Week ending Friday, June 11, 2021

Climate Vintage

Earth’s hotter climate is forcing some European winemakers to change strategies to maintain the quality of their wines. “With warmer temperatures, the vine cycle has been shorter and we’ve been harvesting earlier, on average,” Dom Perignon Champagne maker Daniel Carvajal Perez told the CNA news network. He added that the warmer climate had actually brought higher quality to his grapes. Germany’s riesling growers also like the new climate reality. Twelfth-generation family winery Weingut Peter Jakob Kuhn says it no longer has to suffer seasons when the grapes don’t achieve enough sweetness.

 

Earthquakes

Southern...

ALBUQUERQUE — The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice June 4 of its intent to sue the U.S. Forest Service for failing to protect riparian areas in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains from cattle. The area is critical habitat for the endangered New Mexico meadow jumping mouse.

“These mice represent the health of the upper elevation meadows and streams. It’s immoral and illegal for the Forest Service to continue allowing cattle to decimate the area and cause a local extinction,” Robin Silver, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, stated. “If these tiny creatures become extinct, Forest Service officials will be responsible. We won’t stop...

McKinley county is second only to Los Alamos County among the counties that helped New Mexico in its efforts to reach a 60 percent level of vaccination in order to reopen July 1.

McKinley County had 77.9 percent of people who completed their vaccination series as of June 14.

On June 18, N.M. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham confirmed that the state will retire its color-coded county-by-county system, along with the COVID-19 health restrictions on commercial and day-to-day activities on July 1. On that date all pandemic-related occupancy restrictions on all forms of commercial activity will be lifted and all businesses across the state may once again operate at 100 percent of maximum...

CONCLUSION: A deal climate change could bust

As part of the settlement that made the Navajo-Gallup Project a possibility, the Navajo Nation shifted its priority date from 1868, when the reservation was established and among the earliest rights in the Colorado River Basin, to 1955.

“That’s yesterday, in terms of water rights,” Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University, said.

Given that the system puts the newest rights at the top of the list to cut when faced with a shortage, that puts Navajo water supplies in the crosshairs when faced with ongoing drought and increasing aridification of the Southwest.

Flows in the entire Colorado...