One of these years the Colorado mountains are going to get a fraction of the snow they normally get and it's going to be a disaster for the entire southwest US. It almost happened in the winter of 2020-21, the snowpack statewide was just 30-40% of average at the end of winter. A heavy, wet, late spring storm dropped a ton of snow in the Colorado mountains in April of 2021 and saved the day, but man if that storm hadn't happened...imagine the 60 odd million people from Colorado to Mexico fighting over just a third of the normal amount of water they have to work with?
This is total fiction, Colorado as a whole has been getting way more snow per year on average in the past 15 years(except the 1990s which were very snowy) than at any time in the past 120 years, I know I live in Colorado and crunched the numbers myself. I pulled the numbers from the NOAA gov site. I have both rain and snow totals so as you can see mother nature is doing her part, its just that the population has exploded here in the past 15 years(15% or 800,000 new people since 2010) and that is what is driving down the water supply. See data by decade below:
one city on the front range that isn't even in the colorado river watershed is hardly indicative of the snow pack / snowfall inside that watershed. The inflows into lake Powell are a much better equivalent for the entire watershed and do show a decline. https://graphs.water-data.com/lakepowell/ though that doesn't show diversions / how much is being caught in upstream reservoirs. and the snotel graphs for the watersheds in the colorado basin are a much better source https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/support/states/CO/produ...
I chose Boulder as it has very good record keeping(and it goes way back) and is a good bellwether for the state, plus a number of key government climate labs are based here. So its a solid data point. If I had more time I would crunch numbers from a array of other cities like Breckenridge, Aspen, Colorado springs, and Grand Junction, the former two may or may not have great data from before the 1950s'.
I love the attention to detail. As another commenter pointed out, while this is perhaps true for Boulder, you'll have to acknowledge not only that Boulder experiences a rather distinct climate from the rest of Colorado, and that Boulder is hydrologically disconnected from the Colorado river basin, which is the subject of this discussion.
Furthermore, as the OP's article alludes to, snow _amount_ is only one component that contributes to water availability, particularly its timing. Larger amounts of snow that melt very fast in the spring create a novel regime that our current systems aren't well-suited to support, for example.
Indeed. Worse, it's likely that "one of these years" will turn into "most of these years" before long.
It sounds like you know this already, but the core issue here is that the 1922 agreement which divided the river's flow to various stakeholders overestimated the amount of water in the river even before the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate.
We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario.
Probably the biggest tl;dr here is: it's not going to be 60 million people fighting over water. It's going to be far fewer, and they're all alfalfa farmers.
> the impacts of our modern warmer, drier climate.
Nit: on average, the world will get wetter as it warms. Warmer air carries more water, so the volume of precipitation each year is likely to increase averaged over the planet.
The issue for many of these areas is that that increased precipitation is not going to be evenly distributed. The trend has been wetter areas getting wetter, drier areas getting drier, and increased warmth causing increased evaporation and less snowpack persistence into summer.
yes, certainly. The biggest impact with respect to precipitation is likely a shift in the precipitation regimes (liquid/frozen; frequency/intensity of storms, etc).
> We're left with the consequences of this overestimate mostly in the form of gridlocked renegotiation conversations as the agreement is reworked for the modern resource scenario.
Colorado (the state) is building many new reservoirs to impound water outside of the Colorado River Compact's purview. They're done hoping that California and Arizona will act responsibly, and are now going to be selfish.
As someone who has lived in the southwest, it can't be understated how important the issue of water is.
One thing to keep in mind is that most estimates place human consumption of water at below 20% - a ton of the water of the basin goes to agriculture. To be clear, I think this makes sense - with added water regions in the basin can be some of the most productive ag regions in the country.
The big problem is policy has not adapted to scarcity. There are real tradeoffs when we have 30% less water than forecast and it's not clear who should suffer them.
I think there is often a misconception that this area is somehow "too hot" to live in. Since the advent of air conditioning, we have moved past this. Generally speaking similarly sized homes in Boston will consume more energy for HVAC than Phoenix will simply because heating homes in cold winters is often more energy intensive than cooling in the summer.
