The drought comes after a record-breaking warm winter that left very low “snowpack levels” in water basins. “Even though the reservoir levels are still strong and northeast Colorado soil moisture is still pretty good, we just don’t usually start out quite this warm and dry at this time — so this is very concerning,” CSU climatologist Nolan Doesken said. “In 2002, things didn’t seem that bad at the end of March, as March had been quite cool, with some snow.”

Colorado’s hydrofracking boom — a technology that heavily relies on water — only adds additional strain as farmers and drillers bid for a scarce resource:

At Colorado’s premier auction for unallocated water this spring, companies that provide water for hydraulic fracturing at well sites were top bidders on supplies once claimed exclusively by farmers. [...]

State officials charged with promoting and regulating the energy industry estimated that fracking required about 13,900 acre-feet in 2010. That’s a small share of the total water consumed in Colorado, about 0.08 percent. However, this fast-growing share already exceeds the amount that the ski industry draws from mountain rivers for making artificial snow. Each oil or gas well drilled requires 500,000 to 5 million gallons of water.

A Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission report projected water needs for fracking will increase to 18,700 acre-feet a year by 2015.

Farmers who go to the auctions seeking to produce food — or maybe plant more acres — are on equal footing with companies seeking water for fracking, Northern Water spokesman Brian Werner said.

“If you have a beneficial use for the water, then you can bid for that water,” Werner said. “We see the beneficial use of the water as a positive for the economy of the whole region. Fracking is one of those uses. Our uses of water have evolved over 150 years.”

States including Colorado, Alabama, Florida, and Virginia have all faced raging wildfires before wildfire season even officially sets off, fueled by the winter that wasn’t and the March madness powered by global warming pollution from fossil-fuel polluters like Colorado’s frackers.

Why wouldn’t we embrace it as a darn good outcome? This was not the wicked wind of the east. This was the good wind of the south.

The record warmth has already led to pervasive drought in Colorado, an early wildfire season across much of the country, a record-breaking onslaught of pollen. The heat has fueled an early and destructive tornado season and crippled ski areas and maple-syrup producers.

Hoerling’s sentiment was shared by President Barack Obama, who said “we really have enjoyed the nice weather” even though it makes him “a little nervous.”

Hoerling says that global warming was “certainly a minor factor” in causing the March madness.

Hoerling — who clearly accepts that man-made global warming is making weather hotter and more extreme — has published several non-peer-reviewed reports as the lead of NOAA’s Climate Scene Investigators that claim global warming did not influence recent catastrophic extremes, such as the 2009-2010 Snowmageddon, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 tornado outbreak. Hoerling’s team did conclude, however, that “human-caused global warming was a factor in the Midwest flooding disaster” of 2008. Hoerling’s method of ascribing attribution to global warming relies primarily on statistical analysis of weather records. His method can miss phenomena that occur because of non-linear changes in the climate system, such as how the decline in Arctic sea ice caused by global warming is influencing large-scale circulation patterns.

Peer-reviewed studies that don’t rely on a single test for attribution have found a clear link between global warming and the 2009-2010 Snowmageddon and the 2010 Russia heat wave.

In a peer-reviewed work, Hoerling did find that the increasing frequency of Mediterranean droughts is caused by global warming.

Mrbps via Flickr

One thing I’m seeing—and I see it in our own paper as well as many other news outlets—is that people are covering the crazy weather we’re having and, more often than not, dodging the subject of whether there’s any relationship to climate change. TV weathermen are dodging that subject. Print reporters are dodging the subject. And it’s not so easy to cover because science does not have particularly good answers for us. The concept that I wrote about last week—that we’re in the middle of a sort of weather “weirding”—isn’t really a scientific concept for which you can build a weird index and figure out where we are on that index, but there are some things that scientists can say about weather extremes. Some of the extremes are very consistent with what is expected and what has long been predicted, and we’re seeing very clear trends in certain extremes like heat waves and heavy precipitation events. Reporters are not going to be able to be definitive, in real time, about whether this particular event was or wasn’t connected to climate change, but it’s a bit of a scandal that there’s not enough connecting the dots for people.

As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said in 2011, “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.”

The surreal heat that’s baking much of the central and eastern USA has unleashed an unusually early and intense blast of tree pollen, making life miserable for tens of millions of people who suffer from seasonal allergies. Forecasters and allergists blame the unseasonably warm weather, and few cold snaps, for causing plants to bloom weeks earlier. Atlanta, for example, smashed an all-time record with 9,369 particles of pollen per cubic meter on Tuesday, coating the city with a thin, yellow layer of pollen.

Atlanta’s previous record was a pollen count of 6,000 — 1,500 is considered high. Allergist Stanley Fineman, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, told USA Today “his allergist colleagues elsewhere in the South as well as in parts of the Northeast and Midwest are all reporting patients with severe allergy symptoms, due to the recent warm weather.”

