Rangers in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado crossing the snowfield on Longs Peak on the way to Chasm LakeBOB DOUGHTY: Much research on the subject has been reported during the past ten years. Mister Pederson says those studies identified human activity as the cause of some of the changes in the permanent snow. He says his team's findings support the results of the earlier studies. . . .
GREGORY PEDERSON:"Attributing a proportion of those changes to human impacts has been done by well over a decade of observational and modeling studies... "And what we are documenting here is that trees are telling the same story about snowpack change."
BOB DOUGHTY: Conditions in the qweig0915 ocean and the atmosphere that can make spring temperatures warmer also may influence the changes. . . . . .
FAITH LAPIDUS: The research team studied places that produce major amounts of water. They include drainage basins, areas of water fed by three rivers -- the Colorado, the Columbia and the Missouri. The researchers say the basins provide sixty to eighty percent of the water needs of more than seventy million people.
The report says there were extremely fmdw110915 addjgvldo unusual losses in water flowing into those areas in the late twentieth century. This was found to be especially true after the nineteen eighties.