Is this somehow tied to global warming? The Future Is Drying Up Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.” In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.” One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas. Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it. To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future. The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.” ... (There are 9 more pages... I'm not going to waste bandwidth for those who do not care to read it all...) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/m...&ei=5087&em&en=409568d61448aa92&ex=1193112000
Where does the water go? Don't we have a closed system sort of? Rainfall. Evaporation. Rainfall again.... Are we losing fresh water to the oceans?
It is not raining in the same spots to refill these lakes. Here in Austin we were in a 10 year drought until this year when a wet summer filled the Highland lakes back up. People on the Perdanales river arm of Lake Travis were able to use their boats for the first time in a few years as their docks refloated as the water rose. There have been many studies saying the next big war will not be over oil but rather fresh water. The deforestation is going to have a major effect......the reason the rain forest is so wet is that it in continual rain, evaporation, then rain again. If you get rid of the trees and vegetation, it will be runoff instead of evaporation and thus slow the rain considerably... Hopefully this is just a cycle, but we are clearly having some effect on the climate. DD
Its not an evenly distributed system, if it was there would be no such thins as deserts or rain forests. Many global warming models project disruptions to weather models so that some places will get substantially wetter while others get substantially dryer so from there things look bad for the Southwestern North America. The declining snow pack though adds to the problems as there is almost no way to store up signifigants amount of water if it doesn't come down as snow in the Sierra's or the Rockies so big storms that hit the Ca. coasts most of that water is lost as runoff. By far though the biggest problem is that the Southwest has developed faster than the region can sustain and even without a diminished snowpack its questionable how long places like Phoenix and Las Vegas could sustain their development.
October 22, 2007 Inch by Inch, Great Lakes Shrink, and Cargo Carriers Face Losses By FERNANDA SANTOS http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/nyregion/22oswego.html?pagewanted=print OSWEGO, N.Y. — From his office at the port here, Jonathan Daniels stared at a watermark etched on the rocks that hug one of the commercial piers — a thick dark line several inches above the surface of Lake Ontario — and wondered how much lower the water would dip. “What we need is some rain,” said Mr. Daniels, director of the Port of Oswego Authority, one of a dozen public port agencies on the United States side of the Great Lakes. “The more we lose water, the less cargo the ships that travel in the Great Lakes can carry, and each time that happens, shipping companies lose money,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s people like you and I who are going to pay the price.” Water levels in the Great Lakes are falling; Lake Ontario, for example, is about seven inches below where it was a year ago. And for every inch of water that the lakes lose, the ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads by 270 tons — or 540,000 pounds — or risk running aground, according to the Lake Carriers’ Association, a trade group for United States-flag cargo companies. As a result, more ships are needed, adding millions of dollars to shipping companies’ operating costs, experts in maritime commerce estimate. “When a ship leaves a dock, and it’s not filled to capacity, it’s the same as a plane leaving an airport with empty seats: It cuts into their earning capacity,” said Richard D. Stewart, a co-director of the Transportation and Logistics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. “Because it’s mostly raw materials we’re talking about, the average consumer may see an increase in pennies in the price they pay for, say, a new car or washing machine,” Dr. Stewart said. For major manufacturers or firms managing big projects, however, the increase in transportation costs “is much more significant,” he said. The port of Oswego receives scraps of aluminum from Canada, which are rolled into sheets at a local plant and sent to car manufacturers; soy beans for a bio-diesel plant in nearby Fulton; and parts for windmills that are used to generate power on a farm south of Canandaigua Lake, near Rochester, said L. Michael Treadwell, director of Operation Oswego County, a nonprofit economic development agency. The windmill parts arrive from Brazil and Indonesia, in ships that enter Lake Ontario through the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the lake to the Atlantic Ocean. The port also handles soy beans grown in central New York and sent to the Middle East, and it