Glad to have some classic fall weather

I recently learned from a meteorologist at the Albuquerque National Weather Service office that we’re expecting a dry October and possibly a wet November.

The meteorologist also told me that New Mexico is the “poster child” for climate change.

Over the past 15 years or so, he said, warmer, drier weather patterns in New Mexico have followed global weather patterns closely.

I used to live about 50 miles from the Pacific coastline in California. We lived with a double threat of becoming a beach community. Either an earthquake was going to snap off a 50-mile-wide chunk of city and suburbs into the ocean or global warming was going to bring the ocean to us.

Earthquakes do happen in New Mexico, I suppose, but not on the San Andreas fault, which marks the border between two continent-size tectonic plates, one of which holds up North America. Cataclysmic seismic events just don’t register the same level of threat in New Mexico as they did in California.

Global warming could bring a threat our way, but we are already quite desert-like in the land below the Caprock. More than a decade of drought has severely curtailed crop farming in our region.

As New Mexico becomes warmer and drier, we may have to resign ourselves to a slow return of the days of plentiful water from rain, snow, and the Canadian River.

I think the climate is changing, but I’m not sure if it’s a natural cyclical event or whether people did it. I am baffled that scientific question has become political.

Why, if you believe in universal health insurance and equal rights for gay and transgender people, do you also have to believe that global warming is upon us and that people did it?

And why, if you believe that marriage should be between two people of different sexes and that federal authority should be curtailed, do you also have to believe there is no such thing as global warming?

That makes two ideological non sequiturs, but that is what politics has done to cloud the resolution of a scientific question.

I have more questions:

n If it’s true that we caused global warming, what can we do about it? Will anything short of abandoning electricity on demand and fossil-fuel transportation solve the problem?

n If we take common-sense measures like maximizing our use of renewable energy resources, exercising energy efficiency and reducing our reliance on private cars for transportation, will that reverse global warming or just slow it down?

n Even if we who are privileged to live in the developed world can cut back on a few things, should we deny the developing world the opportunity to raise their standard of living to our level of wasteful consumption, as most aspire to do? Can we?

While others far more knowledgeable wrestle with these questions, however, I am expecting to enjoy a weekend of classic fall weather, which has finally arrived on the heels of a day of storms two weeks ago and a one-day cold snap last week.

A little rain, however, would be reassuring.

— Steve Hansen

Quay County Sun