Here in the western United States, everything is drying up. Just about everyone is familiar with time-lapse photographs of Lake Mead, the reservoir created by Hoover Dam, showing how its water level has been steadily falling for decades. It's down 160 feet since 2000, and if it drops another hundred feet the lake will no longer have enough water to drive the turbines that produce 4 billion kWh of clean electricity every year.
But it's not just Lake Mead that's drying up. Utah is facing big problems too:
If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:
The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.
Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.
Here is what the Great Salt Lake looked like as of 16 hours ago:
Do you see that big chunk of land in the lower left that's connected to Ogden by a bridge? It's called Antelope Island. You know why? Because it used to be an honest-to-God island. Today you can just about walk to it if you wear a pair of good waders.
Why the change? Partly because of Salt Lake City's exploding population and partly because of climate change. Or, more accurately, because of our collective unwillingness to either fight climate change or even adapt to it. In a few decades, if this keeps up, Salt Lake City may become a new Dust Bowl.
The whole world is either parched and choking or getting inundated. Why should the western US be any different?
I've been contemplating about how much longer it'll be before we see the first zoning/development code requiring rainwater catchment and treatment. A decade? Two? Or maybe it'll be added to a new/existing model international code?
The sooner prescriptive codes are added for catchment + treatment, the sooner we'll slow down the effects of climate change.
This year for the first time I haven't put out my rain barrels. This ought to be a reasonably rainy season, but it's been dry as a bone. If it does rain eventually, the first shower will just wash all the bird droppings off the roof into the barrels, and who wants that? And it will probably be the last rain for a long time.
On a less personal note, the Arroyo del Oso Open Space a block or two away is parched. The only things flowering have been the opuntias and the New Mexico chocolate flowers. Usually by this time the canyon is alive with grasses and flowers and the bushes are leafed out and in flower, too. But it's only parched dirt now.
i'm not well read on the details but it seems like the country has ignored disastrous water shortages that seem very obviously coming over the next 20-40 years. The droughts in the west and southwest are pretty obviously already a huge problem, but the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer is predicted I think in about 40-50 years and that will kill $20 billion in agricultural production. the climate change conversation seems dominated by rising coastal sea levels and extreme weather events, but far less attention is paid to food production.
Ignored? More like law suits and court battles. Still, no effective policies. Some how I doubt LA will give up its water rights....
The Western States GQP expects that the Great Lakes States, once rightfully governed by GQP governors of their own, will allow water from HOMES to be siphoned to Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Greater Idaho, & Jefferson.
I mean, the GQP in Waukesha County already bought off those fuckers from Oak Creek to get Lake Michigan water beyond the Subcontinental Divide. Why not expand its reach?
Also: Steve Scaffidi, the Oak Creek Mayor that gave it up for Waukesha, is a mobbed-up greaseball bitchboi.
That too 😉
Oh, yeah. A _lockt_ of people here are majorly pissed about that one. 'Hey we f_ck_d our sh_t up. So we're going to take your sh_t and f_ck it up too.' Apologies for the disemvowelled profanity.
Considering climate change is a bit irrelevant on this....
Pollution from South America, Africa, India, China and Russia is going to be at the levels of the US in the mid-20th century for most of the next century. I will be astonished if anything alters this.
We need to begin creating catastrophe mitigation systems, but large parts of the corporate world are provoking the baboon colony into increasingly frenzied efforts to destroy government and society entirely to prevent anything like that from happening.
Conservatives are the army of pollution.
There's been semi-serious talk of a west coast intrastate pipeline from the Columbia river since 1991. Too far out, too expensive, too too too. I'll put it out there with the High Speed Rail. The problem with action is that it affects too many people who will gain little or no benefit in the near term.
/s I wonder if the mormons could get organized in a rescue of the mother church with a channel out of the Snake river down the the Salt Lake basin. Right of Eminent domain with the blessing of the elders.
It could be done, although it would be hard - you'd have to pump water over Red Rock Pass along the lowest point to get it into the Great Salt Lake.
It might be cheaper just to dredge the lake's main basin to reduce its surface area to volume (to slow evaporation), and then try and cover a lot of the former lakebed to prevent winds from picking it up. There's been talk about that for Utah Lake further south, but that's harder because there's more of an ecology at risk - with dredging the Great Salt Lake, you're not as likely to undermine the migratory bird habitat or brine shrimp.
China is putting solar panels just above lakes and water ways. The water tends to cool the panels, increasing their efficiency and the panels tend to reduce evaporation.
Water skiing and fishing might be a tad difficult but the tradeoffs might benefit everyone.
