Illustration by Kevin Jeffers/The Colorado Sun
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Here is just a sampling of things happening right now in Colorado that we can’t attribute solely to climate change, but that we know will be happening more and more often precisely because of climate change.
Loveland banned golf carts and ordered duffers to walk because the dried-out turf couldn’t handle any more damage from tires. Satellite sensors show the portion of Western lands covered by snow at record lows. Thornton has already imposed strict watering limits for the summer. Ski resort workers had their hours cut. Colorado’s signature ponderosas are on hospice. The governor just activated the drought task force, again, warning that Colorado is in the middle of its warmest year in 131 years of recordkeeping.
Colorado is warmer and drier than 50 years ago. That is not in dispute. Climate change is present-tense.
We set out to catalog what that means on the ground and in the air across Colorado. Not as a diagnosis for depressives, but as a motivation for visionaries. Only by realizing what has already changed can Coloradans figure out where to start the rescue, according to many of the voices we consulted.
“We have, unfortunately, a lot of confidence that we should expect continued warming for the next several decades,” said Adrienne Marshall, a climate change professor and researcher at Colorado School of Mines. “The choices we make as a society about our carbon emissions can still have a large effect on how much warming we experience, and by extension, what the impact is on snow and water in the West. We need to prepare for continued warming, but the amount of warming that happens is to a very large degree still up to us.”
State Forester Matt McCombs calls it “an end of innocence,” as he travels the state warning people of the unstoppable demise of beloved forest tracts. At the same time, McCombs added, “you’ve got to hold harmless the past. We’ve got to stop judging each other so harshly.”
Demanding to know whose fault this was can be just another way of saying there’s nothing to be done about it, McCombs said. “People want accountability and reconciliation. And I don’t know if we have the time. We can adapt. We just have to move.”
McCombs tries to pair his discouraging forest health maps with encouraging words on how humans are good at solving problems.
“We have got to be easy on each other, because things are about to get bananas,” he said. “And they’re already bananas.”
The Heat
Shawn Camp cools off while passing by a mist-spraying fan on Main Street in Grand Junction in July of 2024. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
DENVER
Shaina Oliver used to work in retail. As soon as customers left and the doors were locked for the day, her chain-store employer would shut off the air conditioning. As the employees cleaned the aisles and restocked shelves, temperatures inside the big box crawled relentlessly toward an exhausting swelter.
Human-caused climate change pushed up average Colorado temperatures 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1980 to 2022, according to Colorado State University’s 2024 climate update. Even under assumptions of moderate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — now being actively subverted by Trump administration actions — Colorado’s average could climb 1 to 4 degrees higher within 24 years.
Oliver lives with an asthmatic son in northeastern Denver in the shadow of the highly polluting Suncor refinery. The current reality and the guaranteed future of persistently hotter summers make her worry for all kinds of neighbors: pregnant women laboring in hot food service kitchens or hotel rooms, roofers scraping tar shingles at 120 degrees, children wheezing in the ozone produced by fossil fuel industries like Suncor, Xcel’s local natural gas power plant and others.
When it comes to climate change and temperature, the anecdotal is increasingly statistical. Nine of the 11 hottest Colorado years on record have happened since 2012, according to a CSU update.
As part of Moms Clean Air Force, Oliver is helping argue for a bill in the legislature ordering businesses to provide shade, clean water and humane temperatures at all times. When she meets skeptics, she mentions having to sit out work during her final pregnancy to avoid heat and strain.
“It gets really hot inside those buildings, really quick,” Oliver said. “And we have Latina moms working out on farms. If your body’s overheating, the baby is more likely to miscarry. So that’s a lot of our worries, as moms.”
The Water
Low water levels in Blue Mesa Reservoir on March 2 revealed a foundation from the lost town of Iola. (Dean Krakel, Special to The Colorado Sun)
THE RIVERSIDE
So much of Colorado daily life depends upon the frozen water in a snowbank in the heights of the Gore Range in January making it to a moving stream by May. And that necessity is manifesting less and less.
Lake Powell is the second-largest reservoir in the United States and the key bucket for the water lives of 40 million people in seven states. Under current conditions, already radically depleted by the ongoing 25-year drought, Powell will take in only 36% of the average it usually gets from the Colorado River. The snowpack in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming meant to fill Lake Powell is abysmal, and higher temperatures mean crackling-dry ground will suck up more of the already-low snowmelt before it hits the pipelines otherwise known as rivers.
