When it comes to the things Americans most worry about, climate change has failen far down the list.
It's not in the top 10, with an August CNN poll asking people about their top issues for the upcoming midterm elections showing climate change tied for 14th.
A new study by scientists at multiple Western universities, including the University of Wyoming, could prompt some people to reconsider.
The study, published in the scientific journal PNAS, concludes that the 2025-2026 winter season in the Western U.S., with shockingly low snow and record-breaking warmth, was “about four times more likely” due to human-caused climate change.
None of the scientists who contributed to the study say their work is a way to predict the future, but they believe the data they've meticulously compiled has a lot to say to those willing to review it.
“What I want people to understand is that climate change has contributed to the bad snow years we’re observing now,” said lead author Adrienne Marshall from the Colorado School of Mines. "We want to know how much more frequently we might expect an event like this to become over the rest of the 21st century."
'Black Swan Event'
Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day reviewed the study and concluded that “it's certainly something to pay attention to.”
“Projections like this are useful,” he said. “Nothing that I saw in the paper looked unreasonable, based on their methodology, and it doesn't say that this is a prediction.”
While Day has also categorized this past winter season as a “generational” event, he also has some thoughts on the study’s conclusion. His main critique is the modeling used to reach that conclusion.
“I'm of the opinion there's a lot more going on with last year's winter than just what’s running through these simulations,” he said. “There are a lot of variables that determine what happens throughout the course of the year.”
Day has taken to calling the last winter season a “black swan event.”
Black swan theory is that an event can come as a surprise, have a major impact, and subsequently become overanalyzed.
Studying Snow Drought
The premise of the study was simple in concept. Marshall and her colleagues examined the 2026 winter season to determine how much more likely it was due to climate change, and how frequent similar seasons might be in the future.
One of the study’s co-authors was Stefan Rahimi, a University of Wyoming Derecho supercomputer professor in the department of Atmospheric Science. His contribution was downscaling the physics-based global climate models used to examine this past winter season.
“We use Earth system models to quantify the statistics of the climate system, historical, present, and future,” Rahimi told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s a very difficult process, especially in the western U.S. because of the terrain.”
Using computational physics to scale down global climate models to high-resolution grids, the researchers compared the volumetric snow water equivalent (SWE) on March 15, typically when SWE peaks, between 1950 and 2026.
Then, they ran the same climate models for the period between 1850 and 1900 and for 10 years on either side of 2026 to approximate the current climate.
Through these complex processes, they got an idea of the frequency of “snow droughts” like the one experienced in 2026.
“There's been surprisingly little work on snow drought attribution,” Marshall said. “We needed a model that can simulate our observed extreme snow drought in a world with the climate change that we've observed so far, and then in a world without that same climate change.”
How Bad It Was
One outcome of the study was getting an idea of how extreme the 2026 snow drought was.
“There's been a lot of talk about whether it was record-breaking, and I think that's generally not super productive,” Marshall said. “There are many ways to measure snow.”
Marshall said last winter’s snow drought wasn’t the worst on record in the western U.S., but it was “quite low.” Ground zero was the Upper Colorado River Basin.
“It looks more like it was tied with our worst snow year ever, which was in 1977,” she said. “If we put statistics on how rare it was, it was about a 1-in-140-year event.”
For the western U.S. overall, including Wyoming, statistics indicate the 2026 snow drought was a 1-in-7-year event. Marshall qualified that as “unusually bad, but not so rare.”
However, the study determined those odds could get worse because of climate change.”
“The Upper Colorado River Basin snow drought was an outlier where the risk of having an outlier has become more likely because of climate change to date,” Marshall said. “In the western U.S., it was less of an outlier, but definitely a low, low snow year that has become more likely as well.”
Rahimi added that even if 2026 wasn’t extraordinarily dry, the data indicate it was “extraordinarily warm.”
“I had some incoming grad students play with our temperature data, specifically mean temperatures between November and April going back to the 1890s,” he said. “Almost the entirety of the southern half of the western U.S. was record-breaking warm for that period in 2026.”
Projecting, Not Predicting
Using the same physics-based computations, Marshall, Rahimi, and their colleagues explored how similar climate models could manifest in the future. That would give an idea of whether similar snow droughts could become more frequent.
“We've been careful to say it’s not a prediction of the future,” Marshall said. It’s a statement about our best estimate for a certain amount of greenhouse gas emissions of how many more snow droughts we might expect.”
Their estimate is that with the current level of greenhouse gas emissions, or if they get progressively higher, snow droughts like 2026 will become more frequent.
That has potentially enormous implications for many industries, especially agriculture.
“The ag sector is the largest user of the Colorado River streamflow,” Marshall said. “Individual agricultural producers are going to make the choices they're going to make with the conditions they're facing. Hopefully, there's value in this type of work for the people who are in positions to make decisions about city, state, national, and international climate policy.”
In Day’s analysis, the 2026 winter season was unanticipated and severe. However, the new study concurred with his observation that it wasn’t the worst on record, nor as anomalous as it seemed at the time.
Ergo, there’s the possibility that the 2026 winter season would have been as warm and dry as it was regardless of climate change.
“When you get into situations like this, analyzing whether this wouldn't have happened or was more likely to happen, it gets into modeling and statistics,” Day said. “We’ll have to see whether or not the rubber meets the road in the future.”
Marshall acknowledged that their research was focused on long-range climate modeling rather than short-range conditions.
“The models are physics-based, have been pretty extensively vetted, and represent our best understanding of the climate system,” she said. “We're not relying on short-term forecasting, but our models are grounded in comparisons with observations to make sure that they're trustworthy.”
More Ahead
Now that this complex analysis of the 2026 winter season is published, there are many more questions to be answered.
Marshall hopes to use the study as a foundation for further exploration of the factors that have historically led to snow droughts in the western U.S. and to examine how they might inform future analyses.
“If we know we're going to get more snow years like this, how can we help ourselves deal with them better and motivate mitigation? It can help us think productively about adaptation and how we can change our emissions trajectories to avoid having as many snow years like this,” she said.
Day agreed that the study is valuable even if their projections are further out than he’s comfortable with.
“It’s not going to factor into my forecasting, and it’s not meant to do that,” he said. “It’s not meant to tell us what’s going to happen this winter or next winter. It's meant to inform that water manager in Colorado that they should anticipate that the frequency of what happened last winter, or something similar, may be higher than the last 100 years.”
For all the discourse on what climate change might do in the next decade or century, Marshall, Rahimi, and their colleagues show how their work makes more people look at what it’s doing in the here and now.
“The major contribution of this paper is not looking ahead, but looking at where we stand now,” Marshall said. “People have a lot of questions about climate change. Is it happening now? How bad should we expect it to be? What should we do about it? No study can answer all of that, but I think (this paper) contributes to our understanding.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
