Increasingly, short winters have meant that yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory now emerge 20 days earlier from their seven- to eight-month hibernation than they did in the late ’70s. This, in turn, has meant more time to get fat over the summer, less fat loss over the winter and, over the past decade, a huge spike in their survival and reproductive success.

“We believe that gradual change in climate crosses a threshold, and causes abrupt changes in population,” said biologist Arpat Ozgul from the Imperial College of London, lead author of a study on the marmots being published July 21 in Nature.

This led me (and my traveling partner) to think back to a trip we recently took down to Taos, N.M., during which we encountered an interesting front-page piece in the Valley Courier newspaper of southern Colorado. I can’t find it online, so I’ll just post the two photos I happened to take of the story…

From the pages of the Valley Courier...

And the closing sentences…

Twice! In 15 years!

So should we be worried about  a huge explosion of marmots in cars? Well, Wired says probably not.  Read the rest of their piece.

Folks at Aspen have been noticing changes in the ski season. | flickr user Zach Dischner

The Climate Desk is a new collaborative effort to blah blah blah. That’s how I felt when I read the various releases about the Climate Desk today. Sorry, it’s true.

Here’s what it is: a bunch of people writing about climate change. At the moment, they’re looking at the business of climate change, which is pretty fascinating. Some of the stories come from established news sources like Mother Jones, Grist, Slate and the Atlantic, and some appear to be special to the Climate Desk.

The featured story at the moment gets into just how folks are planning on making money (or losing less money) thanks to climate change, saying, “Spend a couple of hours wandering through the websites of various industrial associations—aluminum manufacturers, real-estate agents, wineries, agribusinesses, take your pick—and you’ll find straightforward statements about the grim reality of climate change that wouldn’t seem out of place coming from Greenpeace.”

And there’s even a little look at Colorado’s most famous industry:

Now, all this tricky weather hasnt exactly destroyed Aspen Skiing; the firm could probably survive even worse stuff. The top of the mountain is so high “we can ski it in 50 years and itll be great,” Schendler notes. But it could certainly erode Aspens profits, and Colorado would suffer: The ski industry overall is a $2 billion business for the state, employing fully 8 percent of the workforce. So to try and preserve its profit margins, the Aspen Skiing Company has recently become a loud voice in favor of congressional action on the climate. In 2007, Schendler testified before the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, calling for a cap on carbon emissions—among other things.

“Our attitude when we go to Congress is, look, were a business!” he adds. “We didnt ask for this. We just started looking at the data and the science dispassionately and said, Look, weve got a problem.”

Read the rest over at the Climate Desk.

On March 27, 2010 cities around the world will turn off their lights for one hour to raise global awareness of climate change. | From flickr user aussiegall

At 8:30 p.m. March 27, you can join people around the globe in celebrating Earth Hour by shutting off your lights for one hour. During Earth Hour 2009, almost one billion people worldwide participated in this  call for action against global climate change. Stepping it up this year should be easy and fun for Boulderites who can celebrate Earth Hour at these cool events:

• The St. Julien Hotel & Spa twill be throwing its own its own Earth Hour celebration with a candlelit happy hour and free, live entertainment. Guests can enjoy locally grown, sustainable food and drinks from 5 p.m. to close and will partake in a celebratory toast and lights out ceremony at 8:30 p.m.
• ReSource Yard, the waste reduction division of the Center for ReSource Conservation, will be be celebrating its grand opening from 5 p.m.-9 p.m. by hosting an Earth Hour party equipped with fireside music, local artisans, free refreshments, raffles, creative workshops, and a silent auction.
• Also, be sure to keep an eye on the Boulder/Denver Grey Wolves meetup group, who are planning an Earth Hour gathering with a TBD location.

So whether you are staying at home, or going out for a night on the town, helping to create awareness is as easy as the flip of a light switch. Click here to find out more about Earth Hour.

If you’ve got an Earth Hour event in the area that we haven’t listed, let us know in the comments!

Click here to view the embedded video.

–Lindsay Gulisano

Maxwell Boykoff, courtesy of CIRES.

Turns out, the way that the mass media report on climate change has exaggerated the debate between scientists who argue that global warming is a real and urgent problem and the skeptics.

That’s according to a scientist at the University of Colorado, Maxwell Boykoff, whose research over the last couple of years has ranged from the perils of celebrity involvement in climate change to the way newspapers have reported on environmental issues.

In the course of his research, Boykoff has followed climate change coverage in 50 newspapers across 20 countries and six continents. His latest research shows that the media often give too much ink to climate change deniers, amplifying conflict and drama (and other things that tend to sell papers).

He says that the media are also guilty of lumping all skeptics together, no matter whether they’re fellow scientists (with, likely, a more credible concern) or politicians and others who have never studied the climate.

“This has been detrimental both in terms of dismissing legitimate critiques of climate science or policy, as well as amplifying extreme and tenuous claims,” he said.

Read more about Boykoff’s research at DailyCamera.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Governor Bill Ritter and the film’s director, Michael Nash, introduced the film to a full audience that included Alec Baldwin on Sunday afternoon at the Boulder International Film Festival.

