Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
They want to see grass and trees everywhere, fountains, 'lakes', etc. in places where it rains like 10 days a year.
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I don't disagree with the majority of yours' and fonzi's posts, but in theory we're supposed to get more than ten days of rain a year (I'm picking nits, to be fair
).
The problem, especially the last two years, is that the monsoons haven't happened with the same frequency as in the past or, in the case of 2020, at all. If I remember right, Flagstaff usually averages about five or six inches of rain in July and August, but we only got about an inch and a half last year? 90F with low humidity isn't intolerable compared to the midwest and southeast, but not a whole lot of us have/use air conditioning because in the past, there was maybe only a few days or weeks a year in mid-to-late June where that happened. In 2019 and 2020, it wasn't uncommon to have months of those kinds of temperatures. And then there's the risk of fire, living in the middle of one of the largest contiguous pine forests on the continent...
And snowfall has become increasingly inconsistent. We depend on the melting snowpack to keep the Colorado River flowing, but that's also seemingly happening less and less. Where I live, it usually averages about 100 inches of snow a year, but I don't think we've come anywhere close to that in a while. We'll get one or two "big" (over two feet) snow storms a season, but that's it. The AZ Snowbowl ski resort began using reclamated (sp?) water to make snow a few years back to bring in the tourists, pissing off the environmentalists and the Native American tribes who consider the peaks to be sacred.
Maybe I read too much Jon Talton?
Long story short, how sustainable is any of this in the long term?