought (just 88 inches so far at Vail) on human-caused heating of the planet. You cant take weather, which is what were experiencing, and make deductions about climate, which is the long-term trend, said Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, which is suffering through an equally dry season. But you dont need to, really. All you need to do is look up the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) NASA global temperature anomaly maps of the world and look at December. Its insane, and each decade gets hotter.
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http://coloradoindependent.com/109613/snow-drought-forces-colorado-to-face-frightening-new-climate-change-reality