Photos of the American West drying up
Marilyn Terrell says:
Link to photos | Link to articleScientists at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona discovered a Douglas fir in Utah that started life in 323 BC, and have been able to prove that the entire 20th c. was an anomaly as far as rainfall in the West was concerned -- far wetter than historically. And now that wet period is over:
"One Nevada water authority official said, 'It's like the impact of global warming fell on us overnight.'"
Photographs by Vincent Laforet include dramatic aerials of a golf course flourishing in the Mojave Desert.
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Amazing that places like golf courses could survive in the middle of a desert. That must be because of climate change and not because of anything else, you know, like irrigation. It's not like they actually water the grass at a golf course, oh no.
So, what were they trying to say, again?
The pictures just highlight the irresponsible abuse of resources that's been rampant in many places in the US. They shouldn't have built all those houses in the desert if they wanted swimming pools and grass yards. There shouldn't be green golf courses in the middle of the desert. And people won't be moving out, abandoning houses: we will all be paying for them to truck water in from all over the country, for the foreseeable future.
It's like building below sea level: a really bad idea made worse by climate change.
Ian70 @1, I'm hearing your sarcasm, but I can't figure out who it's directed at. Obviously, they water the golf course; that's the whole problem. The amount of water taken out of the Colorado annually exceeds the historical average of the river's flow by a substantial amount. Most of it still goes for agriculture, though.
I have golfing relatives who live in St. George, Utah (I wouldn't golf if you paid me), and their course frequently has dead grass because the river drops to the point where what's left is so alkaline (salty) that it kills anything you water with it. Their water is purified three times by the time it comes out of the tap and its still undrinkable.
I think there's going to be a shooting war over Western water inside the next decade.
For the 23 years that I lived in San Francisco, we were on water rationing. For the last 12, we were allowed 256 gallons per day for five people. If you went over, the rates skyrocketed and eventually you'd get a restrictor on your pipes.
Now I live in Palm Springs, compared to which Las Vegas and Phoenix are cool and moist. We get up to 123F/50C and down to 2% humidity in the summer. People here have lawns and tropical foliage. I wanted to put in an underground drip irrigation system and I couldn't find a single landscaper who had ever installed one in the area. There are golf courses everywhere.
We get our water from an underground aquifer. Except, it's so depleted that we buy it from the Colorado River and pump it into the aquifer to replenish it. The local water agency isn't worried about water shortages because we have long term contracts to buy water from the Colorado. They're either oblivious or pretending not to notice that there won't be any water to buy.
IAN70,
What they were trying to say was that all of the cities that have been built and that have grown in the southwest have been built using faulty assumptions. The rainfall and water supply that they assumed would always be available is actually something of a fluke, at least compared to the nearly 3000 years of data they've been able to find using tree rings.
Jared Diamond actually touched on this problem in his book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." While this is a huge ecological issue, it's also a huge issue economically. Right now, the populations there are living beyond what the environment can support. As time progresses, the amount of available water is only projected to decrease. Then three things are going to happen, either individually, or together: People will move away, more resources will be spent on trying to obtain more water, or water conservation will accelerate. Option two can have severe consequences for other areas as well. For instance, the Great Lakes States, as well as the Canadian Provinces, have formed a group to protect the Great Lakes. There has been at least one proposal to ship water to the southeast. This group of governments blocked it, to try and protect the Great Lakes Resource (including the cultural and environmental resources beyond water). Regardless, the Great Lakes are down several feet from normal, in part from the dredging of the Saint Lawrence Seaway to provide a channel for international shipping.
It's very tempting to say that this is a regional problem, but we're all connected these days, either geographically, or politically.
Antinous:
got their heads buried in the sand then?
FNARF@3, a "shooting war"? Who exactly would be waging war - the Utah National Guard vs. the Colorado National Guard, or something? Come on, water is a problem, but don't be ridiculous.
...got their heads buried in the sand then?
More like buried in their bank accounts.
mmm, are Americans willing to kill Canadians for water? A "shooting war" could only go that way.
Takuan, that or Mexico; I guess there's been some heated debate about water usage on both sides of that border.
I was thinking of Mexico, who are at the far end of the Colorado spigot -- the one that's not going to have any water in it.
I also think farmers in the Imperial Valley and elsewhere are going to be uppity about having their water rights taken away, as they inevitably will. And Nevada "ranchers", though most of them have been bought out by Vegas water interests. Farmers and ranchers have lots of guns. What happens when the Feds come -- armed -- to turn off the taps?
As a Canadian I would say yes to the question "Are Americans (or more precisely the US Government) willing to kill Canadians for water?" All your government has to do is repeat "Canada secretly has WMD and is developing nukes - ON OUR BORDER FOR PETE'S SAKE!" a couple of thousand times. Just one warning: 1812
But seriously we have seen this coming for 30 years. It is a real hot button issue up here, but eventually we will start selling water to you. Just like we sell you oil, trees and every other natural resource we have..
oh yeah;
"Western Corridor: The centerpiece of the western water corridor flowing from Canada to the U.S. is the North American Water and Power Alliance. NAWAPA was originally designed to bring bulk water from Alaska and northern British Columbia for delivery to 35 U.S. States. By building a series of large dams, the northward flow of the Yukon, Peace, Liard and a host of other rivers [Tanana, Copper, Skeena, Bella Coola, Dean, Chilcotin, and Fraser ] would be reversed to move southward and pumped into the Rocky Mountain Trench where the water would be trapped in a giant reservoir approximately 800 kilometers long. A canal would then be built to take the water southward into Washington state where it would be channeled through existing canals and pipelines to supply freshwater for customers in 35 states. The annual volume of water to be diverted through the NAWAPA project is estimated to be roughly equivalent to the average total yearly discharge of the entire St. Lawrence River system in Canada."
