Not a Dry Eye in the House as Water Disappears

                         Lake Mead, Nevada in transition

While the $369 billion Manchin/Schumer approved and revised climate change incentive and support bill is highly like to pass Congress, the big question is whether the legislation is way too little, way too late. And yes, without cooperation from a litany of nations – including unfriendly powers like China and Russia, as well as large carbon polluters resisting doing what is needed like Brazil and India – we may be swimming upstream in a raging river. Kentucky faced horrific killer flooding, major Las Vegas casinos on the strip watch water pour out of light fixtures onto slot machines and betting tables, and wildfires (particularly in and around Yosemite) raged across the west where aridification continues to claim farmland, acre by acre. Have we passed the tipping point?

Fire and water are the big stories behind the heat and devastation of climate change. And as heat rises, water has multiple enhanced values needed to sustain life. We need to drink more, water our crops, douse our flames… even flush our toilets and wash our bodies. Water wars loom, battles over rich landowners watering their lush lawns while others swelter make the headlines, and pipes simply running dry are signature disasters of our particularly long hot summer. With untenable heat and aridification now taking down much of Europe, as India and Pakistan witness massive numbers of heat-related deaths, the hard evidence of the impact of climate change and water overuse in our own West is dramatically illustrated by the Colorado River, including Lake Mead (created and sustained by Hoover Dam), as illustrated in the above pictures. Those in Western states are not that far from that dreaded moment when a spigot is turned on… and nothing comes out.

Writing for the July 17th Los Angeles Times, Ian James deals with the failure of the western states’ water accords over Colorado River water (1922 Colorado River Compact) … and the realities we all face: “The Colorado River is approaching a breaking point, its reservoirs depleted and Western states under pressure to drastically cut water use.

“It’s a crisis that scientists have long warned was coming. Years before the current shortage, scientists repeatedly alerted public officials who manage water supplies that the chronic overuse of the Colorado, combined with the effects of climate change, would likely drain the river’s reservoirs to dangerously low levels… But these warnings by various researchers — though discussed and considered by water managers — went largely unheeded.

“Now, many of the scientists’ dire predictions are coming to pass, with Lake Mead and Lake Powell nearly 75% empty and their water levels continuing to fall… Some researchers say the seven states that depend on the river would have been better prepared had they acted years ago… ‘If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that humans are really reluctant to give things up to prevent a catastrophe,’ said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. ‘They’re willing to hang on to the very end and risk a calamity.’… He said it’s just like humanity’s lack of progress in addressing climate change, despite decades of warnings by scientists… If larger cuts in water use were made sooner, Udall said, the necessary reductions could have been phased in and would have been much easier.

“Peter Gleick, a water and climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, said the collective failure to heed scientists’ repeated warnings is ‘directly responsible for how bad conditions are today…. If we had cut water use in the Colorado River over the last two decades to what we now understand to be the actual levels of water availability, there would be more water in the reservoirs today,’ Gleick said. ‘The crisis wouldn’t be nearly as bad.’

“In a 1993 study for the federal government, Gleick and co-author Linda Nash examined the threat climate change posed for the river and warned that the water supply would be very sensitive to rising temperatures… ‘Under conditions of long-term flow reductions and current operating rules, these reservoirs are drawn almost completely dry,’ they wrote. ‘Current approaches to water management in the basin will have to be modified.’… Action was stymied, [Gleick] said, by those ‘who either didn’t want to believe the science or had something to lose if we changed our policies.’… Gleick said there is a parallel in how fossil fuel interests have long fought the sorts of changes necessary to address global warming.

“In the Colorado River Basin, Gleick said, the vested interests that have hindered new approaches to dealing with the water shortfall include some in agriculture who benefit from generations-old water rights, managers with a ‘find more and more’ mentality and politicians who’ve fought to defend old apportionments… In the 2000s, as drought ravaged the watershed, a growing body of scientific research showed that higher temperatures would substantially shrink the flow of the river, which supplies farmlands and cities from the Rocky Mountains to Southern California and northern Mexico.

“In a 2004 study, scientists at the University of Washington projected major declines in runoff and river flow with warmer temperatures… In research in 2007, scientists Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid wrote that climate simulations showed that an increase in drought severity would occur ‘in lockstep’ with global warming, projecting a 25% reduction in river flow from 2006 to 2030 and a 45% decrease by midcentury.” A consistent battery of academic and governmental reports, based on detailed measurements and very accurate modeling, were pressured to be rewritten to depict a rosier future, one that had no real chance of becoming true. Reality has arrived!

I’m Peter Dekom, and Mother Nature (the laws of physics) does not respond well to special interests and biased but inaccurate politicians; it is the rest of us who must live with the consequences or distortion, denial and marginalization of the most serious existential realities humanity has ever faced.