Four of the five driest water years in 128 years of records have occurred since 2000, with the winter of 2025-26 on pace to join that ignoble grouping. Northwestern Colorado summer precipitation is down 20% from the 50-year average leading up to 2000. Southwestern spring precipitation is down 22%.
In previous years that were this dry, southwestern Colorado farmers sometimes received only 10% of the irrigation water they planned for. Denver Water, Aurora Water and northern Colorado communities are contemplating strict home watering restrictions for the summer. Record-high winter temperatures on the Front Range dry up the sparse snowstorms so quickly that utilities have regularly shut down power in foothills red flag winds, in order to avoid sparking wildfires.
Federal officials will most likely have to drain upstream recreation buckets like Blue Mesa and Flaming Gorge reservoirs to keep Lake Powell at a level that allows crucial hydropower generation. When Powell can’t generate much — or in a deadpool scenario it could reach by August, any — power, Colorado’s coal-fired power plants must stay open longer than planned to stabilize the energy grid.
Healthy, deep snow doesn’t just supply water content, noted Colorado School of Mines hydrologist and geology professor Adrienne Marshall. Regular snows build up what researchers call “cold content,” that acts as a refrigerator during spring warmup. The cold content allows snowbanks to melt beneficially later in the water year, soaking the ground all the way to streambeds and keeping a steady water flow.
Shallow snow readings are obviously bad for those prospects, Marshall said. But she watches another map, one showing not snow depth, but basic snow coverage, at any depth, across the entire western half of the U.S. And frankly, those maps look horrendously red right now, as in, minimalist snow cover.
In mid-February, Marshall said as she pulled updates onto her computer screen, “it looks like we are sitting currently at a record low for total snow covered area in the western U.S. since satellite records began in 2001.”
It comes down to a simple fact and a simple warning, Marshall said.
“The snow is kind of our big reservoir.”
And the snow is in serious trouble.
The Crops
The fields of Cantwell Farms on Feb. 18 in Keenesburg. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
KEENESBURG
Adapt or fail. As a young farm family with a tenuous leasehold on 1,400 acres east of town, the Cantwells have always known this.
As their feet crunch along the tops of winter wheat dried out too soon in a February warm spell, the Cantwells know that climate change requires them to renew their vows of flexibility with extra fervor.
If their ditch company cuts their April allocation because the reservoirs are draining, they could still plant thirsty corn on some fields and turn others fallow to preserve their water.
If there’s not enough water for corn, they can switch to milo. But while milo needs less water, it still needs a spring jolt, so if the plains stay as dry as they have been then the milo dies and it’s time to file a crop insurance claim.
In even an average wet year, they could get three cuttings of alfalfa, also a thirsty crop. Alfalfa pays the bills when other plans wither — the local cash market bids up hay prices instead of a grain elevator operator tightening bids for multinational commodities that swing on trade whims.
But without June rains in Weld County, the alfalfa jackpot may only hit once, erasing second and third cuttings along with chances of ending the year with a profit.
They could try for a higher margin on a few hundred acres, growing seed wheat for a local seed supplier. But any profit there would disappear hiring a custom combine company, which would rather sweep corn 1,000 acres at a time.
The Cantwells owning their own combine would be best, cutting, separating and windrowing the right grain to chase the changing weather without complaining about tiny patches of barley or millet or grain corn. A new combine starts at $500,000.
Casey and TaylorAnn Cantwell with the youngest of their three children, daughter Maddie, 1, in the fields of Cantwell Farms on Feb. 18. Winter wheat was planted in October during what Casey says were great soil and weather conditions. “Now we have this,” he says as he looks down at wheat plants that should be mostly green shoots with some brown tips. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)That’s where the state comes in to help, said Kristen Boysen, managing director of the Department of Agriculture’s Drought and Climate Resilience Office. The Cantwells applied for a state grant, and when they won it they bought a used combine.
Harvesting is a distant worry on an unseasonably warm mid-February day. Casey Cantwell is inside the machine shed, tweaking another climate change adaptation and profit-scraping wonder tool. If he switches the 12 planter pods on the back of his tractor from hydraulic to electronic, he and wife, TaylorAnn, will be adapting through precision.
