tldr (updated (note))

(Note) Original email changed significantly from the original post.
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Just when I think I’ve run out of things to write about, along comes an unexpected trivial delight, a small item in a small newspaper that turned out to be a Readers’ Digest version of a much longer piece published in a more widely read journal, though I do not know about the “widely read” attribution.

The Canyon Courier is a small local tabloid here in the Denver foothills, and is part of a larger chain of such publications. It has an editor, Scott Taylor, whom I suspect holds that title for CC and perhaps other tabloids. Is there enough work in the one to justify a salaried title?

Canyon Courier offers some local news, utterly predictable op-eds, a fun weekly column satirizing local sheriff reports, and local sports. The latter is filler and of no interest beyond parents, but a requirement for all newspapers. The Denver Post does the same thing, calling its local sports trivia the Denver Broncos, Colorado Rockies, Denver Nuggets, and Colorado Avalanche. Such filler regularly leaks onto the front page.

As it happens, Mr. Taylor was, I suspect, short of content for his September 7 issue. He had previously exposed himself to me as a climate alarmist, which is vogue in journalism, where “climate skeptics” (“deniers”) are offered no ink. He linked to a real estate blog, Real Estate Today by Jim Smith, which has three followers. Smith does the proper duty of linking to the original Colorado Sun piece linked below, by Michael Booth. It was obvious to me that neither Taylor nor Smith actually read the Booth piece. They just clipped part of it, copying 7-800 words out of 6,155. Tldr.

Booth is listed as environment writer, co-author of a health newsletter, and a podcast. He has no scientific background, only journalism. I do not genuflect there.

So, me being me, read the Colorado Sun Booth piece, yellow highlighter in hand, and emailed my reactions to Taylor, Smith, and Booth. That email follows beneath the fold. It won’t be read by any of the email recipients, c‘est la vie. It’s just a blend of Booth’s words and my words. If he reads at all, it will be a skim. After all, he is a climate alarmist, and those people go straight to print in our news media, unedited. Climate “deniers” are shut out, as befits a propaganda movement. 

To:         Michael Booth, Environmental Reporter, Colorado Sun
Cc:        Scott Taylor, editor, Canyon Couier
Jim Smith, blogger, Real Estate Today

Dear Mr. Booth,

I recently stumbled on a short piece in the Canyon Courier, a small tabloid in our area edited by Scott Taylor. It was titled “Climate Change Evidence in Colorado.” I could not find it on their website. The article was sourced to “the Sun” article you wrote, but also to Real Estate Today, a Substack blog by Jim Smith.  Both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Smith quoted your piece to the tune of 7-800 words.

I then went to your 6,155-word Colorado Sun article. They merely recite without criticism, as your piece, Climate Change is Already Happening in Colorado, while well written and broad in scope, is not unimpeachable.

That said, you appear young to me and think of my own development from youth to age 76 and how many turns of thought I’ve taken. That in mind, I do not wish to talk down to you or belittle your views, as you’ve come to them honestly, but also in an environment that encourages such views to the exclusion of others. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 but not for his successor, George H.W. Bush, who was not conservative enough for me. I idolized William F. Buckley but then later later Noam Chomsky. And once believed in peak oil and reincarnation and other foolishness I won’t detail. I also believed in global warming, as it was then called. I grew up in Montana and loved our snow-covered mountains and grieved that they would someday be barren. I moved forward, if I can say that without condescension, into new beliefs and attitudes. As we all do.

I’ve been reading about Global Warming nee Climate Change since 2012 and in great volume. Then, as a believer, I took time to read the Climategate emails, which turned my head. They were revealing (and have now been relegated to Orwell’s memory hole). They contained exposure of lack of ethics, due diligence, and were even sociopathic in the sense in that they urged removal by any means of any who disagreed with them, be it firing, defunding, or scurrilous personal attack.  That group appeared to be on a mission, perhaps exposed in what was easily passed off as a typo, Michael Mann referring to “our closeted friends.”

I read your article carefully, using a yellow highlighter. Below, I cite your words in italics and mine in regular print. I accept your 6,155 words as thought-provoking, and offer my thoughts, and offer this in a spirit of courtesy and respect.

