What's the 'hub-bub' about at the CSU Spur campus?

We heard about Colorado’s warming but uncertain climate. We heard about research projects. But what exactly is this new Climate Hub all about?

by Allen Best

Colorado State University has created a Climate Hub that is to be based at its Spur campus in the heart of what used to be industrial Denver. This is on the grounds of the National Western Complex.

This is north of downtown Denver, near Colorado’s transportation hub: the intersection of Interstates 70 and I-25. When I first visited the National Western, no interstate highways existed anywhere. That dates me. I can vaguely remember my grandfather, a farmer/rancher from northeastern Colorado, boosting me up atop a fence to see all the cattle. I suspect that some were his.

The cattle have all disappeared except during the Stock Show each January. You can still smell a bit of manure, though, when walking from the parking lot to the Hydro Building, one of four major and architecturally interesting buildings erected on this new campus so far. A certain amount of research goes on at this campus. A correspondent from Gardner, a hamlet in south-central Colorado, mentioned that he had just mailed water and soil samples that he needed tested to the laboratory in the Hydro Building. Denver Water operates its lab there.

As for this event, I suspect it would fall under the label of “marketing.” I was there for the full two hours of presentations and heard much that was interesting but left without understanding exactly what was new.

CSU undeniably has its fingers in what the Climate Hub, at its website, calls “a defining challenge of our time.”

Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist, a professor at CSU, was an obvious choice for leading off a program like this. He recapped the climate report issued in 2024: We have already warmed an average 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. The 10 warmest years in Colorado’s recorded history going back to the 1870s have been in the 21st century. Last year was the fourth warmest, but this year, not as warm — but still in the top 20 on record.

And much more warming is in store, between 1 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, given current emissions trajectories.

“Precipitation is more complicated,” he explained. “If you look at long-term trends, it hits hard, too, but you see a lot of ups and downs.”

Flooding will worsen, as will wildfires. We can also expect more heat waves and droughts.

Oh yummy. Somebody other than Russ, with his happy persona, could leave you very depressed.

The Climate Hub “explainer” meeting on Oct. 14 on the CSU Spur campus.

But then, that’s the story at CSU. They are figuring out solutions. Debby-downer is not the vibe.

For example, there was no talk of converting the world into vegetarians. Instead, Dr. Sara Place, who is an associate professor of feedlot systems (yes, I’m not making this up), talked about the effort to reduce the methane from the burping of cattle. It’s burps, not farts, that produce this significant component of our greenhouse problem. They constitute 3.1% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The takeaway static from the cows-burping presentation was that 80% of the methane emissions come from cattle grazing on grass, not cattle chowing down in feedlots as they fatten up for the conveyor belt to the butchery. And yes, solutions are being devised, although I am at a loss to explain any of this.

Somewhat similarly, we got a peek at the research that has been underway at CSU now for a number of years to tighten up the methane emissions leaking from our “natural” gas infrastructure. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said Dr. Dan Zimmerle.

And still other research, some of it global in scale, is underway, a bit difficult to summarize in something less than, well, maybe a 10,000-word tome. And some of it very Colorado-centric. One presenter asked if any of those in the room had been to Sterling? To Eads? (These are towns in eastern Colorado). My hand was only among a few raised in the room.

This was all part of an explanation about a new concept called digital twins. They can observe what is happening in the field from laboratories.

Surprising, though, was a tag-team effort to peel us back from the narrow confines of what we think we know to imagine possible futures. It was a marked departure from the usual conveyor belt of facts and exhortations at climate meetings.

Courtney Schultz, director of the CSU Climate Initiative, quoted an author, Jim Dater, who had said that the future cannot be predicted. The only useful ideas about the future should (at first) appear to be ridiculous.

Only later did I think about science itself. Some of the big ideas, such as plate tectonics, were originally seen as ludicrous, to be laughed out of the room.

We were asked by Lynn Badia, a professor of English, to engage in what she called speculative storytelling.

We were quickly induced to exercise some of this outside-our-boxes imagining. Can’t say that anything I imagined for Olde Town Arvada in 2050 was all that imaginative. High(er) rises? Fewer blue skies. The next round, I got a little more adventurous: glasses that. you could wear that would allow you to see the essence of the person you were looking at.

Again, only later, did I ponder smart phones. Twenty-five years ago could I see people wandering down sidewalks, sauntering across streets, seemingly mindless of traffic or, for that matter, anything else around them, their faces scrunched close to little boxes in their hands? We call them smart phones, and sometimes I seem them in droves — and just down the street.

“Have you exaggerated the possible changes to the point of absurdity?” Badia asked us.

It was fun. I am so accustomed to trying to verify facts, not to imagine the future.

Others in attendance that I consulted afterward echoed my read on the event. CSU wants to make its presence better known and the willingness to work with the private sector. That already exists with the methane-testing center. Zimmerle said they were working with many oil and gas companies trying to respond to increasing regulation by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. A member of the Climate Central team talked about providing help to Fort Collins Utilities.

One individual pointed to two themes: (a) the value of collecting, analyzing and making available substantive data; and (b) a growing partnership between universities and the private sector, filling in the new gap caused by the termination of the federal government as a research partner.

You can also see that at the CSU Climate Hub website in its statement that it “partners with diverse groups to co-create impactful solutions.”

The Legacy building, which is located across the street from the Hydro and Terrra buildings on the CSU Spur campus in Denver, appears to be ready for imminent occupancy.

As we left the Hydro building, I paused to study the latest edifice — a word I use with deliberation — that is soon to be available for public occupation. Just down the street, though, were train cars, perhaps containing crude oil. Who knows.

When I first moved from the mountains to Denver in 1998, I remember the vacant field west of the train tracks at Union Station. Nothing there. A place of homeless people, maybe. Now? The folks from Aspen and Vail have built luxury real estate. Some of the units overlook the train tracks that to this day are used by coal trains exporting carbon from the coal pits of Wyoming to distant power plants.

I could not then imagine the scene observable today at Union Station. Frankly, it has been very hard for some people to imagine the end of the fossil fuel era. But I may live long enough to see the end of those coal trains. I can imagine that.