The tractor can talk to satellites. The coordinates tell them when they have driven up a hill that will dry out faster than the surrounding lowlands. The electronic seed meters will respond by dropping only 9,000 corn seeds per acre instead of the 35,000 dropped on an acre of wetter ground. Respecting microclimates cuts waste.
While her husband works on the planters, TaylorAnn is trying and failing to find moisture around the emerging winter wheat, and wondering what other changes are lurking in last year’s stubble. The wheat stem sawfly is gaining ground in Weld and other plains counties.
The sawfly larvae winter inside the hollow stem stubs. When adult sawflies emerge, they lay eggs inside fresh stems. Hatched larvae crawl down toward the soil and chew a V-shaped notch just before harvest, and a ruinous percentage of stalks fall over like felled redwoods. Once the wheat head hits the dirt, even a half-million-dollar combine can’t pick it up and save it.
“If it’s not cold enough in the winter to kill some of those,” TaylorAnn began, “then the larvae will thrive in the spring and so we might see a bad year for pests.”
Then she looked down at her outfit. Tennis shoes in February.
And she shrugged.
The Blackouts
Bobby Everett, partner and general manager at Evergreen Brewery, says the brewery and Boone Mountain Sports together lost hundreds of thousands of dollars right before the holiday last December when Xcel Energy cut power to Evergreen during a high-wind event. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
EVERGREEN
The Boone family is willing to do its part to adapt to climate change in Jefferson County: The more frequent wildfires, the appalling, but necessary, forest thinning to protect homes, even the electrical outages called preemptively to prevent sparking power lines in hot hurricane-force winds.
But when they shut power to a holiday-hosting brewery and a bustling ski shop the week of Christmas, it’s exceedingly hard to stay nice. Nice would come with a $200,000 price tag this year, the cost in trashed food and lost ski rentals when Xcel cut off power in parts of Jeffco ahead of a threatening late December windstorm.
“We can’t eat the amount we lost,” said Logan Boone, whose family has run Evergreen Brewery and Boone Mountain sports for decades in an upstairs/downstairs retail center north of town.
In their businesses, climate change is at top of mind. The slopes giveth, and the slopes taketh away. A terrible snow season like this one means Front Range day skiers aren’t stopping by to pick up ski packages or buy new helmets. Yet the tuneup business can thrive, as Boone Mountain’s backshop guys drip burning wax into ski ruts gouged by exposed rocks and branches that would have stayed buried in normal years.
More frequent power shutoffs are a more recent challenge from changing foothills weather and climate. Xcel, after paying out $640 million to settle claims it disputed from the Marshall wildfire, is now shutting off neighborhoods’ power ahead of expected red-flag windstorms. It’s already happened multiple times this winter, the latest on Saturday.
“We totally agree with the concepts of preventing massive problems, like a big fire potential, that is super scary,” Boone said. “That’s way worse than shutting off power and eating the cost of what might happen, right? And so in that regard, with Xcel, I’m OK with this concept.”
“Except the only problem with that is, like, we can’t afford it.”
Insurance didn’t cover their losses from the extended shutdown. Local businesses felt Xcel failed to turn power back on afterward for far too long, and didn’t give out helpful information. The Boone siblings feel they need a backup generator since this will be a regular event, but that’s another $50,000 they’re not sure they can handle.
“We’re in the ski world. So climate change is massively huge in our realm of things,” Boone said.
“I’m not really sure where the buck stops. But you can’t just turn off the power and expect commerce to end.”
The Bad Air
In this July 11, 2019, file photograph, southbound Interstate 25 traffic lanes slow to a crawl at the interchange with Interstate 70 just north of downtown Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
ALONG I-25
One kind of pollution is making another kind of pollution far worse.
The global rise in human-caused greenhouse gases that create climate change have raised Colorado’s average temperature at least 2 degrees so far. More hot days mean more high ozone days, and ozone is currently Colorado’s most acute local pollution problem.
“Only” 23 high ozone alert days were called in 2025, which sounds great only in comparison to the 41 alerts issued for the choking ground-level pollutant the year before. And regional air quality officials are the first to admit that last year, we only got lucky because of the wind.
Here’s how it works: Nitrogen oxide is a pollutant produced by fuel burning, whether in gasoline car engines, coal or gas-fired power plants, and the materials burned up in the region’s increasingly intense wildfires.
Volatile organic compounds leak into the air from oil and gas production and distribution, from household chemicals like paint or cleaning fluids, and from countless industrial processes.
