TUNGSTEN VALLEY — It’s official: Winter 2025-26 was the driest ever recorded in Colorado. The proximate cause was a state-wide, stalled high-pressure system. The distal cause was the earth’s highest carbon dioxide (CO2) level, 430 parts per million, since at least the Miocene, five million years ago.

The Mountain-Ear as the newspaper of record for Gilpin County (and the voice of the Peak to Peak): let the record show that we knew we were in trouble as of April 30, 2026. The CO2 data isn’t a straight line; it’s an exponential growth curve, sloping like a skateboarder would enjoy.

Unfortunately for all of us, this steepening slope is going totally uphill. In 1959, CO2 was accumulating at 0.75 ppm/yr. Today it’s growing three times faster, at 2.25 ppm/yr. That’s the biggest increase rate in at least 20,000 years.

This scary curve is due to coal, oil, and gas being burned faster than ever while forests and oceans, which used to soak up the CO2, are now absorbing only half of humanity’s output. Forest felling continues, and the remaining trees don’t absorb CO2 so well in hotter temperatures. Likewise the oceans, which used to be a big sponge, can’t sop up the gas like they used to because they’re hotter. (Visualize CO2 bubbles emerging from a warming glass of soda.)

For a future generation reading this, here’s what’s happened, and is happening, in our Peak to Peak climate as of April 2026.

We had almost no snow all winter. What little we did get was soupy, sloppy sludge that disappeared as fast as it hit the ground. It sublimated and melted and ran off immediately, instead of soaking in and gradually feeding the vegetation.

The Continental Divide, where melting snowpack should now be filling creeks, lakes, and reservoirs, is topless. Its skimpy snows have mostly already vanished. As of this writing, Barker Reservoir’s water, which supplies downstream users including agriculture and a third of Boulder’s annual needs, is draining instead of doing its normal filling (as I’m informed by my Boulder Water Department sources).

Colorado ski areas appended a terrible season with early closures. They had to make more snow than ever, even as their water sources literally evaporated. Excessive warmth also made for mostly rotten skiing. The long-term handwriting is on the wall for that industry.

And multi-day, widespread ad hoc electrical outages have become de rigueur in now-frequent, dangerously warm and windy conditions, even in winter.

Wrapping up with some good news, Ember Data reports that in March, for the first time ever, America generated more electricity (35%) from renewables and nuclear power than from coal, oil, and gas combined (34%). This was due to long-term investments in clean power, promoting massive growth in solar and wind generation and power-grid battery storage.

The current administration dreams of regressing America into 1926, but in the long run, they and their fossil fuel buddies can’t stop sustainable renewables. The only question is whether America will further develop these technologies or whether our country’s efforts will be eclipsed by China’s.

Fun fact: In a “Frasier” episode from February, 1996 (S3 E16), Martin Crane’s character exclaims of an unseasonably warm winter day, “Thank you, global warming!” Documenting that thirty years ago, popular culture was already well-informed by scientists about the impacts of fossil fuel burning.

The author takes climate questions at: Peak2PeakClimate@gmail.com.