Reasonable climate measures can't hurt

It’s Friday and it has been raining in Tucumcari for three days straight.

While I would have welcomed the thrill and sense of risk that comes with a thunderstorm, the rain we’ve been getting for three days is more of what we need, a few days of steady drizzle, enough to soak into the ground and rescue withering crops and replenish the Canadian River.

The benefit to me is that the weeds in my weedy yard are easier to pull.

The Canadian River replenishes Conchas and Ute lakes. This summer Conchas Lake has looked like a smaller version of the emaciated Lake Mead. Both have glaring “bathtub rings” of recently exposed rock cliffs, and boat ramps that are now a long hike away from the lake’s edge.

Our replenished local lakes, in turn, should bring more visitors, whose boats will be able to maintain respectable distances from each other.

I have enjoyed the irony of enjoying a break from summer heat in eastern New Mexico while the country’s cool northern ocean coasts have been gasping in summer heat more like our usual for this time of year.

When a few people living in small old towns suffer through 100-plus-degree days, nobody notices, but when millions of people living on top of each other get a taste of our usual, it’s big news, especially since the producers of big news live and work amid the crowds and swelter.

Is global warming involved?

One incident does not “prove” or disprove climate change. Patterns seen over years and decades must be noted, and they are. The evidence is convincing, but not based on a few days of reversed weather patterns.

A meteorologist, however, told me that New Mexico has served as a bellwether for global warming. We see climate patterns in New Mexico before they are seen elsewhere. Examples are our long-standing drought and a recent pattern of warmer winters and hotter summers.

David Dubois, New Mexico’s state climatologist, told me on Friday we should not celebrate our recent rainfall quite yet, even though farmers and ranchers are already seeing benefits.

If the rest of the monsoon season through September follows rainfall patterns like we saw last week, some drought severity levels could improve, he said, but we still have a long way to go to repair the damages caused by the extreme drought of recent years.

So, what’s the use of writing an opinion piece about the weather if we can’t do anything about it?

That’s a fair question. Global warming, however, might be something we can do something about. Proposed solutions run from the reasonable — more efficient energy use and more use of renewable energy — to the draconian — like banning automobiles altogether.

I’m not sure current corrective actions will reverse climate change. I’m not even sure how much of climate change is manmade.

But the reasonable measures are painless and they sure can’t hurt.

Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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