Nitrogen oxide and VOCs mix and then bake under hot sunshine into ozone, which attacks the respiratory system and can lead to or exacerbate asthma, heart conditions and other health problems. Ozone reactions tend to be worse in lower-income, industrial or traffic-choked urban areas, which are also some of the urban heat islands at most risk from accelerated temperature rises.
In the parlance of the EPA Clean Air Act, nine Front Range counties have been severely “out of attainment” for federal ozone health standards for years now. Violations got worse as fracking grew to make Colorado the nation’s fourth largest oil producing state, and as miles-driven increased alongside the population surge to 6 million residents.
Wildfires exacerbated by higher temperatures and a 25-year drought at least partially attributable to climate change have also worsened the ozone problem, drifting in more frequently from Oregon or California or Canada or Grand County and cooking in the Front Range stew.
After an alarming 2024 season with dozens of high ozone alerts, 23 in 2025 was a brief respite. But Regional Air Quality Council chief Mike Silverstein pointed out in hearings with state regulators that opportune winds were the biggest factor in the drop, blowing the ozone precursors out of the Interstate 25 valley before they were fully cooked.
To be fair, Silverstein does think recent policy changes are pushing ozone readings in a better direction. Gov. Jared Polis ordered regulators to make rules that would sharply lower nitrogen oxide emissions in oil and gas production. Small engines in leaf blowers and lawn mowers make an outsized contribution to ozone, and RAQC and others have offered incentives to trade those in for clean electric versions and ban summer use by big parks and rec departments.
But other changes Colorado was counting on to clean up ozone are now in jeopardy. The Trump administration has now effectively eliminated fuel mileage standards for the new car fleet, while killing the most lucrative subsidies to help people switch to electric vehicles. The administration has also ordered or supported Colorado’s highly polluting coal power plants to stay open longer than originally planned, pumping far more ozone precursors into the Front Range air than regulators planned for.
Despite years of public policy changes, the race to cut ozone is “only treading water,” National Jewish researcher and former Air Quality Control Commission member Tony Gerber told The Hill in 2024.
“There is absolutely a ‘climate penalty’ when it comes to the Front Range’s ozone problem,” said Ryan Maher of the Center for Biological Diversity. Higher temperatures increase ozone levels, while also extending the ozone season, “so that we’re experiencing unhealthy levels of ozone for longer periods during the year,” he said.
Improvement on ozone will require far more from the oil and gas industry. Producers send methane into the air during drilling, gas gathering, venting and flaring at distribution or refining sites, and in transport. Methane does double-damage in the pollution equation. It’s a major precursor of ozone, reacting with nitrogen oxide in sunlight. Methane, or natural gas, is also more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, helping to raise the temperatures that in turn create more ozone.
“There’s no sign of real progress when it comes to Front Range ozone,” Maher said.
The Birds
Climate change is bringing bird species to Colorado that are either rarely here at all, or never here at certain times of year. Birders flocked to the Auraria Campus in Denver to log sightings of a yellow-throated warbler in February 2026, usually found in the southeastern U.S. (Photo courtesy of Joey Kellner)
BOULDER
For Colorado birders, climate change comes in two forms: The winged creatures they are seeing that they are not supposed to see, and the winged creatures they are used to seeing more of but now can’t find.
Western bluebirds were hanging out in Denver and Boulder in February. They’re supposed to be wintering over in New Mexico or Arizona.
Birders working on their life lists flocked to the Auraria campus a few weeks ago, to snap photos of a particularly friendly yellow-throated warbler that had missed its regular winter flight to Central America.
What they’d like to see more of is the rough-legged hawk, a majestic raptor that looks like a spotted leopard from underneath. They should be spending January in Front Range meadows, snacking on prairie dogs and voles. They don’t wing down our way much anymore, said Peter Gent, a longtime leader with Colorado Field Ornithologists and senior climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“People think that is due to the fact that the permanent snow line is retreating north as the winters get warmer, and so they don’t need to come as far to find the prey of small mammals. So they stop in Wyoming or Montana,” Gent said.
Birders’ growing worries extend even to the state bird beloved of plains hikers and horseback riders, the lark bunting. They of the melodious chirpings and spiraling mating-dance dives. In a kiln-dry year like this one, less prairie grass will grow and the lark bunting will leave in search of food elsewhere.
