Nolan is one of my favorite people. I noticed in the past that he was cautious about mentioning climate change in his public talks. That changed as the High Park fire raged west of his office at Colorado State University, according to this article from Bobby Magill that is running in the Fort Collins Coloradoan. Click through and read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:
…after the High Park Fire swept the foothills in 2012, Doesken decided to talk more openly about the reasons behind Colorado’s changing weather when talking to the agriculture community. Doesken, Colorado’s state climatologist based at Colorado State University, said Tuesday that he never really feared talking about climate change, but it gave him pause…
Before the 2012 drought, Doesken rarely included many of his thoughts on human-caused climate change in his drought and water reports to Colorado’s agriculture and water communities.
“Some folks in my position have experienced certain amounts of persecution for speaking out boldly one way or the other,” Doesken said. “I have feared that at times in the past. I don’t fear it now.”
The future, Doesken often says, is full of uncertainty — variability in the weather will trend to the more extremes, with drier dry years and wetter wet years, sometimes back-to-back.
“What has come out of my mouth has never been driven by a fear of what somebody was going to say or do as a result,” he said. “It’s mostly been me thinking my way through a challenging subject, which is a polarizing topic that I want to communicate as clearly and understandably as possible without an agenda.”
The High Park Fire began to change how he talks about climate change, a story he told to a national audience for last weekend’s “This American Life” episode, which aired on radio stations across the country…
Climate data and nothing else strictly dictates what he reports, Doesken said. It’s hard to argue that carbon emissions are not behind climate change, he said, calling the science “very defendable.”
“If we know what we as a human race is doing could be fouling our nest, then the sooner we figure it out and do something different, the better,” he said.