Climate change and the devastating ‘Marshall’ Denver area December fires

A screen shot of Denver Fox 31 news live coverage of the Marshall Fire in Superior and Louisville, Colo.

editors-blog-entry3The fires that have destroyed up to 600 homes on Denver’s Front Range have been devastating to watch today, Dec. 30, 2021🙁.

I have watched the live news coverage for two straight hours now: Really unbelievable and tragic 🙁

I am going to broach a topic here that some are going to hit me for, but if they do, it will illustrate exactly what the problem is because we should be able to, have to be able to, talk about it: Climate Change.

There is virtually NO WAY this fire happens without climate change. Normally, we’d have had multiple snows that would have kept the ground and grass and trees moist, much lower temps, and almost no chance of fire. Instead, we have had a super dry fall here in Denver with summers now extending regularly into fall, and falls into winter.

That is a clear trend: Later and later and later starting winters every year I have lived here for 25 years!

Now, we are going to have our first big snow of the year  . . . on Dec. 31. I remember winter starting regularly in the last week in November when I first moved here in 1996 from Massachusetts.

Then, winter’s start slid to the first week in December, then to mid-December. Now it is the end of December. Most of December 2021 was in the 50s and 60s this year.

That is October, not December!

And yet, so few of us are doing anything at all to reduce our carbon and environmental footprints. And when someone brings it up, everyone gets uncomfortable, angry, feels attacked, says “now is the not the time” to talk about it, “give people time to mourn,” shouts down “the radical” etc.



Actually, this is exactly the time to talk about how we need to STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS and doing other things to reduce our impact and slow runaway climate change — before the entire metro Denver area burns down.

I have long wondered/thought: Is this possible, could huge swaths of the Front Range burn down, given climate change?

Today shows that, yes, indeed it is possible 😖.

And, sadly, it is going to take exactly that — many major metro areas burning to the ground on a scale much larger than today’s tragedy, which is already huge and then, MAYBE, we might finally move in a serious way to slow climate change and do things that we could do, right now, but are not doing right now — due to greed and political and ideological inertia and corruption: Quit our dangerous and self-destructive addiction to burning fossil fuels and move to 100% renewable energy.