In Ken Buck's first uttered comments after that whole gay=alcoholism debacle, he put his foot in it again.

The Coloradoan reports that after the meeting with supporters in Fort Collins, CO, Buck was heading to a fundraiser featuring Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). "Sen. Inhofe was the first person to stand up and say this global warming is the greatest hoax that has been perpetrated," Buck told The Coloradoan. "The evidence just keeps supporting his view, and more and more people's view, of what's going on."

Buck is behind the curve in Colorado on this one, where state residents have been watching in increasing alarm as the spruce beetle and massive aspen die-offs are turning the Rockies rusty red.

Last year, High Country News [sub req] featured an essay by a Colorado native, now a climate scientist, studying the aspen die-off. He wrote about a town meeting he attended to discuss his research in his hometown, Cortez, "a mid-sized farming town in a rural, deeply conservative county."

I should have served wine beforehand, I thought to myself as I welcomed everyone and put up the first slides. Better yet, whiskey. But I launched into my talk anyway: How many people had noticed the dead aspens on their land or near the road in the mountains? All hands went up. Who remembered the mass death of the pinon pine forests across the Four Corners states several years ago? All hands went up again. Across the Southwest, hundreds of thousands of acres of pinon pine had rapidly succumbed to a beetle in just a few years. Scientists found that the severe 2002 and 2003 droughts lasted no longer than those of the Dust Bowl or in the 1950s, but they differed in one very important respect: They were hotter, most likely due to manmade climate change. Our current scientific picture of the recent half-million-acre aspen die-off paints an incomplete picture, but all lines of evidence to date point towards a similar one-two punch of drought and global warming as the primary cause. When I said this, I expected grumbling, if not a roar of disagreement. But the protests never came. These people had seen the dead forests all around them. The pinon pine die-off had left huge swaths of the landscape a sickly brownish-red. Then the massive lodgepole pine scourge swept across Colorado's high-altitude forests, and continues to wreak havoc today. Faced with mounting evidence on a very concrete level, the locals have come to understand that Western forests are already in trouble, and climate change is the most likely culprit. This audience asked the same question locals had asked all summer -- What can we do about it?

The teabaggers Ken Buck hangs with might be in denial about what's happening around them, but increasing numbers of Coloradans who are watching their forests die en masse aren't. The evidence is clear to them.

In related news, at least the League of Conservation Voters is having some fun with this one.