{"id":108667,"date":"2015-10-22T22:12:42","date_gmt":"2015-10-23T04:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/climate-skeptics-take-fire-seriously\/"},"modified":"2015-10-22T22:12:42","modified_gmt":"2015-10-23T04:12:42","slug":"climate-skeptics-take-fire-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/climate-skeptics-take-fire-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate skeptics take fire seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"People
People who believe that climate change is increasing the risk of devastating wildfires in Colorado are not more likely to take mitigation actions to protect their property, according to a new study.<\/span>Steve Lewis\/Durango Herald file photo<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

University of Colorado Boulder researchers, along with U.S. Forest Service officials, published the results of the recent survey in the journal Environmental Hazards.<\/p>\n

Despite more than half of respondents acknowledging that climate change has increased wildfire risk in the state, those interviewed were not necessarily more likely to take action on their private property to mitigate potential damage from future blazes.<\/p>\n

Oddly, those who are skeptical about climate change are actually more likely to take actions to prevent fire damage.<\/p>\n

\u201cA small but distinct portion of respondents who reject climate science as a \u2018hoax\u2019 are also the ones who reported doing significantly more risk-mitigation activities than other respondents,\u201d said Hannah Brenkert-Smith, a research associate in the Institute of Behavioral Sciences at CU-Boulder and lead author of the study.<\/p>\n

Risk-mitigation activities include installing a fire-resistant roof and thinning surrounding vegetation that could act as a potential fuel source, among other practices.<\/p>\n

Forest officials say the study reveals that it may be more useful to focus on locally relevant hazards in terms of educating and motivating residents in fire-prone areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conventional wisdom that a belief about climate change is a pre-requisite for mitigating local climate-change impacts was not found in this analysis,\u201d said study co-author Patricia Champ of the U.S. Forest Service\u2019s Rocky Mountain Research Station. \u201cThis was a bit of a surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

who believe that climate change is increasing the risk of devastating wildfires in Colorado are not more likely to take mitigation actions to protect their property, according to a new study.Steve Lewis\/Durango Herald file photo University of Colorado Boulder researchers, along with U.S. Forest Service officials, published the results of the recent survey in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":108668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5735,6212],"tags":[84],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-108667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-state-nation-world","tag-wildfire"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108667"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=108667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}