I am very fortunate  to have two Udall brothers contributing to this volume – Carbondale-based James R (Randy) Udall, excerpted earlier this week, is an energy efficiency expert and analyst. Boulder-based scientist Brad Udall works nationally on western water issues as they relate to climate change. Like their father, the late Senator “Mo” Udall, their cousin (Senator Tom Udall, D-NM) and their brother (Senator Mark Udall, D-CO), they are playing a critical role in the debate about the use and the future of western resources.

Brad Udall is a research scientist and the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–funded Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado. He studies the impacts of climate change on the Colorado River and the West.

Excerpt:

“We are already seeing the effects of climate change in Colorado and around the West. Temperatures have warmed by over two degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. Spring runoff is occurring earlier in almost all snowmelt basins in the West. A greater proportion of our annual precipitation is now coming as rain instead of snow, even at our highest elevations. Forest fires in the West since 1986 are significantly bigger, longer, and more destructive, and these changes highly correlate to warmer temperatures. Droughts are more severe and last longer. The recent mountain pine beetle epidemic—caused partly by climate change, partly by natural cycle, and partly by human fire management—is now at 2 million acres and is fundamentally changing our
mountain landscapes and mountain hydrology. Recent state-of-the-art studies have attributed many of these western effects to warming caused by greenhouse gases.

All of these impacts have a strong connection to water. In fact, changes in water availability, not higher temperatures, will be the delivery mechanism for many of the most significant impacts of climate change. Additional heat will fundamentally alter the water cycle—the vast solar-powered cycle that evaporates huge quantities of water from the oceans and moves that water to land every day. The water cycle, the primary mechanism for redistributing heat on the planet, moves heat from places where there is too much, like at the equator, to places where there is too little, like at the poles. Big ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream, and water vapor carried in storms are two critical mechanisms used by the Earth to transport heat poleward. These very large movements of heat determine our weather. With additional heat due to climate change, we will experience significant changes in the patterns of weather and water in the twenty-first century, the very definition of climate change. The western United States will experience
the brunt of these changes…”