As we have been saying for several days, there is a serious threat of flooding in New Mexico. Now, the NWS's National Water Center is forecasting the risk of serious flooding in the dark blue area with a lesser flooding risk in the pale blue area.  More than five inches of rain -- in some areas one-third of the amount of rain that occurs in an entire year -- is forecast in the eastern part of the state. The flood risk begins Tuesday night.  I'll have more on this Monday. 

I prefer the term "free enterprise" to "capitalism" because -- without freedom -- our economy cannot work. We are allowing our freedoms to decay. Something we need to think about with the upcoming elections. 

Monday evening, with both the report of measles in Missouri and a tornado watch in Nebraska and Iowa, Kathleen told me an interesting story from her childhood.  When she was in first grade, she had a case of the measles. In the earliest days of tornado warnings, school officials did not know what to do with the students since Martin City Elementary School did not have a basement. They came up with the following (ridiculous) idea: send the kids out to homes near the school because the homes had basements! Of course, the giant flaw was that the homes were as much as ten minutes away and the tornado could arrive while they were walking out in the open.  Naturally, while Kathleen was home recovering, there was a tornado warning. Her Mom quickly got arriving kids into the basement but poor Kathleen had to stay in her above ground bedroom so as not to infect the other children. If a second tornado hit their home (they were significantly damaged by the Ruskin Heights Tornado of May 2...

I am concerned about a Pacific weather system that may eventually cause serious flooding in New Mexico.  Currently the National Hurricane Center says there is an 80% chance of this weather system turning into at least a tropical depression.  The latest reliable model (ECMWF) has the system becoming at least a tropical storm and reading the mouth of the Gulf of California. These systems, historically, cause flooding in the Southwest or Central United States.  Over the next seven days, the NWS is forecast as much as 5" of rain in eastern New Mexico which could be 1/3rd of its annual rainfall in the area. This has the potential to cause serious flooding. For what it is worth, the ECMWF, which came out after the above forecast was made, has a larger area of heavy rain that covers most of the state.  Typically, once the heavy rain occurs in the Southwest, heavy rain occurs in the Great Plains, somewhere from northern Texas to Nebraska. It is too soon to pin down where tha...

Glenn Beck found a clip of Dan Rather proclaiming that Florida would be underwater due to global warming. Watching the 1982 clip above will give you a laugh. The sad thing is earth's warmer temperatures are a serious issue that deserves serious measures. But we have spent $17 TRILLION -- mostly foolishly. Wind energy is a fiasco. Many of Al Gore's pet solar schemes have already been shut down, including one that required natural gas to keep running!