Our hearts go out to Californians suffering intensively destructive wildfires ignited in bone-dry hillsides. Those fires should remind Utahns of our own vulnerability.
The 2018 water year was the driest in Utah history (“How dry is Utah?” Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 10). NOAA reports 2017 was the warmest non-El Niño year ever recorded worldwide. A crucial link between these facts is that each is related to manmade global warming and expected to get worse, depending on how the world responds.
Higher temperatures lead to decreased snowpack and increased rainfall, but rain is not as reliable as mountain snows for our water.