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SALT LAKE CITY — Around the same time the American West started heating up five years ago, Colorado started losing its lodgepole pine forests to a beetle infestation.
"The population built up rapidly and exploded. It takes out the mature trees," said Ingrid Aguayo, an entomologist for the Colorado State Forest Service, which estimates that about 60 percent of the lodgepole pines have turned red and brown.
"Now we're seeing a new carpet of forest coming up," she said.
Scientists can't be certain global warming is to blame, but the evidence is damning. Now, a new calculation of government temperature data shows that over the past five years, average annual temperatures in the Colorado River basin — the heart of the West — have risen by 2.2 degrees, or about twice as fast as the global rate.
The report is from the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, a coalition of local governments, businesses and others working to protect the climate, and the advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council. It says the West is heating up faster than any other region in the continental U.S. with more catastrophic wildfires among the consequences.
"It's already begun. We are already seeing the effects, and scientists are telling us it's going to get markedly worse," said Stephen Saunders, the organization's president in Louisville.
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