Archive of posts filed under the climate change category.

The science of tree diebacks in drought

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Of possible relevance to the current bosque dieback in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande? From PNAS: Predicting forest resilience requires knowing whether trees can physiologically acclimate to drought. Drawing on global in-situ field experiments, we find a pervasive lack of functional adjustment in forest trees. Trees maintain stable hydraulic and photosynthetic capacities, enabling maximum carbon …

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temperature 3.91 standard deviations above normal

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  It was 96F (35.5C) when I rode my bike home after class at 6:15 p.m. last night. “3.91 standard deviations above the long term record” is not terribly intuitive to me, the graphs above helped me visualize how extraordinarily unusual 2026 has been in Albuquerque. By all three normal measures – daily maximum, mean, …

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Green returning to the Sahel

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Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. …

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2026-05-19: Federal managers increase release for the silvery minnow

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Federal water managers yesterday (May 18, 2026) began pushing a pulse of water through New Mexico’s rapidly drying Middle Rio Grande to try to encourage the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow to spawn. From a note sent ’round to the Bureau’s water management list yesterday by Carolyn Donnelly, water operations supervisor for the bureau’s Albuquerque …

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A Freakish Heat Wave – A Statistical Wonder

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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 …

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Albuquerque’s warmest fall in history

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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 …

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Wrecking Ball Report: Western Water Assessment

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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 …

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“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.”

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“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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A legal guide for climate scientists to safeguard their on line communications

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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 …

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In Albuquerque, a record for July unpleasantness

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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 …

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