Death Valley-like daytime highs and hot nights in Utah and the West last summer reinforced the Southwest's status as ground zero for deadly global climate disruption, a new report says.
    Using government data collected over five years, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization show that Utah and Arizona are heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, with the other Southwestern states close behind.
    The report released Thursday shows that from 2003 to 2007, the average temperature in the Colorado River Basin, stretching from Wyoming to Mexico, was 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the historical average for the 20th century. The accelerating temperature increase was more than twice the global average increase of 1.0 degree during the same period. Only in the Arctic are temperatures climbing faster than they are in the West.
    Without concerted, meaningful policy change and financial support for new energy endeavors, the West's future is dim, said Theo Spencer of the NRDC, one of the report's co-authors.
    "Many people don't think global warming is actually upon us. They think it is something that will happen sometime down the road," said Spencer. "It's changing life in the West as we know it today."
    In the 11-state Western region, the average temperature during the five-year study period increased 1.7 degrees. Utah temperatures, however, increased 2.1 degrees. Only Arizona, with a 2.2-degree increase, topped the Beehive State.
    "Hotter and Drier: The West's Changed Climate," is the latest in a series of reports since 2004 that demonstrate how rising temperatures are responsible for ever-worsening wildfires, human heat-related deaths and other disasters.
    Rising temperatures at high elevations are melting glaciers in Wyoming, the main source of the Colorado River water, which supports some of the fastest-growing cities in the United States.
    In the West, as with the rest of the planet, climate change is driven mostly by carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, with coal the biggest culprit. But today's emissions aren't responsible for the 2003-2007 increases, Spencer said.
    Because carbon emissions hang around for a century or more, "what we're seeing now is the results of the Industrial Revolution," he said.
    That demonstrates the urgent need for policy change now, to avoid disasters including storms far more intense than Hurricane Katrina and Dust Bowl conditions across the entire West by the end of the century, he said.
    Scientists and others have said that the country has about three years to come up with a plan to curtail emissions to avoid utter disaster. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and multinational corporations like GE and BP already are putting billions of dollars into alternative energy research. But Congress needs to get serious, Spencer said.
    "There are solutions. Something can be done about this problem. We just need to start acting now," he said. "We need a market signal to make it happen, which is the federal government."
    Meanwhile, states, including Utah, have taken the lead in addressing climate disruption.
    Last fall, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. released a scientific study of global warming that showed Utah is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than the national average. The report, part of the work of the governor's Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Climate Change, also found the state is warming faster than the global average, and that without concerted effort, extreme droughts and heat waves are virtually assured.
    The state report came with 72 policy suggestions, which the Utah Division of Air Quality is now studying.
    Glade Sowards, a DAQ economist, said the agency has contracted with Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions to conduct cost-benefit analyses that will be ready by May. A second phase to begin this summer would examine policies' effects on the state economy.
    "We're hopeful this analysis we're working on with Duke will give us some good Utah-specific numbers," Sowards said.