There is enough water for human consumption, but agriculture is over in the basin. There simply isn’t enough water forward looking for the water intensive crops in question.
It's not only water, power prices are going to spike when there's no hydroelectric coming from Glen Canyon or Hoover Dams. How many 10's of millions of people get some of their power and or water from this one river?
Not sure if it's different over there, but farming in Australia (whether with questionable water reliance or not) is considered sacrosanct and pushback would be a political risk. Any foreign-owned alfalfa exporters would just throw lobbyists behind broader farming coalitions (small farmers, ranchers, locals, etc) to protect themselves. Residents will cop water restrictions before then, as has happened before.
That's been the same playbook up here but we're on the verge of uncharted territory as the hydro generators will soon be forced to shut down outside of Las Vegas. It's one thing to ask everyone to take shorter showers and xeriscape their yard, but it's a whole different level if nobody can afford to run the AC in 110F/43C heat.
No, the last thing to survive will be alfalfa in the Imperial Valley. We'll see the elimination of Social Security before those water rights are imperiled.
The shrinking reservoirs are the immediate result of record-low snowpack this winter, which was erased by record heat in the spring. Melted snowpack creates most of the Colorado’s flow during the dry summer months. But as the Southwestern climate has grown hotter and drier, the river’s flow has become smaller and less reliable.
Legitimate question: I can understand that record-low snowpack would cause less water to flow into the lake, but the "erasure" of the snow pack by heat is just melting that would be captured in the lake, right? So if the record-low snowpack had been followed by record cold, would we have even less water in the lake?
Not all of the erasure is captured. For example, if the ground is dry, than most gets absorbed into soil and won’t make it to the river. Or the snow may sublimate and go straight to vapor at heat.
Record cold would lead to more water. It would melt out fast later and since the soil was already recharged it would flow to rivers.
Worth noting this is generally glacier free landscape so the snow melts fully each year.
In the mountain west warm dry springs coincide with higher winds. The blowing warm dry air leads to dramatically increased evaporation of snow melt, drying of soil, as well as increased transpiration in plants, so the total moisture loss is much higher than what you might expect simply from modeling simple heat evaporation of open water bodies.
university of utah has several studies on the matter. a substantial percentage of the snowpack sublimates during a heatwave, never has a chance to melt. Of the remaining snowmelt, it has to saturate the ground before any can flow to an adjacent stream to feed the water table, and the bone dry soil around here can absorb a significant amount of water.
Who would’ve thought that growing water intensive crops in the middle of the desert and growing cities like Phoenix with suburbs with lush green lawns at a much higher rate than rest of the country was going to be without consequences.
Most of that is recycled waste water allowed to recharge the aquifer. People won't drink purified waste water directly. Have to pour it on the ground first.
The Saudi's 5 crop a year alfalfa is really the major problem
I recommend folks here read "The Dreamt Land" by Mark Arax. I just started it so it might be a premature recommendation, but it has been doing a great job for me as a new California resident of explaining the interaction between business/agriculture and the desert landscape.
If you are in your 30s, I would think you would have a good chance to see that happen.
To me, the big issue no one talks about will be people who live below say the Mason Dixon Line migrating north, probably starting maybe 50 or so years from now.
More than the Mason Dixon line, I'm more worried about the people in the Global South having to migrate in unprecedented scale because of climate change, and I am certain to see this happen within my lifetime. It will not be pretty.
I was including all countries too, I did not what to name them because this would end up as an endless thread about Immigration instead of Climate Change.
When the West was settled it was widely believed that the act of building a town attracted rain. The 'atmosphere' of human buildings in an area would naturally attract and collect rain from the heavens. Many of the original methods used to estimate water, rainfall, and other essentials for human survival were wrong.
Most of them are catalogued in the outstanding Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - an excellent book with an outstanding audiobook too.
This year was the first year I finally realized how things are going to be from now on and only getting worse. I’m a gardener and the plants are having such a tough time, many trees in my neighborhood are already bare from dropping their leaves from the heat. I’ve been looking into just landscaping with native plants moving forward that can handle the heat. I have drip irrigation, but that does nothing when air temps stay above 100 for days on end. The world isn’t prepared for this in any way. What happens when the breadbasket of your country gets like this?
uh oh this doesn't seem good. but I feel like we've been inundated with articles like this for years so it's hard to tell when it's actually an emergency
I do believe people in general will be fine in the soutwest for years to come. Agriculture will be cut back, natural landscapes will take over, de-sal in socal and better water treatment plants will come online.
