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Other options, including those aimed more directly at water supply, are to seed clouds with the hopes of increasing snow volumes in the high-elevation mountains. Local governments and power companies spend tens of millions of dollars a year on such seeding projects that have been shown to increase snowpack.

But, experts say, such efforts are increasingly undermined by dust and soot accumulations that increase the melt rate of snowpacks, regardless of their depth.

And the problems will persist as long as the Western climate continues to warm, perhaps by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 90 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If such conditions persist, Painter said this year's dust storm intensity and early snowmelt could become the norm across the region.

Belnap, the USGS research ecologist, said focused attention could help reverse the trend, but it will take more effort on the part of government and landowners.

"We do not manage for dust. We don't even think about it," she said. "I think the time is coming where we are going to have to decide we need to think about dust."

With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon.

I share that conclusion, and have explained why to members of Congress before and will again at a Capitol Hill briefing on July 13. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth's remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.

The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere now stands at 387 parts per million, the highest level in 600,000 years and more than 100 ppm higher than the amount at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Burning just the oil and gas sitting in known fields will drive atmospheric CO2 well over 400 ppm and ignite a devil's cauldron of melted icecaps, bubbling permafrost, and combustible forests from which there will be no turning back. But if we cut off the largest source of carbon dioxide, coal, we have a chance to bring CO2 back to 350 ppm and still lower through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.

The essential step, then, is to phase out coal emissions over the next two decades. And to declare off limits artificial high-carbon fuels such as tar sands and shale while moving to phase out dependence on conventional petroleum as well.