Mount Lemmon’s Heat Makes Us Lose Our Cool

Our community’s beloved Mount Lemmon – our retreat from the desert heat – is becoming hotter and more vulnerable to environmental disaster, according to Tuesday’s New York Times.

Mount Lemmon is one of the “sky islands” – the high, green spots perched above the desert area – that are experiencing unprecedented climate change. According to the story by Timothy Egan, Summerhaven, the tiny community near the 9,157-foot summit of Mount Lemmon, was usually 20 degrees cooler than the desert floor. Not anymore.

During the last decade, Mount Lemmon’s new warmth has had an impact on more than our community’s recreational opportunities: Higher temperatures have put Mount Lemmon at risk for catastrophic fires and are endangering native species.

The Times reported that the American Southwest has been warming for nearly 30 years, Mount Lemmon’s winter snows are melting earlier, and “predatory insects have taken to the forest that mantles the upper mountain, killing trees weakened by record heat.”

Our region’s current eight-year drought may not be as bad as the one in the 1950s, according to the Times. However, the higher temperatures and dry conditions send species native to the sky islands scampering to higher, cooler ground, which may not exist.

“A lot of people think climate change and the ecological repercussions are 50 years away,” said Thomas W. Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, in Tuesday’s Times. “But it’s happening now in the West. The data is telling us that we are in the middle of one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States.”

We hope the Times story does not ignite more debate about whether global warming is the result of human activity or merely a natural cycle, but rather incites action.

The scientific bottom line is that it’s getting hotter. The Times reports that there is “broad consensus that much of the West is warmer than it has been since record keeping began, and that changes are happening quickly, particularly in places like the sky islands.”

While campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa this month, Arizona Sen. John McCain – not a left-leaning, alarmist environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination – said, “I strongly feel that climate change is taking place and I also feel that we can address it.” Speaking in favor of ethanol’s use, McCain encouraged combating climate change with methods profitable, not costly, to the United States.

McCain observed that even if cleaning up our environment and reducing our dependency on fossil fuels had little impact on climate change, it will leave a cleaner world for our children and grandchildren.

It’s time to stop arguing over whether climate change is primarily man-made or part of a natural cycle. It’s here and we must take all possible steps to reduce its impact.

(c) 2007 Arizona Daily Star. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.