Things don't look good for our friends down south in the Colorado River Basin. The combination of rapid growth, global warming, and extended drought do not bode well for the future of the 25-30 million or so people who rely on the Colorado for drinking water, irrigation water, and their livelihoods.
Yesterday, the National Research Council released its report, Colorado River Basin Water Management: Evaluating and Adjusting to Hydroclimatic Variability. The NRC committee based its findings on climate models and tree-ring studies which were used to reconstruct past climates in the basin.
The verdict is not good; given the factors cited above, water is going to be in short supply. Severe droughts will continue and likely get worse. The unbelievable growth in the Southwest doesn't appear to be abating. Water to slake the thirst of places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, etc., will have to come from the likes of conservation, desalination, and retirement of irrigated lands. The committee noted that conservation alone is not going to be a panacea. There just isn't enough water to be gained from conservation (efficiency) alone.
Each of these has a price. My post of a few days ago illustrated the down side of water conservation vis-a-vis the All-American Canal. Desalination is expensive, and may pose waste disposal problems. Retirment of irrigated lands could lead to a variety of social and economic ills. And don't forget ESA and water quality issues, which were nowhere to be found (as was the spectacular urban growth in the Southwest) when the Colorado River Compact was negotiated in 1922. And don't forget, the annual Colorado River flows upon which the Compact was based used the records of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which are now known to have been unusually wet years. Those records yielded an average annual flow about 16.4 million acre-feet (MAF) or about 650 cubic meters per second (cms), whereas it is closer to 15 MAF (590 cms). Some tree-ring research puts the average annual flow of the Colorado lower still, at around 13 MAF (510 cms).
And let's not forget future energy development in the Colorado River Basin. That could consume prodigious amounts of water. Remember oil shale? It could be coming baaaccckkkk.....
You can view info about this "chilling" report by going to:
www.nap.edu/catalog/11857.html#aboutprepub
where you can read a copy (free) online. You can also download the Executive Summary here:
or at
books.nap.edu/catalog/execsumm.pdf/11857.pdf
Last summer (26 June 2006) the High Country News (www.hcn.org) had a short story entitled "The Tamarisk Hunter", a not-too-distant-future parable about a man who ekes out a living getting paid to rip up tamarisks for $2.88/day plus water bounty. A huge intake, "the Straw", guarded by the military, diverts the entire flow of the Colorado River to Southern California. That bleak vision may not be so far-fetched.
"Whisky's for drinkin'; water's for fightin' over." -- Mark Twain
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