Conservation has to start with agriculture since that's the vast majority of usage. The simplest and most effective step would be to stop subsidizing that water usage so heavily. Last I looked the average farmer paid about 1/10 the price per gallon as residents, but it varies a lot and some pay less than 1/100. That leads to exactly the behavior you would expect: completely unsustainable high water usage crops being grown in large amounts.
If you don't mind the presentation style, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusyNT_k-1c is great presents an even direr situation: because water rights are "use it or lose it", we are actively encouraging water misuse, beyond just "it's cheap enough to misuse it".
> Generally speaking similarly sized homes in Boston will consume more energy for HVAC than Phoenix will simply because heating homes in cold winters is often more energy intensive than cooling in the summer.
This is true, and I definitely agree that the majority of the work to match consumption with water availability lies in the hands of agriculture.
With that said, it's important to recognize that the CO basin states (AZ, WY, UT) have some of the highest per-capita domestic water use figures in the nation - far above the national average.
Not sure about the other two, but it might be the ubiquitous swimming pools in AZ. The evaporation in an AZ pool during the summer is dramatic. You need to have a pool water leveler on 24/7 or leave the garden hose trickling constantly.
While somewhat common, I wouldn't use the term ubiquitous... When I grew up in Casa Grande, I didn't know anyone who had a pool, and most of my friends and I would ride our bicycles several miles to the public pool. My grandmother's neighborhood in Phoenix had two houses in a couple blocks that had pools. The street I live on today has two houses (of a couple dozen) that have pools.
There are more wealthy neighborhoods where it's closer to 1 in 4, but again wouldn't call that ubiquitous at all.
That said, I think that some of the farming use is excessive and should lean into regenerative agriculture over the more wasteful use of chemical fertilizers and desertification over time only taking away and eroding soil.
In my very middle class suburban neighborhood in Gilbert, you are definitely an outlier if you don’t have a pool. If I look at an aero google map of my street and the street on both sides of mine there are 18 houses out of 91 that don’t appear to have pools. A few of them have so much tree cover that I can’t tell if there is a pool or not so I counted those as a no.
Define middle class here... The median income for 2022 in Arizona is $38k/yr, your neighborhood is most likely well within the top 10% of income earners in the state. Most people don't get that.
No offense, but Casa Grande was, until recently, a modest farm town with modest incomes. Ag labor just doesn't pay that well and pools are expensive.
In contrast, here's a random middle class neighborhood in central Phoenix[0], the fifth most populous city in the US of A. You'll notice some of the streets have a pool in every single backyard. When you zoom in on the higher income neighborhoods, like in Scottsdale and PV, it's rare to see a backyard that doesn't have a pool.
MOST people don't grow up in higher income neighborhoods. While it may seem odd to you, who probably makes well north of $100k/yr on your salary alone, let alone a spouse/partner... Most houses, in most of the Phoenix area don't have pools.
Yes, and we should be investing heavily into technologies and techniques that maximize the efficiency of the water that is consumed by agriculture. The government should probably subsidize the expense of the conversion. We should also get rid of any "use it or lose next year's ration" rules that are in place which cause some farmers to literally just run water out of their pipes to ensure they're recorded as having "used their allocation" and therefore "still require that much next year".
Using a normal common law water rights system is literally prohibited by some state constitutions (e.g. AZ article 17). It would take a movement on the order of civil rights to fix water rights.
Humans should have access to a consistent generous ration for hygiene, drinking water, and moderate home gardening. I think it's reasonable to cut people off (during a major drought with rationing) when they start focusing on trying to maintain large lawns, golf courses, swimming pools, etc.
Anytime water and the southwest comes up I always recommend the documentary series Cadillac Desert, based on the book. It's on YouTube and tells the story of how the southwest became livable due to the damming of many major rivers.
I used to live in Albuquerque, which sources water from a few places—a small mountain range to the east, aquifer, and the rio grande (aka the rio not-at-all-grande).
