One of the hidden constituencies for forest health is downstream water users. Western wildfires can really muck up a watershed, creating problems when bad fire happens and therefore significant incentives to try to keep it from happening. Today’s case in point, from my colleague Rene Romo, is the Little Bear fire in southern New Mexico: …
While it’s easy to get caught up in the climate wars rhetoric about the Colorado River, and the effect of anthropogenic warming on the river’s flows, it’s important to remember that’s only one of the variables changing in my region’s water future: With population growth pushing up Colorado River Basin water demand as climate change …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the Colorado River’s supply-demand problem’ »
I don’t think we’ll recognize this: One upshot will be the emergence of whole new ecologies. The landscape changes brought on by climate change are affecting areas so vast that many previous tenants of the land—ponderosa pines, for instance—cannot be expected to recolonize their former territory. Their seeds don’t normally spread far from the parent …
Continue reading ‘deBuys on the climatology of the New West’ »
Matt Grubs talked to Laura Paskus and I on last night’s In Focus on local public telly. It perhaps goes without saying that we talked about water.
Lissa and I took a drive Sunday up State Route 4 through the Jemez to look at the big Las Conchas burn one year later. A couple of points worth noting: Miles of forest that has not burned Lots of forest that burned healthy (sprouting aspen on the forest floor) Elk grazing in the Valle …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Las Conchas and a search for optimism about wildfire’ »
It’s all relative, I guess. I just finished my June backyard rain sheet for the National Weather Service, and realize I’ve had 8 times as much precipitation in the first six months of 2012 as I did over the same period last year – 2.21 inches (5.61 cm) compared to 0.27 inch (0.69 cm) last …
Hillary Rosner, writing at the New York Times, talked to Craig Allen and captured the essence of the angst as the west burns: “These forests did not evolve with this type of fire,” said Dr. Allen. “Fire was a big deal in New Mexico, but it was a different kind of fire.” The result, he …
When I interviewed Mike Connor, the Bureau of Reclamation’s then-newly minted commissioner, back in 2009, one of his central points was that the era of American dam building was behind us: Michael Connor, the New Mexican who took over as head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation three months ago, inherited an empire. It is …
Over at the work blog, I’ve been having fun with the onset of the North American Monsoon (or lack thereof). My smartypants idea Tuesday, to crowdsource the problem of predicting the onset of our summer rains, turned out in retrospect to be lousy. I made a spreadsheet and everything. So far just four entires, what …
In the morning paper, I pine over our elusive monsoon forecast: I know this is the time you would really like a forecast. You would really like to know when New Mexico’s summer rains will finally get here, and whether we will have a wet monsoon season. Sorry. Can’t help. Believe me, I’d like to. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: forecasting is hard, especially about the monsoon’ »