Yeah. That's the one that's never going to happen. For starters, we no longer have the technological nous to pull it off; it would cost several hundred trillion dollars; and it would destroy the ecology AND the economy of the region; and it would indeed spark a shooting war. I'll be shooting too if it ever comes to pass (I live in Washington State).
I remember one of my profs in field school talking about how several dams in Alberta that are supposedly for irrigation purposes were actually part of a secret plot to divert water to the US. Not sure if I believe it...
Canada has many of its own water issues (over use of groundwater and the massive amounts of water taken from the Athabasca for use in the oil sands come to mind). I can't see us willingly diverting large amounts of water to the states. It would impact a lot of industry, agriculture and power generation. Also Canadians seem to view it is their patriotic duty to protect "our" water from "them". Funny how that doesn't extend to any of our other natural resources.
I love the great logic wihich suggests that when the rainfall levels ebb towards what is considered normal (average) after a century of anomolous plenty, that this is the direct result of manmade gloal warming.
I do not deny that man has an impact (often very negative) on the environment, but I also despise the sort of orthodoxy which treats anyone presenting evidence confounding to the currently sacred paradigm is treated like a holocost denier.
I think it is a kind of arrogence to assume we can make confident predictions about such complex and crytptodynamic systems with our simplistic models.Even the most complex ones take into account less than 100 variables in any one of which minute errors can be raised by degrees of magnitude.
yup, and what is at stake if the "deniers" are wrong?
All Mediterranean climates are turning to Desert and the process cannot be stopped as we have about 200 years of climate change built in.
Sweatin’ the Mediterranean Heat
In your lifetime, your world will change completely and very much for the worse.
depends where you choose to live
Global warming deniers can't spell.
"One Nevada water authority official said, 'It's like the impact of global warming fell on us overnight.'"
So a return to pre-20th century norms is the fault of 'global warming'?.
A return to the time BEFORE the Industrial Revolution and the use of coal and other fossil fuels is the fault of 'Global Warming'?
Idiot. Both the quoted person and the Enviro-grifters selling this drivel that have propagandized this garbage so far that everything is cased by, or adds to global warming.
Meanwhile, here in the Great Lakes area, where water tends to be in large supply, the small local governments are crawling over each other to land deals for locating ethanol plants in their territories.
The ethanol plants which promise to suck obscene amounts of water from the local aquifers on a daily basis. Drying up wells, etc.
The best book on this subject is Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner. A whole history of the aquification of the West.
This is bad news for all. But perhaps not quite so bad for me, being a water lawyer.
The Great Lakes are not an endless supply of water! It LOOKS like there is a lot of water there, but it isn’t supplied by a spring. Most of the water was left there by the glaciers retreating and that is a non-renewable source. All water that is taken out of the Great Lakes has to be replenished. Pretty much, every gallon of water in the Great Lakes is spoken for.
Right now, there are huge arguments among the Great Lakes states about who is taking too much water out, etc. Decades of negotiations have been going into this. One of the big problems: bottled water being removed from underground streams that is lowering the Great Lakes because the water in the Great Lakes has to replenish those underground streams in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, etc.
That water is going to places like Arizona, California and all over the world. We’re already shipping water out of the Great Lakes to everybody!
We don’t want the Great Lakes to end up like the Aral Sea!
Often, aquifers cannot be replenished to prior levels due to subsidence as the water level drops.
The natural water resources of Southern California can only support a tiny fraction of its present population, and California, Arizona, and Mexico have never stopped fighting about water rights. These water fights gets heated enough when there is still water present to fight over, but when it gets critical the bullets will fly. Sabers were rattled between Georgia officials and the Federal Government recently when the Governor of Georgia hinted at a National Guard takeover of the dam controlled by the Army Corp. of Wetlands Drainers since Atlanta was close to running dry. Atlanta! So, no refuge for the future refugees from the Southwest will be found in the Southeast, it seems...
We start shooting wars over oil, and that's not even essential for life (civilization maybe, but not life). The idea that a shooting war over water, even between US states, is ridiculous neglects to consider that if all your water is coming on trucks and rationed at barely enough to keep you alive in your refugee camp, you're going to explode soon enough, and probably irrationally due to dehydration (deserts have a way of sucking the water right out of you; I lived in AZ for years). And, there's a precedent for US states shooting at each other, so anything is possible. Two days without water in the Southwest can kill you, and people often take up arms over far more trivial issues than survival.
The book Cadillac Desert is a MUST read; I'm glad to see others mentioning it.
Someday people are going to look back at pictures of golfcourses and English lawns in the American West, where sprinklers run the entire goddamn day in the middle of August, and they will weep and curse us all.
I think I'll go rehearse my heartfelt apology to my unborn children and grandchildren now.
Oh yeah, and people, it's not about global warming.
It's about those plants NOT belonging in that climate.
Simple as that.
#27
It's a combination of unsustainable agricultural practices exacerbated by climate change.
ah, you mean greed, stupidity and laziness?
My thanks go to the commenters who explained this whole thing out so much more eloquently (and in some cases more succinctly) than the introduction to the article.
s'more book-larnin'
http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Frontier-Ecological-History-America/dp/0802138888
I agree, Cadillac Desert was a great book, and the PBS series was outstanding, too.