Global warming: Yet another threat to Southwest’s iconic pinyon pine? – CSMonitor.com
Those are Ponderosa pines. Pinyons don’t look anything like that.
Temperatures have been running far below normal in the southwest. I was in New Mexico on New Years day. It was extremely cold, tons of snow and the Pinyon trees were doing just fine. CSM got all of their facts wrong, which is about par for the course.
Verbatim to the CS Monitor article author via his contact page http://www.csmonitor.com/About/Contact/Staff-Writers/Peter-Spotts
Mr Spotts,
My guess is that as the writer of the article, you weren’t privy to the selection of the top photo for your piece. As a native New Mexican, I can tell you those in the opening photo are Ponderosa Pines, as are the bulk of them in the NM Wildfire photo gallery accompanying your piece. Only photo #5 appears to show pinyons (or piñons, for the Spanish spelling of it) and/or junipers. Piñons are identified as being rather short, round-ish and somewhat asymmetrical. In aerial photos of the area I used to live in east of Albuquerque, it is dismaying to see the numbers of piñons being affected by bark beetles, which is somewhat at odds with the increased moisture in the are since I left in the mid ’90s. A couple of years ago when I returned to visit, I was amazed to see obvious new green growth in the area’s grasses and elm trees, plus long-dormant springs running which never ran like that during the 30 years I lived there.
Funnily enough the photo’s caption says ponderosa pines – nuff said about stupidity – cant be bothered to try to doctor the photo which lends no support to the claim !