The “surreal heat,” scientists agree, was fueled by the greenhouse pollution that is transforming our planet into a hotter, more dangerous place to live.

Flock of Snow Geese

“The maps on the GBBC website this year are absolutely stunning,” said John Fitzpatrick, executive director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Every bird species has a captivating story to tell, and we’re certainly seeing many of them in larger numbers farther north than usual, no doubt because of this winter’s record-breaking mild conditions.”

Unprecedented findings included more than two million Snow Geese in Missouri and “high numbers of waterbirds such as Mallards, Ring-necked Ducks, Hooded Mergansers, and American Coots, that either never left or came back early to lakes, rivers, and ponds that remained unfrozen.”

He tells the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens.

The tale of adolescence, bread and circuses amid economic injustice, and the trauma of war is beloved by a generation of young adults who are living themselves in a science-fictional world. No-one under the age of 35 has been alive when the planet’s temperature was normal. The coming decades, as climate change accelerates due to the exponential growth of fossil-fuel burning, will make the recent extreme floods, fires, droughts, and storms of the early 21st century a fond memory. But the authoritarian, apocalyptic world of the Hunger Games is avoidable — if its generation of readers makes wiser choices than those who now control the wealth of the world and are deciding to let it burn.

In 2011, Oklahoma was hit by the disastrous Groundhog’s Day blizzard, flooding rains in April, tornadoes in May, and then set the national record for the hottest summer ever of any state in the union, smashing the previous record set by Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl summer of 1934 by 1.8 degrees.

American taxpayers are footing the bill for these fossil-fueled disasters, motivated by the obligation to care for their fellow citizens no matter where they live.

In his speech, Obama made no mention of the climate disasters that have hit Oklahoma. “It is good to be back in Oklahoma,” he said. “I have not been back here since the campaign, and everybody looks like they are doing just fine.”

The winter that wasn’t is bleeding into a spring of fire, with freakish warmth and dry ground breeding a disturbingly early start to wildfire season across the nation:

ALABAMA: A wildfire burned 70 to 100 acres of land in Tuscaloosa County before being contained. [WBRC]

Firefighters are still fighting a forest fire that has blackened more than 350 acres north of Waterloo in Lauderdale County since Monday. [Florence Times-Daily]

ARIZONA: Emergency personnel said a wildfire that broke out in eastern Santa Cruz County burned close to 450 acres Saturday night. [Nogales International]

COLORADO: Residents on Colorado’s eastern plains are trying to determine the extent of damage and the number of farm animals killed following a wildfire that charred more than 37 square miles, destroyed two farmsteads, and forced 1000 people to evacuate. Three firefighters were injured, one with critical burns, while trying to escape from a stranded fire truck after the fire broke out last Sunday. [AP]

FLORIDA: Statewide, the dry conditions and the lack of tropical systems last year have helped cause 986 wildfires that have burned more than 16,000 acres since Jan. 1. [Palatka Daily]

The Florida Forest Service is working to contain a 50-acre wildfire northwest of Baldwin in Baldwin Bay. [News 4 Jacksonville]

GEORGIA: A wildfire forced officials to evacuate four homes and shut down one road for a couple of hours Tuesday evening in Cook County. [WALB]

MICHIGAN: Wildfire season has descended upon Michigan early this year, as unseasonable temperatures combined with low snowfall this winter have dried out grass and wood earlier than usual. [Arenac County Independent]

The remains of a bonfire left unattended in Tuesday’s high winds and heat caused a 40-acre wildfire in a swampy section of Custer Township bounded by Johnson, Stephens, Hansen and Reek roads. [Ludington Daily News]

MINNESOTA: Wildfire activity has picked up significantly, and people are reminded to obtain burn permits and keep an eye on weather conditions. [Grand Forks Herald]

VIRGINIA: U.S. Forestry Service and Virginia Department of Forestry crews are responding to a wildfire that began in the Wise County side of High Knob Tuesday afternoon. [Kingsport TImes News]

WISCONSIN: As of Tuesday morning firefighters had responded to 160 wildfires over roughly 300 acres on state-protected lands. Two people were killed in grass fires in the last week. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]

Meanwhile, wildfires are burning in Costa Rica and ravaging northern Kenya, including a fire on the slopes of Mount Kenya, the nations’s tallest mountain, which “is sending big game animals like elephants fleeing for their lives.”

Scientists have warned for decades that the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution added to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels would bring these disasters. The states that are now burning are now also polluted by dozens of politicians who claim the science is a lie.

“We’ve had a good day,” Obama said. “It’s warm every place. It gets you a little nervous about what’s happening to global temperatures. But when it’s 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March it gets you thinking…”

“Something’s wrong,” Oprah interjected.

“Yeah,” Obama said. “On other hand we really have enjoyed the nice weather.”

