Opinion: State likely to only get hotter and drier

Crazy weather we’ve been having lately, don’t you think? Lots of rain and hail, well ahead of the monsoon season.

After 18 years living in New Mexico, I’ve come to appreciate the volatility of our weather, having been through several extreme events through the years.

I once drove across Bobcat Pass at the Taos-Colfax county line in a blizzard. I drove — more like crawled, actually — over the pass with maybe 10 feet of visibility and down into Red River, where I was able to get behind a state truck “salting” and plowing its way to Questa. After some white-knuckled driving, both the truck driver and I made it through.

Of course, such conditions aren’t uncommon in northern New Mexico, where the mountains and higher elevations invite plenty of extreme weather conditions. The so-called Enchanted Circle can be treacherous in the middle of winter.

My favorite New Mexico weather story, however, wasn’t up north. It was between Albuquerque, where my family had spent a nice spring day, and Las Vegas, where we lived.

To my recollection, we started the 125-mile drive in Albuquerque sunshine, but as we headed toward Santa Fe, we hit rain. Then it began to sleet, then to snow, as we approached the City Different. Around the Glorieta Pass, between Santa Fe and Pecos, we were bombarded with a hailstorm.

Finally, after driving through sunshine, rain, sleet, snow and hail, we arrived in Las Vegas — to blue skies and sunshine!

In my travels around the state, I’ve been through dust storms outside Socorro (with the visibility of a blizzard, only warmer and dirtier); windstorms (with gusts strong enough to topple box trailers), cloudbursts (so violent they stopped traffic), and more.

For those who live and work in New Mexico’s backcountry, such weather events can be downright existential for farmers and ranchers still living off the land.

In the backcountry, the weather makes self-sufficiency a necessity, especially when extreme weather hits.

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“Weather” is the result of short-term atmospheric changes; “climate” is more long-term. It might rain today, and that’s today’s weather, but a prolonged drought might also persist, and that’s the climate. We might have unseasonably cool weather today, but over the long haul, it’s getting hotter.

Still, I wonder how much is weather and how much is climate change. Is today’s rain just part of the ebbs and flows of New Mexico’s weather patterns, or is it part of an atmospheric rise in temperature?

Personally (and anecdotally, since I’ve found no hard data on the subject), I’ve noticed more tornadoes touching down in eastern New Mexico. Could it be that a heating-up Earth is causing a greater number of atmospheric shifts, and vortexes, along with Texas-New Mexico border?

Moreover, the U.S. Drought Monitor now shows a much smaller area of New Mexico still suffering from drought — only the far eastern side of the state remains in moderate to extreme drought, far less than just a year ago. That’s a good weather report, but it’s unlikely to be signaling any sort of shift in climate patterns across the Southwest. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case.

The massive Ogallala Aquifer — a water supply that runs under eight states, from the Dakotas to eastern New Mexico — is shrinking from overuse. If it dries up, so will much of the “breadbasket” our nation depends on.

We need to face the fact that, because of long-term changes in Earth’s atmosphere, the Southwest is likely to be hotter and drier in the years ahead, and we need to take steps to mitigate that future.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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