Will the endless climate change propaganda from the Denver Post ever find reality?
The latest alarmist story is that Colorado will lose half its snow by 2080 based on a study from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Of course, the article came with the typical Post sensationalist online headline, “Colorado will lose half its snow by 2080 and look more like Arizona, federal scientists conclude.”
Computer modeling for future outcomes is far from an exact science, especially with the many factors involved with the Earth’s climate. Modeling has already been found to be overestimating global warming and effects produced by man’s minuscule contribution of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Even the infamous Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted, “Models are really only as good as the assumptions that you put into the model” (NBC Today Show; 04/09/20).
Another Post story in early May headlined a “ridiculous rate of snowmelt” in the Colorado mountains and quoted a state climatologist saying, “If we continue on at the rate we’re at we’re looking at probably a complete meltout by the end of May or beginning of June.”
To no surprise of experienced weather watchers, two moisture-laden storms hit Colorado during the last third of May this year and resulted in Denver International Airport measuring 2.3 inches of snow on May 20th & 21st. The Denver area also received well more than an inch of rain on May 31st into June 1st.
The latest snow water equivalent (SWE) maps for CO mountains a week into June reveal that snowpack is doing just fine for the drainages feeding the high population areas of the Front Range.
One would think the Denver media and certain government officials would have learned their lesson with the local weather patterns that have occurred so far in 2022. Denver officially received a much higher than average 42 inches of snowfall in January through mid March, followed by a very dry and windy month of April, then a wet last third of May.
Ignoring the snowy start of the year, the dire cries from the media during the month of April were drought, drought, drought. In truth, it all comes under the natural variability of weather, not man-made climate change.
Denver’s formal climate zone is designated as dry, semi-arid with normal annual precipitation near 15 inches. Despite the climate alarmism over carbon dioxide, no amount of human activity is ever going to change Denver’s natural climate from one category to another, neither to mild Mediterranean or bone-dry desert.
We all can see that the enviro-left is consistently guilty of confirmation bias, where they embrace data that agrees with their premise and ignore data that doesn’t. The problem is that the data discarded can often be a key piece in understanding what’s going on in the atmosphere.
News commentator Bill O’Reilly best sums up the real issue with those he calls the Climate Change Warriors: “Changing America’s capitalistic system into a quasi-socialistic system under the guise of improving the planet climate-wise.”
Dave Larison is a retired NOAA meteorologist who has lived in Longmont since 1980.
