Marathon Pundit: Huffington Post's Freedman on global warming: Did it cause Yosemite fires and Colorado flooding?

Yosemite's El Capitan

Writing for Huffington Post Green last month, Andrew Freedman mused about global warming and how it may have been the reason Yosemite's Rim Fire spread so quickly:

Parts of the West have been warming faster than the rest of the lower 48 states since the 1970s, a trend tied to climate change as well as natural climate variability.

Anthony Westerling, a climate scientist at the University of California at Merced who studies how climate change effects wildfires, said that increasing temperatures promotes evaporation, which leads to more frequent instances of "extreme fire conditions."

Further east but still in the West, Colorado has been ravaged by deadly floods. And is this ongoing tragedy the result of global warming too?

From a Freedman HuffPo entry yesterday:

It will take climate scientists many months to complete studies into whether manmade global warming made the Boulder flood more likely to occur, but the amount by which this event has exceeded past events suggests that manmade warming may have played some role by making the event worse than it would have otherwise been.