> Settlements in the region depend on groundwater. In the 1960s the City of Albuquerque began to extract large quantities of potable groundwater from wells drilled in the southeast and northeast heights. It was thought that this water came from a huge aquifer that would take centuries to exhaust. In the late 1980s there were declines in the water levels near Coronado Center causing concern that the water resource was not properly understood
The RG AFAIK is also supplied by primary Colorado mountain sources, but also from various other smaller mountain and rainfall feeds. I get that the Colorado River is the big kahuna. Id would love to see the RG at least casually discussed in these bigger sw water discussions.
I'm surprised they had less rain. Here in Minnesota, it's been constant heavy rain. My pond floods almost every week. I have to pump it out into a nearby lake and that's a pain.
> With less rain, the plants in the area rely more on the snowmelt for water, leaving less water to make its way into the nearby streams. Decreased rain also means sunny skies, which encourages plant growth and water evaporation from the soil.
Logical next step: remove the vegetation for more human population!
"What if we took the people and businesses from the places with large rivers and continental climates, and put them in a sun-blasted hellscape that these native gentlemen keep telling us cannot sustain life?" - American policy from 1840 to now
I think the global north doesn’t really line up with human instinct in a lot of ways. Climate, day length pattern, vegetation.
I guess somewhere in Africa should per perfect? I doubt the humans who split off and went north have had their instincts change enough to not prefer that sort of climate, and that explains the draw to sun rich areas. Not to mention those who left that region much more recently.
It’s interesting that I haven’t seen any groups with a Darwinian Zionism, so to speak. An ancestral claim to the region where humans evolved.
It seems unlikely that climate-zone preferences motivated the prehistoric spread of humanity, as that would require both a knowledge of the possibilities and the means to exploit them. More likely, people settled where they could support themselves and moved when that no longer was the case, either from micro-climactic changes or population pressure.
Large-scale migration into the arid parts of North America and elsewhere was first facilitated by the development of the technology to use deep aquifers.
Other way around. Humans and pre-human hominids evolved in a more confined region of the world for an extremely long time, and they left recently enough that they still instinctively prefer the climate of that region.
Prehistoric spread was driven by other factors that were more important than climate preference. But that doesn't eliminate climate preference, and all else equal humans will act on that preference.
Oh, I see, I think: you are saying that we have preserved a preference for our ancestral habitat, and that has motivated recent migration into arid areas? Maybe so; we still have some physiological adaptions for warm climates.
When it comes to agriculture in the desert, which is still the major reason why the snowpack shortfall is a matter of concern, the motivation seems more economic: crops grow very well in sunny climates, so long as you can give them adequate water - and we could, for a while, but probably not sustainably.
Modern humans came frome the Ethiopian plateau right? So low of 75F high of 80F sort of thing. High altitude equatorial. Bogotá is similar but cooler. As is Quitó. Much of coastal Europe and west coast North America is a decent approximate.
Coastal Europe has considerable variation and the west coast of North America even more so, but what is of more relevance to the snowpack issue is that most of the lower Colorado basin is quite unlike what humanity's home was like prior to our global spread.
I don't know, I love the northern flora, too, Rattlesnake master, moline, dogwood, black-eyed susan, blazing star, echinacea (purple coneflower) and so many more.
I think emotional attachment does form to what is familiar within our lifetimes.
But what is a more typical "dream" desire by the average human? To retire in a northern forest, or to retire on a tropical island? Where do people typically vacation, when the surroundings and how they feel are the primary focus? Do the very wealthy, who can do whatever they like, usually spend more time in the woods or in the tropics? Did Ellison and Zuckerberg buy large swaths of temperate forest? Etc.
I am only using very wealthy people as a reference because I think they are a good proxy for hedonistic values, which I believe are rooted in human instinct and what worked in the ancestral environment.
You can’t delete these instincts, you can only bury them.
I'm not arguing, but again, nuance. I don't know that it is human instinct, my understanding is that diseases like malaria and the heat (no A/C) meant European colonizers avoided a lot of the warmer places and moved inland to the mountains where it was cooler.
It might, instead, be a cultural influence?
I feel like I am being pedantic, though. Apologies for that.
For better or for worse, the global north's where most of the land and resources are, along with the majority of human civilization.
