“When temperatures rise above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it leads to more rain than snow. Regions like the Western US rely on snow accumulation in the mountains to store water for use throughout the year, and more rain than snow can mean more flooding in the winter and drought in the summer. On the other hand, if air temperatures rise but stay below freezing, that can lead to more snowfall since there is more water in the air.”

There’s a lot of denial in Santa Fe. So many have moved in here from California and Texas, they have no experience of what Santa Fe’s “original” climate was. They enjoy and celebrate it now … whereas we who have been here a decade or two, are mourning the major flora and fauna changes, the unlivable summer heat.

I’ve related before, Santa Fe was always a ‘ceiling fan’ town. A/C was not necessary. Most evenings, even in summer, were light-sweater temperatures.

No longer. We’re getting weeks of 95 plus fahrenheit days. Let that Sun cook the flat asphalt roofs, which radiate that heat far into the wee hours of the morning … some weeks, unable to completely cool off, building heat within our adobe homes.

It’s not a good situation.

It’s really hard to interact with people who have a layer of Teflon in their brains to the realities they live in. Trying to find the proper conversational ‘hooks’ to get people to restart their thinking processes on this is a real challenge. You would think that walking them through a landscape littered with dead piñons from the ‘03 beetle die-off (95% of piñons in SF died, fully 50% of our city-altitude forests) would generate a reaction. Nope. “I think the grey trunks are SO BEAUTIFUL”. Nice, I agree in theory. But not when you’re walking through a field of a hundred tree-corpses. A complete rejection of reality.