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  • I do believe people in general will be fine in the soutwest for years to come. Agriculture will be cut back, natural landscapes will take over, de-sal in socal and better water treatment plants will come online.

    The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?

    by Ancalagon
  • Life will be fine. Exporting alfalfa from the Imperial Valley, however, might be done for.
    by onlypassingthru
  • There is enough water for human consumption, but agriculture is over in the basin. There simply isn’t enough water forward looking for the water intensive crops in question.

    https://coloradoriverscience.org/Agricultural_water_use

    by toomuchtodo
  • I wonder if I'll live to see the evacuation of Phoenix and Las Vegas. (Or Abu Dhabi, for that matter.)
    by throw-the-towel
  • The shrinking reservoirs are the immediate result of record-low snowpack this winter, which was erased by record heat in the spring. Melted snowpack creates most of the Colorado’s flow during the dry summer months. But as the Southwestern climate has grown hotter and drier, the river’s flow has become smaller and less reliable.

    Legitimate question: I can understand that record-low snowpack would cause less water to flow into the lake, but the "erasure" of the snow pack by heat is just melting that would be captured in the lake, right? So if the record-low snowpack had been followed by record cold, would we have even less water in the lake?

    by jp57
  • Vox did a great video on this a few years ago. [1] Bottom line, growing cow feed in the desert is wasteful and stupid. Blaming cities and industry is just a diversion.

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc

    by jmward01
  • Who would’ve thought that growing water intensive crops in the middle of the desert and growing cities like Phoenix with suburbs with lush green lawns at a much higher rate than rest of the country was going to be without consequences.
    by darth_avocado
  • When the West was settled it was widely believed that the act of building a town attracted rain. The 'atmosphere' of human buildings in an area would naturally attract and collect rain from the heavens. Many of the original methods used to estimate water, rainfall, and other essentials for human survival were wrong.

    Most of them are catalogued in the outstanding Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - an excellent book with an outstanding audiobook too.

    https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...

    by flybrand

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