Graham Knopp's Blog

Topics in land use, culture, and nature.

  • Commodities and Climate Change, a Simple Question Asked

    Observing the global drought monitor, it appears that much of the world is in drought. International | Drought.gov There are significant parts of Europe, central Asia, Africa, South America, and North America in significant drought (D3 or worse). While the USA drought map shows somewhat improved conditions in recent weeks, particularly in California, the situation…

  • The Ogallala Aquifer and Texas Values

    Have a gander at the GoogleEarth image below, in which the Texas-New Mexico border runs down the middle. The difference in color, due to irrigation for crops, is the important thing here. Texas law permits essentially unregulated groundwater withdrawals while New Mexico law does not permit this. Underlying this area is the Ogallala Aquifer: The…

  • Texas Hill Country, but first a bit of Astronomy

    The huge amount of misinformation around 3I/ATLAS is annoying. Let’s stick to the facts. The 3I/ATLAS radio “signal” was from a radio observatory and detected OH in absorption in the bounced signal, which is what one expects for a cometary object. The object is still very strange, of course, given the trajectory alone, which is…

  • Spirit of the Guads – A Hiking Story from Guadalupe Mountains National Park

    copyright 2025 Graham Paul Knopp Parry’s Agave with crickets in the high Chihuahuan Desert at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Many of these plants had crickets so arranged. Is this normal? Is this because rain is on the way? When you want to climb mountains in Texas, your choices are very limited to Big Bend National…