“This film says that we need to stop the debate about climate change and puts a human element to the issue,” Ritter said.  “The face of climate change is the climate refugee.”

In an interview with the Camera before the screening, Nash said that “Climate Refugees” speaks to a climate problem that doesn’t get enough attention:

The human face of climate change really is an untold story and the very reason I felt the need to investigate. When I started this journey three years ago, there was very little data on climatic migration. There seemed to be a vast amount of spin on both sides of the climate change issue. I wanted to move beyond the politics and dig into the truth of whether our climate was really changing and if it was, how was it affecting humans? What I found was mass climatic migration. Victims forced to relocate, unable to live on the land, either from short-term or long-term climatic changes. Our changing climate seems to be all about water: too much in some areas and too little in others.

The screening at the Boulder Theatre was the film’s fifth showing.  It was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.  A small crew and often, just Nash alone, traveled for 18 months filming in Bangladesh, the Tuvalu islands in the South Pacific, India, Texas, China, New Orleans, Sudan and Chad.

The film "Climate Refugees" was screened at BIFF on Sunday

There are about 25 million people considered to be “climate refugees,” – a number greater than both political and religious refugees­ – according to the UN.  These refugees are defined as climate refugees because they have had to leave their homelands due to a lack of natural resources.

Nash narrates the documentary beginning it with a question: How long is man going to survive on this planet?

Answering this question is the purpose to Nash’s journey to places facing resource related pressures and documenting why people must migrate to neighboring countries or larger cities to survive. The planting of 20,000 trees offset the carbon emission from all of the air travel required for filming.

The head of the IPCC, Dr. Pachauri, is among the many interviewees in the film that include Lester Brown, the author of “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” and President of the Earth Policy Institute; Ken Salazar, Secretary of Interior; Madeleen Helmer, director of Red Cross; and Newt Gingrich, R-Ga, former Speaker of the House.

“We are really one family,” Dr. Pachauri said in the film.  “Something that happens to someone else in our family is really a slap in our face.”

The next step for Nash and fellow producer Justin Hogan is to secure a distributor or financial backing to distribute the film themselves.

The idea for the documentary “Climate Refugees” was born in Colorado and primarily funded by Coloradoans.

Portraits of suffering people who shared their stories in the film fill the screen at the end, leaving an emotional stamp on the audience.

“It was moving.  It shows you the humanity and not just the argument,” said Kimberly Baldwin, a Boulder resident who was at the screening.  “It shows that we have to do something.”

—Sarah Horn

the U.S. Geological Society is reporting that Montana’s Glacier National Park will be glacier-less in a decade. Scientists had previously estimated that the park’s signature glacier-grade ice fields would last until 2030.

“There are only about 26 glaciers left now. There were 150 in the late 1800s,” he said.

So. Any ideas for a new name for the park? I’d guess they’d want something by 2017 or 2018 — don’t know how long it takes to order signage and new brochures.

A little more information:

“To be clear, the predicted absence of glaciers in the park after 2020 doesn’t mean everything will be dry. There will still be ice and ‘permanent’ snowfields. However, the size will be below the threshold of a glacier. Mountain glaciers are defined by a minimum size and physical properties, especially movement and replenishment.”

Bam. WELCOME TO “PERMANENT” SNOWFIELD NATIONAL PARK. “It’s ‘majestic!’” Who’s with me?

NCAR's Mesa Lab in south Boulder.

A 1972 article in the Daily Camera “NCAR, Others Will Study Man’s Effects on Shaky Equilibrium of Earth Climate” appears to be one of the first in the Boulder newspaper to tackle the idea that humans might be able to drive the world to some sort of climatic tipping point.

NCAR scientist William Kellogg said this in the article:

There are obviously stabilizing factors that are strong enough to keep our global climate within reasonably narrow bounds, permitting ice ages to come and go, but damping out any large fluctuations.

But, now, man has entered the scene, and we must ask whether he can reach any of the lever  points on this gigantic environmental mechanism and influence it. If there are any lever points that he can reach, history has shown that he will probably be tempted to tamper with them.

The article didn’t talk much about greenhouse gases, other than to mention a growing “carbon dioxide blanket” that had the potential to warm the Earth.

In 1979, Kellogg and a colleague, Warren Washington, received a grant to study how CO2 interacts with the climate. They used the money to run a rudimentary climate model — one that didn’t include any interaction between the atmosphere and the oceans, land or ice caps — to see what would happen if the carbon dioxide was increased by a factor of two.

In the story, Washington points out that no one is yet sure exactly what effect CO2 will have on the climate:

We anticipate a warming effect in both the atmosphere and the oceans. It will probably be changes of a few degrees or less. But a few degrees have a  big effect on glaciers and the amount of water stored in them. …

I don’t think society ought to start making changes until we have a better understanding. It’s not an immediate crisis although it could be in the next 20, 30 or 50 years.

Well, 30 years later, scientists are calling it a crisis, and NCAR has grown from an organization where a couple of its scientists study CO2 on a short-term grant to a group to hundreds of PhD scientists studying climate change.

