Come See It While You Can

I’m in a frantic race to see, feel and photograph as much of the American Southwest as I can, as fast as I can. What’s the hurry? Well, I’m old and getting older, for one thing. But the other thing—the really big thing—is that all this beauty and grandeur is pretty much doomed. Okay, the rocks will survive. But the biosphere, including the human population, is in deep trouble. Without water, this place is just sand and rock. A few things can survive, but nothing like the diverse flora and fauna that’s presently here. Every year the spring melt out comes a little earlier. That’s not helping farmers and it’s not helping wildlife.

Here’s a link to Climate Central with a brief discussion of the national temperature trend. It’s disturbing.

http://www.climatecentral.org/wgts/heat-is-on/HeatIsOnReport.pdf

The southwest has always been prone to droughts. That’s what ended the Chaco Canyon Anasazi civilization about 900 years ago. As the population of the southwest has increased, the region has become more and more vulnerable to periodic droughts. And, if climate models are to be believed (and I think they are), we’re headed into a period of prolonged—maybe permanent—drought. For the last two years skiing in New Mexico has been pretty awful. This is at least partly due to the extended La Niña that we’ve been experiencing. But in recent years, the El Niño-La Niña cycle appears to have increased its frequency. Whether this is a real trend or just random noise is open to debate. But this is about a lot more than just my urge to go downhill way too fast for my own, or anyone else’s safety. That snow pack is our water supply. When it melts slowly more of it seeps into the aquifer to replace some of the water we remove for drinking, irrigation and watering the stupid lawns we shouldn’t have here in the first place. When there’s too little of it, and it melts too fast and too early, and it just runs off and either evaporates or flows down the river.

Climate change deniers can huff and puff, but the whole world, and the American Southwest in particular, is endangered. That’s not just my opinion. For what it’s worth, I used to teach a course in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Texas at Arlington and I hold degrees in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Environmental Engineering. That doesn’t make me a climatologist, but I’m pretty familiar with the arguments and the data. The folks you should be listening to are Dr. James Hansen of NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the equivalent bodies of EVERY DEVELOPED NATION IN THE WORLD. The only real controversy is the one created by people whose paychecks depend on us doing nothing. They make the same arguments and, in some cases, are the exact same people who testified to congress that evidence linking smoking to cancer was "Junk Science."