Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, you’re starting to see the impacts of a climate out of whack. Around here the past few years, in the Colorado mountains at nearly 6,000 feet, we’ve seen heavy rain in January and February, when by all rights it should be snowing. And butterflies, hatched weeks too early, flapping over barely-budded plants in a vain search for flowers. And premature blossoms on fruit trees, fooled into bloom by an oddly-warm March, only to be zapped by freezes into May.

Now researchers have confirmed that global warming is whacking Westerners especially hard. Over the past five years, we’ve had an increase in average temperature that’s 70 percent greater than the increase experienced by the rest of the planet.

For “Warming in the West,” the report released today by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization (RMCO) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, RMCO analyzed new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data for 11 Western states. For the five-year period 2003-2007, the average regional temperature was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 20th-century average, compared to the overall global rise of 1 degree. Both Washington and Oregon saw temperatures 40 percent higher than the worldwide figure.

The report’s next-to-last chapter, “Immediate Action Can Curb Global Warming,” holds out the hope of salvation — if we’ll get off our collective asses and make meaningful policy changes. Now.

But stopping the climatic train wreck is going to be much, much harder than we can even imagine, writes HCN contributing editor Matt Jenkins in a story for Miller-McCune. Read Matt’s grim — but realistic — assessment in A Really Inconvenient Truth. And check out our earlier story, Save Our Snow. On second thought, a cave might be a great place to be.