Gent knows one year’s unfavorable weather is not climate change, but is also ready with the statistics showing that climate change is making this year’s drought the norm rather than the exception.
“If we don’t get that much moisture, the habitat on the Eastern Plains this summer will not be normal. So the species that breed on the plains will be in much smaller numbers than normal, and they will go to other regions of the country where the habitat is better,” Gent said.
The looming, climate-related loss of Colorado’s entire band of ponderosa forest truly worries Gent and his birding colleagues.
“If we start do start to have a climate-related loss of Colorado’s entire band of ponderosa pine forest, then we will lose the species which are absolutely dependent on ponderosa pine,” Gent said. And then it goes beyond birds — the Abert’s, or tassel-eared, squirrel, “is uniquely tied to ponderosa pine,” he said.
Climate-change skeptics may react, hey, it’s just a habitat trade, we win some warblers and lose some larks. But it doesn’t work that way on the edges of survivable habitat.
A bird or pika or other mountain species used to cool temperatures and abundant food at 10,000 feet can’t simply move uphill. They lose food, they lose cover from predators, they lose the steady temperature of winter hiding places. And the anthropogenic clock is running a thousand times faster than evolutionary adaptation.
If the lark bunting becomes another state’s favorite bird, there may be nothing to replace it in Colorado.
Gent has lived in Colorado for five decades, crawling every inch of the state for birds and climate research. In the 1970s, there were three or four frigid winter events a year, now there are only one or two, he said. And that knowledge, at once anecdotal and documented, has changed his own behavior.
“I certainly stopped driving around the state just to see birds as much as I used to,” Gent said, “because I worry about my carbon dioxide output.”
The Insurance
A tree in Yuma still shows the damage from a destructive hailstorm that hit the town two years earlier, causing millions in damage to crops, buildings and vehicles across the city. (Eric Lubbers, The Colorado Sun)
THE FOOTHILLS
It’s right there in the property listing for the million-dollar Evergreen home tucked under towering ponderosa near storied Maxwell Falls. Right after what schools are nearby. Just beyond how many cars fit in the garage. Just before the agent’s license number.
It’s the gamble.
Under “Environmental Risk,” a listing item provided with increasing frequency and burgeoning controversy by First Street Foundation, potential buyers of the mountain aerie are warned, “This property’s wildfire risk is increasing.”
Climate change in Colorado is each year stacking the odds higher against affordable daily living. More frequent billion-dollar wildfires, hail the size of tennis balls pummeling Front Range homes multiple times a summer, farmers adding actuarial classes to their university extension courses to better understand crop insurance.
Colorado home insurance premiums rose 58% in just five years, from 2018 to 2023. For that breezy Evergreen retreat, wildfire risk has helped push the expected premiums past $6,000 a year.
Colorado created a wildfire insurer of last resort, the FAIR plan, in 2024, and has now signed up more than 200 homeowners who were denied policies by companies singed by hail losses or the Marshall, East Troublesome, Cameron Peak, Waldo Canyon and a half-dozen other disastrous blazes.
And it’s not even the wildfires that worry Colorado’s insurance commissioner the most these days. The latest weather risk report from the Division of Insurance said hail is now the worst problem, making up to 54% of the cost for most homeowner premiums in the state.
There were 15 Colorado incidents of hail measuring 4 inches or greater in 2023, shattering the previous record of 5 reports in 2005. There were 796 at 1 inch hailstones or bigger in 2023, according to the Colorado Climate Center, flattening the previous record of 561 in 2018.
Large, damaging hail will only get more frequent as snowpack-dependent states like Colorado heat up. Climate researcher Brian Tang wrote in “Scientific American” that when snowpack melts sooner in the season, more hot, humid and unstable air rises high into the atmosphere to be supercooled into hailstones.
In terms of intensifying risk, Tang said, it’s “similar to turning up a kitchen stove.”
The Ski Slopes
Arapahoe Basin, pictured here in February 2026, is having one of its worst snow years ever as Colorado and the western U.S. contend with warm, dry conditions. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)
ASPEN
Ski areas in the Roaring Fork Valley have lost more than 30 days of winter since 1980, says the parent company’s sustainability chief.
That means not only less play on the slopes, but less work, Aspen One senior vice president Chris Miller told researchers for a Colorado Fiscal Institute report on the economic impact of climate change. Lift crews punch in on fewer days. When Aspen or Buttermilk do open, it can take months into the season before crews are needed for slopes not covered by snowmaking guns.
