Words fall short as we watch the West’s snowpack disappear under the glare of a heat wave so off-the-charts, so freakish, that I had to resort to some pretty extreme math to try to understand how freakishly off-the-charts this is. We’ve got more than a century of weather records in Albuquerque, with really good ones …
Continue reading ‘A Freakish Heat Wave – A Statistical Wonder’ »
Inspired by this morning’s Downtown Albuquerque News Climate and Transport Index (come for the bus boardings and river flow data, stay for the Shawarma restaurant news), I give you data, one of those “Science confirms the obvious, but with graphs!” things. The overnight lows were 2.5F higher than the recent average. I wonder if that …
The Western Water Assessment, a federally funded research and outreach group based at the University of Colorado, sent a note to its stakeholders yesterday informing us that the new administration’s plans to eliminate large swaths of federal climate spending include WWA’s primary funding source: We know that it can be hard to keep track of …
Continue reading ‘Wrecking Ball Report: Western Water Assessment’ »
“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.” – Hanif Abdurraqib I’m obsessed with this quote from the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in a New Yorker piece last month. He somehow packed doom, hope, and obligation into those twelve words. Abdurraqib is riffing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, …
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With the new administration’s shithousery team now pounding on NOAA’s door, a useful resource from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund: Emails sent to and from scientists are increasingly subject to scrutiny through a variety of means, including aggressive open records requests, subpoenas, and even hacking. The prevalence of social media, blogs, and other digital …
Continue reading ‘A legal guide for climate scientists to safeguard their on line communications’ »
July is, in general, Albuquerque’s hottest month. This year’s was the hottest July we ever had. All kind of weather records…. Average overnight low of 72.3F was the warmest for that measure in a dataset going back to 1892. Total measured precipitation at the airport, our official measurement station, was just a trace – tied …
Continue reading ‘In Albuquerque, a record for July unpleasantness’ »
By one measure of overall heat, yesterday (July 25, 2023) was the hottest day ever recorded in Albuquerque. This is a tricky one, the sort of extreme I used to love back in my newspaper days when I needed a hook to slip stories like this past the filter of my editors. The daytime high …
Continue reading ‘Yesterday (July 25, 2023) was the hottest day in Albuquerque history’ »
I dropped off the Santa Fe Overland at Albuquerque about a year ago during the drouth that prevailed over the southwest at that time. The range was as dry and hard as a table. Rivers and streams had dried up. Cattle were dying and the country seemed utterly desolate. Imagine my astonishment and delight when …
The only thing better than a tailwind on the bike ride home up the hill from the Rio Grande is an air conditioned bus on a hot afternoon. Tailwinds are great, but stories happen on buses. Riding my bike to a meeting with folks trying to figure out how to cope with climate change seemed …
Continue reading ‘The Bird Watches Over a Drying Rio Grande’ »
The members of the Cattle and Horse Protective association of New Mexico, composed of men who are naturally deeply interested in a copious rainfall, believe that the Salton sea has given New Mexico a better climate. At any rate they want the matter investigated before Uncle Sam dykes up the Colorado river permanently. – Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘When they thought the Salton Sea would bring New Mexico rain’ »