The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?
> The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?
The lakes behind the Hoover dam are are the ecological catastrophe. Releasing the dam water just restores the river canyon to its natural state.
Draining the river is bad, but it's just as bad downstream of the dam. The dam by itself doesn't do anything but hurt the ecosystem it already destroyed.
Vox did a great video on this a few years ago. [1] Bottom line, growing cow feed in the desert is wasteful and stupid. Blaming cities and industry is just a diversion.
The west is facing a dire water crisis and likely will for decades to come. Meanwhile in places like NYC suburbs in the east everyone waters their lawns with drinkable water because high quality fresh water is in abundant supply. People are literally watering their grass with water that’s better than what probably 99% of the global population has available to drink.
The disparity is quite stark when you drill into it, but water access is going to rewrite the future if the west.
As a longtime climate activist, I'm at the point where, reading this, I feel nothing anymore.
The coming shock is not going to be fixed with geoengineering, simply because GE takes more time than we have left. This is because it will take another five to ten years for the necessity to become widely apparent, and another five to ten to get the geopolitics and geoeconomics sorted (if ever.)
We'll be going into it also having splashed out for datacentres instead of cloud seeders or whatever.
And all this ignores how utterly fscked GE is as a strat anyways. The most plausible variant involves white skies and drought in places we can't afford it, and the less plausible variants are almost laughably worse, or involve breakthroughs that might not happen, even with AI, and almost certainly won't arrive on our preferred (ie. desperate) schedule.
I am afraid, and rightfully so; the shock is on its way, and behind it, the Great Bottleneck.
This year's coming El Niño famine in the global south is just the start.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] threadAs a Canadian, I get nervous when I see the US running out.
https://www.earth.com/earth-science/scientists-determine-the...
It is the fact that everyone wants to live and companies are moving to a desert that is causing the problem.
Just as the residents' needs get more existential, so do the businesses'
Legitimate question: I can understand that record-low snowpack would cause less water to flow into the lake, but the "erasure" of the snow pack by heat is just melting that would be captured in the lake, right? So if the record-low snowpack had been followed by record cold, would we have even less water in the lake?
For data, check out the second visualization here:
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/support/states/CO/produ...
There's no snowpack left, earlier in the season, because there's way less snow, and it's being consumed faster.
Record cold would lead to more water. It would melt out fast later and since the soil was already recharged it would flow to rivers.
Worth noting this is generally glacier free landscape so the snow melts fully each year.
The Saudi's 5 crop a year alfalfa is really the major problem
And nothing of value was lost.
To me, the big issue no one talks about will be people who live below say the Mason Dixon Line migrating north, probably starting maybe 50 or so years from now.
Most of them are catalogued in the outstanding Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - an excellent book with an outstanding audiobook too.
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_follows_the_plow
Yes, New Zealand has an official Wizard: https://wizard.gen.nz/photo-galleries/official-documents/
The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?
The lakes behind the Hoover dam are are the ecological catastrophe. Releasing the dam water just restores the river canyon to its natural state.
Draining the river is bad, but it's just as bad downstream of the dam. The dam by itself doesn't do anything but hurt the ecosystem it already destroyed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc
The disparity is quite stark when you drill into it, but water access is going to rewrite the future if the west.
The coming shock is not going to be fixed with geoengineering, simply because GE takes more time than we have left. This is because it will take another five to ten years for the necessity to become widely apparent, and another five to ten to get the geopolitics and geoeconomics sorted (if ever.)
We'll be going into it also having splashed out for datacentres instead of cloud seeders or whatever.
And all this ignores how utterly fscked GE is as a strat anyways. The most plausible variant involves white skies and drought in places we can't afford it, and the less plausible variants are almost laughably worse, or involve breakthroughs that might not happen, even with AI, and almost certainly won't arrive on our preferred (ie. desperate) schedule.
I am afraid, and rightfully so; the shock is on its way, and behind it, the Great Bottleneck.
This year's coming El Niño famine in the global south is just the start.
Alfalfa and hay production uses up to 68% of Utah’s water, and amounts to 0.2% of the state’s GDP (2022 statistic) [1].
[0] https://www.sustainablewaters.org/why-do-we-grow-so-much-alf... [1]https://waterdesk.org/2022/12/one-crop-uses-more-than-half-o...