Sincerely,

____________________________________________

• “Colorado’s signature ponderosas are on hospice…”  This is so common in the climate alarmism community to make predictions that somehow never come to pass.
• “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.”  I trust the governor is referring to (perhaps CSU) records, which I’ve not examined. Mine, 1918-2018  from NOAA say that our hottest years were in the 1930s. No contest.
• “We have, unfortunately, a lot of confidence that we should expect continued warming for the next several decades”  Let’s agree that until something actually comes to pass, it should be taken with a skeptical attitude.
• “The choices we make as a society about our carbon emissions can still have a large effect on how much warming we experience.”  I cite some real science to mull: 95% of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere each year is natural, only 5% from human sources. How do you decide which CO2 molecules are warming us, which not?
• “…things are about to get bananas, … And they’re already bananas.” Hyperbole.
• “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.” My own records indicate that for the period 1918-2018, our highest monthly temperatures per year have increased by +.156 °F per decade, or +1.56° F during that 100-year period. Such a large discrepancy bears more research.
• “Colorado’s average could climb 1 to 4 degrees higher within 24 years.” A prediction. See above.
• “… 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.” This is an emotional appeal. People at Xcel are merely doing their job in the face of the winds of wild criticism.
• “Nine of the 11 hottest Colorado years on record have happened since 2012, according to a CSU update.” Our Northern Hemisphere has been mildly warming since 1860 or so, when we emerged from the Little Ice Age. So of course there will be records every year! Records in a mildly warming climate over 166 years have little significance.
• “Lake Powell … the ongoing 25-year drought.” Don’t forget 2023, and the Hunga Tonga-influenced downpours experienced there (and here, where our well water turned yellow due to tannin. Lakes Mead and Powell were built in a drought-prone area that that needed water to foster growth. Droughts did not start in the year 2000. Consult the Palmer Drought Severity Index. This too shall pass.
• “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. My NOAA records list very dry years in 1932, 34, 36, 39, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 71, 74, 89, 2003, 05,12,18, where my records stop. In that timeframe, there were also record high-precipitation years, like 42, 57, 69, 95, 99, 2013 and 15. All else `is average. What is normal, what is not? 128 years is not long in the big picture. We have tree rings, historical and archeological data and artifacts, testimony, and writing telling a more comprehensive story.
• “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.” A bit of hyperbole going on there. Historical perspective is missing. Low snow years are not unusual.
• “’The snow is kind of our big reservoir.’” “And the snow is in serious trouble.” Every February I honor David Vining Day. He is a British climate scientist who while at East Anglia in February of 2000 said that in the future snow would be a “very rare and exciting event” and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Since that time Great Britain has experienced five of its six snowiest years on their records, which predate ours. His was a wild assertion, stupendously in error, yet his career suffered not at all. It appears in our current climate (poor choice of words)  that alarmists are not held to account for bad predictions.
• “Xcel Energy cut power to Evergreen during a high-wind event.” I cannot help but think that this procedure is fallout from the Paradise, CA tragedy. It appears to be a warranted response.
• “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.” (My emphasis) I will concede 115 mph winds in the Marshall grass fire. But “hurricane force” when applied to Colorado and our entire history is hyperbole. (By the way, in 2023 the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise purged its records of all lower-48 wildfire records prior to 1983. Why? NIFC claimed that older fires were often the result of controlled burns (50 million acres in 1932?). More likely NIFC and alarmists in general wanted to be able to claim that wildfires are getting historically worse and so removed evidence that they used to be much, much worse than now. So, I took available CO forest fire data, 1998-present and graphed it. It’s mostly calm here, no significant trends and some outlier years, like 2014 and 2021.
• “The global rise in human-caused greenhouse gases that create climate change…”  Note that only 5% of CO2 put in the atmosphere is from human sources, 95% from natural sources. Your statement, while widely cited and agreed upon, lacks rigorous research. How do you decide which CO2 contributes to alleged warming, which not?.
• “…increasingly intense wildfires” See reference to National Interagency Fire Center above. It has been much worse that now in the lower 48.
• “ … some of the urban heat islands at most risk from accelerated temperature rises.” IPCC tends to downplay UHIs, but I do not. I’ve seen research from skeptics of scientific background (I think Wm Happer but am not sure) that claim that removal of UHIs from the temperature database reveals a temperature environment that is only mildly, almost imperceptibly, rising.
• “… while killing the most lucrative subsidies to help people switch to electric vehicles.”  I do not mourn this, nor do I trust Trump, lest you infer that I credit him beyond his manor-born sense of being right all the time. Follow him, or any politician at your own risk.
• “…highly polluting coal power plants” It is true that at one time coal fired plants emitted dangerous pollutants, but scrubbing technology overcame most of this problem, reducing their emissions to CO2 (not a pollutant), nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter. This is not true in China and India, but these are countries are growing in wealth. They will catch up, we all hope.
• “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” There is indeed beetle kill in the ponderosa forest, as in all forests, but until this extinction happens, and I doubt it will, I merely append it to that very long list of predictions made by alarmists that have not come to pass.
• “In the 1970s, there were three or four frigid winter events a year, now there are only one or two, he said.” It was cooler in the 1970s, in fact we were warned about an impending Ice Age back then. Time Magazine’s 1974 cover warning to that effect has now been relegated to Orwell’s memory hole. We’re told that our eyes lied to us, that it never happened.
• “Amateur climatologists…” Climate science is not beyond any sentient person’s grasp. All it takes is reading, thinking, classifying … which few people do. This strikes me as a bit condescending, but at least you did not say “deniers”.
• “… actual climate scientists” The true test of any scientific endeavor is the ability to make accurate predictions. I’m not seeing that being done.
• “As it’s getting warmer, everywhere, more low elevation species are moving to get away from those warming temperatures…” That is a general statement and, since change is a constant in our environment, it would be hard to isolate that activity and blame it on “climate change.”
• “This majestic specimen in front of him is doomed…” [regarding Ponderosa pines]  I am 76, and you are younger. Ponderosas will survive both me and you both. Catalog that prediction to see if it holds up any better than others by alarmists.
• “…we created this mess…”  This gets us down to the essence of the climate alarmist movement, misanthropy. It seems that there are simply too many humans (“useless eaters”, according to Henry Kissinger) on Bill Gates’ planet.

Well, that went on quite a bit, but had you written a tighter article, I would not have contacted you or Mr. Taylor or Mr. Smith. I will publish this on my blog, where I’ve been writing about this and so much else since 2006. It is at https://www.pieceofmindful.com. I have 1,883 followers last count, though I cannot say how many of them read it. It is probably far fewer than those who read your work. I will not show any email addresses on my blog to spare you unwanted correspondents.

 

Sincerely,