Climate has Already Changed, and it’s Ugly

Malin Moench, the brother of UPHE’s Board President – Dr. Brian Moench, and our economic and statistical consultant wrote an Op Ed on the climate crisis that was published in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Temperatures topped 120 degrees in Los Angeles County. Red flag warnings of extreme fire danger are posted from the Mexican to the Canadian border. Bay Area smoke has been so thick that San Franciscans have had to check their watches to tell whether it is night or day. In Oregon, fire has been consuming entire towns at the rate of three or four per night.

Utah is vulnerable to climate change in nearly all the same ways that California is (desert climate, reliance on dwindling mountain snowpack, equivalent amount of permanent warming). Climate warming is drying up Utah’s forests and its primary water sources, setting up the state for the same catastrophic fires we see along the Pacific Coast.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2020/09/17/malin-moench-climate-has/