That’s less barista work to serve sleepy lifties. Fewer waitresses to sling lunchtime burritos. No room-cleaning tips for idled hotel maids.
The Colorado River basin’s snowpack stood at only 65% of normal in mid-March. Southwestern Colorado’s San Miguel-Dolores basin, home to Telluride and other powder parks, was at 47%.
Ski resorts might cheer themselves that climate change models show like CSU’s do not predict drops in overall precipitation as certainly as they can chart rising temperatures. There are equal chances climate change will make Colorado precipitation increase as it might decrease, Colorado Climate Center chief Russ Schumacher said.
But the timing of the precipitation also has big implications for the snow-dependent economy. Crested Butte’s longtime climate observer Billy Barr noted rainfall last December for the first time in his 52 years of keeping meticulous records. Rain in late fall can keep the slopes from freezing and accepting artificial snow. Earlier rainfall in spring quickly melts the snowpack, which is bad for both skiers and downstream farmers needing a spaced-out, reliable supply.
Under a moderate climate change scenario, there will be an average of about 16 fewer natural snow skiing days — without need for snowmaking — in the next 25 years than in the 25 years leading up to now, according to CFI’s report. Resorts will have to rely on snowmaking, and all its accompanying costs in water rights, equipment and personnel, on four more days a year than they currently do.
As was disastrously the case this season, ski resorts’ chances of having a quality base by the all important Christmas-to-New Year’s week will drop significantly in the next 25 years.
“Good seasons become less consistent, and the risk of poor conditions increases, especially around the holiday period, when visitation and revenue are typically highest,” CFI said.
Amateur climatologists love to point out that one season’s anomalous weather does not equate to an era of climate change. But they are increasingly countered by actual climate scientists who say, “Yes, but . . . “ an accumulation of 25 years of such drought-driven reduced snowpack means this year constitutes the new normal. When the aberration becomes the standard, bet on the aberration.
“If we’re thinking about what future winters might look like, the warm conditions we’re having this year are, I think, unfortunately, a useful proxy for that,” said Adrienne Marshall, the School of Mines expert.
The Plants
When healthy, the Avery Peak twinpod alpine plant attracts plentiful pollinators and helps anchor the tundra ecosystem. (Denver Botanic Gardens)
FAIRPLAY
When Alexandra Seglias worries about climate change, which as a high-altitude botanist is often, she goes in her mind’s eye to a windswept tundra on Horseshoe Mountain, above Fairplay.
There, when all is well and the hardy-yet-delicate Avery Peak twinpod gets just the right combination of chilly nights, sunny days and pollinator visits, canary-yellow blooms burst out from between the velvety, pistachio-colored leaves.
But all is not well. Hotter summer days are expected to push other flowers to ever-higher altitudes on the shoulders of the 13,898-foot peak. It’s a forced march out of their comfort zone that may leave the twinpod begging for pollinators more attracted to newcomers’ brighter colors.
“As it’s getting warmer, everywhere, more low elevation species are moving to get away from those warming temperatures,” said Seglias, a seed conservation researcher with Denver Botanic Gardens. “So we are likely to see more of a competition among those species. In particular, alpine habitats are pretty at-risk.”
The twinpod is hurting in some summers on Horseshoe, where other plants are also vying for resources. It’s not far as the crow flies to Weston Pass, where Seglias is also taking expeditions, but the twinpods are putting out more seeds there on a barren, rocky slope with fewer competitors.
Among botanists, the fact their mysteries are quiet does not make them inconsequential.
“With rare species already being rare, there’s more of a likelihood that those species will become even rarer, or potentially become extinct,” Seglias said.
“If you’re saying, ‘OK, why do I care about this one species?,’ then what’s stopping you from just saying, ‘OK, why do I care about all these other species?’
“You can’t just take the importance of one species over another. We can’t be the ones making those decisions because we don’t always know how things interact. And even though a species is rare, it could be very important to the system that it’s in,” Seglias said. “These plant species have adapted for thousands to millions of years. And if you take one out of the equation, what will the impact be on everything else that has adapted alongside that specific species?”
The Forests
Matt McCombs, Colorado State Forester, walks among Ponderosa pine trees, many of them dead or dying from pine beetle infestation on February 19, 2026 in Idaho Springs. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
IDAHO SPRINGS
Matt McCombs is an eternal optimist about the collective: the gathering and harnessing of human intelligence and ingenuity in adapting to threats.
