No obvious explanation comes to mind for this remarkable correlation in Google Ngrams of “New Mexico” and “Arizona”. I checked a bunch of other neighboring states in various combinations, and nothing comes close. Anyone?
I had the distinct privilege yesterday of sitting down with my ABQJournal Washington bureau colleague Mike Coleman (the sitting was virtual – Coleman was in DC) and penning a quick look at Jeff Bingaman’s remarkable career (sub/ad req) on the occasion of his announcement that he will not run for a sixth term in the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ »
I love our winter color palatte. This is one of the main ditches at the Bosque del Apache, a bird refuge on the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque. Taken in December a few years back.
From this morning’s newspaper, explaining our remarkable cold in a continental context (sub/ad req): [I]t was as if someone left a giant freezer door open and all the arctic cold leaked out. While New Mexico lay beneath a mass of arctic air 30 or more degrees colder than normal, central Canada saw temperatures 20 degrees …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Explaining the Cold’ »
We’ve been remarkably cold here in New Mexico this week. Yesterday, it turned into a major infrastructure problem, which forced me to very quickly get up to speed on how our state’s natural gas infrastructure works, on account of because a bunch of people had theirs turned off. From the morning paper (sub/ad req): The …
Struck by the numbers on dairy industry groundwater contamination in New Mexico, I’ve been poking around in the regulatory issues involved. Here’s a bit of what I found (sub/ad req): Dairies are found throughout New Mexico, but are especially concentrated in the southeastern part of the state, where growth of industrial dairy operations has made …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dairies and Groundwater’ »
From the newspaper this week, a look at the bargain that was struck to win support for the New START nuke deal with the Russians (sub/ad req), which includes money for a new plutonium lab at Los Alamos to replace its aging CMR building – despite dramatic cost increases and schedule delays since the project …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The New START Bargain’ »
If you’re a western water manager, the corners of your smile must be crinkled up in delight at the latest Quantitative Precipitation Forecast from the National Weather Service. That’s some mighty big bulls-eyes you see on the map over the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River Basin. Going into this, the snow pack in the …
Most of my water journalism involves the supply side, but this week I indulged my fascination with the back end of the problem – moving it away from the places we don’t want it (sub/ad req): The southwest valley is one of three large areas in the Albuquerque metro area where government agencies working on …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: My Fascination With Flood Control’ »
Does it matter whether the current southwestern US drought is caused by anthropogenic climate change? Or, to be slightly more precise, in what ways does it or does it not matter? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think in the comments below. The question arises anew in the context of the …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Southwest Drought – Is It Happening Now?’ »