Despite the surprisingly long and productive monsoon season we’re having, climate change is clearly now a terrible fact of our lives. Most sane people know this to be true. But if doubts linger, Laura Paskus’s inspiring, fact-filled 2020 book “At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate” will put them to rest.
Her realistic, pragmatic, no-nonsense description of how the overheating of our world is not only making life more complicated but more dangerous and unpredictable, shows us clearly that ours is not a time for hand wringing and hiding, pessimism and political denial. We can’t afford to have ideological buffoons and “what me worry” gladhanders in public office. There’s no room for haters and bigots and militant know-nothings either.
Drought in the Southwest is real and all but unchangeable. In a few months, the seven western states that make up the Colorado River Compact, representing some 40 million people — in California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — will either come up with a workable plan to reduce their consumption of the shrinking Colorado River by a whopping 4 million acre feet or the federal government might abruptly do it for them, as it did in 2002 when it shut down three of eight pipelines from Lake Mead to California and diverted some 600,000 acre feet of water to Arizona.
As Laura Paskus writes, “Climate change is here. It’s human caused. And it will deliver a blow to American prosperity. Already hit by drought, wild fires, and declining water supplies, the southwestern United States will continue to face those challenges and new ones,” including “deteriorating infrastructure and dropping groundwater levels …”
Despite decades of solid science and dire predictions coming true, climate change deniers have managed to win a pyrrhic victory. They successfully prevented early action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to slow down planetary overheating. But they, like the rest of us, will pay for it dearly in the years ahead with a parched landscape, a withered economy, and the radical insecurity both could cause. A long, desperate struggle is in all our futures, and we can’t afford to lose. Circumstances will require us to spend sizable chunks of the rest of our lives figuring out how not to waste water, how to pinch and save and scrape along like our great grandmas used to save bits of string and rubber bands. We’ll have to learn hard lessons of how to be crafty at conservation, of how to help patch millions of public and private water leaks, of how to reuse every drop of water that runs through our systems, and stretch what water we have as far as it can possibly go. And we’ll also face a bitter struggle politically.
We’re in this terrible place largely because of anti-environmental corporations and their shills like Donald Trump who repeatedly called climate change “a hoax.” As we face the future, the last thing New Mexico needs is a Trump protégé and goat head of denial like Mark Ronchetti as Governor. If for no other reason — and there are many other reasons — water scarcity makes the re-election of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham an absolute necessity. She’s a politician with a trustworthy environmental conscience and voting record. We have to make the right decisions about water in the future. Lujan Grisham will. Ronchetti won’t.
The effects of climate change move though our entire way of life. “Climate change affects energy and supply,” Paskus writes. “As temperatures rise, demands for electricity rise. Yet demands for more water for fossil-fuel power plants will coincide with reduced water supply availability from snowpack. Moreover, hydraulic fracturing in oil and gas drilling uses large amounts of water, pollutes water, and emits greenhouse gases.” There’s just no escaping it.
Heating intensifies local undulating weather patterns. The dry times get dryer longer, and wet times get wetter but can’t keep up with the drought. Our early and enduring monsoon season this year, starting in early June, produced more days of rain in Albuquerque than I can remember for the last six or seven years but it is not a trend. It’s an episode, like the high runoff and flow of the Rio Grande in 2019.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) gives a clear picture of the undulating weather patterns in New Mexico that climate change will intensify. New Mexico temperatures have risen by more than two degrees Fahrenheit since the beginning of the 20th century. We’ve have noticeably more warm days and warm nights here since the middle of the last century. And continue to do so episodically. Precipitation, NOAA says, “is highly variable from year to year and decade to decade” here. “State total annual precipitation ranges from a high of 26.6 inches in 1941 to a low of 6.6 inches in 1956.” The wettest times have been in the early 1940 and the mid 1980s. “The wettest consecutive five years was the 1984-1988 interval. The driest multiyear periods were in the early 1950s and early 2010s, and the driest consecutive 5 years was the 1952-56 intervals.” The North American Monsoon system has an undulating pattern as well. Some years, there’s almost no rain at all and in other years, such as 2006 “a remarkably persistent monsoon regime was in place from late July through most of August and caused significant damage and flooding in southern New Mexico,” NOAA says. “In contrast, the 2020 monsoon season was the second driest on record, after 1956.”
