Same here. Meant no disagreement with your posts.
Thanks. I respect you CD, and thought you knew me better than to think me that credulous, so I had to check. I am aware of the weather patterns in NM/AZ, particularly the summer monsoon system, which is entirely different than the exclusively coastal Mediterranean climate we see in California.
BTW, given the terrain and vegetation between San Bernardino and Barstow, I doubt that moisture does very much good for anything. But I do think there's an agenda going on with this article. The left is going for the fantasy that the spread of red brome (sometimes called Spanish Brome, B. madritensis) is the primary cause of the destruction of the xeric annual wildflowers described in the accounts of early explorers. This is in part because their efforts to control the weed have been such a dismal failure (see: "full employment"). So in order to keep the gravy train going, they need a pariah by which their cause can serve as a source of funding (particularly from the foundations invested in global corporate agribusiness and real estate). The goal is to make the landscape SO poor, and so hostile to all life, that the weeds can't (supposedly) make it.
We have a similar scam going here in Santa Cruz, where we have a unique endemic system called "the Santa Cruz Sand Hills." This habitat is being overrun by weeds, notably rip gut brome (B. diandrus) and cat's ear (Hypochoeris spp.). The local "managers" (who show obvious physical evidence of not having done a hard day's work in their lives) are charged with "restoring" more acreage than they can handle. Needless to say, being PC, they'll NEVER use an herbicide and they will never have the budget for "fine scale weeding." They believe that if they can make the land incapable of supporting the weeds, that it will be more native (one problem: I've seen both those weeds grow just fine in washed sand). Accordingly, they are blaming "global nitrate pollution," most of which emanates from China. Needless to say, the only people they can regulate are Americans who are for the most part downwind.
Buncha psychotics. Ain't nothin' quite like leverage. I suspect that the case in this article is the same sort of thing.