Also, as far as climate, day length pattern, vegetation, etc., I don't think moving back to, say, the Midwest (particularly the lower part) would be screwing most people. Alaska? Sure. Kansas City? Day lengths are pretty normal there.
Lol, you forgot "let's move to Arizona because I have allergies, and then plant all of the plants that caused my allergies in the yards and parks, and plant lawns, with all of these things not being native to the climate/drought resistant".
I too like nice weather, but it's getting to the point that the summers over large parts of the US are as harsh as the midwestern winters everyone wants to avoid.
I suppose it depends upon what you mean by sustain life. If somebody is hooked up to life support in a hospital for the rest of their life, does that mean their body is able to sustain life or does it mean the hospital is able to sustain life? That is somewhat similar to what we are talking about. All of this technology is wonderful to introduce stability, to get us through the rough patches, but a permanent dependence upon it is questionable.
As for that native gentleman, I'm not sure what the situation is down south, but the prairies of Canada and the Northern US have been known to have dry spells. The 1930's were particularly bad, but apparently early explorers returned conflicting reports about the habitability of the prairies simply because of the variability in precipitation across the years. Of course, aboriginals would have knowledge of that since they inhabited those lands for time immemorial. I have even seen suggestions that those who lived in the regions were nomadic since they had to follow the food (which, of course, had to follow its own food). This is in sharp contrast to those who inhabited other parts of the Americas, who were settled.
It can't sustain 40 million people who all want a pool, a grass lawn, freshly-grown fruits/nuts/vegetables, air conditioning, large-scale manufacturing, golf courses, etc.
Like I said, it is literally sustaining this as I type this comment. You just don't like the consequences (the Colorado river isn't making it to the ocean).
Perhaps it is, but that's not sustainable. Every ecosystem has a carrying capacity. We're coming closer and closer to that for the Southwestern US. It won't be pretty when we reach it.
I actually couldn't care less whether the Colorado makes it to the ocean. I have two major rivers in my city. There's plenty of water without having to fine people for using water on the opposite of their odd-even day. The heat during the summer is uncomfortable but it's usually not an imminent threat to human life after an hour of unhydrated exertion.
> Every ecosystem has a carrying capacity. We're coming closer and closer to that for the Southwestern US.
The limit of carrying capacity is the limit of sustainability. If the system is coming closer to the carrying capacity, the current state, having 40 million people with lawns, is sustainable!
If your argument is that having 200 million people with lawns is unsustainable, say that! But that's not what you said.
It's not just lawns; you're being purposefully obtuse.
There are already towns in California experiencing spells of not having any potable water [0]. We've pumped so much water out of parts of California that some land has dropped almost 30 feet [1]. Wildfire season in the southwest, including California, is now longer and more severe than it once was [2]. Arizona has passed resolutions imploring Congress to investigate diverting water from the Mississippi River out west [3] which is almost guaranteed to cause serious political confrontations.
So, no, the current state of things and the projected growth isn't sustainable. When you're honestly considering the idea of building a continent-wide aqueduct system to keep golf courses in Phoenix playable, you're better off packing up and heading back to the Midwest and Northeast to repopulate towns that have infrastructure we already bought and paid for decades ago.
Am I the only one surprised this took as much detailed study as it did? Nobody noticed a lot more greenery about in the basins they're talking about? Or nobody noticed the fact that it hadn't been raining in those places in the spring and wondered why the plants there were still fine?
These don't seem like observations that require laboratories and massive studies to me.
In the context of managing water resources in an increasingly variable future, it's very important to quantify the relative impact of these kinds of factors on streamflow.
While perhaps it might be intuitive to you that transpiration impacts streamflow (which, if it is, you should consider a career in water resource management!), it's not sufficient to stop there when trying to model the future.
Its one thing to form a hypothesis, and another to demonstrate that it is correct, especially when there are alternatives (in this case, sublimation was one.) Where climate and ecology are involved, it takes some time to gather robust data, and there is no suggestion that this was a massive study over that period.
It was a stupid riff on the title. But, the Arkansas River does start in Colorado, and so some amount of Colorado's snowpack does wind up in Arkansas' river.
