What Is Your Climate Story? We Need to Talk About the Changes Around Us and Take Collective Action

It has been a blistering summer, and we still have hot August to navigate. Denver has imposed water restrictions, and the brown lawns are this season’s latest distinguishing addition to local landscaping.

If you have lived in Colorado all of your life — or even just a few years — you probably have a climate story to tell. Mine is watching the disappearing snowcapped mountains. Over the past few decades, the receding snowpack from Pikes Peak to Longs Peak occurs earlier almost every year. It is so troubling, and it’s what I notice.

Maybe what bothers you is when your vegetable garden is not thriving as it should, or realizing you must run your air conditioning more frequently to stay comfortable.

Hopefully, you are talking about these changes. They are palpable. In your conversations, you might encounter friends and family who still doubt that the climate is changing. However, you have data available at your fingertips that can help back you up.

Noted climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is a great expert resource for insights, news, and actions you can take.

Through her newsletter (katharinehayhoe.com) I learned about a climate website that shows how much Denver’s temperature (or anywhere else on the globe) has changed every day.

In one recent Hayhoe posting, I learned that Reuters had just launched an interactive globe, called Climate Monitor, that shows how much hotter (or colder) current temperatures are compared to what was typical on the same date between 1961 and 1990.

For example, in mid-July — at the time of this writing — Denver was 15.5º F above normal. Denver’s temperatures have broken records this entire year. We reached a whopping 20.5º above normal in March.

Some may claim that these extremes are just an anomaly. After all, this is an El Nino year, meaning warmer and drier conditions can amplify the impact of our weather.

Six years ago, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that since 1978, El Ninos have been forming farther to the west in the Pacific Ocean, where temperatures are warmer. This shift generates greater heat content, which is then transported eastward. The warming in the Pacific is expected to increase, leading to more intense events.

Sadly, these extremes are becoming our new normal. Climate projections are that the state will continue to become hotter and drier, and will experience more hail and torrential rains.

Unless we can figure out ways to reverse this, we can expect more heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and severe flooding.

As depressing as this may be, we need to keep talking about the changes around us. It’s the first step toward collective action.

We may not all agree on how we arrived here, but many of us believe we must do something, including finding common ground, to work on solutions.

Our city leaders set the policies that determine municipal government’s response in a myriad of ways. Stay engaged in Denver’s planning processes—or those of wherever you live.

• Demand more green space and green infrastructure for stormwater.
• Demand that local government doubles down on expanding the tree canopy in underserved areas such as Denver’s Park Hill.

In recent years, Denver has begun installing more rain gardens — including on Colorado Boulevard. This is great news. Rain gardens are depressed basins filled with native and low-water plants. They absorb and filter stormwater runoff.

We need more of these throughout our neighborhoods in Colorado and elsewhere, particularly in flood-prone areas.

• Consider adding a rain garden to your own property and making other changes.
• Convert your middle driveway strip of grass to drought-tolerant plants.
• Make a plan to reduce your square footage of lawn. It will help our pollinators and beautify the neighborhood.
• Convert concrete to permeable landscape. To increase the land’s ability to absorb rainwater and reduce runoff.
• Get creative.

We have pushed Earth to the brink, but we do have the tools to tackle this crisis.

And yes, it will take all of us.

Tracey MacDermott
Chair Environment & Sustainable Development
environment@nfbpwc.org