In the decades since Washington and Kellogg’s study, NCAR scientists have researched all aspects of the climate — including how such seemingly small variables like soil moisture and changing vegetation cover affect global climate patterns — and they still have a long way to go to create a more accurate climate model.

Here’s a look at one of the more light-hearted studies undertaken by NCAR scientists to understand climate change. This is from a 1991 Daily Camera article (and you’ll notice that by then, the greenhouse effect isn’t in quotes anymore).

The burp — the self-satisfied sign of a meal’s end — has global implications when it comes to cows.

Research that originated at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder is aimed at discovering what contribution bovine burping is making to the greenhouse effect.

Backpacks containing gas-measuring gear will be strapped onto hundreds of cows at Washington State University in Pullman. Each pack holds a gas monitor connected to a tube placed near the cow’s mouth.

Read more about NCAR’s history at DailyCamera.com.

I can see my house from here. | flickr user johnlegear

The Sierra Club has a takeway that applies to us here at BGB, which is that climate change calls for community change (because climate change news is all local):

If we learned anything in Copenhagen, it’s that we can’t wait for governments to hammer out a solution to global warming. Bottom-up, community-based approaches seem just as likely to save the day. Which is why hundreds of cities and towns are signing on to the Cool Community campaign launched by David Gershon, founder and CEO of the Empowerment Institute [BGB note: CAUTION: insanely ugly Web site ahead]. “Approximately 50 percent of America’s carbon footprint is residential,” he explains.  Reducing the carbon output of regular Americans could make a big difference, or at least buy us some extra time.

Gershon’s laying out a big part of his plan/book at the Huffington Post right now, and you can take part in a free two-hour training on March 11 by registering on the Cool Community Tele-Training site. The way it’s described is a little scary, but you can read an overview on the site and there’s also the always-clickable carbon footprint calculator.

Of course it’s entirely possible that you don’t need such training — or that you’ve got better training here in Boulder. We’d love to know about how you’re drastically reducing your own footprint (or how you’ve done it over the last five years). Tell us in the comments!

This book of essays, many by Colorado authors, explores how climate change is affecting the Rockies.

Driven by the desire to localize the issue of climate change, a former editor of High Country News compiled a book of essays by locals illustrating what a warmer climate means for Colorado.

On Monday evening at the Boulder Bookstore on Pearl Street, nine of the contributors of the book read parts of their essays from, “How the West Was Warmed:  Responding to Climate Change in the Rockies,” published in November and edited by Beth Conover.

“I had an opportunity to convene views and speak to the locality and diversity of climate change in Colorado,” said Conover, who also worked as an environmental policy advisor from 2004 to 2007 for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and helped develop the largest urban sustainability program, Greenprint Denver.

Mayor Hickenlooper provides the foreword to a book filled with essays about trash scavenging, recycling, pine beetles, water scarcity, eco-tourism, hitchhiking, renewable energy and Iraq veterans working to train fellow veterans in green jobs.

A former environment and science reporter at The Boulder Daily Camera, Todd Neff, wrote the essay “Getting the Fever,” which examines the driving effect fear can have on making changes to lessen impacts on the environment.

“Its about getting people to understand that its a massive issue,” Neff said.  “We don’t live in a fish tank.”

A Colorado native, Laura Pritchett, is the author of five books including “Going Green: True Tales From Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers,” contributed an essay about her experiences hunting for usable, resellable and recyclable items in trash bins.  Everything Pritchett wore to the reading was found in the trash.

“I want to see the shift of thinking that dumpster diving is cool and throwing useful things in the garbage is oddball,” Pritchett said.

Lisa Jones, a journalist and former editor of High Country News tells about her realization that flying all over world to write about eco-tourism was actually the “messy business of airplane travel.”  Her flights to South America and Africa were making her carbon footprint bigger than she realized.   Jones’ essay follows her and her boyfriend on a hitchhiking trip. They left Paonia, Colo. with just twenty dollars, took jobs in grant writing and restaurants and ended up in Mississippi after being hired by a blind man to drive them there.

The book is an attempt by Conover and the contributing writers to bridge the gap between scientific-heavy books and guides to green living.  
“My hope was that my mother or sister would pick up the book and relate climate change issues to their lives,” Conover said.

A Boulder resident of 22 years and sustainability consultant, Kim Hedberg, attended the reading.

“The problem is the message.  Not everyone is getting the message,” Hedberg said.  “Hopefully people reading this book will get it.”

— Sarah Horn

“How the West Was Warmed: Responding to Climate Change in the Rockies” can be found at the Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl Street, (303) 447-2074

Maybe the message that global warming will cause large-scale displacement of people in Bangladesh doesn’t really resonate with you.

Perhaps the fact that coral atolls in the Pacific — whole countries like Kiribati  and Tuvalu — are predicted to be completely consumed by sea level rise doesn’t really concern you.

But maybe this little fact about global warming will hit home with you: climate change = less power, a shorter ski season and fewer resorts.

That’ the hope of a Boulder-based group called Protect Our Winters, or POW, that’s hoping to motivate the winter sports community to do something about global warming.

Check out the video above to get a feel for their message, visit the group’s Web site, or read more about Protect Our Winter’s efforts at DailyCamera.com.