Global Warming Brings Water Shortage for The West

MSNBC has a good article on what has been a well-known problem for years in the West: lack of water. Most of the West (outside of the mountainous areas) is an arid desert. Population growth especially in rapidly growing parts of the greater Clark County (NV) and Maricopa County (AZ) is partly to blame for the coming water shortage. Global warming, however, is intensifying the problem.

The 25 million Americans who rely on the Colorado River for water should expect continued — and even worsening — drought spells and water shortages as rising temperatures and growing populations create a double whammy, experts warned in a new report.

The experts, convened by the National Research Council, based their concerns on climate models and recent studies that found a cycle of droughts in the region over time. The studies used tree-ring histories to reconstruct local climate patterns over the last 500 years.

"These reconstructions, along with temperature trends and projections for the region, suggest that future droughts will recur and that they may exceed the severity of droughts of historical experience, such as the drought of the late 1990s and early 2000s," the experts wrote in the report released Wednesday.

Does the phrase, "And people in hell want ice water" mean anything to you? The reference is appropriate because temperatures during the summer can typically top 100 degrees. It was 116 in Phoenix early last June when I was there, and the only comfortable place to be was in the pool or an air-conditioned room. Imagine that with a severe water shortage.

The Colorado River is the main source of water for people in the West. If its volume decreases due to climate change, 25 million people are going to have a serious problem. When I lived in California, during particularly hot years, there was some talk about desalinization plants near the beach (turning saltwater into freshwater). In the Los Angeles area there was also talk of using treated water (processed at a sewer treatment plant), but the gross-out factor killed those plans. Water conservation efforts are the norm during droughts, and I can recall as a kid when rich people in the Santa Barbara, CA area painted their lawns green even though they were dead.

Besides population, the car culture of the West is another culprit. You can't go anywhere without your car. And having driven last summer from Los Angeles to Denver, via Phoenix, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Colorado Springs, I can tell you that I've never seen so much construction. It used to be endless desert on the road from Palm Springs to Phoenix. Now, it seems that you can be 50 miles outside of Phoenix, yet in the suburbs. The desert is slowly being turned into miles and miles of the concrete jungle. And there appears to have been no planning for light rail, subways or other form of mass transit to cut down on the cars emitting pollution. It's as if a new Los Angeles with its endless miles of suburbs is being built every couple hundred of miles. And that lack of planning will eventually have consequences.

"The basin is going to face increasingly costly, controversial and unavoidable trade-off choices," said Ernest Smerdon, a former dean of engineering at the University of Arizona and one of the report's authors. "Our hope would be that the community and the decision-makers will have planned before crises occur."

Read the entire article if you live in the West, and then think about how you can reduce your impact on the Earth and conserve resources.

kencamp | February 22, 2007 | Comment on This Post (5 so far) Permalink: Global Warming Brings Water Shortage for The West

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