Even better - you don't even need the waders if you walk to it from Salt Lake City. Pretty much all of Farmington Bay is dry besides the Jordan River course that you see on there.
Short of the drought ending and a bunch of wet years, there's just no political will to really do the level of water rights buy-backs that would save the lake (never mind getting it back to its average level). If the land crust breaks and the Wasatch Front starts getting toxic dust storms, they'll start trying to cover down the land like they are in the Owens Lake basin in California as mentioned.
One thing they could do would be the dredge the main basin (the deepest part) of the lake, to heavily reduce the surface-to-volume ratio and thus reduce evaporation. You'd have a lot of former lake basin that would be permanently dry after that, but you could then cover it with dirt, gravel, and drought-resistant desert plants to anchor it down.
There is no drought. Water has been fairly certain consistent for the last 30 years. Just vast overpopulation. Even the 1900-1990 wet period would fail
The folks at the National Drought Monitor disagree. Go to https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DmData/TimeSeries.aspx and select "state" and "Utah" to get a time series showing recurrent droughts over the last 20 years. WordPress won't let me post a graph.
Here in Arizona, they're still using what little water there is to grow cotton, dairy cattle, and nut trees! WTF?
Maybe California was a bad idea
California is in entirely different watersheds than the watershed of the Great Salt Lake. California doesn't get any water from the latter.
Southern California does get water from the Colorado River (which flows through eastern Utah), but only a fraction of the river's flow. Some farms and communities in the watershed of the Great Salt Lake do get water that's pumped over the mountains from the Colorado River, but that's only a small part of the overall water supply in the watershed of the lake.
White House just announced it's 'Moonshot Cancer Program'.
That's great, why can't we do that for petroleum?
Will Exxon start buying the MAGAnuts tanks?
See, it's not the heat, it the humidity...so the heat wave that's hitting shouldn't be too bad at all. That's why droughts are good.
/s
Not much of a heat wave. Nice cool trough next.
BTW, I think we can officially call your gasoline price prediction wrong. EIA:
Los Angeles
May 2 = $5.545/gal
June 6 = $6.134/gal
San Francisco
May 2 = $5.557/gal
June 6 = $6.335/gal
Now would be an especially good time for Democrats in control of local governments to fully fund public transit and eliminate fares.
Watch the panic it throws Republicans into!
Or nationalism. No more oil elites and their financialists. Time for the concentration camp to honor the American worker. Watching them being tortured and exterminated will be fun.
Too many people is the real problem. It was not sustainable. Time to begin liquidation.
"...Salt Lake City may become a new Dust Bowl."
Correction: "...Salt Lake City [will] become a new Dust Bowl." The entire region is racing towards regional climate collapse in my lifetime. This will not stop, nor will it be slowed in any effective way. American consumption and 'lifestyle' patterns are set in stone, and will not budge. Even better, the northern Arizona/Nevada/Southern California region (which includes Utah by extension) is a North American hot spot, set to have the highest rate of warming on the continent.
Nothing to see here, folks. Just crank up the AC and order in. I hear Hulu has a new series that's killer.
Like the guy mentioned in the NYT article who was threatened by his HOA for not watering his lawn. That mentality is so widespread and so pervasive.
David Leonhardt doesn't think this will be so bad....
Don’t worry. The Red States will get expensive mitigation measures paid for by Blue State residents. As they always do when they fuck up something really bad and then can’t dig themselves out of it. California though will be left out to dry until it starts consistently voting Republican again. Extortion is the only thing Red States contribute to the Union.
President De Santis will do Gaylifornia how he did the Tampa Bay Gays as governor.
Hey, look!
Population as a driver of problems. Boy, I'm sure glad nobody is talking about it.
BTW, in the recent debate vis-a-vis global warming, it's not a binary choice between children or no children, as some would like you to see it. It can be don't have so many children.
People all over the world are not having "so many children". The rate of population growth is declining and is expected to go negative before the end of this century. However, even if the decline in the birth rate was successfully encouraged to the point that population growth went negative immediately, it would still take many decades to significantly reduce the population by natural shrinkage. To reduce the population quickly enough to affect climate change, or the water consumption of the US west, would take genocide.
Here in the great NW, we are having the wettest "spring" in 75 years. Where is the sun. My plants are awash, the rivers full, flowers are mush. It's all rather sad. It's hardly even very warm. When the sun does appear, there is a rush for the outdoors.
"Do you know, they say, the weather's always changing now because of La Nina? The Little Girl? Could a four year old come & kick your town's ass?"
(H/t Henry Rollins, another Generation Jones creature of Southern California like Kevin Drum, but oddly, not as crusty, despite being a punk.)