But as the state forester, he knows too much about the looming death of Colorado’s entire ponderosa forest to be optimistic about the individual: This majestic specimen in front of him is doomed, and he points at a small eruption of sap to prove it.
At 8,000 feet in mid-winter, this ponderosa should be surrounded by snow and creaking in a subzero chill. Instead, every inch of needle-covered ground is exposed, and McCombs needs only a light jacket.
Multiple deep freezes in what used to be an average Colorado winter would kill pine beetle larvae. In an average wet year, the moisture would help the tree produce enough sap to seal up pest holes and branch breaks. The beetle larvae that survived would be ejected by “pitch” tubes — the beetles would be pitched out of the bark to die of exposure.
“The only defense the tree has is the sap. And if they’re low on water, then they’re low on their defenses,” said McCombs. He pokes at the meager sap emanating from the tree in question. It’s not enough.
Colorado’s warming and drying climate is now exposing the ponderosa forest to the same pine beetle devastation that shocked Coloradans with entire counties’ worth of dead lodgepole earlier in the 2000s.
What shocked Gov. Jared Polis into launching a ponderosa pine beetle task force, McCombs said, was the map, and the math.
The damage the mountain pine beetle is expected to do to the Front Range ponderosa forest is evident in this bleak forecast. (Source: U.S. Forest Service and Colorado Governor’s Office)“One infested tree can go anywhere from one to 10 other trees. So you have a 10-times return on a really successful brood. And that’s not good if you think about exponentiality,” he said. With the beetle as the prime number and climate change as the exponent, brown-gray death goes from one stand to a whole mountainside in a season.
“I expect that to cause a lot of alarm,” said McCombs, who as Colorado State University’s official forester is also the primary advisor to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and to collaborations with federal foresters on managing millions of acres more. “Colorado should be prepared for sizable changes in the nature of the landscape, and that’s hard.”
How we got here, so vulnerable to 2 or 3 degrees change in temperature, McCombs said, is the simple reality of what three factors can alter a forest.
Wildfire can alter it, clearing the way for healthy diversity. But humans decided they couldn’t live with uncontrolled fire.
“Managing” a forest through cutting trees for timber and replanting is a second way. But Colorado’s sawmills are long gone, and to many Americans, logging and tree farms are dirty words.
The third way to alter a forest on a massive scale? Bugs and disease.
“If you have an unbroken stand of relatively single age, single species trees that are substantially stressed by a lack of water and an increase in heat, you create an environment where pests become the disturbance regime,” McCombs said. “Nature abhors a vacuum, and what we have right now is a vacuum of disturbance.”
But McCombs still walks the slopes with hope, because he sees the coming shock for Coloradans as the best opportunity to get them to act. Inaction on forests is not an option, we must, he said, “get really comfortable being that disturbance regime ourselves.”
That means embracing wildfire where it can be contained safely. That means logging and thinning in wildland urban interfaces, and even in remote forests that can only thrive by remixing what grows there.
“The hard part for the resident in the moment, or the visitor, or whoever, is that stark change, right? Where you’re like, ah, that looks terrible! And my response is always, it does . . . but it also looks terrible after a fire has moved through. And after a fire, things start to grow back.”
To deliver healthy forests safely to future generations, McCombs said, current Colorado leaders must accept responsibility for the physical impact past generations made, and realize things will have to change more before they get better.
“As managers, we have to get comfortable stewarding uncertainty, and we have to get comfortable embracing potentially unorthodox or highly innovative adaptation strategies so that we can try to keep up with the shifts that we’re seeing in real time, and then keep the public with us,” McCombs said.
The average resident of the state, as McCombs puts it, needs to come to a “radical acceptance that we created this mess … we should do so together, and we should do so rapidly.”
To do it right, he adds, will require “trauma induced policy making and spending.”
It won’t be easy, McCombs said, walking downhill from trees he knows will be dead by summer. He takes comfort, though, in applying his profession’s philosophy across the state landscape.
“Here at the state forest, we say, ‘Trees are the answer. What was the question?’”
The sun sets through a summer thunderstorm over fields near Yuma on June 15, 2024. (Eric Lubbers, The Colorado Sun)Hence then, the article about climate change is already happening in colorado here are 10 signs we can see right now was published today ( ) and is available on Colorado Sun ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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