Instead of temperatures in the mid-40s, the historical average, Chicago is in a record-breaking streak of 80-degree weather. This “extreme and unprecedented” heat wave began last Wednesday and may continue through this Wednesday. “Before the heat wave, there had only been 10 March days on record that reached 80 degrees, and on average Chicago would see one 80 degree day in March every 14 years,” the Daily Herald reports. Most of the nation has been gripped by a record heat wave of weather as much as 30 to 40 degrees above normal. Global warming pollution is continuing to accumulate and heat the planet at a rapid pace.

The May-like warmth forecast over the next week promises to give the cherry blossoms a big shot of adrenaline, bringing them to peak bloom considerably earlier than normal (which is around April 1). With the big temperature spike ahead, the peak bloom date could come close to the earliest on record of March 17, 2000.

This early bloom is no aberration — it’s part of a long-term trend of earlier blooming. The “normal” is moving with the warming of the earth. The National Park Service’s Robert DeFeo has records of the peak bloom dates of Washington DC’s heralded cherry trees since 1921. As this chart prepared by ThinkProgress Green shows, the average blooming time for the trees has moved about 10 days earlier in the last 90 years:

With carbon pollution growing at an exponential rate, it is reasonable to expect that March is the new April when it comes to our capital’s cherry trees.

This eerily warm winter might soon get creepy. Awakened from hibernation underground, in rotting wood and the cracks of your house, bugs are on the rise. Ants, termites, mosquitoes, ladybugs and ticks are up early and looking for breakfast. Orkin, the pest control company, recently said its agents nationwide are reporting a 30 percent increase in calls to treat ant infestations compared with this time last year. Termite swarms do not normally show up until the end of March, but Orkin received 85 termite-control calls in February. An Orkin branch in Montgomery County, which serves the District, has already responded to mosquito sightings this year. And the National Pest Management Association, based in Fairfax, issued an early warning of ticks, possibly carrying Lyme disease, lurking in back yards.

Some insects, like honeybees that rely on nectar-filled flowers, are expected to suffer from consequences of the hot, dry winter.

Scientists have long warned that global warming would increase the spread of insect-borne disease as winters grow shorter and the planet becomes hotter and wetter.

Unusually hot Gulf of Mexico surface temperatures, March 5, 2012

Meteorologist Jeff Masters explained to USA Today that the warm, humid air that fed the tornadoes comes from an unusually hot Gulf of Mexico:

“This year’s unusually mild winter has led to ocean temperatures across the Gulf of Mexico that are approximately 1 degrees C (1.8 degrees F) above average,” says meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground. This places it among the top ten warmest values on record for this time of year, going back to the 1800s, he says. “Friday’s tornado outbreak was fueled, in part, by unusually warm, moist air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico due to the high water temperatures there,” Masters says. He says this exceptionally warm air set record high temperatures Friday afternoon at 28 airports in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia. Warmer winters — and an earlier arrival of spring due to a warming climate — will allow tornado season to start earlier and end earlier. “This year’s early start to tornado season is consistent with what we would expect from a warming climate.”

“Baseline ocean temperatures have indeed warmed because of global warming,” Masters told ThinkProgress Green in a follow-up, “so part of the hot Gulf of Mexico temperatures can be blamed on global warming.”

“It is irresponsible not to mention climate change,” climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told ThinkProgress Green last year. “The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming).”

“As spring moves up a week or two, tornado season will start in February instead of waiting for April,” Trenberth told Reuters this week. The winter season from December to February was the fourth warmest on record for the lower 48 states, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“Inherently the global warming from humans is quite small from one year to the next, but 10 times larger from one decade to next, and so on,” Dr. Kevin Trenberth told ThinkProgress Green in an email interview. With over a hundred years of man-made global warming from the start of the Industrial Revolution, the cumulative effect of greenhouse pollution has become significant enough to change ocean temperatures and regional weather patterns in measurable ways. “But superposed is all the shorter term natural variability that at any time can offset that or amplify it,” Trenberth cautioned.

Because of that variability and imperfect historical records, scientists have not found a measurable trend in tornado intensity and number. However, with greater greenhouse pollution scientists expect changes. “The number of days when conditions exist to form tornadoes is expected to increase” as the world warms, atmospheric scientist Robert Trapp told Reuters.

Scientists are only beginning to have a formal understanding of how our disruption of the global climate is influencing extreme weather such as tornado-bearing thunderstorms. However, a picture is beginning to emerge, NASA climate scientist Anthony D. Del Genio wrote in 2011: “As the climate warms, we might experience fewer storms overall, but more of the strongest storms.” They have identified the risk of longer tornado seasons with stronger thunderstorms. Meanwhile, right-wing austerity policies are causing cutbacks in weather monitoring, infrastructure maintenance, and emergency preparedness.

In the face of this warning, we must ask if our current path of increased pollution and decreased investment in public safety is the wisest course.