Jeremy Jones & Climate Change

I finally, today, made it halfway through the video. I think J.J. has something to say so I'm posting it again.

Purple Mountains is a film about snowboarder Jeremy Jones and his efforts to find common ground around (over, under, sideways, down) climate change among people of diverse beliefs.

Photo lifted from msrgear.com

Rio Grande

Years ago I attended a meeting of business owners at which a politician exhorted us to encourage xeriscape in the cities.

Research showed townies used 2% of the water. I asked if they were going to stop watering the golf courses; she said no.

Cotton, one of the most water-intensive crops and extremely hard on soils is a favorite in southern New Mexico. Of course chili is popular, but it's hard to imagine the demand for pecans and pistachios that must be fueling the thousands of acres being planted not just in southern New Mexico but near San Simon, Arizona. Although they no longer use surface irrigation, the amounts flowing through the 20-inch diameter pipes is boggling.

Climate change isn't just due to carbon dioxide; it also stems from transpiration and its cumulative effects. 

The sky used to be a clear blue. Now the entire Southwest often has a high white haze. Some days there's a thin layer of fog that hangs a few thousand feet up and through which the clear sky above is occasionally visible.

Of course, no one wants to acknowledge there are just too many people.

Near Socorro, in the north

At Arrey, in the south

Regional Haze

An administrator once told me the BLM had, years ago, created a committee to study "Regional Haze."

Outside the museum at the South Rim of Grand Canyon (on the walkway to the left of the entrance) there's an info board that puts some of the blame for visual occlusion on particulates from China. Getting ever worse since the early 1970s, it's now so bad it's hardly worth going to the place though sometimes in January, after a storm, the air clears and the views, though nothing like in the '60s, are better.

Though the museum's placard attributes the haze to smog, it covers the entire Southwest; it's common in Ajo, Arizona which is 337 miles (542 km) south and in the middle of the Sonoran desert. But Ajo is also just down the street from Gila Bend. On most days the air in Gila Bend is so saturated with the reek of nitrogen fertilizer it's unbreathable. Drawing from the Gila River, the area is, for nearly twenty miles east and west and for nearly half that distance north and south, subjected to intense agricultural use.

San Simon, on Interstate 10 about 12 miles west of the New Mexico border, has thousands of acres covered by pecan trees. Served mostly by subsurface irrigation, you can sometimes see HUGE amounts of water pouring from outlets into canals. The trees send it into the atmosphere at a rate that surely has inspired a few Ph.D.s (citation needed).

I'll not bother to mention the California Valley or the pecan and chili orchards in southern New Mexico. Let ALONE all the hay production throughout the southwest that revolves around livestock.

And the skiiiiiiiiies are CLOUDY all daayyyyyyyyy. (Remember the song: Home On the Range?)