Even if the world manages to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions, NOAA predicts that warming will exceed historic record levels by the middle of this century everywhere, including New Mexico and the Southwest. This makes political and pragmatic realism more important than ever for New Mexicans, especially as we’re facing legal battles that could sink us into the sand if we have uninformed leadership running the show.
A Supreme Court case — Texas v. New Mexico — could all but ruin the enormously prosperous agricultural industry in southern New Mexico, including chili farming, if the court should rule in favor of Texas. A major milepost in the case is coming up near the end of September when it is hoped that both parties will have hammered out an agreement that will keep the case out of court. It seems an unlikely prospect to me.
Texas contends that New Mexico has failed to deliver to it the required amount of water stipulated under the Rio Grande Compact. Texas accuses New Mexico farmers of drawing down so much groundwater that surface water has been drastically reduced. But chili farmers here say if they can’t use ground water, they can’t grow their crop. It doesn’t help that climate change has intensified the terrible drought in southern New Mexico, dropping Elephant Butte Reservoir to a mere puddle of its former self especially during the full-to-the-brim years of 1985 and 1996.
As there’s a good chance that we won’t be able to forge a lasting deal with Texas and resolve the dispute out of court, it’s imperative we don’t find ourselves with some radically inexperienced neophyte, faux populist at the helm of state government while New Mexico and Texas struggle mano a mano over life-giving water in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite our rich monsoon season, and because of our long-lasting drought conditions and the drying up of the Rio Grande through the city, Albuquerque again this year has had to stop using Colorado River water in its drinking water program and return to relying exclusively on vulnerable groundwater to drink. The curtailing is temporary, we hope, but it could last well into winter.
It’s not that we can’t adapt. Conservation is a matter of politics, budgeting and engineering. And we have a history here of learning how to use less water. From the 1990s to around 2015, Albuquerque politicians and city government coaxed the populace to reduce its water consumption from 252 gallons per capita per day to 121 gallons. It’s an accomplishment to be celebrated. But there will surely be more calls for reduced use in the future. In Berlin, for instance, Germans consume 125 liters per capita per day. If a gallon is roughly four liters, that comes out to about a quarter of what we use, or some 31 gallons per capita per day. That seems like an impossibly low number for us to achieve. But we may be called upon to try.
Conservation is also a matter of patching leaks. We learn from Paul Hawken’s 2017 book “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming” that in “the United States, an estimated one-sixth of distributed water escapes the system,” or is wasted through leakage. And “losses are typically much higher in low-income regions — sometimes 50 percent of total volume.” Leaks in home water systems are hard to find and often go unnoticed, but are relatively fixable with elbow grease and dollars. Some hookups can lose as much as 150 gallons a day, wiping out other conservation successes. It’s hard to find numbers for public water leakages, but my guess is they are exponentially comparable. And though it’s an engineering problem to fix them, only politicians can raise the dough to do it.
Someday Albuquerque’s water supply might be so compromised by rising temperatures and groundwater pollution that leaders will have to take the political heat of raising taxes to fix the system. Let’s hope we have serious, thoughtful people in charge and not TV personalities, climate-change deniers and anti-taxers if that should be our fate.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
This column, with all its well-reasoned facts and frightening predictions, is one important reason among many to reelect Michelle Lujan Grisham to continue sheparding our state. I am currently in Mexico City for a book launch, and am learning what extreme water scarcity can mean for a population of 22 million. Bravo to you, V.B. for consistently telling it like it is.
“Anti-taxers” or “anti-vaxers “ – last sentence in your sept 4 edition
V.B., another good column. Thank you.
As a DVM I continue to work on One Health/Conservation Medicine issues. Over 70% of the infectious diseases our species is now contracting are zoonotic. Much of this is due to lack of understanding that a healthy and intact natural world is critical to our health.