So here’s a story that hasn’t been featured much in the news media: The Southwest has had a pitiful winter so far—parched and warm. It’s drier than a tumbleweed here in south-central Colorado. And it’s worse elsewhere south and west of here. It’s like the flip side of the famous “Year Without a Summer” (1816) that is cited as an impetus for the creation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and is widely believed to have been caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, circa 1815. What’s our warm winter cause? Most likely La Niña, which tends to cause the jet stream to veer farther north, making winters warmer and dryer in the Southwest. Whatever the cause, the result is very little snow and brown grasses in fields and hillsides usually white. Ski resorts in Colorado are panicking. I’ve owned a home in the Sangre de Cristo mountains since 2003. This is the worst snow drought I can remember.
Although there is some snow—as the photo above illustrates, showing the Wet Mountain Valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains west of Pueblo, Colorado—it’s a pittance of what we usually have. Climate change likely has a role in this moisture decrease as well. At one point in climatologist Michael Mann’s excellent book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012) he warns that La Niña winters could become common in the West, and exacerbate a mega-drought. It seems to be happening.