receives potash, a mineral used in fertilizer, and road salt, which are distributed by truck and rail to companies across the Eastern United States. The water levels in all five Great Lakes — Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario — are below long-term averages and are likely to stay that way until at least March, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. (The same is true at Lake St. Clair, which straddles the border between the state of Michigan and the province of Ontario and is between Lake Huron and Lake Erie; it is not considered one of the Great Lakes, although it is part of the Great Lakes system.) Most environmental researchers say that low precipitation, mild winters and high evaporation, due largely to a lack of heavy ice covers to shield cold lake waters from the warmer air above, are depleting the lakes. The Great Lakes follow a natural cycle, their levels rising in the spring, peaking in the summer and reaching a low in the winter, as the evaporation rate rises. In the past two years, evaporation has been higher than average, and not enough rain and snow have fallen in the upper lakes — Superior, Michigan and Huron — which supply water to the lower lakes, to restore the system to its normal levels, said Keith Kompoltowicz, a meteorologist at the Corps of Engineers’ office in Detroit, which monitors water levels in the lakes. “Mother Nature is largely the driving force on what the water levels are, and it plays a large role in what we project water levels to be,” Mr. Kompoltowicz said. The International Joint Commission, which advises the United States and Canada on water resources, is conducting a $17 million, five-year study to determine whether the shrinking of the Great Lakes is related to the seasonal rise-and-fall cycles or is a result of climate change, said Greg McGillis, a spokesman for the commission. A final report is expected in March 2012. Lake Ontario’s water level can be regulated through releases from a dam on the United States-Canada border, which allowed the lake to maintain its normal levels until May, Mr. McGillis said. Then a drought hit, and the releases became less generous, said Robert O’Gorman, supervisor of the United States Geological Survey field station here. The drought and the lower inflows from the upper lakes, diminished Lake Ontario’s water level, he said. Lake Ontario stood at 244.1 feet as of Wednesday — 3 inches below where it was at the beginning of the month, 5 inches below last month’s average and about a foot below last year’s average. The water, however, is still about 2 feet above the lake’s low of 242.19 feet, registered in 1934, according to the Corps of Engineers. The picture is just as serious in the upper Great Lakes and is particularly grave in Lake Superior, where water levels have hovered below average since 1998 and, based on provisional data, set record lows in August and September. It is the longest stretch of below-average readings at Lake Superior since the Corps of Engineers started tracking the Great Lakes’ levels in 1918. On average, 240 million tons of cargo travel across the Great Lakes every year. The United States fleet circulating in the Great Lakes has 63 ships, which have lost a total of 8,000 tons of cargo capacity for every inch of water the lakes have fallen below normal this year, said James H. I. Weakley, president of the carriers’ association. Those 8,000 tons, he said, correspond to enough iron ore to produce 6,000 cars, or enough coal to provide electricity to the Detroit area for three hours, or enough stone to build 24 houses. Mark W. Barker, president of Interlake Steamship Company, said the nine ships his company operated made about 50 trips a year across the Great Lakes, and the larger ones have transported 1,800 tons less per trip this year compared with last year — the equivalent of losing an entire ship’s capacity over the length of a season. “We get paid by the ton, so we’re losing a lot of revenue per trip, and we’re just going to have to reclaim that loss by increasing our rates,” said Mr. Barker, whose family has owned the company since 1987. “It’s either doing that or risk the business.” The Great Lakes region is home to about 70 percent of the steel industry in North America and about half of the heavy manufacturing in the United States, Mr. Weakley said. Here in Oswego, a city of 18,000 residents that is 40 miles north of Syracuse, the port has acquired renewed significance in the past two years, largely because of a budding renewable energy sector that depends in part on lake shipments. The area’s economy has struggled since the decline of its agricultural-based industries, like brewing, began in the 1970s. Mr. Daniels, the port director, said that water transportation was still one of the most efficient alternatives for companies that rely on bulk cargo, and that Oswego was banking “on the water coming back to the lakes.” “If the low levels in the Great Lakes are a result of global warming, I don’t know,” he said. “What I know is that we can’t control nature. All we can do is hope for rain.”
