A warming climate and growing Colorado population will conspire to further stress the state’s water supply in the decades ahead, as extreme weather conditions that support wildfire growth are expected to become more frequent.
Those are some of the takeaways from the Coloradoan’s Wednesday question-and-answer session with local climate experts. Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher and CSU Atmospheric Science Professor A. Scott Denning answered subscribers’ questions about climate change and its impacts to weather and life in Colorado.
Here’s a sampling from the full conversation, which can be viewed online at Coloradoan.com.
Questions and answers have been edited for length and USA TODAY writing style.
Question: What, specifically, do the climate models predict for Fort Collins? I thought they predicted we’d be wetter and warmer. Is that true? What’s the confidence level for the predictions?
Schumacher: The projections for future warming have very high confidence. For the Fort Collins area, assuming moderate increases in greenhouse gas emissions, models project about a 4 degree Fahrenheit increase in average temperature by mid-century (compared to the late 20th century average), with warming in all seasons but most pronounced in the summer.
There’s much less confidence in how precipitation will change. This is because precipitation is highly variable from year to year and month to month, and also because climate models still don’t have the capability to fully…
