Extreme Weather

I'm back after taking a blog vacation for a trip to New Jersey to visit family. We arrived there from New Mexico's heat and wildfires to a heat wave and unbearable humidity for those of us used to the high desert dryness. I love the deep green back east but the humidity and high heat made me want to hide in the air conditioned motel and not come out.  I will say that Madison where I grew up, has wonderful ancient trees which I will be painting when I finish all my Oklahoma installations that will be part of the group show I am curating at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The show will contain my work and the work of other creative individuals we interviewed for our documentary on Oklahoma for the Creative-Native Project.
www.creativenativeproject.com
You can see some clips of our shows and learn more about them at our website as well as reading earlier blogs on this blogspot. I will post my installations in progress and completed on this blog also.

I usually love summer in New Mexico. But I have been miserable this summer and the smoke from the fires coupled with the record breaking heat have made me wish I was anywhere else until I went back east. By now we are usually having more monsoon rains and cooler weather. So all this complaining brings me to today's topic: Extreme Weather and an interview I heard this morning on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. To hear the full and fascinating interview go to this link for the July 25th, Monday show and hear Terry interview Heidi Cullen, a climate change researcher.
http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/
She has written the book 'The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet'. It really struck home for me experiencing these two places, one where I  now live and one where I grew up. This is just a taste of what we will be experiencing in our futures with weather I find unbearable. Usually I find it hard to listen to interviews on this topic because I find so disturbing, but I was totally engaged in this interview. Heidi Cullen is so knowledgeable and presents the story in such a compelling fashion with lots of research to back it up and a dose of hope for what we can do to help the situation.

This is from Subhankar Banerjee and his Climate Storytellers and speaks of our state of New Mexico a place which is so rich in sunshine and wind for alternative energy. Our state could establish itself as a leader in solar power. Heidi Cullen said on Fresh Air that 100 miles of solar in the Four Corners Region could power our whole country. But now the proposed 80% reduction in emissions from the Four Corners Coal Plant have been rolled back to 20%.
http://www.climatestorytellers.org/stories/mariel-nanasi-a-future-without-coal-in-new-mexico/
If PNM isn't going to take the lead, I thought once more of investigating our own solar system on our house and hoping that it will become more and more affordable for homeowners to generate their own power. I was surprised how many homes and public buildings in New Jersey had installed large photovoltaic arrays on their roofs since I was there about three years ago. And New Jersey has gray winters unlike our sunny ones in New Mexico.