I am talking about where it enters Lake Travis, usually when the lake is at it's normal height, the river is full at the end, when it is lower, not so much. DD
I think man made global warming is happening, and that it is an issue we should be addressing, but certain parts of the global warming rhetoric really bug me, and this is quote is one of them. Snowpacks don’t produce water. Glaciers don’t produce water, they simply transport it. If snowpacks and glaciers are receding that’s a sign that things are getting warmer, but it doesn’t speak to the amount of precipitation that is falling on that catchment basin. Precipitation may even have increased, but due to an increase in global temperature the snowpacks and glaciers would be receding. When people make confusing or incorrect statements in support of their cause, it doesn’t help their cause.
An unconnected but related problem is the total overuse of all the ground water aquifers in the USA. This is really more a problem of overuse for agriculture, so I guess we are burning the candle at both ends when it comes to water use. Fundimentally, the 'American Breadbasket' that supports a large portion of the world's food needs is unsustainable long term using current water practice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#Aquifer_water_balance Which will run out first? Underground water supplies, or above ground resevoirs?
Very serious. I really like Tahoe but don't want to buy a house there only to have no snow and no lake by the time I retire. If we're accepting model predictions of weather pattern changes, there should be a list of places that will benefit from the changes I would assume.
It's like being able to buy real estate in California at prices from 30 years ago. We just have to get the right place because people will be moving with the weather.
I never understood why people purchased property in the southwest when it's always been known that water supply is going to be a big problem. there isn't enough fresh water for an increasing human population. the result will be unfortunate suffering.
well i guess it really still is but how long can they irrigate the damn thing? we could be in for all kinds of weather related crises and i'd like to be somewhere where they will effect me and mine the least. not that i wanted to go to socal, just that it would be one of the last places.
I like living in Austin. We're high enough that the worst case rise in the oceans won't come near us (only the millions of people ), and the Highland Lakes, while capable of being hit hard by a drought, have never been in danger of not supplying enough water for Greater Austin. We have enormous aquifers in the area. Having said that, where we are screwed here is the state government. It is well and truly broken. The Lege is in the pocket of the lobbyists of those who want to make millions off of pumping water from the aquifers and selling it to growing cities, or whoever else will pay for it. Those people don't give a tinker's continental damn about the aquifers going dry, or what affect that will have on our future. Texas has no water conservation laws worth mentioning, and what we have has little in the way of teeth. Every time Austin has attempted to set controls on water use to protect the aquifers, some member of the Lege from the Panhandle, or some other unrelated spot carries a bill that is written just to screw Austin. Until Texas gets an honest Legislature, Lt. Governor, and Governor, and they pass laws to save our water supply, we're screwed. As for Austin? We have plenty of water for the forseseeable future. We may not always have lakes as full as we'd like, but we have plenty of water. D&D. Impeach Bush.
It's a chaparral, which is pretty close to a desert. The California Central Valley is much like the Great Plains, extremely fertile lands that require massive irrigation projects to sustain agriculture. A lot of farming have exploited subsidized water in their quest for profit margins even when there are alternatives that can conserve usage. Right now the West's goal is to divert more water from other sources northward to sustain consumption, but at one point or another, we'll have to price water to reflect its true cost and value to discourage its waste. I don't think water reclamation will be the main answer because of the size and scope of our needs. It works fine in small areas like Singapore, but for here, its use could be for eventual aquifer restoration. They treat the water to the point where it isn't safe to drink, but safe enough to dump back into the ground. In spite of all this, the US is considered lucky in terms of water needs. Mexico has a tiny claim on the Colorado River, but other nations have several neighbors with equal or greater claims to river rights. Israel has been locked in a dispute with its neighbors, and that could be a potential tinderbox as other slowly replenishable sources become taxed or dried up in bad rain years. Other areas will receive more rain their geography can handle and the flooding will cause untold amounts of damage, pollution and disorder. With world development rising all around the world, there's going to be untold waste and pollution with poor disposal methods potentially ruining the few clean water sources left. At risk to this is the Millennial Development Goal of reducing the parts of the world that needs clean potable water by half. Yet governments sound reluctant to bring out their power or their checkbooks to prevent future calamity with a crucial cause.
